When Melba Hernández met Fidel Castro in the early 1950s, she likened it to a religious experience. “I felt secure,” she said. “I felt I had found the way.”
In an interview with Tad Szulc for his 1986 book, “Fidel: A Critical Portrait,” Ms. Hernández continued, “Fidel spoke in a very low voice, he paced back and forth, then came close as if to tell you a secret, and then you suddenly felt you shared the secret.”
Ms. Hernández, who became one of the first four members of Mr. Castro’s general staff, and who died at 92 on March 9 in Havana, went on to share many secrets with the man she helped make the Cuban revolution — beginning with its opening volley, an attack on the Moncada army barracks in southeastern Cuba on July 26, 1953.
For her revolutionary services, which included helping to start the Cuban Communist Party, Ms. Hernández was named a national heroine, among many other honors. After the Vietnam War ended on terms most Communists liked, she was her country’s ambassador to the united Vietnam.
“For our people, she is one of the most glorious and beloved combatants of the revolutionary process, an everlasting example of the Cuban woman,” the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, on which Ms. Hernández served, said in a statement.
In her later years, Ms. Hernández, her face crowned with snowy white curls, occasionally appeared at official events, accompanied by one of the Castro brothers. Fidel stepped down as president in 2006, citing ill health, and passed command to his younger brother Raúl.
She was a presence throughout the Castro era, beginning when Fidel Castro was abandoning plans to run for Cuba’s national legislature as the candidate of a non-Communist party in favor of covertly plotting to overthrow the government. Both were young lawyers dedicated to serving the poor and dispossessed.
That idealism turned deadly at the Moncada barracks in Santiago de Cuba, on the southeast coast. More than 130 outnumbered, outgunned rebels — accounts differ on precisely how many — failed to capture military arms, their objective. As many as 60 were killed in the fighting or as prisoners. About 18 police officers and soldiers were killed.
What was a disaster in human terms helped put the little-known Mr. Castro at the center of the opposition to the dictator Fulgencio Batista. Six years later, Batista was overthrown by Mr. Castro’s so-called 26th of July Movement.
To disguise themselves, the rebels needed army uniforms, and Ms. Hernández persuaded a sergeant to give her more than 100. At the insurgents’ hide-out on a rented farm, she sewed insignia of rank on their sleeves. She brought rifles or shotguns (accounts differ) to them in a florist’s carton.
With Haydée Santamaría, the other woman in Castro’s original top leadership, she ironed the uniforms in dim light the night before the attack. The women prepared a chicken fricassee dinner that reverberates through Cuban revolutionary history as the last meal of either heroes or cannon fodder. They passed out glasses of milk.
Mr. Castro initially vetoed sending the women on the mission, but was persuaded to dispatch them as nurses to help the wounded. Both were arrested when the mission failed.
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The two were released from jail after serving five months of a seven-month sentence, and the still-imprisoned Mr. Castro used them as his trusted agents on the outside. He smuggled out letters written with lemon juice, which they made visible by ironing them. They oversaw the publishing of the text of Mr. Castro’s courtroom defense of himself and his revolution under the title “History Will Absolve Me.”
The women led demonstrations demanding amnesty for their compatriots. On May 15, 1955, Batista released Mr. Castro and the others.
By this time, Ms. Hernández had moved to Mexico to make contact with movement members exiled there. Her immediate assignment was to dissuade Batista opponents from supporting the former Cuban president Carlos Prío Socarrás, who had been deposed by the dictator.
In July 1955, Mr. Castro joined Ms. Hernández and other top leaders who had assembled in Mexico, among them Raúl Castro, Che Guevara and Jesus Montane, whom Ms. Hernández later married. They bought a dilapidated yacht, the Granma, and made plans to use it to return a small expeditionary force to Cuba.
Leaving from Veracruz, they arrived at Playa Las Coloradas, Cuba, on Dec. 2, 1956. Three days after the rebels had set off from the beach for the Sierra Maestra, they were ambushed by government troops. No more than 20 of the 82 who had come on the Granma survived.
But the tiny invasion signaled the beginning of the guerrilla campaign that would lead to victory on Jan. 1, 1959. Ms. Hernández, who was not on the Granma, joined the insurgents later.
Maria Hernández Rodríguez del Rey was born to middle-class parents on July 28, 1921, in the town of Cruces, in west-central Cuba. She earned degrees in law and social sciences from the University of Havana and worked as a customs lawyer for the government after graduating. Like Mr. Castro, she belonged to the Ortodoxo Party, which condemned the Batista government as corrupt and fruitlessly tried to enact peaceful changes.
As the movement turned to armed insurrection, Ms. Hernández, one of the earliest recruits, joined what Mr. Castro called his “general staff.” Other members were Ms. Santamaría and her brother, Abel, Mr. Castro’s second in command.
Ms. Hernández described the months leading up to Moncada as “militancy 24 hours a day” and said Mr. Castro had told his troops that “they had no right to get tired.” She told Mr. Szulc that “indiscretion, any kind of indiscretion” — including being only seconds late for a meeting — was cause for expulsion.
Mr. Santamaría was killed at Moncada. Ms. Santamaría committed suicide in 1980. Mr. Montane died in 1999. The official Cuban news media reported that Ms. Hernández had died of complications of diabetes. Information about her survivors was not available.
Ms. Hernández was showered with honors. She served as a deputy in the national assembly and in various governmental posts. In one, she oversaw women’s prisons. It was not clear whether she was in charge in later years when the Organization of American States and others accused Cuba’s penal system of human rights abuses.
She was also secretary-general of the Organization of Solidarity of the People of Asia, Africa and Latin America, a Cuban political movement to promote socialism in the third world.
Mr. Castro’s extensive correspondence with Ms. Hernández had its human moments. In July 1955, when he was in Mexico and she in Cuba, he complained that he could not find a good cigar.
His political advice was blunt. In a 1954 letter from prison on the Isle of Pines in Cuba, he told her not to make unnecessary enemies, a possibility given her feisty nature. “There will be enough time later,” he wrote, “to crush all the cockroaches together.”
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