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Vol. 72/No. 22      June 2, 2008

 
‘The best fighter in revolutionary
Cuba’s combat aviation’
Brig. Gen. Arnaldo Tamayo’s remarks at Havana
meeting on memoirs of Div. Gen. Enrique Carreras
(feature article)
 
The following are remarks by Brig. Gen. Arnaldo Tamayo at an event held during the Havana International Book Fair in February where he presented Por el dominio del aire: Memorias de un piloto de combate, 1943-1988 (Controlling the Air: Memoirs of a Combat Pilot, 1943-1988), by Div. Gen. Enrique Carreras.

Carreras, 86 and still on active duty, is considered the father of revolutionary Cuba’s air force. As an officer in the air force before the revolution, he opposed the 1952 coup by Fulgencio Batista and became a collaborator within the armed forces of the July 26 Movement, led by Fidel Castro, which was fighting the U.S.-backed dictatorship. He was arrested in September 1957 for taking part in a military plot against the regime. Released from prison with the January 1959 revolutionary victory, Carreras joined the effort to build the air force of the new revolutionary government. An interview with Carreras about his life and his participation in the revolutionary movement is included in Making History: Interviews with Four Generals of Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces, published by Pathfinder.

In his remarks at the February 14 book presentation, Tamayo recounts how Carreras was his teacher when he first joined the Revolutionary Air Force in the early 1960s. Today head of international relations of Cuba’s Revolutionary Armed Forces, Tamayo became famous around the world in 1980 when, as part of the Soviet Union’s space program, he became the first Cuban and first person of African descent to take part in a space mission.

The event also presented Pombo: un hombre de la guerrilla del Che (Pombo: a Man of Che’s guerrilla), by Brig. Gen. Harry Villegas, who spoke on the panel. Villegas, known by his nom de guerre Pombo, is executive vice president of the Association of Combatants of the Cuban Revolution. Sergio Ravelo and Iraida Aguirrechu of Editora Política, the publishing house of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, made introductory remarks. Editora Política issued new editions of the two titles, subsidized by the Cuban Book Institute as part of its Special Plan to make books broadly available to the Cuban people (see article on the meeting in the March 3 Militant).

The translation and subtitles are by the Militant.
 

*****

BY ARNALDO TAMAYO  
It’s a difficult task for me to have to talk about Div. Gen. Enrique Carreras Rolas. All the more so here in front of his closest family members, including his children, who know him better than any of us.

Carreras is one of the combatants of the Cuban Revolution who have beautiful and glorious deeds to their credit. He is one of the combatants who have had the privilege of becoming part of history. And not just as a combatant, but because of what Ravelo just described: for his modesty, his simplicity, his total devotion to a cause.

We often hear about combatants who have distinguished themselves in the guerrilla struggle, in internationalist battles, in different areas of defense. But when we speak about the defense of our skies, of the combatants of the air, Carreras must hold a special place in that history. Without Carreras’s story, I believe, it would be difficult to write a history of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Cuba, much less a history of the air force.

I say it’s difficult for me, because we have before us an exceptional figure. As I learned from reading the book, Carreras started in the air force when I was born—he joined the air force in 1941, and I was born in 1942. From that point on he was trained as a pilot. Many years later I was able to meet him. Later I can tell you some anecdotes about this complex profession of being a combat pilot.

In the course of his professional record Carreras has accumulated great merits, the greatest of which is that he became a complete revolutionary, in every sense. And he did so, above all, in very difficult times, when the July 26 Revolutionary Movement and other revolutionary forces were fighting to overthrow the tyrant. In the book he explains what a blow Batista’s March 10, 1952, coup was for him, even as he served in the professional army. Many professionals of the army and air force were also hard hit by that violation of the constitution and of the principles of democracy.

From then on Carreras began to rebel against the repressive forces and against the tyrant himself. That’s when he linked up with cells of the July 26 Movement and began to cooperate in organizing to topple the dictatorship. As he was doing so, the uprising of September 5 in Cayo Loco in Cienfuegos occurred.1 He was one of the pilots connected to the July 26 Movement who interceded to get themselves assigned to a mission against the uprising. By doing so they prevented the indiscriminate bombing that was going to be carried out against the people of Cienfuegos, who had joined in the uprising. It was very difficult to determine where in Cienfuegos the revolutionary forces were, since the people rushed out into the street and joined the movement of September 5.

The massacre would have been tremendous. But Carreras and other pilots achieved their aim. Given orders to bomb Cienfuegos, they dropped their bombs and all their murderous shrapnel in the ocean. That’s how his history as a revolutionary, his cooperation with the July 26 Movement, began.

The regime caught him conspiring, and he was court-martialed. He and a group of conspirators were sentenced to jail on the Isle of Pines, today the Isle of Youth. In prison on the Isle of Pines, he became involved in revolutionary work. They were in jail until Jan. 1, 1959, when the revolution triumphed and he and other revolutionaries were freed.

From that point on Carreras began a new stage of revolutionary activity. He continued his training as a pilot, improving his flying skills and learning new technologies as we began to receive Soviet weaponry.  
 
Victory at Playa Girón
Not to jump over stages in his life, however, shortly before we received the first Soviet planes, Playa Girón took place.2 With the few planes we had taken over from Batista’s air force, with the few pilots we had at the time, the revolution confronted the mercenary aggression at Playa Girón.

In the book we see how it happened. In addition to being few in number, the majority of planes they were flying were in very poor condition. There are many stories about how our engineers, our mechanics, our technicians made the planes operational, even using contact breakers from automobiles. And the courageous pilots who achieved this, under these conditions, were headed by Carreras, as leader of one of our air force’s attack groups.

The mercenaries had supremacy not just at sea but also in terms of planes. The proof is that we shot down more of their planes than the total number of planes we had, which was barely seven. Nonetheless, between our artillery and our planes, we shot down 12 of theirs. They acted like cowards—their planes bore Cuban insignia, creating uncertainty among our pilots and artillerymen. At the hour of battle, you didn’t know if you were firing at friend or foe. That complicated things a bit until we figured it out and our pilots came up with signals to identify each other in the air.

Our planes played an extremely important role in the final outcome in the battle of Playa Girón. All this is well told by Carreras here—his participation as well as that of other pilots who risked their lives, not just due to combat but because of the technical condition of the planes. These pilots carried out this important duty to defend the revolution, and we know the results: the mercenaries were defeated in less than 72 hours. And Carreras played an outstanding part in that battle.

Later came the period of the development of our air force, with different types of aircraft coming from the USSR. And there was Carreras participating again, organizing and planning the groups of us who went off to study in Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, China. His recommendations were very important with regard to the requirements for the pilots who were to go study—that they have good reflexes, be in good health.

I remember the first medical exam at the airfield in San Antonio de los Baños at the beginning of 1961. That’s when we had the opportunity to get to know Carreras firsthand. He went through the hospital many times, inquiring about the pilots, the young personnel there—17 or 18 years old—who came from the Young Rebels.3 These youth were integrated into our armed forces, enriching our units.  
 
Sense of humanity
There’s something worth recalling. In the medical books inherited from the old army, there was an affliction called “repulsive ugliness” that was used to prohibit individuals from flying. Doctors could put down “repulsive ugliness” for someone with juvenile acne, for example. They didn’t let many blacks through. Anyone a doctor didn’t like, he could put down “repulsive ugliness” and that was enough to bar the person from flying.

Well, Carreras fought those strange concepts. Sometimes there were very good compañeros about whom the doctors would put down “repulsive ugliness,” and Carreras would go fight with them. I’m telling you this, because one of his qualities was his sense of humanity, which has always been part of his character, his charisma.

Many of us young people went off to train as pilots in different countries. In one year we were trained as pilots. In accelerated courses, we learned the technical aspects of aviation, the same as the technicians and engineers. We finished the initial part of our schooling in other countries, but when we returned to Cuba in May 1962, as Carreras describes here, the older pilots, beginning with Carreras, became our tutors. Because as pilots we were still rookies. We had learned to land and take off, but it was different learning the combat side—experience in combat aviation, the aggressiveness a pilot must have in the air, among other things.

Many of you know Carreras, he’s calm and easygoing. But in the air he was a lion, hunting targets, accelerating at moments of danger, seizing the offensive.

And he instilled these virtues in us, the young pilots. I had the privilege of being with him during the October Crisis in San Antonio de los Baños.4 I arrived in May, and by October—thanks to what I and others had learned from him and other experienced compañeros—in a few months we were able to assimilate aerial tactics, aerial combat, mastering complex techniques.

Now, Villegas here is someone who really knows something about ground combat. But not all combat is the same. In all combat you risk your life. In the air, however, you don’t even need to be in combat to do so. Every takeoff, every landing, exposes you to the same intensity, the same rigor, the same danger. Carreras taught us that. Calmness is also a virtue of his. He is very cool in the face of danger. He talks about that in the book; you’ll be able to read it in these pages.  
 
Front ranks in October 1962 crisis
You could see all those attributes of Carreras during the October Crisis. I remember when the commander in chief [Fidel Castro] showed up at San Antonio de los Baños at one of the most critical moments of the crisis, in the middle of the night. He met with all the pilots. He had just given the order that, the next day, Cuban troops were to open fire on the planes that were flying over Cuba, scouting out where the strategic missiles were located and what planes we had in the air brigade. By then we had MiGs. The Soviets had a MiG-21 regiment. And there were antiaircraft missiles.

The night the commander in chief arrived we were asleep—we were bivouacked there, of course. The commander told us that by dawn we were to be positioned in our cockpits on the runway, with the planes armed, ready to go into combat.

Clearly the danger was very great. [Raúl] Curbelo, head of the air force at the time, decided that the most experienced pilots—those with Playa Girón under their belts—would be the first to take off, and then us rookies. Owing to his experience, Carreras was in the front ranks of the planes that were to confront that powerful air force. During the October Crisis, this power was shown by the number of exploration flights the U.S. government carried out, not to mention the planes they had in reserve in the event of total war.

Our air force was going into battle at a disadvantage relative to the enemy’s numerical superiority. And Carreras, courageously, was in the front ranks of takeoff position number one.

Fortunately the Yankee planes did not fly over Cuba that day, because it would have been a real dogfight. All of us pilots were equally ready to take to the air and give the aggressors the beating they deserved.

That was the October Crisis.

In the following years we increased the air force’s technological capacities; we obtained new planes. We received the MiG-15 and MiG-17 fighter jets, then the MiG-21 F-13. Then the next line of planes, the MiG-19; then other variants, the MiG-21 MF, the MiG-23, and finally the MiG-29. Also different types of helicopters and transport planes.

There were few pilots able to master and fly all the types of planes our air force had. One of these was Enrique Carreras Rolas. Few of us had that privilege. Because every plane has its own peculiarities. Each has its own method, its own way of being flown. He became an ace in the Cuban air force.

Later on, because of health problems, he could no longer fly fighter jets, but as long as he could fly he continued piloting transport planes of different kinds. He felt—and feels—that he is a man of the air, because he’s a professional of the air force. I believe he still conducts flights in his mind. He is a man of the air who was born and raised to become one of our heroes who have always defended us, kept our skies blue and clear of any type of enemy aircraft.

For that reason, his participation in the formation of our air force—which became, after that of the United States, the strongest in the Americas—has great value. No Latin American country has, or will have, either the fire power or the courage that our air force demonstrated in Angola, in Ethiopia, and in other countries. Our pilots were in the Congo, in Yemen, and I’m sure all of them carry with them the teachings of Enrique Carreras Rolas, the master of the air.5 In one way or another, all of us flew with him. He oversaw us, he watched over us.

I never heard from the mouth of Enrique Carreras Rolas, toward me or any other pilot, a single offensive word. If he had to point out errors in your flight, he’d do it modestly, calmly, and with a tremendous revolutionary spirit.

These are the characteristics of the great man who has written this book. He is the most honest man one could know, the most humble, the calmest, the most decent.

But he is also the best fighter we have known in combat aviation.


1. On Sept. 5, 1957, an uprising against the Batista dictatorship took place in the city of Cienfuegos in south-central Cuba, led by disaffected forces in the navy, as well as the July 26 Movement. It was quickly joined by working people and youth from the city. Originally intended as a national uprising by anti-Batista forces in the military, the revolt was isolated to Cienfuegos and was quickly crushed; dozens of revolutionaries were killed.

2. On April 17, 1961, 1,500 Cuban-born mercenaries invaded Cuba at the Bay of Pigs on the southern coast. The action, organized by Washington, aimed to establish a “provisional government” that would immediately appeal for direct U.S. intervention. But the invaders, never able to secure a foothold, were defeated in less than 72 hours by the militia and the revolutionary armed forces and police. On April 19 the last invaders surrendered at Playa Girón (Girón Beach), which is the name Cubans use to designate the battle.

3. The Association of Young Rebels (AJR) was a revolutionary youth organization formed in 1959 by the Rebel Army’s Department of Instruction headed by Ernesto Che Guevara. It was one of the predecessors of the Union of Young Communists (UJC), founded in 1962.

4. In the face of escalating preparations by Washington for an invasion of Cuba in the spring and summer of 1962, the Cuban government signed a mutual defense agreement with the Soviet Union. In October 1962 U.S. president John Kennedy demanded removal of Soviet nuclear missiles installed in Cuba following the signing of that pact. Washington ordered a naval blockade of Cuba, stepped up its preparations to invade, and placed U.S. armed forces on nuclear alert. Cuban workers and farmers mobilized in the millions to defend the revolution. Following an exchange of communications between Washington and Moscow, on October 28 Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, without consulting the Cuban government, announced his decision to remove the missiles.

5. Between 1975 and 1989, more than 375,000 Cuban internationalist combatants served in Angola, helping to defend that country against a South African invasion and an imperialist-backed insurgency supported by Washington, among others. In 1977 Cuba responded to a request by the government of Ethiopia to help defeat a U.S.-backed invasion by the regime in neighboring Somalia aimed at seizing the Ogaden region. In 1965 Che Guevara led a column of more than 100 Cuban combatants in the Congo to help train liberation forces fighting a proimperialist regime installed with Washington’s support. In the 1970s Cuban military instructors trained forces in South Yemen.  
 
 
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