During the battle for the surrender of the troops of the dictatorship stationed in the warehouses of the Banco de Fomento Agrícola e Industrial de Cuba (BANFAIC) in Maffo, the Commander in Chief of the Liberation Army Fidel Castro Ruz, planned the combat missions to also force the military square of Palma Soriano to surrender and open the road to the eastern capital, Santiago de Cuba.
Fidel Castro decided to make contact with Commander Francisco Sierra Talavera, chief of the military plaza of Palma Soriano and summoned him to his command post in Contramaestre, to convince him to lay down his arms.
At 11:00 p.m. on the night of December 26, 1958, the rebel leader arrived at Eduardo Sorribes’ house accompanied by his personal assistant Celia Sánchez Manduley and several members of his staff. In this place, about 200 meters from the BANFAIC ships, was the advanced command post of the Rebel Army during the battle that had begun on December 10 of the aforementioned year.
While the negotiations were beginning, the rebel officer Pedro Miret Prieto advanced on the BANFAIC ships with an armored vehicle occupied by the Army of the tyranny. In the midst of the heat of combat, he did not make an adequate exploration of the road and was paralyzed when he fell into the crater caused by a bomb of the tyranny’s air force, thus beginning a true odyssey inside the war machine trapped between two fires.
The armored vehicle had no reverse gear, which created a very difficult situation for the leadership of the Rebel Army, given the possibility that the tank would be rescued by the troops of the dictatorship.
Minutes after the surrender of Palma Soriano was agreed upon, one of the crew members of the tank stuck in the vicinity of BANFAIC, presented himself to Fidel to receive instructions. His incorporation to the Rebel Army was so recent that he was unarmed.
The Commander in Chief, in recognition of his bravery, gave him his pistol and his gun. Knowing that the armored vehicle only had eight shells left, he decided to send for another eight to Central America and ordered the young fighter to return to the tank with the following missions:
(…) Don’t waste a single cannonball on me; wait for the day to get a little clearer, for the light to break, for you to see the BANFAIC ships well, and cannon shots come and go, but never before eight minutes each cannon shot one after the other (…).
In these circumstances the heroic patriots Wilfredo Pajés Pérez and José González Sarmientos fall while the surrender of the square of Palma Soriano is effectively approved in the early morning of December 27, 1958.
In this place died in combat Wilfredo Pajés, from Manzanillo, trying to rescue an armored vehicle.
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