It is 9:00 a.m. on December 28, 1958 in the ruins of the old Oriente power plant, about 15 kilometers from the city of Palma Soriano.
The Commander in Chief of the Rebel Army Fidel Castro meets with Major General Eulogio Cantillo, head of the First Military District of Oriente province, to propose his collaboration with the end of the war in the country and to decide the surrender of the square of Santiago de Cuba.
In the last days of December 1958, General Eulogio Cantillo Porras, head of Military Operations in the Oriente province, requested, through the mediation of a priest, to meet with Commander in Chief Fidel Castro. The proposal was accepted, as it would avoid further Cuban bloodshed. On December 28, 1958, the meeting took place in the demolished Oriente headquarters, in Palma Soriano, where Cantillo went accompanied by Colonel Jose M. Rego Rubido, chief of the Santiago de Cuba Regiment. Cantillo’s subsequent actions left no doubt that the request had been made with Batista’s consent.
Fidel himself recounted that conversation years later:
He [Cantillo] arrived in a helicopter, met with me near Palma Soriano ( ) and I set three conditions, because he insisted on coming to the capital. I told him: “Don’t go to the capital, there is no need; raise the Santiago de Cuba Regiment and I guarantee that the regime will not last 24 hours”. I wanted to look for an elegant way out since Cantillo was coming to parley and acknowledged that we had won the war, but asking how we would end it.
I suggested to him how to end it: “We are going to make a movement in which we and the military forces of Santiago de Cuba are united”.
As we were fighting hard against them, we made many casualties, we made a very generous war, there was a very great moral influence in the enemy troops themselves. Hence our proposal to Cantillo: “To be able to save all that could be saved of honorable people in your ranks”, and he agreed. He insisted on going to Havana, that it was safe to go to Havana.
Then I put three conditions: first, that there should be no coup d’état in the capital; second, that Batista should not be allowed to escape; third, that there should be no negotiations with the Yankee Embassy. Cantillo comes to Havana and organizes the three things: the coup d’état in the capital, Batista’s escape and the talks with the Yankee Embassy, and I wait because that uprising was to take place around December 30, and the news that arrived was that he should wait. What do you mean wait, if we have stopped the military operations in consideration of the agreement? We cannot stop them.
On the 30th I sent a letter to Rego Rubido giving him a deadline (…) I think it was 24 hours, if the agreement was not fulfilled, hostilities would be declared broken, and if we started fighting they would not stop until the capture of Santiago de Cuba. Already on the first day we started. We were in the now central América Libre, in Contramaestre, between Maffo, which we had just taken, and Palma [Palma Soriano], which [had] been taken a few days earlier. From there we were preparing all the movements for the attack on Santiago de Cuba.
The rebel leader proposed the surrender of the forces of tyranny on the basis of six points: the resignation of the tyrannical government of Fulgencio Batista on December 31, 1958, the arrest of war criminals, the surrender of the military detachments and barracks throughout the Oriente to the Rebel Army, the commitment not to promote a coup d’état in the country, not to let the tyrant Batista escape and to prevent foreign intervention in Cuba.
Only 4 days before the end of the year, in Oriente only the garrison surrounded in Maffo remained to surrender. The situation was not such as to wait contemplatively for the enemy to surrender, so the rebel command adopted important decisions.
During the exchanges with the officers of the tyranny surrounded in the warehouses of the Banco de Fomento Agrícola e Industrial, the rebel command reasoned about the uselessness of a resistance that could not be supported by any means. The besieged had very little food and to survive they had built a well inside the central building. At the same time, they were taking shelter under the dense concrete floors.
For its part, the Rebel Army concentrated on this date its artillery rescued from the hands of the tyranny itself and moved a mobile tank from the free city of Palma Soriano with the objective of filling it with gasoline to spray the accesses, exterior trenches and even the land surrounding the BANFAIC to later set it on fire and provoke the surrender of the soldiers.
The troops of the tyranny in BANFAIC had very little hope of combat.