FIDEL CASTRO FELT LOST. On July 24, 1955, he wrote to Melba Her-
nández: "Ten days have passed without news from you.... I'm being
driven crazy, wanting to know how things are going there.... I feel more
isolated than when they had me in solitary confinement." People spoke a
different kind of Spanish in Mexico, and he knew almost no one in the city.
His greatest need was for money, and he could no longer count on his
family for support. A week later he wrote her again: "I don't have an alarm
clock here. If I oversleep, we'll miss the mailman. So I won't go to sleep. I
have a cold and a cough, and my whole body aches." He missed the com-
forts of Cuba's tropical climate. Even in the summer months the Mexican
capital, at an altitude of more than seven thousand feet, could be chilly.
Worst of all, he said, "I don't have any Cuban cigars. That's the picture
here." His ties with the movement in Cuba were now tenuous at best. His
other contact in Havana was a hotel clerk, Pedro Pérez Font, who could
receive and intercept mail discreetly. On August 1 Castro wrote to thank
him for having sent eighty-five dollars. "I can't tell you how much pleasure
it gives me.... I can understand your impatience there, but I don't know the
hour the revolution will start." He might have gone to Miami instead, but
he preferred to distance himself from the intrigues and petty infighting of
the exiled politicians. Moreover, the Eisenhower administration, in prose-
cuting Prío Socarrás, had signified that it would not tolerate Cubans who
plotted armed rebellion against a friendly, anticommunist government. In
the weeks that followed, Castro worked to rebuild his shattered network of
supporters throughout the island and to bind it to his new headquarters.

Revolutionary Mexico had long attracted refugees from many lands,