He quickly distinguished himself as one of the top commanders of the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces and a popular leading figure of the revolution, becoming close friends with Che Guevara during their guerrilla campaign in Las Villas.

He oversaw the reorganization of the armed forces, in order to purge leading figures of the Cuban National Army and replace them with guerrilla commanders more loyal to Fidel Castro.

[1] Camilo's older brother Osmany Cienfuegos, who had graduated as an architect, became a communist activist,[4] at a time when student dissidents were highly active and increasingly being repressed by the anti-communist regime of Fulgencio Batista.

[32] The following month, they received news that Ángel Sánchez Mosquera was leading the National Army through the adjacent valley and destroying the local peasantry's homes there.

[39] In February 1958, Guevara's armory began preparing supplies for the rebel forces' first offensive of the year, a planned attack on a National Army company at Pino del Agua.

[52] On 16 April, Cienfuegos returned to active combat in the Sierra, with Castro appointing him as commander of the guerrilla warfare in the area between Bayamo, Manzanillo and Las Tunas.

Your eternal chicharrón, Camilo.On 24 May 1958, the National Army launched Operation Verano, an offensive into the Sierra that aimed to cut off Castro's supply lines and weaken his forces.

The revolutionaries pressed on despite the poor conditions of the expedition, with Cienfuegos reporting in October:[71] Forty days of march, often with the south coast and a compass as the only guide.

[74] Before the arrival of Guevara and Cienfuegos in Las Villas, the insurrection there was mostly directed by independent groups such as the Revolutionary Directorate and the Second National Front of Escambray, as well as small detachments of the Popular Socialist Party and 26 July Movement.

Although these groups had accomplished little before, the new leadership of Guevara and Cienfuegos would transform the revolutionary situation in Las Villas and prove instrumental to the adhesion of the Communists to the movement.

[75] Cienfuegos' and Guevara's columns arrived in Las Villas on 14 October 1958,[76] gaining strength from National Army deserters and local 26 July Movement activists along the way.

[78] Together they clashed with a 450-strong detachment of the National Army and faced difficulties with a local unit of the Revolutionary Directorate, with Enrique Oltuski coming to them from Trinidad, in Sancti Spíritus Province, to mediate the dispute, and in the process meeting Guevara and Cienfuegos.

[80] The revolutionaries also implemented a programme of agrarian reform in Las Villas,[81] with Cienfuegos organising local sugar workers to hold a national conference later in the year.

[80] When the 1958 Cuban general election was held, Guevara and Cienfuegos organised a boycott in Las Villas and attempted to prevent voting urns from being brought to the province.

[86] In an attempt to appeal for US support, president-elect Andrés Rivero Agüero initially promised to negotiate a peaceful solution to the political crisis in the country, but quickly re-committed to Batista's plan of forcefully suppressing the uprising.

Camilo's column should be in the lead, the vanguard, to take over Havana when the dictatorship falls, if we don't want the weapons from Camp Columbia [military headquarters] to be distributed among all the various groups, which would present a very serious problem in the future.

In the comandant's office was Camilo, with his romantic beard, looking like Christ on a spree, his boots thrown on the floor and his feet up on the table, as he received his excellency the ambassador of the United States.The following day, 26 July Movement called for a general strike to mark the final blow to the Batista regime, with the old institutions falling to the revolution with each passing hour.

[108] When visited in Camp Columbia by television reporters, who broadcast the interaction to thousands of viewers, he made a point to release a number of parrots from their birdcages, declaring "these also have a right to liberty".

[109] Cienfuegos' "easy manners" quickly became emblematic of the revolutionaries,[110] who Havana was pleasantly surprised to find on good behavior; neither drinking alcohol nor looting the city after its capture.

[122] Meanwhile, Camilo solicited his brother Osmany Cienfuegos, a member of the PSP, to establish a Cultural Section of the Revolutionary Armed Forces that would oversee the Cuban literacy campaign.

[131] Baseball quickly became a fixture of post-revolutionary Cuban culture,[132] with United States ambassador Philip Bonsal observing: "The spectacle of the Prime Minister, alleged by his admirers to have been a promising pitcher of big league caliber, throwing a few curves to Major Camilo Cienfuegos, a former minor-leaguer, and generally clowning about on the diamond was a feature of the pregame show of many important contests.

[136] Although Cienfuegos originally envisioned an equitable merger of the Revolutionary and National Armies, Castro quickly convinced him that it was "necessary to reorganize the armed forces with men loyal to the Revolution, and not accomplices of tyranny.

[183] This meant the end of judicial independence and the re-establishment of revolutionary tribunals,[184] which expanded the definition of "counter-revolutionary" by criminalising strike action, eliminating the category of "political prisoner" and assuming collective guilt by association.

[186] To Cuban-American historian Samuel Farber, Cienfuegos "exemplified the quintessential native, male, urban Cuban with his sense of humor, great interest in dancing and baseball, good looks, love of women, and overall joie de vivre".

[187] To American historian Robert E. Quirk, Cienfuegos' "easygoing and friendly demeanor and Old Testament beard combined to project a popular counterimage alongside that of the July 26 leader.

"[168] While to the British ambassador Leycester Coltman "Camilo's austere figure, black beard and gentle, dignified manner gave him an even more Christ-like appearance than Castro.

"[153] While Fidel Castro himself described Cienfuegos as "a pure revolutionary soul, Communist timber", he also speculated that he could have been removed from command due to his "low political level".

[168] After the revolution, Cienfuegos was remembered fondly by his soldiers, who compared his affectionate leadership style to that of a parent or a teacher, rather than that of a "chief", recalling that "he even insisted that prisoners should eat first".

In October 1958, when a Cuban Masonic organization expressed concern that someone captured by the rebels might be tortured and killed, he replied that he wouldn't even have considered such an act, which he thought would have lowered the revolutionaries' methods to the level of their opponents.

[220] To mark the 50th anniversary of his death, on 28 October 2009, a steel outline of Cienfuegos' face and the words "Vas bien, Fidel" were added to the side of the Ministry of Communications [es] building on the Plaza de la Revolución.