One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution (11 page)

“Celia had real passion for her father,” Carmen reflected, and described how Celia shooed everyone from the house after lunch each day so nothing could disturb her father’s nap (“not one crack of a screen door or of a window being opened”). She’d load them into the car—Carmen, much younger, seems to have spent most days with Celia—and drive to a woman’s house where they drank coffee in little cups made from condensed milk tins in a room with walls papered in newspapers. Celia dubbed this house
Estrada
, after Fellini’s
La Strada
, echoing her interest in the cinema, and when it was time to wake Dr. Sánchez, they’d go home again.

I heard this observation about Celia’s passion for taking care of her father from the Gironas as well. Only they took it a bit further, saying that when the time came she transferred that passionate care to Fidel.

But now, in the summer of 1956, Dr. Sánchez was nearing seventy and she had taken care of him for nearly two decades. Every day, with her increasing immersion in clandestine activities, she had to yield control a bit more, passing the baton to Acacia, her youngest sister. Aware that after the landing this part of Cuba would likely become a war zone, Celia decided to send her father on vacation to Europe.

Dr. Manuel Sánchez, seated with a friend on the porch of his house in Pilón. Dr. Sanchez educated Celia the way men educate a son. And she, in turn, had real passion for her father. (
Courtesy of Oficina de Asuntos Históricos
)

On August 21, Celia mailed her father a letter, mostly about the drought they’d been having, her garden, and news that some American geologists were looking for oil near Manzanillo. She wrote again September 5, saying that his reply had taken only three days from Amsterdam, faster than most letters from Havana. She assured him that the whole family loved hearing about his health and the good time he was having, and that they expected him home soon. She includes the Bronx address of Orlando, who is “waiting for you,” and a joking postscript: “Your sisters have purchased a television set but they don’t touch it. They don’t turn it on unless someone comes who can tune in a program.”

With their father away, and Acacia taking over the medical office, Celia made straight for Manzanillo and began raising money. Her partner was the 26th of July Movement’s treasurer in the city, Micaela Riera, a good-looking, well-dressed young woman who flouted the police and always kept (as nearly all these people did) an open-date, first-class airplane ticket out of the country.
(The first-class fare was not an indulgence. If you appeared to be from a rich or prominent family, Catholic, and white, the police and army would turn a blind eye for about twenty-four hours.) Celia and Micaela were selling 26th of July bonds—contributions, really, since people reasonably feared getting caught with these documents—handmade showy certificates, with “26th of July” heraldry at the top, drawn in black and red ink—and destroyed them. Celia was assisted by Enrique Escalona, a young man who worked in a Manzanillo bank and organized a network of sympathizers among his fellow workers.

She also enlisted a longtime friend, Dr. Rene Vallejo, who operated a surgical clinic in Manzanillo, to begin soliciting the cooperation of doctors in training field medics. As the time for the landing approached, this training was given in all the coastal areas where she’d done her recruiting. Volunteer doctors taught farmers and ranchers first-aid: how to make splints, crutches and stretchers out of tree limbs, how to give injections, to craft bandages using gauze wrapped over cotton. They were preparing for lightning attacks, skirmishes, and inevitable injuries. The doctors collected medicine and supplies, and Celia shipped them down to the coast, where the packages were buried in fields or placed in cisterns in preparation for the arrival of the rebels. Also under her direction, women in Manzanillo sewed uniforms, made or adapted knapsacks and cartridge belts. Merchants, usually relatives of 26th of July members, donated clothing and footwear. Elsa Castro, a young movement member, offered the pickup and delivery system of her father’s stationery store (without her father’s knowledge). Elsa explains how Dr. Vallejo would, say, drop off a fountain pen for repair, but in reality hand her vials of medicine. In the shop, Elsa and Celia would make packages (wrapped in plastic then covered in burlap), and the next day the mailman would pick them up and get them on their way to the southern coast where recipients hid them in holes and caves.

BY MID-SEPTEMBER
, Celia was back in Pilón, where she gave dinner parties and raised money with the Servants of Mary. Her friend Berta Llópiz reports that she made trips to select toys for the coming New Year’s celebration. She kept up her small business selling accessories because it provided continuity, and good cover
in case she needed to travel outside the country. Celia’s life had become extremely stressful, Berta Llópiz told me, and Celia was afraid of being discovered. Even with Acacia acting as nurse and receptionist when her father returned from his vacation, she still lived in the house, which had become her headquarters. She was in something of a bind: when she wasn’t around patients noticed, and made a big issue of her absence. Berta says that if Celia didn’t recognize a patient, she’d tell everyone in the house to say that she wasn’t home. By this time, the army had grown openly suspicious of her. According to the two Larramendi sisters from Pilón, then in high school, she sometimes arrived at their house with a thermos of coffee and a pack of cigarettes, and would wrap her head in a scarf and sleep all day while they watched over her. Most people I interviewed think that her father knew what she was up to, but I am not so sure of that. She told Acacia to be careful and say she wasn’t in. But Berta says that when patients arrived in the night—since Pilón, a port town, was prone to bar fights and shootings people came to the door at all hours—the “old doctor” would forget that Acacia was there, and shout, “Celia, get up. I need you to help me.” (If he’d really known what she was up to, I don’t think he would have exposed her so casually.)

María Antonia Figueroa remembers seeing Celia during the later months of 1956, when she was working around the clock, and I asked her to describe Celia on these occasions. Figueroa took a few moments, and began with Celia’s voice and how softly she spoke, that she didn’t allow tension to distort it (people often mention this when talking of Celia). Figueroa described her makeup (eyebrows drawn in black pencil, red lipstick), and her hair, jet-black and shiny. On the particular day recollected, the two women had met in Manzanillo and Celia had been wearing sandals and a floral-print dress—Figueroa shaped her hands to indicate a pattern of oversized blossoms. Pinned on the neckline was a bunch of fresh flowers. Figueroa called it “flowers on flowers.”

6. O
CTOBER AND
N
OVEMBER
1956
The Last Five Days of November

In October Frank flew once again to Mexico. He told Fidel, apparently quite flatly, to forget about making the landing at the end of the year—they couldn’t pull it off. But Mexico was getting increasingly difficult. Batista had placed agents there, and Fidel was uneasy. Unsuccessful in his bid, Frank returned to Santiago and intensified his work preparing uprisings to divert the government forces from the landing. Celia, learning of Fidel’s determination to come within the year, made a quick trip to Havana to ask Armando Hart and Haydée Santamaria for permission to fly to Mexico and return on the
Granma
, accompanying Fidel and his soldiers in the landing. She pointed out that she knew the coast better than any others who would be onboard, could guide the crew into any of the harbors, and could then be there to coordinate the truck drivers. Haydée was supportive; Armando talked the idea over with Frank. Fidel was consulted, and was ambivalent about the dynamics of having a woman on the trip. It was Frank who made the decision: Celia was in command of the landing, and should be there, on the coast, directing the preparations for it, not on the vessel en route from Mexico.

In mid-November Mexican police arrested Pedro Miret and seized the rebels’ arsenal (hidden in a Mexico City residence). On the 21st, Mexican authorities gave Castro three days to get out of
the country. He and his men traveled to the Gulf city of Vera Cruz, then up the coast to Tuxpan; there, as many men as the
Granma
would hold crowded aboard. Some had to stay behind, but eighty-two set out for Cuba at 2:00 a.m. on Sunday, November 25, determined to change history or die.

It was another two days before Arturo Duque de Estrada, in Santiago, received a telegram from Mexico: “
Obra pedida agotada
” (Work ordered out of print), signed “Editorial Divulgacio.” This was the code to confirm the
Granma
’s embarkation. During Frank’s visit in October, he and Fidel had calculated the time to complete the Gulf of Mexico crossing, but they hadn’t taken into consideration that the boat would be overloaded both with men and cargo. Instead their calculation, of four days, was based on a crossing under normal conditions and with a reasonable cargo. Frank estimated the landing would take place sometime on November 29.

As soon as the Editorial Divulgacio telegram reached Santiago, the planning phase, in which Celia and Frank and their many lieutenants had been immersed all year, shifted to implementation.

Frank traveled all over Santiago, making contact with the leaders of his action groups, going over arrangements for the uprisings throughout the city and the province, to take place more or less simultaneously with the rebels’ arrival. Lester Rodríguez (now directing the 26th of July Movement in the city so Frank could concentrate on the landing) sent coded instructions to all the major players, to take their battle positions.

That month Santiago had been filled with city police, armed forces, the military secret intelligence service (SIM), and customs police. Perhaps hedging its bets, the government was also backing at least one paramilitary group, the
Tigres
, directed by Rolando Masferrer, age thirty-eight, a senator and publisher who sought to protect Batista militarily. All of these forces were looking for Frank, whose idea of making himself invisible—in such marked contrast with Celia’s methods of blending into her various surroundings—was to drive around in a new car purchased by the movement, a fire-engine-red Dodge. Those who recognized him and had some sense of what he was involved in could hardly believe their eyes: it was Frank País behind the wheel of that attention-grabbing automobile.

By the end of the month, the man in the street, in addition to all the police and military agencies in Santiago, expected Fidel to arrive before the year was out. Oscar Asensio Duque de Heredia, who had been the editor of the high school newspaper and was now president of the student body at the Teachers’ Institute—a position Frank had formerly held—as well as a member of 26th of July Movement, left an account of what Santiago was like at the time. Rumors were everywhere, in open talk of invasion; insiders announced that they knew the exact date for Fidel’s arrival; that hundreds or even thousands of men were coming with him; that cargos of weapons had already arrived; that millionaire former president Prio, exiled in Florida, was funding Fidel and that tanks and planes had been provided. Such gossip was augmented by the military, which issued its own disinformation, fueling the fire to inspire the government forces to greater vigilance. The higher-ups knew from their informers in Mexico that something was in the offing. Even then, Duque de Heredia remembers, “We would see Frank in the red automobile, bought with movement funds, carrying out his grand activity, along with Pepito Tey and other well-known revolutionaries. This car, which many of us called the Red Threat, would drive about under their noses.”

Rodríguez also contacted Celia. She alerted her people in Manzanillo. “Celia came to my house, the house where I lived with my mother,” Elsa Castro recalls. “Ours was one of the [eighteenth-century] wooden houses. Celia had given me a jacket to keep for her, black with long sleeves and zippers on the pockets.” Celia came by that day to collect the jacket.

On the 28th, Frank ordered Lalo Vásquez (using a coded phone call) to take up his position in Niquero, to coordinate the on-the-ground activities of Celia’s militants as they attacked the garrison in that key city, so close to the action just north of Las Coloradas beach. In Niquero, the militants would disguise themselves as members of Batista’s army, ascend the hill above the port, and attack the garrison there. Lalo would give the order to initiate this component of the region-wide uprisings; then the 26th of July sabotage teams would cut electrical wires and telephone lines, ruining the communication systems and bringing about general chaos.

That same evening, Celia left Manzanillo at the wheel of a black car, taking the old coastal road from Manzanillo south to Media
Luna. Headed for a dinner party, she was dressed in a chocolate-colored skirt, and had on the black jacket. She parked her car in front of a house ablaze with lights, going inside to join the jubilant dinner guests. There was food on the table; they all ate and drank as people came and went, receiving instructions. The dinner party was stage one for the reception of Fidel’s landing.