One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution (17 page)

Che Guevara wrote about his escape with four comrades: Juan Almeida, Ramiro Valdes, Reynaldo Benitez, and Rafael Chao. Three others, Camilo Cienfuegos, Francisco González, and Pablo Hurtado, joined them four days later. Fidel left Alegria de Pio with his second in command, Juan Manuel Marquez, a lawyer in his forties. They escaped into a cane field, but got separated. (Marquez wandered around, alone, for ten days, was captured and executed.) Later that night, Fidel caught a glimpse of Faustino Pérez and called out quietly: “Médico, médico.” Now there were three: Fidel, Universo Sánchez, and the M.D., Faustino Pérez.

FROM DECEMBER 5 TO 16
, Celia and everyone else in the 26th of July Movement had to live with heart-wrenching silence as to the whereabouts of the guerrillas. No one knew the fate of Fidel, or any of the survivors. It is estimated that over a ten-day period, until the 15th, Batista placed upward of 40,000 troops (counts vary) in the area. Platoons combed the open fields, set up roadblocks on all routes throughout the region. And in this atmosphere of stratospheric danger, when one would think that she would be frightened, careful, or at least circumspect about leaving Cira’s house, Celia went to Santiago—within a week of her escape—to see Frank. Wearing a pair of harlequin sunglasses with white frames and black lenses, sporting a new short haircut with bangs, a maternity blouse to cover a chicken-wire stomach and a black skirt, she boarded a bus in Manzanillo. She later explained to documentary filmmaker Santiago Alvarez, “I had to go to Santiago to see Frank. . . . I had to see what he knew about the landing.”

Several people had mentioned that she was at the top of the army’s most-wanted list. This was confirmed by one of Batista’s officers, who gave the reason: by mid-December, the army believed Fidel was isolated and harmless. Admittedly, he was still out there but, according to Retired General José Quevedo Pérez, the army thought snagging Celia would get them Fidel. Quevedo told me that Celia Sánchez was the number-one target on the army’s radar, the first priority of the military intelligence unit, SIM, for that reason.

During the week she traveled, buses running between Manzanillo and Santiago were empty because nobody wanted to get involved with the national crisis under way. Most left empty and returned empty. When Celia caught the 6:00 a.m. bus from Manzanillo, accompanied by Eugenia (Gena) Verdecia of the 26th of July Movement, they were the only passengers. Every highway was blocked by military patrols, every car was subject to search, and the bus was halted at the checkpoints in every town along the route. When she chose her disguise, Celia had gambled that soldiers might respect a pregnant woman. When the bus got to the last stretch, near Santiago, it pulled into the military garrison at El Cobre. Soldiers invited the driver into the garrison for coffee. He turned around to tell his two passengers to wait in the bus.
Celia piped up, indignantly, “What about us?” and the driver asked the soldiers whether his passengers could have coffee, too. The soldiers agreed. When Celia climbed down from the bus, the soldiers saw that she was pregnant and expressed concern for her condition. They took hold of her elbows to help her over a barricade they’d constructed. She made it a jump. She later joked that when she made the leap, she had been afraid her wire belly would come loose.

Both women went to the garrison bathroom before entering the kitchen, where they were offered seats, in straight-back, cowhide-clad wooden chairs common in the Sierra Maestra. At some point Celia tipped hers back, balancing her chair on the two back legs, and one of the soldiers scolded her to take care, she might hurt herself or her baby.

She got a good look at the inside of the garrison and later was able to draw a floor plan that proved useful. She asked the soldiers where the troops were going. The coast, they answered, where the rebel landing had taken place. But the danger was over, they added. The rebel chief, Fidel Castro, was dead, and everything would be over soon. The others were dead or in prison.

She’d be sarcastic, later, in speaking of this incident, would say that it demonstrated how stupid the army could be. More to the point, she had been brazen, confident of their stupidity, sure they’d never recognize her. Maybe Celia put this spin on the story to avoid admitting that her trip may have been foolhardy, carrying unnecessary and excessive risk. Pedro Álvárez Tabío, director of the Office of Historical Affairs, a research archive devoted to tracking down this kind of information, is not sure which day she traveled to Santiago; he put it at sometime between the 7th and the 10th. The inconclusiveness leads one to infer that Celia wasn’t all that forthcoming regarding this trip. Her sister, Flávia, says the scratches from the thorns had healed a little by the time of the trip, especially those on Celia’s face (which she’d covered with her hands inside the
marabuzal
), but that her hands and arms—where the thorns had penetrated deepest—were still covered in angry, red scabs. The maternity blouse (housed in the archives) has short sleeves. It seems incredible that nobody considered this disfigurement odd in a pregnant woman, or thought it suspect. She certainly did not look normal.

MAKING IT TO SANTIAGO
, Celia asked Frank what to do about her young militants who had been exposed waiting for Fidel, and now were in hiding. She explained that Cesar Suarez, on his stop in Media Luna, had found out that there were some whose families had denounced them when the police showed up, and she was determined to protect these people. Frank gave her his firsthand account of the Battle of Santiago, and told her to go home to Pilón and sit tight, to keep to the plan: wait for Mongo Pérez to contact her. No matter what developed, whenever Fidel surfaced, he would go to Pérez’s farm,
Cinco Palmas
. Frank explained that he personally had asked Pedro Miret, on Miret’s final trip to Mexico, to carry that precise message, in person, to Fidel: “Look for Ramon ‘Mongo’ Pérez as soon as you land.” Celia was likely learning only now that this element of the plan had been put in place directly by Frank. That meant Fidel would go nowhere else.

In the end, Celia’s carefully recruited network of farmers saved Fidel and his men. When Lalo Vásquez and Manuel Fajardo left the icehouse in Niquero on the morning of December 1, Fajardo, instead of returning to his normal life (Celia’s orders), went instead to Guillermo García’s house. He had no fear of being caught or pegged as a collaborator. In normal life he was a cattleman: “I’d be out of town fifteen or twenty days and nobody missed me. But I didn’t go back.” From the moment he heard about Alegria de Pio, he’d devoted himself to finding survivors of the battle. After the army moved in, when traveling about the region seemed impossible to others, Manuel Fajardo, Crescencio Pérez, and Guillermo García spent their days combing the countryside for dropped weapons or any sign of the surviving guerrillas. “We knew the area. We knew, by heart, how many trails there were, and that we could go anywhere. We rode on horseback and went on foot until it was impossible to continue farther.”

ON DECEMBER 12
, Fidel, Universo, and Faustino arrived on their own at Daniel Hidalgo’s house. Hidalgo and his wife, Cota Coello, weren’t members of the farmers’ network, but they were sympathetic. They were aware that one of their neighbors, Ruben Tejeda, also a farmer, was involved in “something” with Guillermo García that was “anti-Batista” and gave Fidel directions to Tejeda’s house, several miles away. The three guerrillas got there at dawn on December 13 and Tejeda, following Guillermo’s orders, took them to a farm that belonged to Marcial Areviches. From that moment, they were safely in the hands of Celia’s official rescue network, as soon as Guillermo took over. A little after noon, his father, Adrian García, arrived with rice, turkey meat, bread, milk, and coffee in a bucket. Adrian García waited there with them for the rest of the day until the clock rolled over into a new day. At 1:00 a.m. exactly, on December 14, as Álvarez Tabío told me, Guillermo García greeted Fidel Castro, Universo Sánchez, and Faustino Pérez. Then he, along with the farmers Tejeda and Areviches, guided the three guerrillas from Areviches’s farm to a place called La Manteca, where they hid in a cane field (on a farm that belonged to Pablo Pérez) for another twenty-four hours, or until the evening of the 15th.

In the end, Celia’s carefully recruited network of farmers saved Fidel and his men. Guillermo García (photographed), Manuel Fajardo, and Crescencio Pérez spent their days combing the countryside for dropped weapons or any sign of the surviving guerrillas. Fajardo remembers: “We knew the area. We knew, by heart, how many trails there were, and that we could go anywhere. We rode on horseback and went on foot until it was impossible to continue farther.” (
Courtesy of Oficina de Asuntos Históricos
)

In 2011, standing by the modest monument at La Manteca that honors this event, I marveled that Fidel and his companions had made it up and down this set of steep hills and valleys. To me, it seemed a nearly impossible route.

THE ARMY LIFTED ITS CORDON
of the Niquero-Pilón road on December 15, and the three farmers led the guerrillas across it when Guillermo felt it was safe. He delivered Fidel into the hands of Ramon “Mongo” Pérez at dawn on the 16th, after having guided the group over twenty miles of very rough terrain and through the enemy lines. Mongo immediately set out for Manzanillo to tell Celia personally that Fidel was alive. Celia had moved from Cira Escalona’s to Angela Llópiz’s house. Ana Irma Escalona, who also lived there, says that Celia hugged Angela, and said “See, Angela, I told you so.” With Fidel accounted for, Celia began running around town again. Ana Irma says that when Guillermo García arrived two days later with the news that Raúl and another group of guerrillas were okay, Celia was not there. She had slipped out of the house and nobody knew where she was, or what she was up to, and Guillermo had to wait until she returned. I asked Ana Irma whether Celia had presented them with an explanation or apology. Ana Irma’s eyes rolled upward and the expression on her face told me: this was a futile question. Celia didn’t offer explanations or apologies. Her kind of silence was simply one of the many ways she demonstrated her worth.

10. D
ECEMBER
18, 1956
How Many Guns?

WHEN ACCOUNTS OF THE REVOLUTION
were recorded, months and years later, Celia’s network of farmers, fishermen, ranchers, and cattlemen was given a formal name: the Farmers’ Militia. Nobody, least of all Raúl and Fidel, questions the fact that they saved the Revolution. Of the twenty-one survivors discovered by the farmers, sixteen made it to Mongo’s place: three with Fidel on the 16th, five with Raúl on the 18th, another man on the 19th, and seven came with Almeida on the 21st. (Che has given a good account of the last group.) By December 21, the
Granma
’s scattered forces had reassembled.

THE MEN FIDEL HAD APPOINTED
to command positions were dead or had been captured: Juan Manuel Marquez, José Smith, Candido González, and Jesus Montane were those he had relied on most in Mexico and during the crossing. The persons we think of today as leaders of the Cuban Revolution, Camilo Cienfuegos and Che, for example, were not so special then. Che was a member of Fidel’s command platoon, but still only a rank-and-file soldier, though a doctor. Raúl Castro and Juan Almeida were platoon chiefs. Of the sixteen, Fidel sent Faustino Pérez to Manzanillo on December 23 to operate for him on the outside. In the end, fifteen remained in the mountains to stand beside Fidel and to form
the core of what would become the Rebel army. Fifteen, sixteen, twenty-one—any one of those numbers is a fair interpretation, but there never were twelve,
doce
, expressly evoking the Apostles, as claimed by Carlos Franqui, veteran of the Revolution, and briefly editor of
Revolución
, a Havana daily.

IN CUBA, THERE IS THE STORY
—a favorite story—of the conversation that took place between Fidel and his brother on the day they were reunited. Every Cuban can tell you, word by word, the story of Raúl’s arrival. Fidel asked his brother how many guns he had. Raúl answered five. Fidel said that he had two, so that made seven. Fidel’s summation, the punch line that everyone likes to deliver: “Now we’ve won the war.” The story encapsulates unflagging optimism, complete conviction, the intimacy of brothers, relief, confidence—and the entire exchange consists of barely a dozen words.

On December 18, 2006, Cuba celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of that moment, televising the event to the nation. I was in a hotel room, watching. Fidel was in the hospital recovering from an abdominal operation, Raúl was running the country, and Guillermo García, Juan Almeida, and Ramiro Valdez were the guests of honor, standing on a wooden stage that had been constructed at the site of the real landmark,
Cinco Palmas
, Mongo’s place, at the edge of the Sierra Maestra. You could see royal palm trees growing in one clump of three and another of two along the crest of the hill. Fifty years earlier those palms had marked the route, the final beacon. Students from the dance academy of Niquero, dressed as guerrillas, reenacted the terrible Battle of Alegria de Pio on the hillside above the temporary stage and below the palms. They wore green uniforms and carried wooden machine guns. I saw an incredulous look pass over Guillermo García’s face as the young dancers pranced up and down the hillside, representing the survivors who had gotten separated and lost. Two dancers, as Fidel and Raúl, embraced as they delivered the famous “how many guns” exchange, marking the reenactment’s finale. The camera returned to García, now looking delighted, finally on firm ground.