One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution (27 page)

Back in Manzanillo, Celia had to confront two huge problems. One was José “Gallego” Moran. He had been around since the end of February, when she brought him down from the mountains to a Manzanillo clinic. Moran had not gone to Mexico and the United States, the assignment he’d sought from Fidel. He’d been working with the local 26th of July Movement in Manzanillo and moving about, whenever he felt like it, to the mountains and Santiago. They didn’t know what he was up to, and he was someone they fundamentally distrusted. Frank had warned Rafael Sierra, who took over while Celia was with the rebel army, to keep Moran on a short leash. He did not: Moran had been popping up in various places since the rebels had left the CBS television journalist on Pico Turquino and come down to the coast. Moran was an ongoing problem. She had to solve it.

Upon her return, she encountered the second grave problem. Sierra had authorized some “boys” to join Fidel in the mountains. Only Frank and she had authority to do this. Although I don’t have all the pieces of this story, I learned certain details: she didn’t initiate this group, but she didn’t stop them, either, and helped Sierra outfit them before they left Manzanillo. The outcome was disastrous. While Frank was voicing his disgust for the 26th’s general ineptitude and lack of discipline, Celia, his star pupil, was providing him with a shining example. I gained a clear picture (if not a full understanding) of this situation from the letters Celia sent to Frank, asking him for help. The boys were unseasoned, she told him; they thought 40-pound backpacks were too heavy; they’d been barely trained; they lacked discipline, they ate up all their rations on the first days; and some “ran off” (she does not call it desertion) and threw their weapons and ammunition in the underbrush (which must have left Frank reeling). Celia, by now, had processed well over a hundred soldiers through her eccentric barracks, and had done so very professionally. Yet this one group of men jeopardized her
marabuzal
operation, which was becoming the lifeline of the rebel army, and she was faced with the responsibility of finding them, punishing them, and explaining why this group had become derailed.

IN SANTIAGO, FRANK SENT OSCAR LUCERO
to the mountain zone of his birth. It was in a region northeast of Santiago, near the Miranda sugar mill, within the range called Sierra Cristal. Frank had already made a trip there, liked what he saw, and had informed Fidel. Fidel gave Frank his blessing in a letter written on June 4. In mid-June, a base camp was set up on a farm near the Miranda mill (today called Julio Antonio Mella) not far from the town of Palmarito de Cauto. In Frank’s plans, the 26th of July Movement Second Front, or M-26 SF, would attack a small army garrison protecting the Miranda mill. After a lightning attack, his guerrillas would escape into the Sierra Cristal.

In Santiago, the movement’s greatest threat came from the paramilitary force
Los Tigres
, led by Rolando Masferrer, who had issued a press release that infuriated Frank. Masferrer announced that he would be speaking at a recruiting rally in Santiago on June 30, and Frank decided that would be the date to launch the Second Front’s inaugural attack at the Miranda mill. He also went to work on ways to disrupt Masferrer’s speech during the rally.

On June 26, Frank’s hand-picked forces began to leave Santiago; there were around forty men he’d assembled from clandestine groups all over the country, with Rene Ramos Latour (Daniel) as their leader. Daniel was the first to leave Santiago and head for a farm where weapons were stashed. He traveled with Oscar Lucero, familiar with the area, as his second in command. Taras Domitro was quartermaster; Raúl Perozo Fuentes, Miguel A. Manals, and Luis Clerge were platoon leaders; and José R. Balaguer (later to become architect of Cuba’s famous health system) was their doctor. On June 28, the remaining M-26 SF soldiers left Santiago by train, and got off at two stations, Miranda and Bayate, a way station up the line. The group at Bayate waited, then left when no one showed to pick them up. They stopped a car going to Miranda and, anticipating who they might be, a clearly sympathetic driver said, “I’m sorry for you, but they saw you in the station. An army sergeant dressed in civilian clothes. He called the garrison near the Miranda mill to send a delegation to meet you.” The army put troops in three stations in the region: Miranda, Bayate, and Palmarito de Cauto, and detained everybody who even went near them. The SF Bayate men broke up into two groups. One group hid near a cemetery, drew fire, and Rene Medina, one of Frank’s
soldiers, was shot and died shortly afterward. The rest made it into the mountains. Daniel, on the farm, ordered his men to remove all weapons they’d stored inside the farmhouse and bury them. Then they left, moving carefully through the countryside. That night, they were able to elude the army, and crossed the Rio Cauto by constructing a bamboo boat that carried two at a time, for seven crossings. Daniel was leading thirteen men; they made it out of the zone and sent a messenger to Santiago to get Frank’s help.

In Santiago,
Los Tigres
got their rally rolling on Sunday, June 30, “in full battle gear . . . with the backing of tanks, three thousand soldiers, and more than two hundred of Masferrer’s thugs,” as Frank described it. He’d devised a plan that called for his youngest brother, Josué, seventeen, to ride by in a car with two other boys, Floro Vistel and Salvador Pascual. The police recognized the three and sprayed the car with machine-gun fire.

The following day, unable to attend the funeral, Frank sat in a safe house composing a poem to his dead brother. “I feel my soul shattered,” he wrote. “How much I always hoped to give you.” Women of Santiago, in substantial numbers, went to the cemetery. It was too dangerous for young men to be seen there as they would be marked as supporters by the police. This became the pattern: women, and older people, would attend anti-police, antiBatista events. On June 30, the day of the three burials, someone recognized an undercover agent for SIM. When the brother of one of the boys killed heard that an SIM agent was present, he assaulted the agent. Women—perhaps to protect him—joined in. Celia described what happened to Fidel: she said the women took off their shoes and hammered the man with their high heels.

CELIA WAS IN THE SAME DILEMMA
as Frank after she returned to Manzanillo. She began living in another round of safe houses. Elsa Castro was ordered by the movement to take charge of feeding her in a couple of these houses because nothing, absolutely nothing, could call attention to where Celia might be hidden. Elsa explained that if a grocer noticed that an extra lamb chop had been purchased, he might say: “I see you have a guest,” and speculate that the family was feeding an extra person, then mention this to the police. So Elsa would go on her lunch hour, when all shops were closed, to prepare something for Celia to eat. She’d carry a
can of some imported Spanish gourmet product that her brother-in-law stored in his house, under a bed sheet, until he was ready to display these cans in his booth at trade fairs. She’d swipe a can, put it in her purse, maybe add an egg or two and make an omelet. She laughed recalling an omelet she filled with fruit cocktail: “Celia loved it.” Like any pretty, well-dressed working girl of twenty-one, Elsa had appeared to be going to a friend’s house during her lunch hour. She would ring the doorbell, be admitted at the door, and no one would have any idea what she was up to.

Hardship wasn’t Celia’s problem, Elsa says. “She didn’t simply hide. Generally, she stayed in middle-class homes.” Elsa wanted to clarify, as did others I interviewed, that Celia’s real problems as a
clandestino
were insidious, and gave an example. “When she went to my cousin’s house, there was a cleaning woman.” Hector Llópiz had delivered Celia to Elsa’s cousin’s house, and the door was opened by a young girl who cleaned for the family, who exclaimed, “I know you! You’re Celia.” The girl became very excited at Celia’s celebrity, claimed she’d seen Celia’s picture in
Life
magazine. She bragged to Celia that her boyfriend was in the 26th of July Movement, and, in the manner of girlfriends, began to promote him. Now that Celia’s cover was blown, and the girl knew who she was and where she was staying, Celia realized, to use Elsa’s words, that “she’d have to lure her in, jeopardize the girl in order to keep her quiet.” Celia apparently told the girl to bring her boyfriend by later that night. When the couple arrived, Elsa says, “She gave him an assignment. Told him—or maybe it was them—someplace to go and plant a bomb. They did. That way, she involved the girl and the boyfriend so they wouldn’t talk. She compromised them and ensured their silence.”

Situations like this are the stuff of urban guerrilla or clandestine warfare. I have taken Elsa’s story at face value and see it as simply one more reason Celia was champing at the bit to get out of the underground, preferring battle as an alternative.

17. J
ULY
2, 1957
Thanks to Moran

ON TUESDAY, JULY 2
, Felipe Guerra Matos was arrested for the third time as he drove into Manzanillo. He had just transported some men into the mountains, and his arrest was, he says, “Thanks to Moran.”

During our interview, Felipe’s voice dropped, markedly; his tone became soft, reflective. “It didn’t happen overnight. A person doesn’t come down from the Sierra one day and start working with the enemy the next. He worked for several months in Manzanillo. He worked with all of us.” According to Felipe, Moran had been arrested by the police, let go, and after that “many of us were arrested and didn’t know why.” Mass arrests started on July 2 as members of the Manzanillo 26th of July Movement were taken to jail, one after another. Frank contacted Celia that he was sending someone to help her, along with “some packages.” The next day Celia wrote a quick note to a woman she often worked with, asking her to take in packages. “We are in much danger with Moran. I have been in exile for three days. I’m counting on you to take care of my request.” Frank’s delegate got there, and the same woman contacted Celia. “Let him wait for a week,” Celia wrote back, unsure when she’d be ready to meet with him.

On Friday, July 5, Frank wrote Fidel: “Things in Manzanillo aren’t going very well. The Galician Moran stool-pigeoned on the
whole movement. I warned Norma [Celia] and Sierra [Rafael] that the enemy was profiting by what Moran was regaling them with and that they had better execute him before he did more damage, but Sierra is irresolute by nature. Now the damage is done, and I think the least Sierra deserves is to be expelled from the movement for his constant negligence and incompetence.” Frank had ruled out Sierra; that left Celia in charge. The delegate Frank had sent to Manzanillo would help her assassinate Moran.

Stalling perhaps, Celia turned to Elsa Castro for help. “Elsa, go to your friend Cabado and others who are always collecting blankets, sweatshirts—and flashlights, if possible, but not the small ones, normal size ones with replacement batteries. By tomorrow, I need four mountain knives with good handles because everything here has to be strong. The same goes for the blankets, the heaviest possible; the cold is so intense it will freeze your bones,” which implies that she’s either in the mountains, and needed these supplies, or was getting people out of Manzanillo.

In Frank’s letter to Fidel, he confronted all the worst situations. When he sat down to write this letter, his hand shook as he picked up the pen, he told Fidel. When he was calm enough to write, he described what had happened to the Second Front, the failure at the rally, and his brother Josué’s death. “Everything planned in such detail, everything so well distributed, and it all turned out badly, absolutely everything went awry, one thing after another. The time bomb, so meticulously prepared and placed, did not go off because it got wet a few hours before; the hand grenades did not work; the Second Front, organized with such secrecy, was aborted and we lost weapons and equipment worth more than US$20,000 [the peso and the dollar were equal at the time], as well as the life of a comrade. And we lost three more comrades here.” Then Frank, in this letter, begins to describe what happened to the three boys, one of them his brother. “They were taken by surprise as they were carrying out a delicate operation. They preferred to die fighting rather than allow themselves to be arrested. The loss of the youngest among them has left me with emptiness in my heart and sorrow in my soul.”

As more and more people were arrested in Manzanillo, and as Celia was trying to deal with Moran, Fidel sent her a message saying that some rolls of film would be arriving and he wanted her
to get them developed and printed, and to be sure to put a package of prints on the first plane to Havana the next morning so they’d get in
Bohemia
’s weekend edition. She was furious but found a way to get it done. “Enough is enough: look, when the two rolls come, it’s okay [this time]. . . . ” she wrote Elsa. She asked her to tell Hector Llópiz the whole Fidel-
Bohemia
story when he came to pick up the prints, adding, “If Fidel wants his picture in
Bohemia
, next time he’ll have to figure it out for himself.”

ON SUNDAY, JULY 7
, Celia warned Fidel that “a highly respected person” had come to tell her he had been approached by the government with a $50,000 offer to assassinate Fidel. But the man, after assuring the government’s agent he didn’t know how to find Castro (let alone assassinate him), contacted Crescencio Pérez to warn them of the government’s offer. Crescencio sent him to Celia. She thanked him after listening to his story. Before leaving, the man had warned her to be careful, because “that kind of money is tempting.”

In four letters, written between July 7 and 16, Celia pours out her problems to Fidel. She analyzes why that one group from Manzanillo had been such a failure; mentions that $10,000 is missing, a matter that she and Frank are investigating; and moans that Rolando Masferrer planted a company of his paramilitaries in the Sierra disguised as 26th of July soldiers wearing false armbands. She is extremely upset about this, since mountain people—farmers, ranchers, and small business owners—assist the 26th of July Movement. They are the ones who are going to get caught in Masferrer’s trap. But Celia had good news to offer as well: she let Fidel know that she was sending guns and ammunition (the contents of the packages from Frank) and adds: “I want to continue preparing and organizing well in case I am not around.” (Does this mean she’s vulnerable, as in death, or is she reminding him that it is high time she moved out of there and into the protective geography of the Sierra?) She closes her letter with, “I love you and remember you,” but the “you” is plural and she means “all of you.”