One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution (32 page)

CELIA’S FATHER HAD BEEN ARRESTED
on September 1 and on the next day she left Manzanillo with Rafael Castro (no relation to Raul or Fidel), sent by Fidel to guide her to a place she thought they’d meet. Because of the army’s reaction to the attempted mutiny on the 5th, they got caught in a place called La Maestra. Batista’s forces quickly retaliated by sending troops to “lay a
dragnet”—block the highways. Planes began to drop bombs in various parts of the Sierra Maestra, as she explained to Fidel (in October): “On the 5th and 6th [starting] at 6:15 a.m., five planes bombed the area, and on the 7th and the 8th they continued to do so. By then I had no place to hide. On the 8th troops came up, according to the news [she probably means rumor] to make a siege. They shot mortars and machine guns all they wanted to.”

She waited in La Maestra—which was a code name for the place in “The Sierra” and a general geographical location, not the name of an actual village, where Fidel often camped—and because, as she put it, “I didn’t want to leave, waiting to hear from you,” she stayed on after Rafael Castro left. Celia joined up with other fugitives who, like herself, were on the run. She was trapped there until the 17th of September. She and the fugitives lived in caves, and couldn’t leave the area because it would have required getting through the cordon of army troops set up to block all the roads. At one point, eighteen people made up what she called their “caravan,” barely armed, or if armed, without bullets. For nine days, between the 8th and the 17th of September she existed like that, and with little or no information. “We were not sure whether there would be troops on the road,” she would later explain to Fidel, “we heard that there were,” and thought about leaving, but one of the members of the caravan “deserted” and “we heard five shots and then I really resisted exploring the road.”

So where was Fidel? On September 10, he and Che took their columns to a place called Pino del Agua, after receiving intelligence that the army was about to move into this place. Fidel and Che decided to set up an ambush, with Fidel marching his column into the area first, making sure everybody knew about it, then moving them out again. Fidel would create a lure while Che and his men quietly set up an actual ambush. They waited for the army to appear, which it did on the 17th; Che and his men captured a few trucks, which they burned, and some weapons.

Going strictly by the documents, it appears that Fidel panicked when he discovered that Rafael Castro wasn’t with Celia, because he ordered Daniel and the Santiago Movement to find her. Daniel and his men did everything they could think of, couldn’t locate her, and were in despair. On September 15, Daniel reported to Fidel that they had failed. “With Aly missing and . . . the five
army companies blocking the way to the area that we had been using for our communication route, we tried to make contact with Guevara,” thinking she might be with him. Then they exhausted other possibilities: “We tried to locate a girl here in Santiago who, according to what was reported to us, was the person who had delivered the letters. We couldn’t find her anywhere. Then we hunted for the person who had replaced Aly in Manzanillo.” The Santiago 26th men finally made contact with Celia on September 17, and, still expecting to be rescued by Fidel, she became rattled. Why was Santiago trying to find her? As she explained to Fidel weeks later, “When I received a note saying that Jorge [Sotus] urgently wanted to talk to me . . . I was filled with confusion.” But Sotus did not find her. She left the caves and made it to Santiago, apparently guided by her famous survival instinct. Celia got there on September 19, seeking out Frank’s old comrades. She learned that Jorge Sotus had tried to find her in Manzanillo. Sotus had been the one commander who’d been successful at the Battle of Santiago. He was a loner, from a bourgeois background—his father was a merchant—but he was a scrappy character, exceedingly tough, and a very good fighter. It is to Sotus that she turned when she got to Santiago, and to Daniel. They filled her in. “After talking to Ulises [Jorge Sotus] I was even more confused,” she wrote Fidel, which prompted this query: “How come, if you had sent for me and paved the way for me to the Sierra, how could it be that it was Ulises who came looking for me in Manzanillo? I don’t understand these things.” She either didn’t understand or wasn’t going to let him off the hook.

The Sierra Maestra, that September, was close to anarchy, with roving bandits; in short, it was a very dangerous place for Celia to be. If not caught by Batista’s army, she was “a temptation” to bandits, a wanted person attached to a nice reward for anyone who could capture her. I don’t know the amount, but the government had just placed a $100,000 reward on Fidel’s head. The reward on hers was less, but the army always thought that she was key to finding him.

ONCE AGAIN, FIDEL SENT RAFAEL CASTRO
to pick her up in Santiago and bring her to him in the mountains: “At 9:00 p.m. on September 19, he showed up saying that you had sent for me. . . . [I
did not go because] for the first and only time someone had come to pick me up.” This was her way of saying, “He didn’t lead me to you the first time, why trust him now?” She didn’t go because, on the 20th, having sent Rafael Castro packing, she, Daniel, and Jorge Sotus sat down to compose a memo to Fidel.

The preamble read: “In what follows, we are going to set forth a series of requests that we hope will be given special attention in view of the serious upheavals and troubles we have experienced in our work because of not having anticipated these small details that, at first sight, seemed insignificant but nevertheless, in practice, have caused very serious problems.” Six points followed. They addressed the poor quality of Fidel’s soldiers and their lack of discipline, and the fact that there were sixty men waiting in Santiago “from all over the island” (left over from Frank’s Second Front, needing to get out of Santiago and into the protection of the mountains) who wanted to join the guerrillas and could not because “[you] confer overriding powers on many people who have gotten to you by disregarding discipline and acting irresponsibly.” Celia, Daniel (Rene Ramos Latour), Sotus—Frank’s disciples—had decided that the time had come to be like Frank and to bring their (surviving) commander into line. “And so we ask that all individuals who are sent out on negotiations or special missions be sent to the Directorate, where we would gladly offer them our cooperation through our existing organization.”

Next, the three of them laid down the law on Fidel’s ad hoc messages as well, announcing that from then on, all his letters had to go through their hands to avoid spreading false or improper news. If the “General Staff” dismisses a soldier, the Directorate must be notified “in order that these people not be considered deserters.” Names of deserters, they said, must be reported immediately so this information could be circulated. Now, referring to him in the third person, they observed that “there are many cases of individuals who have taken advantage of Fidel Castro’s signature on papers of no importance, which, however, have been used by irresponsible parties to pass themselves off as direct representatives of our leader, simply by flashing his signature.” They concluded their memo with “For the triumph of the Revolution.”

Celia left Santiago. You can almost hear her saying, “Forget him, I’m going home.” When she got around to explaining how
she felt, she told Fidel: “On the 22nd of September, I reached Manzanillo,” but that was when they were on writing terms again. Once again dipping into her women’s network, she summoned Elsa Castro to come for her in Santiago (or at least Elsa describes a situation that seems to fit this date). After Celia telephoned, Elsa filled her car with young women and drove to Santiago, returning very late on Saturday night (which would have been the 21st); they were stopped at every checkpoint, and pretended to have been at a party. Elsa says they giggled a lot, asked one soldier if he’d like a piece of cake, and only once did a pair of soldiers actually shine flashlights directly on their faces. But the soldiers didn’t get a good look at Celia, who was crowded in the backseat, and the group got to Manzanillo before dawn Sunday morning, the 22nd.

In Manzanillo, she faced an interesting problem. From Havana, her father wrote that he’d made friends with Lina Ruz, Fidel’s mother. Both parents wanted to come home, and Manuel Sánchez had written to Celia that he and Lina Ruz were going to travel back together and would like to visit their children in the Sierra Maestra. From Celia’s point of view, this was an awful idea. She asked him to stay in Havana because the army would arrest him again if he came back. She suggested, very gently, that he be patient.

She was aware that such a message called for a carefully considered response, and she wrote to her father as if she were filing a report to her commanding officer. She describes life in the rebel army, reassures him that they are as secure and well organized as General Antonio Maceo (in the nineteenth century) had been, and includes detailed information. She writes as if she were an officer in the field, in a remote country, addressing headquarters, and thus better equipped to evaluate the situation and disabuse the recipient of any desire to journey to the front. Part general, part daughter, she claims she is safer than he is: “Today you are in much more danger than myself; no one can find me, whereas your situation is dangerous.” Flattering and to an extent true, since it is now thought that the army had wanted to use Manuel Sánchez, capture him, in order to extract a promise, in an exchange for his release, from Fidel Castro that the rebel army would not attack Pilón.

Her father had enclosed a snapshot of himself and Fidel’s mother. Celia makes no comment about this memento, nor does
she even touch upon their desire to visit the guerrilla army in the mountains. She had to deal with her father’s longings, and Fidel’s mother only complicated matters. Both these old parents were homesick for Oriente Province, plus they wanted to see a bit of action and hang out with their famous children. But she knew the desperation of such a trip and suppresses real news—and does not mention having been trapped by the army, hiding in caves, getting caught in places where planes were dropping bombs overhead, having no place to go, living hand-to-mouth, feeling a heart-sinking possibility that someone might betray her—and, having lied to her father about how nice and safe she was, stresses how well organized members of the rebel army all are.

She waited a week in Manzanillo, until the 29th, before beginning to compose her messages to Fidel—the better to summon her ire and lambast him. The opening lines are completely professional, as if she were complying with rules of communication laid down by Alberto Bayo (the Spanish war veteran who’d trained Fidel’s guerrillas in Mexico), which required that the first section of reports contain weapons statistics. “You’ll receive 5,500—five thousand five hundred—M-1 rounds that came last night from Santiago in
presillas
[clips] of 10 bullets each,” she begins. But soon enough her thoughts are personal; she promises to enclose newspaper clippings from a Miami paper, send him a leather jacket (“I ordered one made in olive green, very light and warm”), canisters of calcium tablets (“Take them, they will be good for your cavities”) but isn’t above observing that he isn’t the only person with a toothache: “With the persecution that I’m under with these bandits I am forced to continue with this pain in my molar,” implying he might do the same. She tells him she’s well hidden (“More than hidden . . . I’m buried alive”) and gives him news of a shootout—two members of the Santiago 26th of July Movement have been assassinated. She mentions a bill she’s found in the mail for his eyeglasses (a reminder of his bad habit of breaking his glasses when he’s angry), the availability of a journalist, and what’s this about your having no money? He’s asked her for money. She reminds him that she has been sending him money all along. She signs off with “a hug” (
abrazo
) a typical way to close a letter among Spanish speakers, just as common as “Yours truly” in English, and not to be confused with a warm embrace.

The next day, September 30, she wrote to Daniel: “My trip was very good, but upon my setting foot in Manzanillo, somebody informed [the police] of my arrival and they searched for me day and night.” Not finding her, the army went after her sister Griselda, surrounding her house and forcing her to leave Manzanillo. “Two trucks and two jeeps of soldiers went to my sister’s house. What a fuss!” In Celia’s “I’m so safe” letter written to her father, she doesn’t mention that his other daughter is being harassed by the police, was then run out of town, when in fact they had been searching for Celia herself. She employed the same type of thinking (or is it deception?) when she didn’t warn Flávia of the upcoming mutiny that Celia surely knew would be taking place in Cienfuegos. In other words, she’s safe. The Dove had returned to the Ark. The Dove’s keeper, Hector Llópiz, was finding safe places to hide her. With the paradoxical logic of a guerrilla, her attitude was, I’m okay, let them figure it out.

Two days later, she started another note to Fidel, beginning with a few paragraphs about 26th of July business, then asking him to apologize to Raúl, his brother, for not sending film, and ending, ironically, with “Please write!” These two relatively short letters were a mere warm-up for a long letter she was composing simultaneously—a complicated, private manifesto that she’d been working on since she got back. It is dated on its first page October l, but midway through, she asks: “Have you noticed that we are almost at the end of September?” Here, she allows herself to describe being alone and on the run, to tell him what it’s been like, for her, between late July and the first days of October, including the arrest of her father. It’s clear that she is angry with Fidel, but she pours it all out. These two letters—one to her father, the other to Fidel—confirm how tough but diplomatic she could be, how good she was at masking her own vulnerabilities, standing up for herself, giving orders, and meting out criticism. It’s a pity Celia never had a turn at being president. She was educated for the job, particularly as relates to her knowledge of Cuban history, of medicine, her unwavering commitment to social justice, and her popularity. Combine these with her war experience, both in the underground and as a soldier, and you have a powerful package. She could talk like a politician: The Revolution is in motion but nothing can stop it now, is the central theme of the letter to her
father. But her future role as presidential advisor emerges as she writes to Fidel.