One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution (33 page)

“HOW WE NEEDED A REVOLUTION,”
she tells her father. “How we’ve struggled for recognition! But that’s history now,” because the people know what they think, are aware of their feelings, and have given the Revolution priority. “Cuba always follows a leader. It is a fact of life,” she muses, and pragmatically observes that they’ve needed Fidel. “I was always afraid he’d be killed, and people would abandon us,” but claims this is old news “now that the people back the revolution.” As for coming home, “you know how to wait.” She asks him to have patience, be serene in his suffering, and promises that the day when he can return isn’t far away. Celia is too adroit to use such a contentious word as
no
.

She doesn’t mention that the 26th of July had been having trouble exerting control over volunteers flocking to the Sierra in hope of joining the rebels, nor the problems they faced with the influx of paramilitary forces, under Rolando Masferrer, who were posing as 26th of July soldiers. Instead, she reassures her father that farmers had organized the territory into zones to protect the rebel army and were supporting the movement by stopping infiltrators, interrogating suspicious characters, taking them prisoner, and condemning them. Continuing in this “we are in complete control” vein, she writes that these same farmers have closed the zone to outsiders and nothing can be sent up to them, “not even a bottle of medicine.”

Then she tells him a story about two of “our men” who with pistols—not rifles—shot at 150 armed men and slipped away before the army, confused, had time to take up position to return fire. “Fidel always used to dream about this sort of thing and I’d always argue with him, never thinking that incidents like that could take place.” For the rest of the letter she sticks to the joys of guerrilla warfare. There is some truth in what she says—rebel army commanders Escalona and Ochoa emphasized the huge advantage they had had operating alone or in pairs, always striking from higher ground—but she masks the fact that, at this stage in the war, they were completely trapped.

As a way of further reassuring her father that they are okay, she claims, “We’ll never die of hunger because the ranches have pigs,
fowl, and we have warehouses with food, but money is scarce,” and she admits that they have to figure out a way to solve this problem, the crux of the matter.

Money to meet their needs had become a huge issue for Celia, who essentially was the supply officer of the rebel army. In the following paragraphs of the letter, she documents her plans for securing money. She suggests “threats,” that is, terrorism, which in my opinion gives her great credibility as a guerrilla leader. Cubans from the current generation remark that she wasn’t very political, just a good organizer, and cite Fidel as the catalyst of all radical ideas. But this letter refutes that. She tells her father that she can’t stand the idea that Cubans with money are unwilling to hand it over to the 26th of July Movement. How could they not? “I can’t forgive big capital,” she writes, because they won’t sacrifice for the country or for a just cause; on the contrary, they always take, and only give us what we ask for “through terrorism.” They’ll give to a colonel (referring to an officer in Batista’s army), they’ll pay for a political campaign “for any shameless individual,” she complains, but they won’t pay “to save the country.” Borrowing a theme from Fidel, she claims that “we” never wanted to make our revolution with dirty money, but don’t have enough weapons and that’s why this fight is costing so many lives. We don’t want to obtain money by force, she continues, because “it sets a bad example, especially to young people,” and we can’t get caught doing something we’re fighting against. But big capital doesn’t understand, so “I am encouraging us to begin to apply terrorism. It is what they are accustomed to.” All of this is an admission on her part that she has decided to threaten local big business—rice growers and ranchers as well as merchants, owners of sugar mills—in other words, some of the wealthiest men in the nation. As a coordinator of the 26th of July Movement for the Manzanillo region, Celia was in the position to make that call.

Their victory, discussed so matter-of-factly here in 1957, is more than a year off. Yet to read this letter you’d think it had already happened. This attitude was verified in several interviews I made over ten years with soldiers who spoke of her prescience, marveled at her conviction they’d win even before they’d begun to fight. Start with Guerra Matos’s recollection of the days following
the landing; everything indicated that Fidel might easily be dead, but she’d heaped scorn on Guerra Matos for his lack of faith. Yet her evidence was mostly instinctual. She describes their upcoming victory with confidence. What concerns us, she tells her father, is how to control “sentiment” (which really meant bloodbath and retaliation) after victory. Fidel has his platoon captains read Curzio Malaparte’s
The Skin
to prepare for the first moments after their triumph, and she assures her father that the rebel army must—at any price—avoid letting people lose their common sense. We want to control their passions; we do not want to create chaos, she writes. There will be no need for vengeance, since we are the ones who have suffered most of the cruelties, and we will set the example; there will be no “tomorrow’s heroes” (to use Malaparte’s phrase) on our side handing out vigilante justice.

Returning to the present, as if it were a newsy aside, she asks her father what his views had been on the mutiny in Cienfuegos, but she does not mention Flávia, or Flávia’s family who lived there. Celia simply does not allow other members of her family to enter her war. She says she’s heard people expressing their shock that the army would bomb one of Cuba’s own cities, but what about the Sierra? Aren’t we people too? We’ve been bombed daily for ten months—forest, family homes. She tells her father that people had been collecting empty shells to show her. They were stacking them in their backyards, like trophies. Then Celia, like any good politician, closes by expressing pity for her opponent: “So many arms, so many troops, yet they are nothing compared to us.” She had come to this conclusion because the army had resorted to dropping flyers, offering reward money that she calls pitiful and “indecent” and predicts they’ll have no takers.

Again, she addresses the impossibility of her father’s return, echoing his words, written after she escaped in Campechuela, when he advised her (along with a gift of his Colt 45 pistol): Don’t think you are the only one; don’t think for a minute that the way the army acts won’t be applied to you. “Stay on a little longer,” she urges, “you’ve done it before”—previously he’d extended his Havana vacation because he had been having a good time. Circumstance, she says, evoking a word used by Martíto to explain nearly everything, requires the high road. “Love and kisses, Aly,” her
nom de guerre
.

After she’d finished this masterpiece to her father, she polished her letter to Fidel, a letter that is well over 4,000 words. She explains what happened in September, beginning with her father’s arrest, her leaving Manzanillo to find Fidel, and ending up being confined to the forest. In his August 16 letter, he’d sarcastically asked her: “When are you going to send me the dentist? If I don’t receive weapons from Santiago nor Havana, nor from Miami or Mexico, at least send me a dentist so my molars will let me think in peace,” and when she read this, after what she’d been through, hiding in caves, and so on, it clearly got on her nerves. He’d tried to be funny, too, but she failed to notice or acknowledge it: “Now that we have food, I can’t eat. Afterward, my molars will be okay and then there won’t be any food.” And he’d been sweet: “I don’t blame you. You do more than you can handle.” She was having none of it. She tells him she found a dentist who’d agreed to go into the Sierra but changed his mind (
pero el se arrepinteo
; the verb she used is “repented”) at the last minute, but promises she won’t go again without bringing along a dentist. And again she sourly reminds him that he is not the only person in the world with a toothache . . . but she is sending “calcium tablets, take them, they will be good for your cavities, I have a hundred of those cans.”

The real trouble between them was money. While Celia was in the mountains and on the run, she’d come across undelivered letters containing money she’d sent Fidel at three houses located in the Sierra. From her viewpoint he had needed money and she had sent it. But the person Fidel sent to pick up the money (which didn’t arrive), was the same person Fidel had sent to rescue her in Manzanillo (and didn’t arrive). She takes this opportunity to say that the arms she’d taken into the mountains, when she went with Rafael Castro, had been distributed with the understanding that “when we got to you, we’d turn them over, and you’d hand them out as you saw fit.” But Rafael had selected a coveted M-1 for himself. And still has it, she says. “He and the rifle are still strolling the Sierra in search of you.”

She was winding up this letter on the night of October 1 when Felipe Guerra Matos showed up in Manzanillo, sent by Fidel, to find her. So she pens, adding on the front pages: “What a surprise to see Guerrita, and even more to know why—because you hadn’t gotten any money for two months.” She explains that in the
beginning of August, when he first asked for money, the banks were closed and she could only send $500 on the 7th. (The reason, of course, was the general strike following Frank’s assassination, when the banks were closed.) In Manzanillo, the banks reopened on Saturday, August 10, and she took out $1,000 that she sent him on August 11 via Rafael Castro. Then she edges into her main, or most obvious, reproach, the reason she, Daniel, and Sotus had composed and sent their memo. She tells Fidel that they’ve heard about the “famous group” that went into the Sierra on its own, and that he’d incorporated into “our rebel army,” and reminds him that it isn’t “his rebel army,” implying he can’t just make monarchical decisions. It was bad for me and bad for you, she points out: “You already know the consequences this had for me and they were bad for you”—using
ustedes
, meaning “all of you.”

She softens her tone after that, and tells him that it had been a “balm” to read his letter inviting her to the Sierra. But soon she returns to the money theme, and describes how she got hold of another $1,000 and sent it August 24. She assures him that she did write back, she wrote as soon as she got his last, August 17 letter, and that it had arrived on the 26th. She even reminds him what he asked her to do: find information for him about property titles, which she’d done. She’d even sent an example of one, she says, and other things he wanted. She has enough to do running her own life: “This is the way I ended August, so busy, despite the intense heat, that I didn’t even have enough time to fan myself.”

After this comes the painful part. She tells Fidel that these have been bad times for her, the arrest of her father, what happened after his arrest, and she states that rather than stay in Manzanillo she had gone with this questionable character she’s been ranting about, Rafael Castro, because it was “more important to be with you than stay and defend his [my father’s] life.” (What could be more flattering or manipulative than this?)

After that preamble, she describes the terrible trip she made through the mountains trying to reach him, planes dropping bombs overhead, the caravan of eighteen people she’d lived with while waiting for him to show up in La Maestra, hiding out where she could,. But she tells him: “On the road I kept finding letters of mine that had not reached you, [there were] up to three.” She had found $1,000 in one letter lying in someone’s house, claims
that she wrote from La Maestra saying that she’d go back home, but only if she had to. “I wrote you that I would turn around, but regretfully, and if you saw no problem with it, I’d continue.”

She was, she told him, really confused, especially since she kept finding her letters along the road, also a letter from Daniel, propaganda from Marcelo Fernández (one of the leaders of the Manzanillo movement), a report about the mutiny in Cienfuegos, and “eyeglasses for you.” But money is the issue here. Although I have not read the message Fidel sent her via Felipe Guerra Matos, it is fairly easy to imagine its content. He must have accused her of not writing, not sending money in two months, and (I deduce, from the way she answered, that after he’d been kicked verbally by the memo she, Daniel, and Jorge Sotus sent) implied that she was not doing her job responsibly, neither for him nor for the national organization in Havana.

Shortly before his death, Frank had complained in a letter to Fidel: “Funds are down a bit (it would have to happen right at this moment!), so we’ll have to find a way of getting more. Havana spends too much: 4,000 pesos a month, sometimes more.” Fidel’s inquiry may have been reasonable, but she responded defensively: “Through my many letters which are on the way and which probably haven’t been lost—you’ll receive confirmation that at no time have I abandoned anything having to do with you (all). Since David has been missing”—notice she cannot bring herself to say dead—“I have intensified my work.” For two months, she tells Fidel, she has dedicated herself to his cause. But, at this point, she stops short of defending herself and simply tells him to figure out what she’d been doing when he gets the letters she sends, and “let the others account for what they are doing.”

Then she goes in for the kill. Appearing a lot like an illustration of a thundercloud, set apart from every other sentence, she underlines the word
treasury
. You can actually see the force of her pen pressing into the paper. Then she proceeds to set down a history of their finances together, starting on the day they first met face to face, waiting for Herbert Matthews and the
New York Times
interview. “The money raised has never been fantastic,” she writes. “The first time Santiago donated something for the Sierra was on the 16th of February, when Frank and I went up [to meet with you in the mountains] and we argued over one thousand
dollars; he, because he owed them, and I because I wanted him to leave them in the treasury. We finally gave the money back to Vilma [Espin].” Celia goes on to explain how the two organizations, Manzanillo and Santiago, raised money, and how she and Frank had handled their accounts. She points out, with a pat on the back, that Manzanillo had supported his revolution with far more money than Santiago ever had.