One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution (34 page)

Then, and it is hard to imagine that she wasn’t hurt by the implication this refutes: “In reference to my personal expenses, I want it to be quite clear to you that I’ve never caused any expenditures to the movement. My expenses have always been paid for by Papa and my brothers; they all help the treasury of the movement corresponding to where they live, and the money they send me is for my personal expenses. I don’t use it because my expenses are minimal. They have always been spent on extras that I send to the Sierra.” (And here, one has to stop and consider what those extras might have been. The first thing that comes to mind is the olive-green leather jacket she had ordered, and mentioned in her last letter to him.) And there you have, in one fell swoop, the paradox of your basic, successful nearly always middle-class revolutionary: ready to slash and burn and terrorize, but supported by Daddy, and who never forgets to buy and send expensive presents.

With her family in hiding, she reminds Fidel, she’s had her own financial problems, since her relatives are scattered, “but in spite of this I have not made use of anything from the movement. I know how to do without.” This is followed by two sentences with lots of space around them, so that they stand out on the page: “I would have preferred not to reveal all this but you’ve forced me to account for everything. This time, Fidel, you really have judged me unfairly.” He had gone too far. No use of his protective alias is deserved here. No need. There is no way that Guerra Matos would have been able to swallow this stack of pages, had he been caught on the highway driving back to the Sierra Maestra.

Finally, before she ends this letter, she brings up Frank: “We’ve all reacted differently to Frank’s loss—you, myself, all of us have been deeply affected by it. You’ve been trying to prove what it meant for you while I’ve been doing my best so that you wouldn’t feel the impact of it; you were acting above the movement and very
differently from how things are done. You are the ones that were affected. You cut all communication after August 17. You started to act unwisely and you are all suffering for it.” But Fidel hadn’t cut communication—he’d been defeated in the Battle of Palma Mocha. But what she said is true: he’d let people into his army and didn’t have the authority to do so: they were admitted by Frank. Now this would be handled by Frank’s surrogates.

She ruefully admits to being a gofer with nothing to show for it. “The Sierra is a large place and you’ve made me work in a crazy manner sending letters and an endless number of things all over the place; there are $6,000 in different places. This is the insanity you’ve caused. I continue sending the weekly magazines and some article or other that might be of interest to you. And when I analyze all this, I see the effort I’ve made over the past two months has been of no use, since it’s only created this state of chaos.”

Completely spelled out, Celia has told Fidel that he is unwise and unjust, full of himself and out of order, and, deep down, she is probably thinking that he is definitely not Frank. Besides those scathing observations, she implies that he is a bad judge of character and can’t even pick a guide to carry letters, deliver money, or rescue her. She claims that she’s sent money she doesn’t have, meaning it was hard to get hold of, therefore can’t afford to have it lie around somewhere. (She had a point: chances are Crescencio or Guillermo could have suggested better delegates.) She slips in several little barbs, a reminder that she always has to replace his glasses (because he is such a brat and breaks them), and because I did not ask the curator of Fidel’s papers at the archives for his response do not know what nasty and mean things he wrote back to her. One thing is clear: there was now so little objectivity, so many freely flung accusations stirred up between them, and delivered with so little humor, as if they were falling in love.

As if the thunderclouds had lifted and the grand finale is about to begin, she ends with these lines: “I hope you really can understand what happened during the last two months, and that everything will be forgotten. Let’s reach an agreement for your well-being and my peace of mind.” And that is what they did.

There are a few more sentences, mostly end-of-letter add-ons. Lightheartedly, she suggests that he not agitate Agitado (her nickname for Guerra Matos) too much (whom she’d sent to
Santiago to pick up money to send Fidel), and “he’ll show you a little map.” That map marked the location of where she’ll be sending his next group of soldiers.

Sixty or seventy men would be going into the mountains led by Jorge Sotus (who had raced off to Havana to raise money for these troops). They would be veterans of Frank’s Second Front—and she assures Fidel that she’ll outfit them as well as she possibly can. And, “without your even asking, seven days ago I ordered two pairs of glasses. I called Havana and they are being sent by plane, should have arrived today but didn’t, and we called again. Tomorrow they’ll be here for sure.” (Stamp on your glasses, Fidel, but get used to it: Frank’s men and I are back in the business of choosing your soldiers. End of story.) Then she tucks the picture of his mother and her father into the letter, and hands it over to Guerra Matos. It was their last letter—this truce, this personal report—because less than two weeks later she went to live in the Sierra Maestra with Fidel and the rebel army. She remained with him for the rest of the war. They do correspond again, but it would be several months later, while preparing for the summer offensive. They begin again to write to each other daily because he is on one mountain and she is on another.

Part III
S
IERRA
M
AESTRA

23. O
CTOBER
17, 1957
Celia Leaves the Underground

CELIA LEFT MANZANILLO
for good on October 17, 1957, accompanied by Hector Llópiz, who flew into exile to Costa Rica, where he lived until the end of the war. Both took an escape route via a particularly pretty country house owned by local CocaCola executive Rene Suarez. Their host was arrested almost immediately; he quickly left for the United States, along with his wife, Teresa Marinol, and teenage daughter.

Celia would always recall this period in the Sierra Maestra as the best time of her life, something wonderful, as if she had entered Paradise instead of a war zone. After reaching Fidel’s camp, she left immediately with a guerrilla who guided her to another part of the mountains where she visited a newborn baby—the daughter of Pastor Palomares, who as he lay dying on a riverbank, following the battle at Palma Mochain August, had asked Fidel to raise his child. The baby had been delivered by the child’s grandfather, Angel Palomares, in La Jutia cave, since the whole area was under constant aerial attack. Angel Palomares was a famous herbalist in the region, who treated members of the rebel army (even Che was one of his patients). He explained that he’d stuffed the baby’s mouth with coffee leaves to muffle her cries because the Rural Guards patrolled a path on the hillside above the cave. The child’s mother, also there, had remarried and planned to leave the baby
with the grandparents. The old herbalist informed Celia that the baby couldn’t breast-feed and had rejected cow’s milk; Celia sent the rebel soldier who’d brought her there back to Fidel’s camp for canned milk, assuring the old man that she’d supply the baby’s food from then on.

The baby’s birth seems to be the reason she finally took leave of Manzanillo—the place she’d been trying to abandon since December 1956—and it seems likely that Fidel asked her to get there in a hurry, on learning that Pastor’s baby had been born, because she left Manzanillo carrying baby clothes.

As soon as she got back to Fidel’s camp, the entire Command Column 1 “José Martí” traveled to El Coco, a village on Pico Caracas, where they held military trials. These trials were being held so a soldier known as “The Teacher” could defend himself (for impersonating Che, calling himself doctor, and raping a young woman), and a gang in the business of theft and extortion (who’d been wearing fake M-26 armbands) could have their say.

Hungarian photographer Andrew St. George, then associated with the Magnum photo agency, documented the trials (negatives and contact sheets are now in Yale University’s Sterling Library). Celia, a member of the jury, appears to be hanging on every word, and looks as if wheels were spinning in her head; her expression incredulous and skeptical. In one picture, her mouth is open, presumably offering her opinion or making an observation. The jury sits on the ground. Fidel is in the middle: his back is erect, his legs are folded in a kind of semi-lotus position under him, and his jaw is drawn down as he keeps his eyes straight ahead. His expression is perceptively indignant; one finger is raised as if making a point. Raúl Castro balances on a tree limb, his legs are stretched out, while he writes in his diary. They all focus on the prisoners, who appear to be a sad bunch of rascals. Some were executed that day, while others were merely frightened (in a mock execution). A couple were set free to be drafted (or incorporated), right then and there, into the rebel army.

When the trials concluded, the rebel army traveled back to their favored part of the mountains. Celia and Fidel, along with a priest, Father Guillermo Sardiñas, took another route. They hiked to La Jutia cave, where they baptized Pastor’s baby. They named her Eugenia—as the story goes, not for the child’s mother. There, Fidel assured Angel Palomares that he and Celia would raise the child in compliance with his son’s wishes. They made it clear they’d do this after the war was over. The child’s biological parent, the mother, left after the ceremony with her new husband to live in another province.

Celia washing clothes in the river at Las Vegas, 1957. (
Courtesy of Oficina de Asuntos Históricos
)

CELIA BEGAN HER NEW LIFE
as a nomad. Comandante Dermidio Escalona, then a newly enlisted soldier in Fidel’s command column, describes it: “We would walk for ten or twelve hours every day in the rain, going up and down mountains,” dawn until dusk, changing locations constantly; they’d camp somewhere at night, eat, sleep, and move the next day. The men were shocked to find out she was going to join them. To the soldiers, her extreme thinness had been disconcerting, and Escalona ruminates that “Celia seemed so fragile. . . . We assumed she’d stay in a village and live in a house with a mountain family.” Instead, she marched beside Fidel. “We couldn’t conceive of someone as fragile as she being able to stand such a hard life.”

Escalona also says that Celia immediately began to take care of Fidel, would prepare his coffee before he got up in the morning, made sure his uniform was clean, the buttons sewn on, rips and tears mended, and boots cleaned and repaired; and, she always had an extra pair of glasses on order. For her, these tasks were
effortless, second nature, after all those years of looking after her father. Hers was a traditional Latin role: she’d drawn her father’s bath, brought him a cup of morning coffee, organized his medical office, carefully scheduled patients according to his or her special needs—and it wasn’t hard for her to transfer this routine to Fidel. “She wouldn’t go to bed until after he did,” Escalona told me. Once the soldiers in the column had seen how gracefully she managed to blend in, perform many and varied tasks, and live among them with such simplicity, they were happy, particularly since Fidel was so pleased to be the object of her attention. He was easier to live with, thanks to her presence; it made life easier for everyone. Although Haydée Santamaria, a national director of the movement, occasionally spent time in the mountains, generally speaking, Celia was the only woman in Fidel’s camp.

IN THE EARLY DAYS OF THE REVOLUTION
, Fidel’s column must have been something of a road show. They traveled with several medical doctors. Some were hiding, but doctors were living with the guerrillas for a number of reasons: they had been caught providing treatment to guerrillas or collaborating with the rebels in some manner, such as donating medicine; or they might have had to go underground for giving testimony of police brutality. And some, of course, chose to be there. Doctors were a rarity in the mountains. When Fidel’s column reached a town, the
medicos
would receive patients no matter what time of arrival, day or night, according to Ricardo Martínez, a radio announcer in the Havana underground who’d been transferred to the safety of the Sierra. He told me that Celia was the key to this community outreach: “We would reach a small valley where maybe there were five to ten houses. The women and children would come to wherever the rebels were camped. Celia would see a child who might be sick, and she would ask the child to bring its father, or maybe the grandmother.” When the guardians arrived, she’d ask permission to let the rebel army examine and treat the child and summon one of the doctors. It was 26th of July policy to leave medicine for further treatment, and Celia was the source of much of this medicine.