One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution (36 page)

Three days later, soldiers arrived again. During this search, Silvia got a call from a doctor saying her husband had just been arrested while making a sales call. Silvia again telephoned Maximilian Torres, who went to the Moncada for a second time, where Canizares greeted him coldly, saying that “Pepin is alive only because there are no battles in the Sierra Maestra at the moment.” Again, the army released Pepin to the mayor’s custody, but Canizares warned, as Sergio Sánchez told me: “The next time you get here, you are going to find Pepin with ants in his mouth.”

Nobody in Santiago at that time would have doubted the threat behind this kind of statement. Torres hurried to Silvia, related what had happened, and implored her to leave town immediately. It isn’t a threat, or even a warning, he said, “It’s a prophecy,” and urged them to leave Santiago that night, at the very latest.

They didn’t actually get away until around five the following morning, and were accompanied by their next-door neighbor, Pepe Boix, because Boix actually had Pepin’s medical supplies, which he had been shipping to the Sierra Maestra. Boix, who
owned a hardware store in downtown Santiago, also shipped all Celia’s supplies to the rebel army directly from his warehouse. For years, he had shipped Celia’s King’s Day toys, which she bought in bulk in Santiago, putting the packages on the coastal boat to Pilón. Nothing had really changed: Celia recruited him the way she recruited everybody. It was easy, and he was glad to help. This is a good illustration of how she developed her own personal network, through expediency mostly, often bypassing the 26th of July Movement. She would get her family and friends to buy oil, lamps, blankets, boots, plastic, and ammunition—all the things the rebel army needed—and let Pepe Boix do the shipping.

On the night of Pepin’s second arrest, neither Rene nor Pepe knew if the army had discovered Boix’s involvement. They felt the army might know, but were turning a blind eye, temporarily, since Boix’s brother was a colonel in the army. Boix’s brother was the army’s public relations officer for the eastern region, a well-known officer in those parts, so Boix proposed they both get out of Santiago while he could still talk his way through Central Highway checkpoints by merely mentioning his brother’s name. Both families fled: four adults and four children, with luggage, crammed into Pepin’s car. Both families locked the doors of their fine Vista Alegre houses, hoping for the best, and when they reached the first checkpoint, Pepe did the talking. They passed through easily, as he’d predicted.

Silvia was weak from childbirth, still bleeding, feeling sharp abdominal pains, and she was physically exhausted after having spent the night packing, getting her family ready to leave. Mollified from their checkpoint experience, they decided it was safe to stop at a roadside café outside the first major city they came to, Holguín. They settled down in a booth, when, through the windows of the restaurant, they saw armed jeeps and patrol cars racing down the highway. Obviously something extraordinary had happened. Holguín was famous for its violence, and reprisals were par for the course. They reckoned that this was something big, and they’d better get out of town, so they left the café immediately.

On the far side of Holguín, all cars were being waved into the army’s garrison. Seeing this, Silvia took command and told her husband, who was driving, to stop the car so she could speak to the soldier directing traffic. “Don’t drive into the garrison, no matter
what they tell us,” she ordered Pepin as they pulled abreast. She leaned forward, looking past the driver’s seat to sweetly inform the soldier that her children were about to have their tonsils removed and she was taking them to Havana. They had a long trip ahead, she reminded him “with a mother’s urgency,” Pepin remembers. Silvia started to describe the appointment schedule for the tonsil operations, quoting the hours, etc., and explain why they needed to get to Havana as soon as possible. Convinced, the soldier waved them on. “Our mother had lost her baby, and her house, but she was not going to lose her husband,” Sergio concluded, also saying that their mother “looked soft, but could be just as strong as Celia.” Later that day, tuning the car radio to Radio Reloj, the 24-hour news station, on the car radio, they learned that Holguín’s notorious army chief, Colonel Fermin Cowley, had been assassinated that morning, and had they pulled into the garrison, neither Pepin nor Pepe Boix would have come out again. I asked if that meant they would have been put in jail. “No,” Sergio and Pepin answered, incredulous at such a tepid suggestion. “They would have been killed, because the army didn’t ask questions.”

Pepin burned up the highway, and 970 kilometers later, he dropped the Boix family at the Hotel Lincoln in Central Havana. Then he’d turned east, and drove another hour to Flávia’s hideout, “the green bungalow,” arriving on the night of November 22. Silvia’s family moved in with Flávia, Rene, their two daughters, the youngest sister Acacia, who’d arrived in late September, and Griselda with her small son, Julio César, who showed up in early October after the police ran them out of Manzanillo. Pepin drove into Havana the next day to meet the director of the Analec Pharmaceutical Laboratory, and told him their story. The director found an office for Pepin and put him to work immediately as a Havana salesman. Of the eleven people now living in the beach house, only Pepin was bringing in a salary.

IN NOVEMBER, SOME “ACTION” MEMBERS
from Guantánamo’s M-26 finally ran José “Gallego” Moran to ground; they assassinated him, carrying out the order Celia had assiduously avoided.

By early December, the 26th of July Movement national director, Armando Hart, officially and pointedly asked Celia when she was going to return to Manzanillo: “I am tasting the
bitterness of incomprehension. . . . Aly, we thought you were going to keep your promise to return. . . . Without your very able collaboration, they have had to make superhuman efforts to keep the supplies going to the Sierra.” He reminded her that Daniel was overworked while she was away (thus Hart did not know that staying there had been her plan). By December, the situation in the cities was quite dangerous. When the seemingly untouchable Colonel Cowley had been assassinated, the people of Holguín had rejoiced, and their reaction caused increased repression in all cities. In Santiago, when Salas Canizares heard that his Holguín counterpart had been murdered, he sent tanks into the streets. Celia’s
clandestino
colleagues were encouraged to keep up the pressure. The underground started a new campaign: to burn the sugar crops around the nation and heighten subversive activities. Around November 28 it began, and the movement operating within cities began suffering losses as many clandestine fighters were killed. Celia did not return to the underground and take part in this particular stage of the Revolution. She stayed in the mountains with Fidel, keeping his buttons from falling off, his mind engaged, his coffee brewed, and a box of cigars ever ready to keep his mind stimulated and his behavior mellow. Women’s work? Not if you speak to the retired comandantes and other alumni of Colunm 1. Everyone that I spoke to concedes that this work badly needed doing, to keep Fidel on an even keel, and is one of the crucial ways she helped win the war.

24. J
ANUARY
–J
UNE
1958
Planning War

DURING THE FIRST MONTHS OF
1958, Celia and Fidel planned a defense strategy. The 26th of July had an informer within the Cuban army and knew it would be staging an all-out offensive in the upcoming summer months. This piece of intelligence gave Fidel time to make preparations.

By January 1958, the rebels held most of the mountains of southeastern Oriente. After a year of rebel army harassment, the Rural Guard had pulled out of nearly all the smaller garrisons in the Sierra Maestra. Now, with this geographical zone in their possession, it was up to the rebel army to look after all the people who resided in it. Fidel put Celia in charge of some managerial duties in the
zona libre
, or free zone. Her main responsibility was to figure out how they would acquire enough food to feed everyone in the zone should Batista’s army wage a long and effective blockade against them—a blockade lasting months, maybe even years. She already provided for about one hundred people, Comandante Delio Ochoa told me, rebel army soldiers and specific Sierra families who were working for the guerrillas. In January, with an eye to the future, when they would be under siege and she would be supplying everyone, she set about obtaining cattle from ranches outside the mountains. She began by canvassing ranchers south and east of Manzanillo, where she knew many of the ranch owners.
She sequestered the herd on her family’s farm first—the Sánchez Silveira 40,000-acre ranch at San Miguel del Chino—but tapped all owners, demanded or bargained for cattle, which were paid for with a graciously written I.O.U. penned by Fidel promising payment after victory.

Fidel suggested setting up warehouses along the western slopes to store food and other supplies. In 1956, when Celia had been planning the landing, she’d urged farmers to buy extra kerosene and bury it. Now she began to visit mountain farmers in various places, asking them to grow food, encouraging fields of malanga—big plants with exotic leaves and edible roots—on mountain slopes. It was a plant that blended in well with the scenery. She ordered some families to raise livestock. “I started out with a small farm with pigs, hens, turkeys and pigeons,” she wrote her father a few months later. “They are now giving us such good results that we are going to develop them in each zone. We’ve got pens, chicken coops, grain tanks for corn. I found an empty house and a rebel couple to take care of it and do all the work. Each farm is going to have a corn field.” After gathering stats, taking one of her censuses, she drew up a plan for distributing the confiscated cattle by placing them in convenient places within the free zone. She tried to spread them equally among families.

None of this was easy; Celia had a lot of trouble getting those cattle from the ranches into the mountains. Soldiers from the rebel army borrowed horses to drive the cattle and didn’t return them to the owners. Her letters to Fidel provide a glimpse of what was going on. She complained that the guerrillas were getting to be as bad as Batista’s guards, taking whatever they wanted, and he shot back: “It is almost as though it is my fault that the people who borrowed the horses didn’t return them.” Humberto Sori Martín, the rebel army lawyer, was in charge of the civil government of the free zone. “Sori came to me with this problem,” she wrote Fidel, and “I thought it best that civilians [local people] under the order of Sori’s representatives [rebel soldiers, platoon captains] should be in charge of moving and looking after the cattle, protected by our troops, but [I told him] not to determine anything until Che arrives.” Fidel definitely did not like the idea of the locals being in charge, but went along with it. He let Celia and Che work it out.

Fidel decided that he, like Che, wanted an executive courier. He chose a farm girl, Clodomira Acosta, who, as a messenger for the rebels, had been caught and arrested, and famously escaped from the Cuban army. Celia, thinking Clodo was sixteen, was ambivalent about Fidel’s using someone so young (Clodo was actually 21), but still did everything she could to help her. In this picture, taken in Guayabol de Nagua in early 1958, Clodo, on the left, avoids looking at the camera; Pilar Fernandez is in the middle, and Celia, in doorway, listens to Luis Crespo. (
Courtesy of Oficina de Asuntos Históricos
)

She and Fidel developed a work pattern: she ventured out to take care of projects while he stayed in one spot, concentrated on planning the defense of the rebel army. Her presence, as members of the rebel army repeatedly told me, “freed him up to win the war.”

FIDEL SOON DECIDED HE
, like Che, wanted a courier. He found the right person when a farm girl showed up at his camp in late January. Clodomira Acosta Ferrales was born on February 1, 1936, but looked much younger than twenty-two. (Celia thought Clodo, as she was called, was sixteen or seventeen and was ambivalent about Fidel’s using someone so young.) Her parents, Estaban Acosta and Rosa Ferrales, had an orchard farm on the Yara River.
She was the third of eight children, and had briefly worked as a maid in Manzanillo, but hated it and returned home to help cultivate fruit trees. The nearest town didn’t have a school, so she was uneducated. She lived with Sergio Pena briefly, when she was about seventeen, in a common law marriage that lasted a few months before she left him. One day she saw a couple of Rural Guards arrest a boy and knew he helped the rebel army, so she had gone up to the Guards and shouted: “Let him go. Don’t you see that he’s nobody?” Like everybody else in the Sierra, she’d experienced Rural Guard brutality, saw how they treated farmers: stealing animals, raping women, burning houses, and probably experienced or heard about unreported incidents that had ended in murder. In the heat of the moment, this impetuous young woman had sealed her destiny, and become political. She joined one of the rebel army platoons, where they found a job for her as a messenger. Clodo was caught and arrested, interrogated, and locked in a cell. Her head was shaved, but Clodo managed to escape right under their noses after setting a couple of backpacks on fire with some matches she’d hidden on her person. In the smoke and confusion, she jumped out of a high window, but she landed safely, and traveled on foot through several towns, with a shaved head, until she could join another rebel army platoon at La Vega de la Yua. Once again, she worked as a messenger.