One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution (38 page)

While Fidel worked on war strategies, Celia had quietly created a surprisingly large military complex, covering a square mile. First she concentrated on a field hospital, the largest building in the unit, and practically invisible as it subtly hugged the contours of a hillside, roofed in palm branches. It is camouflaged even today to those walking nearby, and completely blends into the landscape. She had proposed to the men that they construct an entrance that was a separate building—a kitchen set apart from the other structures, sort of a decoy. It links via a walkway to a dining pavilion and leads to the hospital. The objects in the foreground distract the eye from the large infirmary, surgery, and pharmacy that is pinned against the side of the mountain and nearly hidden under a thatched roof. The hospital was large by necessity: it had to accommodate rebel army wounded, plus soldiers from Batista’s army that they’d captured wounded, and function as a clinic for the local population as well. The hospital was rough but not primitive, because, thanks to the mule teams, there were standard metal hospital beds, assembled on-site, covered in white linen bedding. They named the facility
Mario Munoz
, for a doctor who was killed at Moncada. This hospital would be duplicated west of the La Plata River, at Habanita, and was called
Pozo Azul
, Blue Well.

The next set of buildings to be constructed was quite a distance from the hospital: a civil administration building (the equivalent of a small courthouse) to deal with collecting taxes (a form of income) and judicial issues, plus a few small facilities, located farther up the mountain, under civil administrator Humberto Sori Martín. At about the same time, Radio Rebelde put up in the mountains an antenna that could be raised and lowered. The engineers often slept in Mountain House, where, starting in April 1958, the rebels transmitted radio programs.

Celia was now architect plus supply chief, mule team
jefe
, and communications director. She had put herself in charge of taking care of all the messengers who were now threading their way throughout these precarious mountains to rebel headquarters, and her special couriers, a group of people she picked (mostly women, I think), began to supply intelligence reports. She’d leave the Sierra occasionally, to interview people, if she thought they had something to tell her, but mostly she communicated through little handwritten messages, carefully folded several times. “I asked her one day,” reminisces Comandante Delio Escalona (a veteran of Column 1, who would later be in charge of his own column in Pinar del Rio Province), “why do you write on these little pieces of paper instead of sending messages by word?” He thought her female messengers would be detained, her notes confiscated, and the rebel army endangered. “Escalona,” she replied, “they carry the message in a place where nobody can find it,” thereby ending the conversation. He chuckled and commented that Celia could be very mischievous.

Celia had arrived in the mountains in mid-October 1957. By the following April, she’d become the voice of Fidel, confirms Escalona: “For us, she was like the boss.” He instantly modified this to: “For us, she was the boss; very sweet, but with a very strong temper.” A second commander, Delio Ochoa, said, “Most of us considered her to be second in command in the Sierra Maestra,” and supplied the reason: “Because Fidel never revoked her orders.” Ochoa explained that men had confidence in what she told them, because she was so in tune with Fidel’s way of thinking they couldn’t go wrong following her orders. Whereas “with Che, there was—sometimes—certain points where he and Fidel differed, and which Che would discuss even though Fidel had stated them, because Che was very analytical. But not with her.” His point: she knew what Fidel had in mind, and when she spoke, it was with understanding and authority, and he did not have to deal with what might be Che’s interpretation.

Ochoa—Comandante Delio Gómez Ochoa is always referred to by his mother’s surname—said, “Let me give you an example.” He explained that in April 1958 Fidel had gone to Che’s camp. Celia stayed at the
Comandancia
and from there she ordered Ochoa to travel to the coast to meet an airplane that was going to land near Las Coloradas Beach. She handed him a written order, which she’d written on one of her small pieces of pink paper, to take all measures to ensure the plane had a safe landing and that, in his absence, Fidel’s headquarters was fully protected. “So I left some squadrons there, and put the rest of column 1 in trucks. We had to travel all day and into the night so that we could be there, waiting near the place where they expected the plane to land. We waited for about a week, then I got a note [from Celia] that the plane wasn’t coming. But I want to prove with this example, that I, myself, was second in command of the Column then, but I followed her orders, even though I knew that Fidel didn’t know about any of this.” Ochoa added that her name recognition, by that time, was national. “In Havana, people knew of Celia Sánchez, and Che. Not just Fidel.”

May 1958: Celia is in the window of Bismark Reyna’s house in Las Vegas de Jibacoa, where she has moved in order to assist Fidel in preparations for the upcoming summer offensive. Here, she is midway between Fidel’s command headquarters and Che’s. In Las Vegas, she oversaw the digging of trenches and installed a telephone system to link Che and Fidel. (
Courtesy of Oficina de Asuntos Históricos
)

By May 1958, Celia was in Las Vegas de Jibacoa—the locale thought to be the most vulnerable place in their territory—where she was midway between Fidel’s command headquarters and Che’s, overseeing trench construction. “What arrived here, for me, were picks, shovels, iron bars, a sledgehammer, files, machetes,
pipes, 24 rolls of wire, and school supplies of all types in large amounts,” she wrote Fidel. She was setting up seven schools to instruct children, parents, and soldiers in and around the Las Vegas area. She tells Fidel that she is expecting there to be forty students in the morning, forty in the afternoon, and however many grown-ups show up for night classes.

Celia celebrated her thirty-ninth birthday on May 9, away from the
Comandancia
, and received sad news from Fidel, written in a state of agony. The store, house, and coffee warehouse of one of his friends, Nassim Hadad, a Lebanese who immigrated to Cuba from the Dominican Republic, had been burned down by Batista’s soldiers. Nassim supported the rebel army but maintained a civil relationship with members of the Rural Guard, until they discovered that Nassim had been buying supplies for Fidel, and destroyed his property. Celia traveled, probably on horseback, to Nassim’s charred house at Guayabal de Naguas. Delio Ochoa arrived ahead of her, also sent by Fidel because Ochoa was nearby. He found the bodies of Nassim’s two boys in the ashes: a white boy, who was Nassim’s adopted son, and a black Jamaican boy Nassim had been raising. The black boy’s body had been tied to a post. She didn’t have to tell Fidel what had happened because Ochoa filed the report. She purchased Nassim’s herd of animals consisting of many species, and gently wrote Fidel that she’d acquired “a Noah’s Ark.”

Either there, near the ruins, or somewhere en route back to Las Vegas, she wrote to her father. He had been moved to a special wing of Calixto García Hospital, reserved for members of the medical profession, which alerted her to the fact that he was entering the final stages of lung cancer. She gives him an honest appraisal of the war. “The reprisals are tremendous . . . we are living Malaparte’s
La Piel
, only our war is not on the road toward denigration.” She refers to the Italian Curzio Malaparte’s book
The Skin
, which describes Naples in all its deprivation at the end of the Second World War. The rebel army was using the book to anticipate the very worst that could happen. Ochoa told me they were developing their own set of rules based on ethics, a set of rules for that time when they’d be victors.
La Piel
was a kind of primer for how all their soldiers should not behave after victory. She writes: “Cayo Espino was bombed from two to six thirty in the afternoon.” And continues,
“When the bombing was over we went [there], spent the night, took out the dead and wounded. . . . We did not find a house that had not been hit by bullets, some were like colanders . . . The small town of El Cerro was completely burned, some 32 houses. Another small neighborhood, San Juan, was burned, two kilometers from Estrada Palma. There, it was 36 houses. All of these families are coming toward the Sierra with nothing but themselves, grateful for having saved their own lives.” A young woman had come looking for a doctor: “A 17-year-old girl came to our camp in search of a doctor because she was injured. I asked her [what happened] and she told me that while she was breast-feeding, soldiers came looking for her husband, and because he is with the rebels, they shot her baby girl and the same bullet went through her breast.”

When her father was first admitted to the hospital, Celia had sent Clodomira to see him. “What do you think of Clodo?” she asks. “You can believe the things she tells you.” Celia had discovered that Clodomira was illiterate. Clodo always kept a notebook in her breast pocket, which Celia had assumed contained their wish lists from Havana. But then she picked up Clodo’s shirt, which she saw lying somewhere, thinking she’d go over the list. Squiggles filled the pages, and Celia recalled that Clodo usually climbed a tree and sat on a limb when she wrote in her notebook. Celia talked to her, offered to send her to school, but Clodo declined. Celia promised to be silent, though Clodo continued to climb a tree whenever she made her notations. Celia wrote to her father: “She told me that if she knew how to read, she wouldn’t be so shrewd.”

I think it very likely that Celia wrote this letter alone, perhaps accompanied by a bodyguard, while still in the vicinity of Nassim’s burned-out house. It is a letter of death and destruction. She, who avoided speaking of death, was looking it in the face. She made her way back, probably stopping in Che’s camp. Lydia Doce carried the letter to Havana and personally handed it to Celia’s father.

THE NEXT PROJECT CELIA CARRIED OUT
—miraculously—was the installation of a telephone system so Fidel could get in touch with the front from his headquarters. She began collecting equipment and managed to get cables, battery telephones, and other components needed. Ricardo Martínez, who was there, has no idea how she accomplished this. Probably, we decided, the same way she did most other projects: through her personal friends and contacts. She always had her own network of followers outside the 26th of July Movement, composed of people who wanted to help her personally. We deduced that in Las Vegas, she wasn’t too far away from the plains and her old subversive Bartolomeo Masó colleagues from her early 1950s action team and from the
clandestinos
who worked with her on the landing of the
Granma
. No sources are able to tell me. But I think I know how she did it. It seems very likely that the telephones were stolen from local sugar mills. The road that ran north of Pilón was so narrow that drivers had to stop and call ahead from one sugar mill to the next, and it’s not hard to imagine some of her friends sneaking out to “collect” a battery telephone or two, and any other “necessary” equipment she wanted. Martínez told me that she personally supervised the installation of the phone lines using 26th of July soldiers.

The directors of the 26th of July Movement convened for a meeting in early May 1958 at El Naranjo farm in Santo Domingo. Among them is Nassim Hadad, Fidel’s friend. Seated, from the left, is Haydee Santamaria and behind her, Celia and Vilma Espín. In the center is Nassim Hadad, Fidel, and Faustino Perez. At the back, standing, are René Ramos Latour (aka Daniel, who succeeded Frank), Marcelo Fernandez, and David Salvador. (
Courtesy of Oficina de Asuntos Históricos
)

Fidel wanted the telephone system to extend from La Plata to “key points” on the front lines, meaning wherever he thought Batista’s troops might be able to penetrate. At the time, the “key
point” was Las Vegas, directly down the mountain from his headquarters. Although the telephone system was makeshift and the reception poor, it would prove to be immensely effective. During the offensive, these telephones connected Fidel to his spread-out forces and allowed him to reinforce his units at a moment’s notice by sending additional men into critical areas. By using the guerrilla army telephone he could effectively move equipment from one site to another. Martínez said that the rebels had only one 50-caliber machine gun. “That machine gun fought in all the different fronts. We would have it one place today, transport it to a different place tomorrow, and bring it back. Then we’d take it another place so that the enemy thought we had several.”