One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution (50 page)

FIDEL’S PERSONAL LIFE BEGAN
playing itself out in a public drama: Naty Revelta, with whom he’d had an affair in the mid-’50s and fathered a child, was trying to reestablish a relationship and regain some of her former significance. Meanwhile, Dr. Vexel-Robertson moved to Havana and edged out the young Marita Lorenz, still living in the Havana Libre. Miffed, Lorenz took part in a conspiracy, under the influence and guidance of Frank Sturgis, who worked for the CIA. Most of these dramatic events were played out at the Havana Libre between early 1959 through 1960. In other words, his personal life became hectic. Longing for a simpler life, in 1960, Fidel and Celia rented (for a dollar a year) a large villa in Cojimar, a village outside Havana. They had to drive around the bay then (the tunnel under Havana Bay had not yet been constructed), via the eighteenth-century villages of Regla and Guanabacoa. The Cojimar property was on a hill, with woods and a stream. It was, in that aspect, reminiscent of the Sierra Maestra, as well as a romantic fishing village. From the hill, they could see the wharf area, where fishermen set out each day in small boats and returned to use the town’s big set of scales to weigh their catch; the famous small marina where Hemingway kept his boat, the
Pilar
, and its pilot, Gregorio Fuentes, lived in the village. Hemingway sponsored the village’s fishing contest in 1960, and it was won by Fidel, a highly competitive sportsman. According to village lore, he took this opportunity to tell Hemingway that he’d gotten some ideas on guerrilla warfare from reading
For Whom the Bell Tolls
. The weekends at Cojimar were pleasant.

Celia opened a house for boys in the village. Some came from the Sierra Maestra, a few were orphans, some were godchildren from among the dozens of children whose baptisms she and Fidel had witnessed, performed by Father Sardinas and other priests who came into the Sierra. All were scholarship students new to Havana. She and Fidel were trying to give these children a home, an education, and a sense of belonging. She furnished the house with her father’s things: among them were his collection of canes and walking sticks that had decorated the porch in Pilón, and a few surviving pieces of his furniture.

Celia opened a house for boys, many orphans from the Sierra Maestra, in the village of Cojímar. Some were godchildren from among the dozens of children whose baptisms she and Fidel had witnessed during the war in the mountains. Here she speaks to students of the Escuela Sierra. (
Courtesy of Oficina de Asuntos Históricos
)

Photographer Raúl Corrales, a Cojimar resident, speculates that she was starting a family—although when he told me this it sounded too abstract, too super-socialistic, but now I can see that this may have been what she was doing. Corrales, who worked with Celia for years, claims that the villa and the children were good for Fidel. It was a private, quiet place where he could get away and do some thinking; and there was a stream on the property that he liked to walk along, be close to nature. Corrales felt sure that Celia proposed this house in order to get Fidel away from the Habana Libre. It worked for a time. The house at Cojimar had to be abandoned because it was on the coast, and no matter how well guarded, it was vulnerable from gunboat attack. There was only one road in and out. They put in another road, but negatives mounted, and the weekend getaway no longer measured up, since Fidel’s life, at this point, was clearly in peril.

COMMENTS MOUNTED
, across the country, that Fidel should marry her. “Everyone thought he was going to marry her. If he didn’t, it was only going to cause Celia to lose face,” one woman explained. “This reached him, and it reached her. They talked it over and Fidel proposed they get married. Celia told him that it’s only gossip. And if the essential feelings aren’t between us, we shouldn’t carry it out. She also told him: these people don’t know what it is we have together.” And then, my source—within the family, who asked that I maintain her anonymity—says that Celia explained her reasons: “She told him that she felt older now. When she was young, she’d had marriage on her mind, but now, she wasn’t so interested. He understood what she was telling him.”

From what I gather, she was reassuring and made it clear that they could keep what they had together, be as they had been in the Sierra Maestra here amid all the complexities of life in town, that is was all right to keep the status quo. But mainly this: he was free to come and go.

Celia was far too smart to accept an arrangement of the type she was being offered: a life filled with his present and past women. She would not have wanted to be put in the position of asking that age-old question: where were you last night? I know she believed in marriage, but not for marriage’s sake. Long before this, she’d often comment to her friends that married women end up being subordinate. If Fidel stayed with her, at her urban command post, that sort of question need not come up. She may have been disappointed with this solution, but not jealous. She could see right through Fidel—and that’s not very romantic. This solution was a defining moment: together, they would be partners and play out this moment in the history of their country.

IN 1960, CELIA FOUND
her developer’s legs. She’d work all day at the palace in Revolution Square and take up her design projects at night, working from home. Notorious for her late-night confabulations, she was no different from the men; all were workaholics, taking care of the nation by day, shunning sleep in favor of regenerative pet projects after dark. If you worked for Celia, you had to keep her hours. The best example of what this meant came from Maria Victoria Caignet and Gonzalo Cordova, Celia’s interior design team, who told me that a man from the telephone company appeared at the door of their apartment announcing that he’d come to install a new line. This was extraordinary because AT&T had been banished from Cuba by then, and getting a new telephone was impossible. They had had no idea what was afoot. It remained a mystery until the phone rang in the small hours of the morning on their new line and Celia said, “Now you can’t escape me, even in the dead of night.” They were forewarned. She called them anytime, but usually between 2:00 and 4:00 a.m., when she had time to work on one of the architectural projects. “Celia was so nice about it. She offered such good excuses,” Caignet said, laughing, “that we didn’t really mind. You’d work from night into morning. It was like a party. It became contagious to work all hours.” Over the years, working for Celia turned out to be a huge plus for anyone in the design field. Her projects were completed, buildings got constructed, good materials were used in the construction—no matter what crisis or stringent cutbacks were affecting the rest of the country. And her buildings were well maintained, even during the Special Period of the 1990s they were noticeable for their good repair. “Thanks to Fidel,” Caignet commented.

Celia, smiling with pleasure, is being honored at the founding of the National Federation of Cuban Women, held August 23, 1960, in the union hall of La Central de Trabajadores de Cuba. With her are Fidel and Vilma Espín. (
Courtesy of Oficina de Asuntos Históricos
)

AT THE VERY END OF 1959
, Celia engaged the Caignet Cordova design team. Maria Victoria Caignet had just graduated from the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs in Paris, and Celia asked her to give Cuba a new image. It would start with the Revolution’s first official Christmas gift, which Celia wanted to be natural and Cuban, hand-delivered to every embassy in Havana. They settled on a reed basket, woven in Cuba, packed with a bottle of rum, a small clay pot holding a mint plant, some limes, and a recipe for mojitos printed on a cocktail apron. During 1960, Celia planned, with Caignet and Cordova’s help, most of the diplomatic receptions stressing the importance of simplicity—of ingredients and of materials. But there was more to it than the design element. “Each reception was a creative moment. A gift from Celia to Fidel,” Caignet explained. She and Cordova had been put in charge of these events. From the earliest days of the Revolution, state receptions formed a major part of diplomacy between Fidel and the leaders of other countries because so many wanted to visit Cuba to meet Fidel. But, Caignet says, “nothing is more boring than a reception: same food, same waiters, same policemen, same guests. They are only interesting to the guest of honor.” She stated, dispassionately, that a year into the Revolution Fidel had become impatient with receptions, as did the other Cubans who had to attend them. He complained so bitterly to Celia (who refused altogether to attend) that Celia and her design team took over all receptions from then on. They’d be a surprise, since she changed the theme for each, and as Caignet says, “It became more fun.”

By the end of 1960, the large reception hall in the Palace of the Revolution had been completely refurbished with panels of native woods and planters filled with Sierra Maestra ferns. There was a rock bed brought from a mountain stream in the Sierra Maestra, and one particularly famous wall covered in bark. “She would fill that wall with white orchids and foreign visitors would marvel at this,” Caignet said.

Celia and the designers planned every aspect of the official receptions there: the invitations, decorations, favors, menu, tablecloths, plates, flatware, and glasses. Everything was created by the design team, who say that if anything they did spoke to Celia of the past, or was even remotely
batistiano
, it was banished. The food was always local, delicious and very simple,
and this aspect had been particularly refreshing to visitors used to the elaborate dishes of Spain. Cordova recalled that they had decided to serve tamales—“As we do in Cuba, in a clay pot”—for Brezhnev’s visit—“He went nuts over it.” Sometimes they moved these receptions around the city, and on one occasion Celia brought in Cuba’s all-male syncopated swim team to entertain at a reception she held in one of the diplomatic houses, a house with a long balcony overlooking the pool. Verano, the fashion workshop she’d set up, was brought in to design their bathing costumes, and, at the last minute, she added an ankle bracelet so that when the swimmers kicked a leg in the air, visitors could see a little band of flowers.

“She wouldn’t go to receptions. She made us stay to make sure nothing got changed. If we weren’t attentive, someone would come out with a silver platter,” Cordova explained while Caignet laughed. Silver platters had been banished by Celia and replaced by carved wood platters (or huge plantain leaves) in the new, simpler, more natural Cuba. She’d ordered waiters to wear guayaberas and pronounced bow ties and black jackets for waiters too hot for the climate, as well as being too formal, too Spanish, and positively un-Cuban.

One time Celia decided to barbecue lamb inside the large, high-ceilinged, Art Deco banquet room at the palace. It appealed to her to make a break with the usual presidential formality, and well ahead of the event she, Caignet, and Cordova started preparations for the upcoming reception. They got the metals workshop to assemble small oil drums, cut them in two, and mounted them on stands to make the barbecue grills. They placed one at the end of each of the long banquet tables, and did a test trial, cooking the meat in the huge enclosed room. Everything went to plan. On the night of the reception, Celia inspected her masterpiece, arriving at the banquet hall several minutes before the guests were due: the coals were hot, the lamb was cooking beautifully, and everything was perfect. She added a few guava leaves to each fire, to give flavor, and having done this, she went home.

The guava leaves had been a little damp, and the room began to fill with smoke as the guests arrived. “When Fidel walked in, you couldn’t see anything. There was no way out for the smoke.” Cordova and Caignet quickly located Fidel to explain what had happened. They made a few suggestions about what might be done, such as open the windows, which were high up on the wall, although they weren’t sure if they’d open. As it turns out, “Fidel loved it.” Another person who attended this event claims that Fidel walked around all night saying, “This is wonderful. I can’t see a thing.”