The city offered a range of schools and possible futures. Oscar went to a college-preparatory high school. Yolanda attended business school. Lilia entered teachers college.
“Then heaven sent me a very special man, Reynaldo Ramirez. He was a poor boy from the countryside, come to finish his studies. He boarded at our house with three other students, because we had a large house and the pastor asked us to receive them … We were three single girls in the house, Yolanda, Rosa, and I. My mother loved him so much that she wanted one of her daughters to marry him.” Lilia’s eyes shone. “I was the lucky one.”
Lilia and Reynaldo, both trained as teachers, were married in December 1946, when she was twenty-four and he was twenty-six. They began their careers at the Colegios Internacionales Del Cristo, “a Baptist school of international reputation. I have always loved teaching; if I had the opportunity, I would return to it. We went to work and we were very loyal to our faith.”
“Santiago was the center of the Baptist presence in Cuba. Can you tell me why this was so?” I asked.
“Because of the war that started in 1895 and ended in 1898, the War of Independence,” Lilia says, raising her hands, palms up, to signal the obviousness of her answer. “That’s when the Americans came. Our tradition was Catholic, because that was the religion brought by the Spaniards. When the war ended, however, American missionaries arrived and were well received.”
When the United States wrested Cuba from Spain, the spoils weren’t only strategic and commercial. Do-gooders also divided Cuba into spheres of influence.
America’s Baptists split the country in two. The wealthy western half, focused on Havana, was apportioned to Southern Baptists, and the poor East given to Northerners. The racist Southern Baptists found few converts among Cuba’s multicolored patriots. By contrast, Northern Baptists, inheritors of the liberal theology that supported abolitionism and Reconstruction, rolled up their sleeves and evangelized by example. They applied themselves to everything from sanitation engineering to school-building, and spoke up for civil rights and good government.
“Baptists, in our work and in our church and our biblical readings, are much committed to the concept of social justice,” Lilia said. The faith these Northern Baptist missionaries brought to Oriente preached “love for all, rights for all, the love of justice and the grief of injustice, which we feel in the heart.”
Santiagueros appreciated the Baptists’ good works and political message, because the pressures of the new economic order “began increasing until people were very much in need. Terrible need,” Lilia said. “Men could only work three months, and then there was no more work. They were in misery while the owners of the centrales were getting richer and our wealth was being taken out of the country.”
Lilia said that Oriente would always have been more responsive to the Baptists’ social justice teachings than other parts of the island. The people “have been rebellious always, especially in Santiago. All the wars began in Santiago.”
I asked “Why?” knowing I was playing straight man.
“Because it is muy caliente, very hot!” she chirped, laughing girlishly. “Yes, and because Havana was far away. Havana always was the capital, always had the wealth, the power. We had trouble getting the necessities. We had the difficulties, the poverty, and police brutality. So all wars began in Santiago.”
I could see the bright wall of the Moncada Barracks framed in Lilia’s front door. Fidel Castro was never a religious man, but one reason the war against Batista began in Santiago was the passionate idealism of the city’s Baptist community.
Lilia’s mother, Amparo, was a leader in the local church, and Lilia and her husband, Reynaldo, became leaders, too. “He worked with the men. I worked with the women and with the Baptist Convention of Eastern Cuba.” Baptist missionary teachers had taught their Cuban students to love America’s revolutionary heritage, the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution; Lilia’s generation of homegrown Baptist teachers schooled students in Cuba’s need to be truly free. “In our ordinary little public schools, we used to talk about Maceo, about Martí, and about Máximo Gomez. We grew up like that, so we didn’t see a conflict between our faith and the struggle.”
I asked when Lilia became aware that her younger brother had become involved in the anti-Batista underground.
She raised her palms again. “We all got involved, at the same time. The whole family was involved. We hid people, we sold bonds, we smuggled weapons … We would tend the wounded. The revolutionaries were students in the Colegios Internacionales, and we helped them. Batista’s guards were all around the town, and every now and then they would shoot into the school, but they didn’t dare come in. In the kitchen of one of the colegios, we performed surgery to remove a bullet … The ones that were badly wounded we would take to a deeply hidden hospital for revolutionaries.”
“Was this a policy that your family shared? No one questioned it?”
“No one,” she replied. The Luceros were leaders in the Baptist community, and Santiago’s liberal Baptists were among the nation’s boldest opponents of Batista’s dictatorship. “Our motto was, ‘Love and struggle.’”
By the end of 1956, the struggle had become a war. Castro had survived the 1953 Moncada assault, been jailed, and set free. Joining the community of Cuban rebel expatriates in Mexico City, he founded Movimiento 26 de Julio, the July 26 Movement, named for the date of the Moncada attack. “M-26-7” distinguished itself from the many fractious, ineffectual anti-Batista groups by insisting on the necessity of war. The Batista regime was backed by Wall Street, the CIA, and the Mob, and armed by the U.S. military-industrial complex; political maneuvering, street protests, and coup conspiracies were never going to change the neocolonial status quo. In the last days of November 1956, Castro, Camilo Cienfuegos, and eighty other M-26-7 revolutionaries boarded a dangerously overloaded motor yacht and set off across the Gulf of Mexico for a landing on the coast of Oriente.
Though the would-be guerrillas aboard the yacht Granma included a few dedicated Communists—among them Castro’s younger brother, Raúl, and a young Argentine doctor, Ernesto “Che” Guevara—the Movimiento 26 de Julio declared no ideology and welcomed all Cubans to join in a broad, democratic alliance for freedom. Many Cubans were leery of M-26-7’s vague politics, but most activists agreed that only war could challenge Batista’s ruthless security state.
Santiago’s anti-Batista underground had been organized by an idealistic young Baptist preacher and teacher named Frank País. Not long after Castro’s Moncada assault, nineteen-year-old País began creating a network of resistance cells, organizing students and workers—many of them Baptists—for political protests, fund-raising, and the secret accumulation of weapons and military supplies. The network grew into a clandestine organization, Acción Libertadora en Santiago de Cuba, Revolutionary Action. Under País’s leadership, Revolutionary Action merged with the new M-26-7; País became the national movimiento’s director of urban operations.
Castro and País attempted to coordinate the Granma landing with a diversionary uprising in Santiago, but when País’s urban guerrillas rose, as scheduled, on November 30, 1956, the yacht was still wallowing eastward through choppy seas. Rebel santiagueros died for no tactical gain. Castro’s fighters finally disembarked on December 2; Batista’s undistracted army promptly slaughtered at least sixty of them. País and Castro survived these disasters, and País’s urban infrastructure began supporting Castro’s tiny army in the Sierra Maestra. Without the money, weapons, and medical supplies delivered by Santiago’s deeply democratic, Baptist-centered underground, Castro, Raúl, Camilo, and Che wouldn’t have lasted much longer than the rest of Granma’s passengers.
The entire Lucero family was involved in the underground, but Oscar became a key leader of Frank País’s national organization.
I asked Lilia what she remembered of Oscar’s transition from little brother to urban guerrilla.
I was beginning to understand that
she speaks from the heart, always, before she bothers organizing just-the-facts answers, so I wasn’t surprised when she said, “My memories of Oscar are that he used to caress my hand so tenderly.”
She looked down at her hands, which were, at that rare moment, at rest on the tabletop. They’re spotted with age, but still elegant. “My hands were very soft back then,” she murmured, before looking up. “He was very gentle, but also rebellious. One day, while he was studying at university, a professor from Spain said he couldn’t understand why the Cubans hadn’t expelled the yanquis from the base at Guantánamo. Oscar stood up and said, ‘When you toss the English off the Rock of Gibraltar, then we’ll throw the yanquis into the sea.’”
A biography by fellow resistance fighter Renán Ricardo Rodriguez, El Héroe del Silencio (“Hero of Silence”), describes Oscar as taciturno, tranquilo, y meditativo, “melancholy, calm, and thoughtful,” but fierce in his opposition to injustice.
“Oscar was really opposed to segregation,” Lilia says. “It was everywhere. Blacks could not work in large stores. There was prejudice against intermarriage. Oscar detested all that.”
The Luceros lived on a side street, Prolongación de Pizarro, “across from a girl named Blanquita, who was very young and beautiful,” Lilia said. Her eyes were shining again, as when she’d spoken of her husband. “My brother Oscar fell immediately in love with her … They had the most beautiful love that you can possibly imagine,” she declared, shaking her head at the wonder of it.
Ricardo writes of finding Oscar one afternoon, sharing a shady bench in the park called Plaza Marte with una bella muchacha, a beautiful girl whom he recognized as Blanca Niubó, the daughter of a Pizarro Street shopkeeper. Oscar said, “She is my girlfriend and we’re getting married right away, even though her father doesn’t like it much.”
I asked Lilia about Blanca’s father.
“Yes, he objected to the relationship. He was a capricious gallego,” a Spaniard from Galicia, a region once known for stubborn poverty and frequent rebellions. “Eventually, he gave his consent, because Oscar was a good person, a fine student, handsome, without any vices. And their love was so strong …
“But that love was cut short,” Lilia said. “They only stayed together two years, because Oscar was totally committed to the Revolution.”
Oscar dreamed of becoming a lawyer, but the Luceros were still very poor. He somehow managed to continue his studies while working wherever he could find a job, including stints alongside his older brothers back in the cane fields at Central Miranda. Oscar earned his bachelor’s degree while educating himself in the brutal truths of the sugar economy, and after graduation his life was devoted to social justice. He was one of the first santiagueros to join Frank País in creating Revolutionary Action, and when País brought the group into the M-26-7 coalition, Oscar Lucero became a leader in the national struggle.
While Castro’s army in the mountains gathered strength, progressing from hit-and-run guerrilla strikes on isolated garrisons to successful defense of its base of operations against Batista’s troops, artillery, and airpower, the war in the cities—la lucha clandestina, the clandestine war—escalated into a ferocious exchange of terror tactics and assassinations. The police and Batista’s CIA-trained SIM (Servicio de Inteligencia Militar) secret service killed suspected dissidents without compunction, and those who were shot on the street were luckier than those taken back to barracks and jails for torture and interrogation before their inevitable executions. M-26-7 fought fire with fire, targeting police chiefs and military men for assassination, bombing pipelines and power plants.
The Pentagon calls conflicts between powers with all the conventional advantages—big budgets, big armies, lots of military hardware—and upstart organizations such as M-26-7 “assymetrical warfare.” Because the opponents cannot meet on the battlefield, “asymmetrical warfare” is even more likely than conventional conflict to cross accepted boundaries of ethical mayhem. La lucha clandestina shocked cubanos with intimate horrors: a police chief’s wife cut down in the same fusillade that killed her much-hated husband, a local boy beaten to death for carrying a sign in a protest. And it shocked by assaulting icons of national identity and standards of international law: an M-26-7 squad stormed the Presidential Palace in a failed attempt to kill Batista; Havana police broke into the Haitian embassy and murdered ten asylum-seeking revolutionaries.
This was the war Oscar joined. It was a war of high ideals and vicious methods. Underground warriors had to practice ceaseless paranoia and routinely entrust their lives to strangers. Oscar spent the last three years of his brief life disappearing, losing his home and name to a series of hideouts and noms de guerre. Just as Fidel Castro was often known to the network as “Alejandro”—among other code names—and Frank País was “Cristian” and “David,” so Oscar became “Omar,” and also “Narciso,” “Héctor,” and “Noel.”
País and the M-26-7 directorate put “Omar” in charge of rebuilding the resistance in Holguin, the first important city north of Santiago. Batista’s regime had responded to the November 30, 1956, uprising in Santiago with a nationwide crackdown on dissidents; the total failure of the Corinthia expedition, another Granma-style landing in the region, had further incensed the dictatorship and exposed more revolutionaries to assassination. The M-26-7 network in Holguin had been smashed. Before Castro’s uniformed army in the Sierra Maestra could break out to the north, Holguin’s underground would have to rise again.
Oscar took up a secret existence in Holguin, drew together the network’s survivors and recruited new cells, restored trust, and put the organization back to work gathering supplies and intelligence. One holguinera, the poet and clandestine warrior Lalita Curberlo Barberán, wrote that “Omar” brought the network back to life with “something warm and human … with sweetness, with fondness, and we’d obey.” Within a few months he reclaimed the initiative in Holguin’s war by masterminding the execution of Colonel Fermín Cowley Gallegos, a bloody-handed Batista enforcer. Oscar Lucero, the young man who gave orders so sweetly, proved himself as an effective leader in a merciless war. M-26-7 decided to send him to Havana.
No matter how great the danger, “Blanquita always supported him,” Lilia said, catching Maricel’s eye to make sure this reference to her mother is heard. “Always.”
As Lilia continued, I realized that, in this historical context, “support” doesn’t mean what it means in contemporary American relationship-speak: emotional or financial backing. Lilia was talking about something else.
“Blanquita was pregnant with Maricel,” Lilia said, “when she drove the getaway car for the kidnapping.”
Kidnapping? I want to hear more, but Lilia was really speaking to Maricel, and I didn’t want to interrupt. “She was in the movement, just as he was, but when he was arrested, they took him, but not her.”
They are the SIM, which finally cornered Oscar in an apartment in Havana on April 28, 1958. “We think it was because she was pregnant. But who knows why they did what they did?” Lilia’s shrug and smile weren’t bitter, just weary with the work of forgiveness, with the effort of overcoming anger and revulsion, finding compassion for the people who murdered Oscar.
“Yes, when my brother died, after terrible suffering, extremes of torture, Blanca was pregnant.”
The SIM torturers did their worst to Oscar for twenty days. By the spring of 1958, Oscar had taken on responsibilities that made him one of the most valuable prisoners the dictatorship had ever captured; he could have told his torturers everything they needed to know to destroy the M-26-7 network in Havana and much of the nation. Yet interrogation tapes and notes show that, in the words of his biographer, “Oscar said not a single word that jeopardized the movement or the life of any compañero.”
Perhaps it was courage that enabled Oscar to stay silent—but plenty of courageous revolutionaries talked under torture. Maybe it was his faith—but many Baptist rebels broke down. Oscar’s ideals and loyalty were not uncommon s
trengths in the M-26-7 underground. But there was the unexplainable blessing of Blanca’s freedom. Oscar was taken from their betrayed safe house—Ricardo says he showed the police a “serene and tranquil” face—knowing that Blanca was still free. There was the possibility that the SIM didn’t know Blanquita belonged to the movement. If he talked, he might name the name who would betray his wife and their unborn child.
Hope and fear and an immeasurable love: maybe these powers explain Oscar’s extraordinary marytrdom. Somehow he became el héroe del silencio. Somehow Blanca stayed safe, escaping the SIM’s brutality to suffer a different pain: the ordeal of knowing what they were doing to Oscar, of not knowing whether to hope that he was dead or alive.
“Maricel was born three months after Oscar’s death,” Lilia said. “Oscar never met her.”
The women had shared this story before, cherished and endured it over the several years that Maricel had been returning to Santiago, so they didn’t quite cry. They smiled at each other and at me with their matching dark, brimful eyes.
The university in Holguin is named after Oscar, as are numerous primary and secondary schools. On an earlier trip, Maricel visited an Oscar Lucero Moya elementary school in the countryside east of Santiago. “The children read me poems they’d written about my father. They were so beautiful.” That memory almost spilled her tears.
Growing up in Santiago after the Revolution, Maricel’s own school days were marked by the consciousness that she was “the martyr’s daughter”; she recalls being singled out for special kindnesses.
In those years, Lilia and her husband, Reynaldo, took on new teaching responsibilities. “I received various government appointments, such as municipal director of literacy education, until I got to the technical school founded by the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics … I was a Spanish teacher. I had many leadership positions, such as grammar school principal, but I really liked teaching.”
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