by Nancy Stout
As 1956 approaches, it is again time to sell raffle tickets and prepare for the church supper on New Year’s Eve. She’ll go, before that, to Santiago and buy toys in bulk. This year, because the sugar workers have been on strike, there is little money around. Calling merchants, Celia reminds them to donate items for the raffle, or make pledges of food, pointing out that parents with little or no work are counting on these gifts.
Sometime on this day, she gets a message. If it comes by telephone, it is almost certainly coded. More likely it is spoken, by one of those who wait on the porch, who otherwise appear as patients to see the doctor. Fidel Castro sends word that his right-hand man, Pedro Miret, is coming to Pilón. He will be accompanied by the 26th of July Movement’s national director of action, Frank País. Castro wants her to show them locations along the coast where he and his guerrilla fighters, returning from exile in Mexico, can land.
However it reaches her, the message is a tap on her shoulder, an invitation to become one of the instigators of the revolution that Castro had put in motion last July. Clearly Celia is not solely what she appears to be: a father’s daughter, a civic-minded and house-proud woman, a member in good standing of the provincial gentry. Although, she is those things as well. It might be tempting to say she is unique in her place and time.
She was, in fact, fairly representative: a thirty-five-year-old woman in 1950s Cuba, looking for a person (it could have been nearly anyone), or political party, or any movement whose objective was to remove Fulgencio Batista from power.
Since Batista seized the presidency by a coup d’état in 1952, Fidel Castro had emerged in the minds of many as the person most likely to end the dictator’s reign. He fearlessly, even rashly, had led an attack against the Moncada garrison, the national army’s command headquarters in Santiago. The army reacted with extreme force, summarily executing most of the participants, but Fidel escaped the massacre, aided, in part, by the Archbishop of Santiago, Monseigneur Enrique Pérez Serrantes, Spanish, sent to Cuba in 1922, who had personally tried to protect the few survivors of the 26th of July attack. The Archbishop even went so far as to search for the young revolutionaries hiding in the hills, dressed in his cassock, carrying a cross, and (some say) using a megaphone. Fidel argued his own defense at trial, was imprisoned for a time, and released in May 1955. Less than two months later, he went into exile. Between his release from jail and his exile in Mexico City, he founded his revolutionary 26th of July Movement, named for the day in 1953 when the Moncada was attacked, and took on one goal: removing Batista. Celia had decided to join Fidel and his movement.
After the 1952 coup, she, along with everyone suspected of opposing the dictatorship, was put on the list of organizations considered dangerous. This wide range included her fellow members of the Orthodox Party, formed legitimately in the late 1940s and led by the popular Eduardo Chibás. Not intimidated by being listed, she became an activist. She joined two clandestine anti-Batista groups, headed by men in the coastal towns of Campechuela and Manzanillo.
Even before the attack on the Moncada or the formation of these groups, she and her father had carried out a personal project that had its own seditious element. On May 21, 1953, along with a small group of Martí scholars, they erected a statue of Martí on the top of Cuba’s highest mountain, Turquino Peak in the Sierra Maestra. This range extends along the southern coast. They approached from a small wharf on the Caribbean, from the southern side, where the land dips below sea level then soars to an elevation of 6,560 feet. The military had been intent on the packing case the group hauled up, imagining it held guns, so had kept up surveillance as it was transported to the mountain. But Manuel Sánchez’s resistance project was conceptual: to place José Martí on the highest plane so he could reign over Cuba. The feat’s oddity, as much as its symbolism, made an impression on military officials, who deemed all the participants suspicious. Later—during the Revolutionary War—Fidel would favor the lofty heights of Turquino’s western companion, a peak called Caracas, and make his command post there, just above the La Plata River.
Those who became activists in response to Batista’s seizure of power had already been struggling over more than a decade to reform Cuban politics. Ramón Grau had become president in 1944 through fraudulent elections. In 1947, a new political party was formed, officially named the Cuban People’s Party but generally called the Orthodox, and Manuel Sánchez established a branch in Pilón. The party leader, Eduardo Chibás, even stayed in the doctor’s house in 1948. He began his presidential campaign in Oriente Province, and there is a photograph of Celia wearing a hat, quite properly, sitting among the bigwigs on the platform. The new party showed its strength in the 1948 elections, increasing its power. Still, Carlos Prio Socarras, who succeeded Grau that year, was not appreciably better. It became obvious to Batista, who had ruled Cuba in the 1930s and was living in retirement in the United States, that even if he returned he would be unable to win the 1952 fall elections. It was that year he staged his coup. By the next year, police arrests and station house beatings were common. The police were out of control whenever and wherever they chose. Torture by police agents was so widespread, writes British historian Hugh Thomas, that Batista was compelled to give his “personal assurance” that it would be investigated.
The process by which Celia became a political person is not an unusual one. It is the story of how revolutionary and national liberation movements begin. It is precisely those without power—teachers, nurses, housewives, secretaries, telephone operators, cane workers, bus drivers—but with intelligence and self-esteem who quite legitimately make the decision to fight for their cause. The language of these movements addresses loss of freedom (this means free press, free speech, religious freedom, adequate incomes, adequate health care, access to a stable system of justice), and without access to those rights or freedoms, the participants come to the conclusion they have nothing to lose. So, they take chances. They organize. They become members of movements that are as passionate as they are imperfect.
HER VARIANT OF THAT STORY began in 1940, when Celia arrived in Pilón and embarked upon a rarely mentioned period of mourning. At fifteen, she had fallen in love with a young Spaniard, a Catalonian named Salvador Sadurní. He had arrived in Manzanillo after attending a U.S. business college, paid for by his uncle who planned to leave Sadurní his profitable hardware store in that city. Both Celia and her sister Flávia had left their father’s house after outgrowing the local school in Media Lunato to attend the Institute, a private school for girls, in Manzanillo. There Celia started a club she called Los Pavitos, whose members were mostly her sisters, cousins, and their friends. They went to their favorite park, walking in groups of three or four, and when they saw someone they wanted to get to know, they would invite him to a beach party or picnic, which they then organized with elaborate care.
Salvador Sadurní, from Barcelona, was older (nineteen to Celia’s fifteen), with a well-defined future. From friends, cousins, and a few photographs I’ve been able to piece together this relationship. Celia’s friend Berta Llópiz has no doubt he was “crazy, crazy for her,” and her Girona cousins added the telling detail that he and Celia, along with their friends, avidly followed the news of the Spanish Civil War, discussing whatever they’d read or heard on the radio. This was a cord that bound them all together, tightly; no matter where they were, these young friends—spunky, attractive, confident—would whip out a donation can that each carried along with school books, picnic baskets, and all their other paraphernalia, to collect money to support the Republican cause. I found out a bit more by probing Celia’s brother-in-law, Pedro Álvarez, husband of her sister Chela. He affirmed that Sadurní was a great guy, “one of the best,” but said that Salvador and Celia were each too independent to be a good couple. I pressed for a reason, and we agreed that Celia was still pretty young, only fifteen when she met Salvador, but they had stayed together and created an affectionate and devoted friendship. Pedro added that Sadurní spent his nig
hts “singing to other women,” and at this point Chela broke into the conversation to remind her husband that Salvador had performed several pieces of music written and dedicated to Celia on a local radio station. Slowly, another image of the young man began to emerge: he had been a businessman-musician who spent his free time writing and performing songs. He played the guitar, would hire and rehearse musicians, then take them with him like troubadours, to serenade under people’s windows and perform the music he’d written. His group played at houses all over town. The families would send somebody down to the street with money and to thank the leader of these musical bands for including their household. He was flirting with tradition, strictly speaking; a man only serenades the girl he is in love with, and he had extended his serenades to an alarming number of women. Even at the age of eighty, Pedro still allowed a certain jealousy to creep to the surface when he spoke of Sadurní. But I could almost feel Chela’s pride as she spoke of the midday or lunchtime radio programs when Salvador performed. At least two pieces of Sadurní’s music had been for her sister: a tango called “Celia” and “Los Pavitos,” named for her group of girlfriends, “those illusive queens who dance one day, swim the next, and that’s the way they enjoy life.” It was a good description of how the singer was charmed by this vibrant young girl who had a life of her own, championed her friends, and was, above all, busy and independent. In a world where a woman was supposed to be in tune with “the man who might be her future husband” and learn very early to be quietly available—“there for him”—she had at fifteen already turned the tables. She, and everyone else, seemed to be happy with Salvador. The couple was often seen together, and Celia was pleased with all this recognition in Manzanillo, at the time the third-largest city in Oriente Province.
Celia with Salvador Sadurní in Media Luna, 1937. (Courtesy of Oficina de Asuntos Históricos)
Cousin Olga Sánchez and her boyfriend, León Moreno, spent many weekends with Celia and her boyfriend, Salvador Sadurní, at the Sanchez farm in San Miguel del Chino, where this picture was taken in 1937. (Courtesy of Oficina de Asuntos Históricos)
She went home on weekends to work for her father in Media Luna, and Salvador Sadurní would come down the coast to visit her on Sunday, the day when both the hardware store and doctor’s office were closed. Sometimes he came with his friends—bronzed, muscled, smartly dressed in bathing suits, on a yacht he had rented; a less glamorous boyfriend would have taken the coastal ferry—and they often went to the Sánchez family farm in the highlands of San Miguel del Chino. Celia’s friends say she took it for granted that life was going to be wonderful.
SALVADOR DIED ON JUNE 9, 1937, when he was twenty-one and Celia had just turned seventeen. He injured his knee in a sports accident, and it ballooned up and required surgery. The swelling turned out to conceal an undetected aneurysm, and he bled to death on the operating table. As she watched him die through a window in the operating room door, he called out her name.
“Celia was horribly affected by his death,” her cousin Nene states flatly. “She was in love with him, but only realized she was in love with him after he died.” Others have said the same, but less succinctly. She lived in the moment; and that moment ended almost before she was fully aware it had arrived.
There were various suitors in the ten years after Salvador Sadurní’s death, and, inevitably, some were boring and one or two were heartbreakers. Chela, who has lived in Miami forty years, is confident she would have married Sadurní “for sure, for sure.” Flávia, in Havana, who was able to view the complete spectrum of Celia’s life including her long friendship with Fidel, said that no one had been able to touch Celia’s heart after Sadurní, that his ability to show his love for her became the gold standard. Flávia, who thinks carefully before speaking, added an astonishing comment: “I am under the impression that she really fell in love with Sadurní, and when he died, she was inoculated against love.”
Celia became something of a widow. Outwardly, she developed a rash, a skin ailment that lingered. People felt sorry for her; they already viewed Manuel’s children tragically, as their mother had died young. The year after Sadurní died, when the town held its festival, the Feast of St. James, she was sponsored as festival queen by Los Pavitos, Alianza Feminista, the Women’s Club, and several of the top social clubs: the Yacht and Fishing Club of Guacanayabo, the Spanish Colony, and the Manzanillo Circle. She won hands down amid all her tragedy and pathos.
She performed the ancient Spanish rite of looking for a mate by going to Cespedes Park, just as her father and mother had done—although Flávia remarked that it seems impossible that in 1938 women still kept to the segregated paths walking in one direction while men (to view their faces) walked in the other. That summer she dated a young man who disappeared in the fall, off to study at the University of Havana.
The next man literally arrived on her doorstep as a full-blown infatuation in August, Manzanillo’s hottest month, when being indoors was so unbearable that the Sánchez women placed chairs outside on the narrow sidewalk. Someone noticed a young man passing the house again and again and finally brought out a chair for him. They recognized Pepín Artime, the son of a local hotel owner (Celia’s aunt Amanda Manduley’s husband was the proprietor of the Hotel Casablanca). It didn’t take long to discover that Pepin was interested in Celia. She was surprised at the sudden interest, tried to ignore him, but Artime continued to arrive daily. At parties he’d only dance with Celia. Her friends began to tease her about this budding romance until Pedro Álvarez, then Chela’s boyfriend, stepped in because he knew that Artime was engaged to the daughter of a rice grower. He invited Chela and Celia for a drive in the country to test a new car (his father owned the local Ford dealership); in enforcement of the strict social rules, he drove them past the house where the Fluriach sisters lived when he knew Pepin Artime would be sitting on the porch with his fiancée. Celia did not ride by silently, or wave at him, or simply stare, which probably would have been enough to make him squirm, but called out loudly: “Hello, Pepin. Good-bye, Pepin,” furious she’d been drawn in. The next morning he was in the street in front of her house, but Celia refused to see him; in the days to come, he was there, asking to speak with her. Her sisters were astounded at the depth of her anger, since they knew she really didn’t care for him. They may have missed what she was saying: I will not be played around with.
She exhibited this shift to an iron will in other aspects of her life as well. During their last year at the Institute, in the late spring of 1939, Celia and Nene took a final exam and the teacher, Rodríguez Mojena, also the superintendent of the school, returned everyone’s bluebooks except for theirs. He pronounced them unreadable. “We had difficult handwriting,” Nene concedes. I obtained a sample of Celia’s handwriting as it was then: girlish, filled with loops and floating circles, but quite readable. “I was so embarrassed,” Nene said, “that I gave my school uniform to someone else.” A few days later, the director sent a summons. They were to come in separately and take an oral exam, but by that time Celia had stopped going to school. “I took the exam, but it was two months later,” Nene says. “My father made me do it.”
As long as she refused to take this exam, Celia could not graduate. The most influential person in her life, her father, was very unhappy at her stubbornness and tried to explain to her what was at stake. “Let Rodríguez Mojena be who he is,” he had argued, “you are only hurting yourself.” Her aunt, Amanda Manduley, a teacher and upholder of the glorious profession, thought the world had come to an end. Even Uncle Miguel, who had frequently demonstrated, by word and gesture, that Celia could do no wrong, became disgusted with her behavior. Nobody came out well; withholding the diploma from a daughter of one of the leading families in town wasn’t in the Institute’s best interest. Nene says that a private joke in their social circles was that Celia couldn’t graduate because her professor couldn’t read and she couldn’t write. When Nene finally took her exam, Mojena told her this kind of writing
might be acceptable in high school, but not at university.
Celia had been an uneven student, excelling only in what she liked (history), and maybe she was afraid of going to university. “We all assumed we were going to university,” Nene confirms. “If someone studied baccalaureate, they were going to go to university.” Weeks passed, and Celia did not go back to school. The crisis at home mounted but she never relented. Her real diploma, one might say, had been questioning authority, and this huge rebellion is the badge that symbolized her education. Her family was highly educated; by skipping college, Celia was taking her first big step toward nonconformity.
THE DIPLOMA DEBACLE is so uncharacteristic and implausible that Pedro Álvarez Tabío, while director of the Council of State’s Office of Historical Affairs, investigated the Institute’s records to see if they actually did let Celia Sánchez graduate retroactively, but he did not find her name on the list of alumnae. In other words, Mojena did not reconsider at the time (this would have required opening the bluebook and reading her answers), nor were the records changed later, after Celia became one of the country’s leaders.
She had fallen from grace, gone from top to bottom, from sweetheart (novia) to beauty queen (reina) to black sheep in rapid succession. She, so self-assured, had been used to getting what she wanted, so coming up against the Institute must have shocked her. It was her first big confrontation with both authority and the fact that she wasn’t perfect.
It was in the aftermath of all this that she arrived in Pilón. There, having convinced herself that she could achieve what she longed for by just being herself, by doing her own thing (for which a university degree isn’t a requirement), she became a doer. In this new location she came into her own. This was manifested in caring for her father, decorating his house, developing the garden, working with her charity, the Servants of Mary, teaching herself to drive, exploring every inch of the region, making friends, showing those friends what she’d discovered, accompanying her father on horseback into the Sierra Maestra, and finding all the great places to go fishing. Leaving behind her adolescence and Manzanillo allowed her to quietly mourn Sadurní. She was able to get away from the ghosts of her on-again, off-again Romeos. In Pilón, she could make a fresh start.
