One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution

by Nancy Stout

  In the summer of 1956, Celia did as she always had, and so did not attract unusual attention. She’d hire a truck, put benches on its open back, and invite her friends for an excursion. Celia brought a picnic basket, and the other women brought covered dishes. They’d drive to a remote spot—this year more often in the mountains rather than on the coast—and, as Elbia explains, if the place had a river or a waterfall, or any attraction, it provided an object for their outing. If not, then the group would improvise a baseball diamond in a field, and their game made an excellent cover for an entire afternoon. The residents of these little settlements wouldn’t be able to take their eyes off all the stylish, town-bred men and women having such a good time in their cow pasture, and nobody noticed how, by the end of the day, Celia had spent several innings in conversation with one of their neighbors. Nor had the group of friends that accompanied her, because it was only later that Elbia and Elbia’s sister-in-law, Berta Llópiz, figured it out. “At the time, I couldn’t imagine that [these trips] served as decoys to her revolutionary activity,” Elbia commented. She pointed out that the residents who lived in these places they visited—“so far away from the ports”—rarely saw visitors and noticed if anyone from the village left for the day (so Celia couldn’t summon them), and would be extremely suspicious if just one or two outsiders arrived. Any small change in the natural course of events would have been discussed endlessly, so Celia’s way around the problem was quintessential Celia: go to a village, overwhelm the locals with numbers, bring along food; once there more or less keep to her role as hostess, busy talking to everyone and no one in particular. In that way, with everyone having a good time, she could just disappear.

  She told these people, plainly, what she wanted. In some cases a “yes” may have come immediately. But most people don’t want to volunteer for anything, let alone anything dangerous. After all, this wasn’t about pledging a bushel of sweet potatoes at the end of the harvest season for the Servants of Mary supper—although that is the sort of conversation she probably was having with them, too. Agreement to become an activist comes in many cases after a cataclysmic event. That had certainly happened when the army, rather than take prisoners in the attack on the Moncada in 1953, killed most of the young men involved and the Catholic Church had intervened.

  Yet not everybody in the mountains even knew about the Moncada, let alone had heard of Fidel Castro. So Celia approached them in another way: as herself. Convincing them would have taken time, and meant discussing pros and cons. She no doubt used every variety of persuasion, never taking no for an answer.

  If Celia heard about a disaster, she would pay a visit. María Antonia Figueroa, the director of a school in Santiago who turned into a revolutionary and 26th of July member, told me that if Celia heard that a young woman had been raped by one of Batista’s soldiers—and Figueroa emphasized that “young woman” meant someone’s daughter, sister, or wife—Celia would visit that woman and inquire if there was anything she could do to help. The mention of rape, in any discussion about pre-Revolution Cuba, always carries with it the implication of the army or Rural Guard, although, for all we know, these women could have been raped by a drunken relative. But rape was common, and carried with it a stigma, a feeling of helplessness and shame, and Celia, as the doctor’s daughter and also his nurse, could offer much welcome help. Moreover, victims and their families believed that she was discreet. Figueroa says that Celia would offer to take the woman to see Dr. Sánchez (although I think it seems very likely that she would do the examination herself). If a farmer’s wife or daughter or sister had been raped by the Guard, Celia’s offer of help was another way to build her small but growing army and advance her cause.

  CELIA’S FIRST DIRECTIVE FROM FRANK had been to put together a network of militants from towns along the coast. So one of her first activities was to set up a surveillance system, which she called “vigils,” to log the movement of the military garrisons. She recruited various people to accomplish this activity, drawing them as Frank had suggested from Orthodox Party faithful and 26th of July Movement members in the newly formed chapters in Pilón, Niquero, and Media Luna, where the garrisons were located. After a month or two Celia knew the names of the garrison personnel, their schedules, guard changes, patrol routes, the type of weapons they carried, the effectiveness of those weapons. Over time, her people became acquainted with every one of the enemy’s weaknesses, for example, whether a soldier on sentry duty routinely catnapped. This information helped her to plan a surprise attack as ordered by Frank. Over the first half of 1956, she carefully selected people she considered best qualified to carry out such attacks.

  We need to bear in mind that Celia was setting up a regional, clandestine military operation: she was selecting her own army; picking people to train that army; and, in some cases, she would also be supplying it with uniforms and weapons. Although Frank assured her that Fidel would be bringing uniforms from Mexico, she also acquired them because she needed Cuban army uniforms for her assault teams, so they would look like a small company from Batista’s army. Arriving in the back of a truck, rolling up to the garrison, to jump out and offer assistance, and to help those poor members of the army (out of their guns and ammunition). The garrison’s personnel would move to put in a call to headquarters in Manzanillo or Santiago, requesting reinforcement, but the electric, telephone, and telegraph wires would have been cut. So, when the attack came, it would be dark inside the garrisons, and the soldiers would have to defend themselves without the usual comfort of being able to find their arms and ammunition easily. Celia’s army would be there to offer assistance by stealing Batista’s soldiers’ guns and ammunition at gunpoint, and encourage them to hand everything over, without any fuss, because it was easier that way. Then back in the truck, and onto streets and along main roads, to be waved through by 26th of July sabotage units that would already have set up official-looking road blocks. This is how Celia planned for her troops to carry out their attack.

  IN SELECTING HER FORCES, Frank had asked for “proven militants” from various organizations Celia had worked with over the years. All her recruits lived along the coast. She needed to induct enough personnel to storm a guard post, yet use discretion in her choices, picking the younger and more independent over the older and more experienced. Young people were also closer to the age of army recruits, and it was hoped that young faces would all look alike to old soldiers, and therefore be indistinguishable. It is thought that Frank encouraged her to select her militants not only from a variety of groups, but put together individuals who did not know each other, since he tried to keep the members of his own action groups separate, unaware of each other, and their functions compartmentalized.

  Later that summer, Celia’s recruits were given basic military training by the Movement. She directed some of this instruction herself, in the hills outside Pilón. She taught her troops to crawl along the ground and gave firing-range demonstrations. Why she elected to do this, when all those Movement men were available, is anybody’s guess, but in trying to understand Celia’s behavior we have the peeping-tom incident as a reference point. When that prowler looked in the bathroom window, she hadn’t called Cleever from his small house across the garden, or gone across the street to summon Elbia’s father: she got her pistol, which she evidently kept loaded, and fired it at him. Celia consistently favored a hands-on approach. After all, she was a local, able to blend in; she probably also had to see for herself her troops’ offensive capabilities.

  These military workshops took place outside the towns on property that was often “borrowed” to the surprise of the owners if they discovered it. It required chameleon-like behavior on her part, since Pilón was under the control of Sergeant Matos of the Rural Guard, who kept watch over every activity. For her, he was the enemy, but we can assume that as far as Matos was concerned she was pretty much someone he respected, a woman who ran a successful local charity, the doctor’s daughter whose maverick ways called for some accommo
dation on his part. Why? Because her father treated everybody equally, as doctors do: the batistianos, the paramilitaries, the 26th of Julyers, cane-cutters, mill executives, everybody in the town.

  She was aware of Sergeant Matos’s respect. His style of vaguely tangible deference would have been good enough for most people, but not for her. Celia befriended his son. A newspaper article from that time shows a photo of Celia and Wilfredo Fernández, Elbia’s brother, a pole resting on their shoulders to hold up two huge fish. Celia had caught a 75-pound sierra (everybody in the boat had helped her haul it in). In a second photo, the entire fishing party of nine is assembled. Showing this clipping to me, Elbia pointed out herself, then Celia’s friend Carmen Vásquez, and, moving her finger across the yellowed paper, came to a young man in the back row: Sergeant Matos’s son. She explained that Celia had invited “Matito” to this particular fishing party so as to render all her fishing trips, in the eyes of his father, harmless. If the sergeant wondered what these people were up to out there on the water, his son could reassure him that they had gone out to catch fish.

  Eventually, Celia had people everywhere: some studied all movement along the coast, including traffic on the highways, and reported directly to her; others drew up assault strategies. She lined up vehicles to accomplish Frank’s additional mandate: transporting the arriving guerrillas into the mountains. She considered her best bet the truckers who regularly drove cane to the mills in Niquero and Pilón. They’d be picking up the guerrillas near their place of landing. Who among the truckers, in the Pilón area at least, had not received a toy or transported toys for her on Kings Day and could say no to Celia and foist the new responsibility on others less reliable than themselves? She also recruited men who worked in the administrative offices of the sugar mills and regularly drove jeeps into the coastal cane plantations. They wouldn’t seem out of place if they were seen behind the wheel of one of the mill trucks. She obviously chose well. When Fidel and his men landed, there was a fairly large fleet of trucks waiting along the coast. None was detected by the government’s forces or agents.

  Crescencio Pérez was a local patriarch with family spread throughout the Sierra Maestra. Celia recruited him in 1956 to help the guerrillas when they returned to Cuba at the start of the Revolution. (Courtesy of Oficina de Asuntos Históricos)

  AFTER GUILLERMO GARCÍA, the next major figure Celia recruited was Crescencio Pérez, whom she had not previously known. It is likely that his name came up on weekend outings—at a ball game or picnic near some waterfall. People would have told her that she needed Crescencio Pérez not only because he was a local don, a patriarch, but because he hated the Rural Guard. To back it up, they told her tales of Pérez’s arrest and escape during Machado’s presidency. She listened closely to the region’s folklore.

  Crescencio lived in Ojo de Agua de Jerez, a settlement of five or six houses located on the main road between Manzanillo and Pilón, a road she often traveled; but she lived on the coast and he in the upper foothills, in another world. Crescencio was the man for her, they explained, because the Rural Guard gave him a wide berth. He had a great number of children spread throughout those hills, and over the years his family and neighbors, in formidable numbers, had protected him. He’d earned his reputation as a person to be respected. She wanted to know more about him and his family, and found out that Crescencio was a famous womanizer—a good many of his children were by women other than his wife. In his case, the story had a promising twist: he recognized the children as his own and had them baptized with his name. Here was a regional patriarch whose sexual prowess had earned him a certain dignity, since he not only openly recognized all his children but held the sway to do so. But not all his neighbors, especially those men whose wives he’d seduced, harbored benign feelings toward Crescencio. So, while he might be a good person to work for Celia’s cause, she was aware that she might be venturing onto thin ice here.

  She made an appointment to meet him through Juan León, a relative of Crescencio’s. In the first quarter of 1956, he came to Pilón. The patriarch was sixty-one years old, with a square jaw, gray hair, blue eyes, with head reared back in his photographs, somewhat rooster-like because his head presided over such a solidly built, poker-straight body. He immediately promised to help her in every way possible. Álvarez Tabío thinks this happened so readily because Pérez liked rebellious causes, and Celia, by nature, was persuasive.

  She must have been curious to meet this man; and, though she always dressed meticulously, she would have taken special care of what she wore that day, so as not to disappoint him. He may have felt the same about her; Juan León would have filled him in on her background: that she was the daughter of the doctor, of a man who had spoken out against Machado, and would have told him about her political background, her support of the Orthodox Party, of Eduardo Chibás and Emilio Ochoa. León might have described what he knew, or had heard, about the men in her life, her love affairs. Celia found out from Crescencio that Ignácio Pérez, his favorite son, was already eagerly conspiring with the union-organized cane-cutters in their strike against mill owners, and she could see that this worked to her advantage, that the old man was eager to be dealt in, handed a role. Several things jelled, and Crescencio needed little encouragement to act.

  Guillermo García and Crescencio Pérez, in a completely natural way, began traveling in their own regions, saving Celia from exposing herself unnecessarily. This was helpful, since the Rural Guard watched everyone’s movements, especially those named on the government’s lists—Cubans say “marked”—as Celia was for her previous Orthodox Party activities. García, as he went about purchasing livestock, now rallied like-minded farmers near the coast. Pérez’s recruitment extended throughout his fiefdom: his children and their neighbors and relatives who lived in the central highlands from west to east in the Sierra Maestra range. The enlistment of these two men expanded Celia’s network to cover an immense territory; it soon had representatives in Belic, Ojo de Agua, Alegria de Pio, Rio Nuevo, Las Palmonas, Santa Maria, Guaimaral, Ceibabo, Convenencia, El Mamey, Palmarito, Sevilla, Las Cajas—all possible routes that Fidel’s men might take if they had to travel on foot from their landing point and into the mountains. Crescencio and Ignacio devoted themselves to Celia’s project, and by the middle of 1956, they had made useful contacts with people almost all the way east to Pico Turquino. Álvarez Tabío wrote that Crescencio and Ignacio passed through Purial de Vicana, El Cilantro, El Aje, La Caridad de Mota, La Habanita, El Lomon, Caracas, El Coco, El Jigue, and La Plata, laying the groundwork along a route the guerilla columns followed later. In other words, Crescencio and Ignacio Pérez had pledges from farmers and ranchers that paid off two years later, in early 1958, when the rebel army was being aggressively pursued by Batista’s army during the war.

  Celia could not let her field commanders know about each other. For one thing, Crescencio had, at some point in the past, compromised a woman in Guillermo’s family, and in the 1930s had treated Guillermo’s father so badly that feelings against him remained strong in the García family, enough that the antipathy would have outweighed even the most ardent anti-Batista sentiments. She no doubt evaded questions and lied flat-out when she thought it was appropriate to ensure her network’s survival until her first two great missions were accomplished.

  When Crescencio and his son Ignacio traveled from farm to farm, and house to house, they were recruiting clan members who were anti-Batista and anti-Rural Guard. People in this region had been exploited at every opportunity, for decades, and in an especially brutal manner, so it wasn’t all that hard to get them to come aboard—to say, in effect, “Sure, when these guys arrive, we’ll do our part.” Every generation had the desire to rid the place of government soldiers—dubbed casquitos or “little helmets”—who usually took the job to receive extra pay. If posted in the mountains, they received a per diem they never had to spend, living as they did by extortion, so it became the equivalent of bonus pay. Blatant expropriation of g
oods was the Guard’s standard behavior. Another factor worked in Crescencio’s favor: most of the Pérez clan had heard about Fidel and the Moncada when they agreed to join Crescencio’s cause, but it’s generally agreed that their decision was less a matter of supporting Fidel than of the pleasure of involvement: It was an opportunity for one more fight. In this instance, the fight was especially sweet because of the endorsement of their patriarch. Before long, Crescencio had secured the Pérez family’s collective pledge, and Celia’s network had real security in numbers.

  In Guillermo García’s region near the coast, members of the Rural Guard regularly helped themselves to the ranchers’ cattle and horses. Logistically, the area was somewhat more important since it was closer to where the guerrillas might land: Boca del Toro, the cove called “mouth of the Toro River,” in Guillermo’s zone, was one of landing spots under consideration. The ranchers who agreed to go along with García surely took some time to think over the consequences: if they were caught, they would be jailed, and they didn’t have the safety in numbers that protected the Pérez family. If they were suspected of assisting the guerrillas, their buildings would likely be burned down. Each enlisted farmer and his wife made a decision to take a chance, based on others who were willing to do the same, and with a sense of community. It is my impression that García told them about an upcoming rebel invasion and mentioned the doctor’s daughter, which would have given them pause. If she was involved, she would be exposing her father, and if she was ready to take risks, they had better help her. When Guillermo showed up to ask if they had made a decision, they joined his team. By May, the job was done and Guillermo described all this to Frank and Celia at a meeting in her house.