One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution

by Nancy Stout

  By now, they were marching in three platoons: the vanguard led by José Smith, followed by Fidel’s platoon and Raúl’s rear guard. On the road, they had met a carbón (charcoal) cutter (Fidencio Labrada), and considered him to be a good omen: if he met other guerrillas, he could tell them where to go. They came to a little village called Agua Fina, where three carbón cutters lived, and once again the guerrillas were fed; this time it was chicken with black beans and rice, for which the carbón cutters were handsomely paid $5. They spent a relatively calm night on December 3.

  AS CELIA AND BETO PESANT were about to leave the next morning, Tuesday, December 4, they heard a milkman coming down the road and persuaded their host to go outside and buy a bottle of milk, which they shared. Then went on their way but right away ran into trouble. As they were going into town, a sentry recognized Pesant; they ran for cover and quickly separated so they’d have a better chance of getting away. Pesant told her how to find a dance hall in this part of town; he’d meet her there. They spent the rest of the day hiding out in the empty dance hall building, but when night came, the place filled up with prostitutes, and, at some point, they heard an argument followed by gunfire and were afraid the police would come and find them. They were desperate to leave because they were hiding in an office with only one way out, through a single door. Pesant thought the owner might have weapons hidden in the ceiling, so they spent the night searching frantically, and Celia would later describe the night, cryptically, as “very hectic.”

  BY THE 4TH, FARMERS WERE BEGINNING to hear stories: Batista’s forces were in the area. The guerrillas still had not reached the trocha, and soon after 8:00 a.m. Fidel’s group heard planes overhead, and their guide, José Rafael, had led them to terrain where the volcanic rocks were so cutting—Cubans call them dientes de perro, dog’s teeth—that they made little headway. More carbón cutters came to their rescue (Jesus Luis Sánchez and his brother, Pedro Luis), providing food and water, and buying food for them in a bodega, as they kept marching eastward. The column spent the night of the 4th in a cane field, sucking on cane, which quenched their thirst and gave them a little energy. This was to be their undoing.

  AROUND 5:00 A.M., on Wednesday, December 5, Celia and Beto left the dance hall. They had been in Barrio d’Oro, located on a bluff above the harbor, and now they carefully circled the hill moving toward the older part of the city. They separated, mindful that the sentry, who had seen them the day before, would have reported seeing them together. Completely out in the open and alone, Celia walked along the streets of Manzanillo and was greatly relieved to see one of the Larramendi brothers. He was stunned to see her, listened to her explanations (the same story: her car had broken down, she’d left it behind, could he take her home) and let her into his jeep, but started berating her for her political activities. “How can you do these things? You know what times are like. They are going to kill you.” She ordered him to “let me off right here” and got out of the jeep.

  She made it to Cira Escalona’s house. Cira, one of her dearest friends, who had lived in Pilón but now lived in Manzanillo, called a young doctor, Lascos Vásquez, who gave Celia a tetanus shot as 26th of July Movement women arrived and began to remove marabu thorns with tweezers. She had a high fever and complained of severe headache, so her old friend, Dr. Rene Vallejo, came to Cira’s and surgically removed thirteen thorns from Celia’s skull. “Like Jesus Christ’s crown of thorns,” she’d say, later on.

  WHEN CELIA’S FATHER HEARD that she was in Cira’s house, he was overjoyed and wrote a long letter describing Hatuey’s visit on the afternoon of her escape. In this letter, he told her that she shouldn’t think of herself as different, or braver than anybody else, and he’d included his Colt 45. He advised her to use the pistol on herself rather than be tortured. This pistol (now housed in the Cuban Council of State’s Office of Historic Affairs) is sheathed in silver and has the head of an Aztec warrior engraved on the stock. It fits into a holster made of thick, jet-black leather. A semiautomatic, the Colt was a very good gun and she was probably happy to have it, but closed her mind to her father’s warning and ignored his pathos.

  AT THIS POINT, THE WHOLE AREA SOUTH of Manzanillo—Campechuela, Media Luna, Niquero, and Pilón—was awash in speculation: was she dead or alive? Gossip flew from house to house, and town to town, linking the “doctor’s daughter” to Fidel Castro, and the moment she arrived in Manzanillo she was the main subject of conversation, a hero. “When the landing happened, everyone started to talk about Celia and how she helped the guerrillas,” explains Felipe Guerra Matos. He too had been inspired by the news of Fidel’s open revolt against Batista and wanted to do his part, and like a lot of other people, he wanted to have the privilege of joining the 26th of July Movement. To do that, you had to talk to Celia. She became the person to see in that part of the country. So he put in a request to meet her. Guerra Matos says that people didn’t use her name then, didn’t call her Celia Sánchez: “We referred to her as the ‘doctor’s daughter’ from Pilón. When we heard that she was in Manzanillo, everybody wanted to see her.” When Elsa Castro heard that Celia was alive, she went to Cira Escalona’s house to ask Celia to hand over the chocolate-brown skirt she’d been wearing. Celia was mystified, so Elsa explained: “This skirt is an important piece of Cuban history.” It ought to be in a museum someday, “like Panchita’s.” Clothes worn by the wife of Bartolome Maso, a leader during the Second War of Independence, were kept on display in a local museum. “Burn it,” Celia snapped. “You’ll never see me in medals.”

  Elsa told me she still regretted not having ignored that injunction. She explained to me that Celia received many medals in her lifetime but never wore them. When she died, Fidel pinned these medals on a little cushion he placed by her coffin.

  Even in the early days of the fight, Celia was suspicious of anything that smacked of a cult of personality.

  ALTHOUGH SUFFERING SEVERE HEADACHES from the infection and toxicity of the thorns, Celia immediately began recruiting. Just days after her escape, she agreed to interview Felipe Guerra Matos. He introduced himself as the administrator of a rice mill, with many contacts among the rich farmers around Manzanillo, growers, mill owners, and rice producers. She responded by asking him to raise a thousand dollars. When Guerra mentioned the possibility that Fidel might have been killed, as the army reports were saying, he recalls, her voice dropped and she stated, quite coldly, that this was simply impossible. He watched the change come over her and thought he was going to be dismissed, until Celia explained why that information lacked validity. If they had killed Fidel, she reasoned, the army would have published a picture of his body in every paper, everywhere, “even pulverized.” Guerra Matos was moved by her strength, her insistence, and says that her conviction carried the whole movement during those moments when people turned to her for strength.

  Guerra was overwhelmed by her fragility. “I didn’t have a proper description of Celia. I thought I would be meeting a big, strapping woman, but I met a thin, medium-tall woman instead, with a very refined manner. In bad shape. She had gone through a marabuzal. The first thing I said to her was, ‘Have you been in a cat fight?’”

  9. DECEMBER 5–16, 1956

  The Farmers’ Militia

  THE GUERRILLAS WERE AMBUSHED on the afternoon of December 5. Chewed cane stalk marked their trail. A hundred Rural Guards armed with machine guns and rifles trapped them at a place called Alegria de Pio, in a field, then set fire to the field to flush them out.

  In the battle that ensued, as Cuban historians explain it, two were killed in combat; nineteen were captured and immediately executed; and nineteen escaped one way or another, making it out of the mountains to safety as best they could, but did not return to the life of a guerrilla. Twenty-one were taken prisoner. Another twenty-one survived to form the rebel army.

  Che Guevara wrote about his escape with four comrades: Juan Almeida, Ramiro Valdes, Reynaldo Benitez, and Rafael Chao. Three others, Camilo Cienfuegos, Fr
ancisco González, and Pablo Hurtado, joined them four days later. Fidel left Alegria de Pio with his second in command, Juan Manuel Marquez, a lawyer in his forties. They escaped into a cane field, but got separated. (Marquez wandered around, alone, for ten days, was captured and executed.) Later that night, Fidel caught a glimpse of Faustino Pérez and called out quietly: “Médico, médico.” Now there were three: Fidel, Universo Sánchez, and the M.D., Faustino Pérez.

  FROM DECEMBER 5 TO 16, Celia and everyone else in the 26th of July Movement had to live with heart-wrenching silence as to the whereabouts of the guerrillas. No one knew the fate of Fidel, or any of the survivors. It is estimated that over a ten-day period, until the 15th, Batista placed upward of 40,000 troops (counts vary) in the area. Platoons combed the open fields, set up roadblocks on all routes throughout the region. And in this atmosphere of stratospheric danger, when one would think that she would be frightened, careful, or at least circumspect about leaving Cira’s house, Celia went to Santiago—within a week of her escape—to see Frank. Wearing a pair of harlequin sunglasses with white frames and black lenses, sporting a new short haircut with bangs, a maternity blouse to cover a chicken-wire stomach and a black skirt, she boarded a bus in Manzanillo. She later explained to documentary filmmaker Santiago Alvarez, “I had to go to Santiago to see Frank. . . . I had to see what he knew about the landing.”

  Several people had mentioned that she was at the top of the army’s most-wanted list. This was confirmed by one of Batista’s officers, who gave the reason: by mid-December, the army believed Fidel was isolated and harmless. Admittedly, he was still out there but, according to Retired General José Quevedo Pérez, the army thought snagging Celia would get them Fidel. Quevedo told me that Celia Sánchez was the number-one target on the army’s radar, the first priority of the military intelligence unit, SIM, for that reason.

  During the week she traveled, buses running between Manzanillo and Santiago were empty because nobody wanted to get involved with the national crisis under way. Most left empty and returned empty. When Celia caught the 6:00 a.m. bus from Manzanillo, accompanied by Eugenia (Gena) Verdecia of the 26th of July Movement, they were the only passengers. Every highway was blocked by military patrols, every car was subject to search, and the bus was halted at the checkpoints in every town along the route. When she chose her disguise, Celia had gambled that soldiers might respect a pregnant woman. When the bus got to the last stretch, near Santiago, it pulled into the military garrison at El Cobre. Soldiers invited the driver into the garrison for coffee. He turned around to tell his two passengers to wait in the bus. Celia piped up, indignantly, “What about us?” and the driver asked the soldiers whether his passengers could have coffee, too. The soldiers agreed. When Celia climbed down from the bus, the soldiers saw that she was pregnant and expressed concern for her condition. They took hold of her elbows to help her over a barricade they’d constructed. She made it a jump. She later joked that when she made the leap, she had been afraid her wire belly would come loose.

  Both women went to the garrison bathroom before entering the kitchen, where they were offered seats, in straight-back, cowhide-clad wooden chairs common in the Sierra Maestra. At some point Celia tipped hers back, balancing her chair on the two back legs, and one of the soldiers scolded her to take care, she might hurt herself or her baby.

  She got a good look at the inside of the garrison and later was able to draw a floor plan that proved useful. She asked the soldiers where the troops were going. The coast, they answered, where the rebel landing had taken place. But the danger was over, they added. The rebel chief, Fidel Castro, was dead, and everything would be over soon. The others were dead or in prison.

  She’d be sarcastic, later, in speaking of this incident, would say that it demonstrated how stupid the army could be. More to the point, she had been brazen, confident of their stupidity, sure they’d never recognize her. Maybe Celia put this spin on the story to avoid admitting that her trip may have been foolhardy, carrying unnecessary and excessive risk. Pedro Álvárez Tabío, director of the Office of Historical Affairs, a research archive devoted to tracking down this kind of information, is not sure which day she traveled to Santiago; he put it at sometime between the 7th and the 10th. The inconclusiveness leads one to infer that Celia wasn’t all that forthcoming regarding this trip. Her sister, Flávia, says the scratches from the thorns had healed a little by the time of the trip, especially those on Celia’s face (which she’d covered with her hands inside the marabuzal), but that her hands and arms—where the thorns had penetrated deepest—were still covered in angry, red scabs. The maternity blouse (housed in the archives) has short sleeves. It seems incredible that nobody considered this disfigurement odd in a pregnant woman, or thought it suspect. She certainly did not look normal.

  MAKING IT TO SANTIAGO, Celia asked Frank what to do about her young militants who had been exposed waiting for Fidel, and now were in hiding. She explained that Cesar Suarez, on his stop in Media Luna, had found out that there were some whose families had denounced them when the police showed up, and she was determined to protect these people. Frank gave her his firsthand account of the Battle of Santiago, and told her to go home to Pilón and sit tight, to keep to the plan: wait for Mongo Pérez to contact her. No matter what developed, whenever Fidel surfaced, he would go to Pérez’s farm, Cinco Palmas. Frank explained that he personally had asked Pedro Miret, on Miret’s final trip to Mexico, to carry that precise message, in person, to Fidel: “Look for Ramon ‘Mongo’ Pérez as soon as you land.” Celia was likely learning only now that this element of the plan had been put in place directly by Frank. That meant Fidel would go nowhere else.

  In the end, Celia’s carefully recruited network of farmers saved Fidel and his men. When Lalo Vásquez and Manuel Fajardo left the icehouse in Niquero on the morning of December 1, Fajardo, instead of returning to his normal life (Celia’s orders), went instead to Guillermo García’s house. He had no fear of being caught or pegged as a collaborator. In normal life he was a cattleman: “I’d be out of town fifteen or twenty days and nobody missed me. But I didn’t go back.” From the moment he heard about Alegria de Pio, he’d devoted himself to finding survivors of the battle. After the army moved in, when traveling about the region seemed impossible to others, Manuel Fajardo, Crescencio Pérez, and Guillermo García spent their days combing the countryside for dropped weapons or any sign of the surviving guerrillas. “We knew the area. We knew, by heart, how many trails there were, and that we could go anywhere. We rode on horseback and went on foot until it was impossible to continue farther.”

  ON DECEMBER 12, Fidel, Universo, and Faustino arrived on their own at Daniel Hidalgo’s house. Hidalgo and his wife, Cota Coello, weren’t members of the farmers’ network, but they were sympathetic. They were aware that one of their neighbors, Ruben Tejeda, also a farmer, was involved in “something” with Guillermo García that was “anti-Batista” and gave Fidel directions to Tejeda’s house, several miles away. The three guerrillas got there at dawn on December 13 and Tejeda, following Guillermo’s orders, took them to a farm that belonged to Marcial Areviches. From that moment, they were safely in the hands of Celia’s official rescue network, as soon as Guillermo took over. A little after noon, his father, Adrian García, arrived with rice, turkey meat, bread, milk, and coffee in a bucket. Adrian García waited there with them for the rest of the day until the clock rolled over into a new day. At 1:00 a.m. exactly, on December 14, as Álvarez Tabío told me, Guillermo García greeted Fidel Castro, Universo Sánchez, and Faustino Pérez. Then he, along with the farmers Tejeda and Areviches, guided the three guerrillas from Areviches’s farm to a place called La Manteca, where they hid in a cane field (on a farm that belonged to Pablo Pérez) for another twenty-four hours, or until the evening of the 15th.

  In the end, Celia’s carefully recruited network of farmers saved Fidel and his men. Guillermo García (photographed), Manuel Fajardo, and Crescencio Pérez spent their days combing the countrys
ide for dropped weapons or any sign of the surviving guerrillas. Fajardo remembers: “We knew the area. We knew, by heart, how many trails there were, and that we could go anywhere. We rode on horseback and went on foot until it was impossible to continue farther.” (Courtesy of Oficina de Asuntos Históricos)

  In 2011, standing by the modest monument at La Manteca that honors this event, I marveled that Fidel and his companions had made it up and down this set of steep hills and valleys. To me, it seemed a nearly impossible route.

  THE ARMY LIFTED ITS CORDON of the Niquero-Pilón road on December 15, and the three farmers led the guerrillas across it when Guillermo felt it was safe. He delivered Fidel into the hands of Ramon “Mongo” Pérez at dawn on the 16th, after having guided the group over twenty miles of very rough terrain and through the enemy lines. Mongo immediately set out for Manzanillo to tell Celia personally that Fidel was alive. Celia had moved from Cira Escalona’s to Angela Llópiz’s house. Ana Irma Escalona, who also lived there, says that Celia hugged Angela, and said “See, Angela, I told you so.” With Fidel accounted for, Celia began running around town again. Ana Irma says that when Guillermo García arrived two days later with the news that Raúl and another group of guerrillas were okay, Celia was not there. She had slipped out of the house and nobody knew where she was, or what she was up to, and Guillermo had to wait until she returned. I asked Ana Irma whether Celia had presented them with an explanation or apology. Ana Irma’s eyes rolled upward and the expression on her face told me: this was a futile question. Celia didn’t offer explanations or apologies. Her kind of silence was simply one of the many ways she demonstrated her worth.