One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution

by Nancy Stout

  10. DECEMBER 18, 1956

  How Many Guns?

  WHEN ACCOUNTS OF THE REVOLUTION were recorded, months and years later, Celia’s network of farmers, fishermen, ranchers, and cattlemen was given a formal name: the Farmers’ Militia. Nobody, least of all Raúl and Fidel, questions the fact that they saved the Revolution. Of the twenty-one survivors discovered by the farmers, sixteen made it to Mongo’s place: three with Fidel on the 16th, five with Raúl on the 18th, another man on the 19th, and seven came with Almeida on the 21st. (Che has given a good account of the last group.) By December 21, the Granma’s scattered forces had reassembled.

  THE MEN FIDEL HAD APPOINTED to command positions were dead or had been captured: Juan Manuel Marquez, José Smith, Candido González, and Jesus Montane were those he had relied on most in Mexico and during the crossing. The persons we think of today as leaders of the Cuban Revolution, Camilo Cienfuegos and Che, for example, were not so special then. Che was a member of Fidel’s command platoon, but still only a rank-and-file soldier, though a doctor. Raúl Castro and Juan Almeida were platoon chiefs. Of the sixteen, Fidel sent Faustino Pérez to Manzanillo on December 23 to operate for him on the outside. In the end, fifteen remained in the mountains to stand beside Fidel and to form the core of what would become the Rebel army. Fifteen, sixteen, twenty-one—any one of those numbers is a fair interpretation, but there never were twelve, doce, expressly evoking the Apostles, as claimed by Carlos Franqui, veteran of the Revolution, and briefly editor of Revolución, a Havana daily.

  IN CUBA, THERE IS THE STORY—a favorite story—of the conversation that took place between Fidel and his brother on the day they were reunited. Every Cuban can tell you, word by word, the story of Raúl’s arrival. Fidel asked his brother how many guns he had. Raúl answered five. Fidel said that he had two, so that made seven. Fidel’s summation, the punch line that everyone likes to deliver: “Now we’ve won the war.” The story encapsulates unflagging optimism, complete conviction, the intimacy of brothers, relief, confidence—and the entire exchange consists of barely a dozen words.

  On December 18, 2006, Cuba celebrated the fiftieth anniversary of that moment, televising the event to the nation. I was in a hotel room, watching. Fidel was in the hospital recovering from an abdominal operation, Raúl was running the country, and Guillermo García, Juan Almeida, and Ramiro Valdez were the guests of honor, standing on a wooden stage that had been constructed at the site of the real landmark, Cinco Palmas, Mongo’s place, at the edge of the Sierra Maestra. You could see royal palm trees growing in one clump of three and another of two along the crest of the hill. Fifty years earlier those palms had marked the route, the final beacon. Students from the dance academy of Niquero, dressed as guerrillas, reenacted the terrible Battle of Alegria de Pio on the hillside above the temporary stage and below the palms. They wore green uniforms and carried wooden machine guns. I saw an incredulous look pass over Guillermo García’s face as the young dancers pranced up and down the hillside, representing the survivors who had gotten separated and lost. Two dancers, as Fidel and Raúl, embraced as they delivered the famous “how many guns” exchange, marking the reenactment’s finale. The camera returned to García, now looking delighted, finally on firm ground.

  It had been the usual Cuban commemorative program: schoolchildren recited José Martí, party and union bosses were introduced from the podium, a choir sang, and the local head of the Communist Party closed the program, saying exactly what I wanted to hear: the real hero had been Celia Sánchez. And then Fidel’s voice eerily came over loudspeakers and he explained in a high, raspy register, like a countertenor with laryngitis, what a difficult thing it is to make a revolution. He hadn’t spoken to the public for months—it felt as if his ghost were attending the event. Guillermo García, along with all the people present—hundreds perhaps—raised little Cuban flags made of paper that rustled in the wind and had the overall effect of thousands of people, over a hill somewhere, clapping.

  FIFTY YEARS EARLIER, in Manzanillo, Felipe Guerra Matos, good to his word, raised a thousand dollars among the rice growers. Celia, good to hers, had sent him to Cinco Palmas to hand the money personally to Fidel. This would have been a natural occasion for her to be present. Fidel was still the man she’d never met. But she sent, along with Guerra Matos, Rafael Sierra, and Enrique Escalona, the woman who had accompanied her on the daring bus ride to Santiago, Eugenia (Gena) Verdecia. Gena wore a big, circular cotton skirt that covered a petticoat stuffed with ammunition. (Fidel’s biographer Tad Szulc writes that she carried three hundred submachine-gun bullets and nine dynamite cartridges.) This had recently become the 26th of July Movement’s standard method for moving sensitive material: petticoats. Guerra Matos brought Faustino Pérez back to Manzanillo, so he could personally describe to Celia everything that had happened since the force had left Mexico. She and Faustino talked all through the night. The next day, December 24, Guerra drove Faustino to Santiago to see Frank. All this driving was conspicuous, but Guerra Matos explains how he got away with it: “I was a manager at a rice mill and I had a certain relationship with the police. There were some cops I liked to drink beer with.”

  THE GUERRILLAS LEFT MONGO’S FARM on the 25th rested, well fed, and aware that it had become dangerous to stay too long in one place. They began their final ascent in the Sierra Maestra with three newly inducted soldiers: the mountain patriarch, Crescencio Pérez, and the two young blades, Guillermo García and Manuel Fajardo. Crescencio and Guillermo were friends now, in the name of the Revolution. Faustino stayed on as Fidel’s man in Havana, while on Christmas Day 1956, with an eighteen-man army, Fidel moved into the mountains.

  11. JANUARY 1957

  The Dove and the Zebra

  AS A CLANDESTINA, CELIA BEGAN a new kind of life. Manzanillo’s police force had a new captain, brought in from another part of Cuba specifically to capture her. She changed locations every few nights, and was managed by one person, a kind of keeper, a guardian angel. Guerra Matos ruminates on this. “She still had to keep in touch with the movement. But when you receive two or three persons in one place, there are security measures you have to use. Some of the people who visited could be arrested. And they could talk, because you never know. You cannot know how much [torture] a person can resist.” Guerra concluded: “The life she led barred her from a lot of things.”

  WHEN SHE GOT BACK from seeing Frank, Hector Llópiz—shocked, perhaps, by Celia’s having run the risk of a trip to Santiago—had taken her to stay with his sister, Angela. He simply assumed the role of her protector, not trusting the movement to do the job.

  The arrangement had its genesis in the close friendship between the Sánchez and Llópiz families, dating back to 1914. That year, Manuel Sánchez had bought his first house from a member of the Llópiz family. The bond formed carried over to the next generation, and was consummated when Berta Llópiz made a trip to Pilón to visit Celia in the 1940s, fell in love with cousin Elbia’s brother, married him, and stayed on.

  So much of Celia’s survival depended on family friends, and on Angela Llópiz and Cira Escalona in particular, who hid her from the military police. Photographed in 1928 are the older girls (back row, left to right): Silvia Sánchez, Angela Llópiz, Cira Escalona, and Chela (Graciela); front row: Griselda, Celia, in the middle, eight years old, and Flávia. (Courtesy of Oficina de Asuntos Históricos)

  Hector could go unnoticed largely because he was quiet, middle-aged, short, thin, with hair beginning to gray. He was a family man with a wife and daughter. He’d been a teacher until a local businessman and dentist, Dr. Pepe Ramírez, began to admire his organizational skills and hired him to oversee his real estate investments. The job gave Hector a flexible work schedule and plenty of leeway to find hiding places for Celia. Surprisingly, finding hosts wasn’t as hard as one might think. Felipe Guerra Matos claims that after the landing, when the government issued its statement that she had been arrested for assisting the guerrillas, this piece of news not only surpri
sed everybody in Manzanillo, but inspired local social pages and gossip sheets to take up her story. It was such a sensational piece of information, according to Felipe, that a dozen or so people came forward, all from upper-crust families, offering to hide her. Still known as “the daughter of Dr. Manuel Sánchez,” which helped, she was also the granddaughter of Juan Sánchez Barro, one of the richest turn-of-the-century Spanish merchants in Manzanillo; and it can’t have hurt that she’d once been the town’s beauty queen, sponsored by the leading social clubs. Those social steps had not been forgotten by the old families who were epitomized by Celia’s aunts: three stately, unmarried sisters, icons of Spanish respectability. As Felipe said, it was hot news that one of the Sánchez daughters was up to something with the young guerrilla chieftain Fidel Castro. Women, rich and middle class, stepped forward offering—indeed vying—to protect her, obliging their Rotarian husbands go along. Had the press said nothing, Felipe assures me, it would have been difficult for Hector to find safe places for her. Elsa Castro makes a point of saying that things weren’t physically tough for Celia during this clandestine period, since she stayed in the best houses all over town. The number of these houses varies, but the town’s historian puts it at twenty-five. There are plaques on many. Schoolchildren take an inventory each year, inspect the signs, dust them off, and refresh the paint when necessary. If some houses she stayed in don’t have plaques, it is, I suspect, because their owners have since decamped from Cuba—in the lexicon of the Revolution, have become traitors.

  Clandestinos have their own idiom, too. Members of the underground often mention that he moved her “at the best time of day,” which meant—it would take me some time to learn—when people were indoors having lunch, or when it was raining. Hector usually drove her himself, but sometimes his brother Angel, a schoolteacher, showed up in his jeep, entered the house where Celia was staying, changed into a different shirt, and the two walked out as a couple. Occasionally, Felipe Guerra Matos was allowed to perform this delicate task, but mostly Hector trusted only himself. Hector became the lion at the door, scheduling all Celia’s interviews, making all arrangements, moving her daily. He used a code word for her, especially when it came time to relocate her, calling her “the Dove.” I believe Hector kept her alive through this period.

  DURING HER “CLANDESTINITY,” Celia began to develop her own unique parallel network of helpers outside the movement. They worked for her as couriers, tailors, suppliers, shippers, party-givers, and letter writers (soldiers need mail). Drawn from among the women of Manzanillo, their work took convoluted and beguiling forms, like the wonderful courier system she orchestrated for carrying messages to Frank in Santiago. Since that route across the mountains was littered with checkpoints, Celia recruited especially pretty young girls to travel with Manzanillo businessmen. And, true to form, when a man was seen driving a big American car with a young woman, all dressed up, sitting in the passenger seat, Batista’s soldiers checked the driver’s papers but never requested the girl’s, which would indicate a lack of respect for the man at the wheel. Celia had a foolproof system and knew it. Her bravery had clearly inspired admiration and a desire to emulate her. Celia reciprocated by putting so much confidence in these women, and, by the end of the war, no one had discovered her courier system. She was their hero.

  While she ran her growing underground, Celia relied heavily on a telephone operator named Lilia Ramírez, whose second-floor window at the AT&T exchange directly overlooked police headquarters. Lilia monitored the cops’ shifts, knew who was on duty, who went to lunch and when, and would phone Hector with the information so he was better able to plan Celia’s move. More important, Lilia was the first person to take note of unusual, or stepped-up, police activity. If several cops left headquarters at once and piled into jeeps or squad cars, she’d alert Hector and often call Celia directly. Lilia usually knew precisely what was going on, since she—and other operators—listened to police and army telephone conversations. She, like Hector, was in the lifesaving business.

  The new chief of police, Caridad Fernández, was unaware of Celia’s new haircut (gotten for her trip to see Frank in Santiago), because for years she’d worn her long hair in a ponytail, and he began pledging, as he swaggered around Manzanillo, that he was “going to cut it off.”

  “If she—if any of us—caught sight of him, we’d call him Cachita, the nickname you’d give a woman named Caridad,” Felipe says. Yet “Cachita” was no slouch. Probably on more than one occasion, but on one, which I was able to nail down, he nearly caught her. “Forty-seven guards came and jumped down from the roof,” is Elsa Castro’s version of this incident. “I was working a block away and saw the police go by with their legs hanging out of the jeep, their long rifles, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, they’ve got her.’ But she got away.” Ana Irma Escalona once heard that Celia used a bed-sheet rope to slide from an upper-story window. But she didn’t hear this from Celia, she says. It had been a close call, and typically, Celia refused to discuss it.

  ANA IRMA, ALTHOUGH NOT A LLÓPIZ RELATIVE, had been raised in Angela’s house, and when she was about seventeen, Celia began asking her to buy things like pencils and writing paper. “There would be a contact person in the shop. Celia would send me to that person, who knew I was going to buy specific things. Sometimes she gave me money, but other times these were people who helped the cause.” Celia wrote on little pieces of pink paper, cut into 4-inch squares. (Elsa Castro supplied the paper, scratch pads her father sold to banks.) Eventually, Celia asked Ana Irma to carry messages. These, too, were written on the little squares, folded over several times. “You know what these times are like,” Celia admonished, and ordered Ana Irma to swallow them if anybody stopped her. Celia, at the time, had been requesting donations; if people didn’t pledge money, she would send Ana Irma back with another note to say that she’d be paying them a visit. Ana Irma says that people were frightened when they got a note like that, since Celia was the last person they wanted found in their houses. They usually sent money. They volunteered, but it wasn’t voluntary.

  Celia’s great helper in Manzanillo was 21-year-old Elsa Castro who worked in her father’s stationery store. “It was a beautiful war those women waged,” one of Celia’s friends, Berta Llópiz, told me. “If the police had figured it out, they would have killed all of them.” (Author’s collection)

  Clandestinity hadn’t dampened Celia’s rebellious nature; in fact, it gave her more time to primp. She sometimes wore a dress that aggravated Hector: a pencil-skirted sheath made of wide black and white horizontal bands from bodice to hemline. It’s a stunning dress (now in the archives). Hector implored her not to wear it since it was so conspicuous, and she ignored him. When she wore this dress, she was no longer his “Dove,” and he’d grumble to her hosts, “Today I have the Zebra.”

  “IT WAS A BEAUTIFUL WAR THOSE WOMEN WAGED,” Hector’s sister, Berta, commented. “If the police had figured it out, they would have killed all of them.” This was tough on women in the movement. Elsa Castro describes a night when she’d carried out an action. She’d come home wanting nothing more than to take a bath, go to bed, and put her head “under the covers,” but the final step of her task required changing into a dress and high heels and sitting on a park bench in front of the cathedral—which is just across the park from the police station—in order to be seen by the authorities. She says she was sure that every person who glanced at her could tell what she’d been up to. The women’s hearts were in their throats most of the time, she admits. Some of the women in the movement got so they couldn’t control their bladders when they saw policemen. Elsa laughs softly recalling a time when she was carrying documents for Celia. She’d been sitting in a café and caught her reflection in a mirror. She could actually read the documents she was carrying through her new transparent nylon blouse. As they were so young, dressing well in the latest style was part of the thrill, and Celia’s elegance part of their attraction to her. A realist, Elsa admits that “you
lived with something very cold inside your stomach.” She takes a deep breath, then tells me that her sister, also a clandestina, had not been able to stand the pressure and had committed suicide.

  12. JANUARY 7–FEBRUARY 15, 1957

  The Traitor

  HAVING RESOLVED MANY OF THE ISSUES of the landing by getting Fidel into the mountains, Frank and Celia set about augmenting his depleted guerrilla forces. First they sent Beto Pesant, who led a small group of men from Manzanillo.

  While awaiting Beto’s arrival, Fidel’s unit was finding sympathizers and becoming familiar with its new territory. Farmers and rancher known to Crescencio let them camp on their properties, got their wives to prepare food, and suggested where they might spend subsequent nights. In this setting, on the evening of January 7, the group arrived at the ranch of Eutimio Guerra, who invited them to warm up inside his house. Eutimio gave them hot coffee with cognac and honey, while his wife and a family friend cooked a pig. After dinner, Eutimio led them to a small outbuilding where they could shelter and sleep. Thus began, almost instantly, the love affair between Eutimio and the band of guerrillas—or between him and Fidel, anyway. Fidel’s brother, Raúl, observed in his journal that Eutimio was between thirty-five and forty years old, and white. He also pegged the structure hidden in their host’s pasture, where he’d taken them to hide, as a venue for cockfights. The popular blood sport was illegal.

  Off and on, Eutimio Guerra began to help the guerrillas, becoming self-appointed facilitator.

  Once Pesant and his ten new recruits met up with Fidel and his men, they headed toward the highest parts of the Sierra Maestra. It was from these far reaches that they swept down, January 17, on an isolated army garrison, located near the coast at La Plata. In their first high-profile victory, they killed five of Batista’s soldiers and took two prisoners (whom they set free almost immediately); one of the garrison’s defenders escaped. Following the engagement, the guerrillas evaporated into the vast Sierra Maestra forests.