One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution

by Nancy Stout

  In Santiago, Los Tigres got their rally rolling on Sunday, June 30, “in full battle gear . . . with the backing of tanks, three thousand soldiers, and more than two hundred of Masferrer’s thugs,” as Frank described it. He’d devised a plan that called for his youngest brother, Josué, seventeen, to ride by in a car with two other boys, Floro Vistel and Salvador Pascual. The police recognized the three and sprayed the car with machine-gun fire.

  The following day, unable to attend the funeral, Frank sat in a safe house composing a poem to his dead brother. “I feel my soul shattered,” he wrote. “How much I always hoped to give you.” Women of Santiago, in substantial numbers, went to the cemetery. It was too dangerous for young men to be seen there as they would be marked as supporters by the police. This became the pattern: women, and older people, would attend anti-police, antiBatista events. On June 30, the day of the three burials, someone recognized an undercover agent for SIM. When the brother of one of the boys killed heard that an SIM agent was present, he assaulted the agent. Women—perhaps to protect him—joined in. Celia described what happened to Fidel: she said the women took off their shoes and hammered the man with their high heels.

  CELIA WAS IN THE SAME DILEMMA as Frank after she returned to Manzanillo. She began living in another round of safe houses. Elsa Castro was ordered by the movement to take charge of feeding her in a couple of these houses because nothing, absolutely nothing, could call attention to where Celia might be hidden. Elsa explained that if a grocer noticed that an extra lamb chop had been purchased, he might say: “I see you have a guest,” and speculate that the family was feeding an extra person, then mention this to the police. So Elsa would go on her lunch hour, when all shops were closed, to prepare something for Celia to eat. She’d carry a can of some imported Spanish gourmet product that her brother-in-law stored in his house, under a bed sheet, until he was ready to display these cans in his booth at trade fairs. She’d swipe a can, put it in her purse, maybe add an egg or two and make an omelet. She laughed recalling an omelet she filled with fruit cocktail: “Celia loved it.” Like any pretty, well-dressed working girl of twenty-one, Elsa had appeared to be going to a friend’s house during her lunch hour. She would ring the doorbell, be admitted at the door, and no one would have any idea what she was up to.

  Hardship wasn’t Celia’s problem, Elsa says. “She didn’t simply hide. Generally, she stayed in middle-class homes.” Elsa wanted to clarify, as did others I interviewed, that Celia’s real problems as a clandestino were insidious, and gave an example. “When she went to my cousin’s house, there was a cleaning woman.” Hector Llópiz had delivered Celia to Elsa’s cousin’s house, and the door was opened by a young girl who cleaned for the family, who exclaimed, “I know you! You’re Celia.” The girl became very excited at Celia’s celebrity, claimed she’d seen Celia’s picture in Life magazine. She bragged to Celia that her boyfriend was in the 26th of July Movement, and, in the manner of girlfriends, began to promote him. Now that Celia’s cover was blown, and the girl knew who she was and where she was staying, Celia realized, to use Elsa’s words, that “she’d have to lure her in, jeopardize the girl in order to keep her quiet.” Celia apparently told the girl to bring her boyfriend by later that night. When the couple arrived, Elsa says, “She gave him an assignment. Told him—or maybe it was them—someplace to go and plant a bomb. They did. That way, she involved the girl and the boyfriend so they wouldn’t talk. She compromised them and ensured their silence.”

  Situations like this are the stuff of urban guerrilla or clandestine warfare. I have taken Elsa’s story at face value and see it as simply one more reason Celia was champing at the bit to get out of the underground, preferring battle as an alternative.

  17. JULY 2, 1957

  Thanks to Moran

  ON TUESDAY, JULY 2, Felipe Guerra Matos was arrested for the third time as he drove into Manzanillo. He had just transported some men into the mountains, and his arrest was, he says, “Thanks to Moran.”

  During our interview, Felipe’s voice dropped, markedly; his tone became soft, reflective. “It didn’t happen overnight. A person doesn’t come down from the Sierra one day and start working with the enemy the next. He worked for several months in Manzanillo. He worked with all of us.” According to Felipe, Moran had been arrested by the police, let go, and after that “many of us were arrested and didn’t know why.” Mass arrests started on July 2 as members of the Manzanillo 26th of July Movement were taken to jail, one after another. Frank contacted Celia that he was sending someone to help her, along with “some packages.” The next day Celia wrote a quick note to a woman she often worked with, asking her to take in packages. “We are in much danger with Moran. I have been in exile for three days. I’m counting on you to take care of my request.” Frank’s delegate got there, and the same woman contacted Celia. “Let him wait for a week,” Celia wrote back, unsure when she’d be ready to meet with him.

  On Friday, July 5, Frank wrote Fidel: “Things in Manzanillo aren’t going very well. The Galician Moran stool-pigeoned on the whole movement. I warned Norma [Celia] and Sierra [Rafael] that the enemy was profiting by what Moran was regaling them with and that they had better execute him before he did more damage, but Sierra is irresolute by nature. Now the damage is done, and I think the least Sierra deserves is to be expelled from the movement for his constant negligence and incompetence.” Frank had ruled out Sierra; that left Celia in charge. The delegate Frank had sent to Manzanillo would help her assassinate Moran.

  Stalling perhaps, Celia turned to Elsa Castro for help. “Elsa, go to your friend Cabado and others who are always collecting blankets, sweatshirts—and flashlights, if possible, but not the small ones, normal size ones with replacement batteries. By tomorrow, I need four mountain knives with good handles because everything here has to be strong. The same goes for the blankets, the heaviest possible; the cold is so intense it will freeze your bones,” which implies that she’s either in the mountains, and needed these supplies, or was getting people out of Manzanillo.

  In Frank’s letter to Fidel, he confronted all the worst situations. When he sat down to write this letter, his hand shook as he picked up the pen, he told Fidel. When he was calm enough to write, he described what had happened to the Second Front, the failure at the rally, and his brother Josué’s death. “Everything planned in such detail, everything so well distributed, and it all turned out badly, absolutely everything went awry, one thing after another. The time bomb, so meticulously prepared and placed, did not go off because it got wet a few hours before; the hand grenades did not work; the Second Front, organized with such secrecy, was aborted and we lost weapons and equipment worth more than US$20,000 [the peso and the dollar were equal at the time], as well as the life of a comrade. And we lost three more comrades here.” Then Frank, in this letter, begins to describe what happened to the three boys, one of them his brother. “They were taken by surprise as they were carrying out a delicate operation. They preferred to die fighting rather than allow themselves to be arrested. The loss of the youngest among them has left me with emptiness in my heart and sorrow in my soul.”

  As more and more people were arrested in Manzanillo, and as Celia was trying to deal with Moran, Fidel sent her a message saying that some rolls of film would be arriving and he wanted her to get them developed and printed, and to be sure to put a package of prints on the first plane to Havana the next morning so they’d get in Bohemia’s weekend edition. She was furious but found a way to get it done. “Enough is enough: look, when the two rolls come, it’s okay [this time]. . . . ” she wrote Elsa. She asked her to tell Hector Llópiz the whole Fidel-Bohemia story when he came to pick up the prints, adding, “If Fidel wants his picture in Bohemia, next time he’ll have to figure it out for himself.”

  ON SUNDAY, JULY 7, Celia warned Fidel that “a highly respected person” had come to tell her he had been approached by the government with a $50,000 offer to assassinate Fidel. But the man, after assuring the gove
rnment’s agent he didn’t know how to find Castro (let alone assassinate him), contacted Crescencio Pérez to warn them of the government’s offer. Crescencio sent him to Celia. She thanked him after listening to his story. Before leaving, the man had warned her to be careful, because “that kind of money is tempting.”

  In four letters, written between July 7 and 16, Celia pours out her problems to Fidel. She analyzes why that one group from Manzanillo had been such a failure; mentions that $10,000 is missing, a matter that she and Frank are investigating; and moans that Rolando Masferrer planted a company of his paramilitaries in the Sierra disguised as 26th of July soldiers wearing false armbands. She is extremely upset about this, since mountain people—farmers, ranchers, and small business owners—assist the 26th of July Movement. They are the ones who are going to get caught in Masferrer’s trap. But Celia had good news to offer as well: she let Fidel know that she was sending guns and ammunition (the contents of the packages from Frank) and adds: “I want to continue preparing and organizing well in case I am not around.” (Does this mean she’s vulnerable, as in death, or is she reminding him that it is high time she moved out of there and into the protective geography of the Sierra?) She closes her letter with, “I love you and remember you,” but the “you” is plural and she means “all of you.”

  On July 11, she writes: “I think I told you before about this. . . . Luis Sardina here in Manzanillo, his real name is Rafael, [is] a gangster; at present he is talking to Moran and organizing a group. . . . We have to fear all these people because they are capable of anything.”

  Two weeks had passed, and what had she done about Moran? “You can’t imagine the problems that come up daily,” she writes Fidel. “Moran is exhausting! He lives at the Moncada garrison, is always with the head of the SIM in Santiago; when he came here it was with someone else. He owns a jeep, two pistols and two machine guns, and it hasn’t been possible to eliminate him.” This letter to Fidel was written on the 16th. She treats Moran as a predicament, that is, a problem that comes up daily, but is defensive in case Fidel has forgotten that everybody in Manzanillo has been getting arrested (while he was interested in getting his rolls of film developed). She adds, with a certain amount of drama: “He left us here with 49 arrested and others in hiding. . . . He left me alone and out in the street.”

  As to the assassination, the person Frank sent stayed two days. “The delegate came to exterminate ‘Gallego’ [Moran] and, I repeat, it was not possible.” I’m sure Fidel got this the first time. Then, in a separate paragraph, positioned on the page in a way that the words stand out clearly, she assures Fidel that “it is impossible for him to get the papers I have.” She briefed Frank, in a separate letter: “He [Moran] says he has nothing against the movement, only against me for not giving him his passport and address book,” meaning Moran spoke to her or passed messages to her. “In it, he has all the addresses of people in charge in the U.S. He says that he is getting a new passport and will be transferred to New York and before that is going to Mexico. He’s already left here for Santiago.”

  I CAN ASSURE YOU THAT most of the old revolutionaries I interviewed did not want to remember Moran, let alone talk about him. It took a long time to collect all the pieces to this story; I wanted to discover if the movement—to me this means “the men”—permitted women to carry out assassinations. I admit that I was wary of talking about assassination, but the veterans of the early movement were not. Still, when talking to the never particularly forthcoming members of the underground, I’d always ask about Moran; it was just one of the questions I asked. One day I hit the jackpot, and found out why Moran’s passport and address book were “impossible for him to find.” Elsa Castro had them. In January 1959, she handed an envelope over to Celia. Only then did Elsa discover what she’d been safeguarding.

  In guerrilla warfare, assassination is one of the duties attached to leadership, under certain circumstances. When Nicaragua took on the job of describing for me the steel-tempered aspects of Frank’s character, he started with, “I want to tell you a story.” He selected a situation in which he, Nicaragua, had been in charge of storing arms “in one of our cells,” meaning within the group he was responsible for, and two of its members sold some of the weapons. “Some young men in the cell, who were poor, were brought over by [another group that included] people with money.” Frank had just assumed a leadership role with the movement when this happened (on June 22, 1955). He went to see Nicaragua at the bank where he worked as a teller and stood in line at his window. When he got to the head of the line, he passed a deposit slip to Nicaragua with this written on it: “They stole your weapons and the measures we take have to be exemplary.”

  After work that day, the leaders—“We didn’t leave this to other people”—traveling in several cars, had gone to the houses of the boys, searched, found the boys and “arrested them and set them free.” After a pause, Nicaragua continued, “It hurt us to do what we did,” and he skipped the details. I realized that he expected me to fill in what must have happened, so I said: “They were shot, right?” “It was a painful thing to do, but it had to be done,” he answered. It is basic, in a clandestine military movement, that members cannot sell weapons. That I understood. He waited as my mind edged forward to fill the gaps. I sought clarification: “Setting them free” meant letting them go, but only so they could get away from home, out of sight of their families, when they were assassinated? Nicaragua nodded. He explained that “the leaders” had left the bodies on a hill in the Loma Colorada section of Santiago (near the Hotel Versailles) as an example, so that other cell members and everybody in Santiago knew that the 26th Movement was tough and couldn’t be messed around with.

  Celia was supposed to assassinate Moran. She didn’t, says she couldn’t—not even with the help of Frank’s “delegate”—because it was too dangerous. Instinct tells me that she would not do it, and didn’t have to. She knew full well that being Celia Sánchez didn’t require bravado since she’d already played an important role in this revolution, and she didn’t have to assassinate someone just to please Frank and Fidel. They were all equals. She also knew that they had to accept it. She’d been through this before, when she rescued Moran and brought him to the underground clinic in Manzanillo. “It’s not about Moran,” she seems to be saying. The important thing is this: we, the 26th of July Movement, are not killers.

  It is interesting to take note that, after telling Fidel that she could not eliminate Moran, she immediately changed the subject. In the next line she informs Fidel that Errol Flynn is premiering his movie in the Sierra Maestra town of Estrada Palma and Flynn sent someone to Manzanillo to make sure they were all invited. End of story—let’s not talk of assassinations.

  It took me a long time to find out whether Frank had killed the policeman at Caney. Frank is so beloved, I realized, that this wasn’t a question for everybody. Finally, I slipped it in when interviewing Eloy Rodríguez. He paused, looked me in the eye, and nodded.

  JUST HOW FRANK HAD BEEN ABLE to assemble US$20,000 worth of weapons for his Second Front is a mystery, but a fairly strong clue lies in his letter to Fidel dated July 7, 1957. Discussing Lester Rodríguez, who has been trying to get out of Cuba, Frank writes: “You probably know that, at long last, after so much work, El Gordito [Fatso] Rodríguez left today for the United States. The very meritorious and valuable American embassy came to us and offered any kind of help in exchange for our ceasing to loot arms from their base [at Guantánamo]. We promised this in exchange for a two-year visa for El Gordito and for them to get him out of the country. Today they fulfilled their promise: the consul took him out personally, and the papers, letters, and maps he needed were taken out in the diplomatic pouch. Good service. In exchange, we won’t take any more weapons from the base (anyway, security there is now so tough, we couldn’t possibly get away with it), so we will only take ammunition (they didn’t mention that). The weapons, if all goes well for us, will be brought directly from the United State
s.”

  18. JULY 12, 1957

  The Manifesto

  FRANK HAD BEEN REALIZING one of his greatest political achievements during the two weeks he helped Celia with her problems in Manzanillo. He had charmed a couple of high-profile Cubans into going up to the Sierra to talk with Fidel: Raúl Chibás, Eduardo’s brother, and Felipe Pazos, former head of the National Bank of Cuba. Frank initiated this project after his brother’s death, and carried it to completion in less than two weeks.

  “The idea you proposed is a good one,” he compliments Fidel, “precisely because the 26th of July Movement lacks respectability among the general populace.” People of Cuba might hate Batista, but were hesitant to endorse the 26th because it was too militant. Frank continued: “I think it necessary for you to have a General Staff with certain outstanding personalities to give it prestige and an even greater aura of danger for all the sectors of the nation who look upon you—romantically, perhaps?—with certain reservations.” Having talks with opposition leaders, Frank points out, would cause the general population to reconsider the rough-and-ready guerrilla leader in a new light, “when they see you surrounded by people of this kind.” Frank wanted a broader political base, uniting the two major parties, Authentic and Orthodox, behind the 26th of July Movement. “No one doubts that the regime will fall,” Frank states assuredly, but “what concerns them is the quality of the engineers that the 26th can mobilize to construct the new edifice.”