One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution

by Nancy Stout

  On August 11, Fidel wrote to her again: “Today I put on the new uniform you sent me, in which I will begin the fourth campaign.” His letter declares public reaction to the recent assassination “a rehearsal, unmistakable proof, a beautiful explosion of Cuban dignity, a well-deserved homage to our Frank.” He also tells Celia that he accepts the national directorate’s choice of Rene Ramos Latour, referring to him as “Daniel.” “I believe our comrades in Santiago can continue Frank’s work. They are inspired, and I’m certain they will do it well. I myself am going to work harder and help in any way possible. I urgently need to get news of the doctor”—Faustino Pérez, his candidate as Frank’s successor—“and Jacinto [Amando Hart]: their plans, ideas, immediate projects. I have great confidence in what they can do.” He wanted Celia with him, in the mountains, when he talked to Daniel: “And you, why don’t you make a brief trip here? Consider the possibility of coming as soon as the upcoming days, days of observation and expectation. A big hug, Alex.”

  As mediator, she conveyed Fidel’s sentiments to Daniel, in Santiago, waiting it seems for approval direct from the mouth of Mars. Within a couple of days, Daniel composed a letter to Fidel (dated August 14) clearly relieved at his acceptance: “I’ve waited until today for news from you. Your silence had us worried. We’re trying to keep you informed through Aly. We received your warm, inspiring message and have spread it throughout the Movement.”

  Underneath those sentiments, recall that just before Frank’s death, Daniel had given Fidel the exact breakdown of the guns they’d rescued from the Second Front disaster. This cache of weapons more than anything else held Fidel’s interest. He wanted Celia to be the go-between, and wrote Celia the same day he heard from Daniel—the 14th—about getting down to business: “I insist, as I did in my previous letter, that a directive must be given to the movement right now concerning the war: ‘All weapons, all bullets, and all resources are for the Sierra.’ Weapons must be sought everywhere. . . . Tell me to whom I should write to and what I should do. . . . You know that with Frank gone, we’ll have to be more directly involved in the work that he carried out so brilliantly. There is no shortage of courageous comrades, but one doesn’t acquire that authority, that initiative, and that experience in a couple of days. For that reason, I’m ready to write whatever letters, papers, or recommendations are needed from here. . . . Now I realize that I should help you where and when you need me in order to facilitate your work. P.S.: Take great care! I don’t know why, but I feel sure that nothing can happen to you. Our misfortune with Frank was too great for it to happen again.”

  Two days later, he asked her once again to come to his camp in the Sierra. But she remained in Manzanillo. The army had stepped up the heat on the underground, and she was, in her own words, “out in the street,” under greater threat than ever and literally on the run.

  21. SEPTEMBER 5, 1957

  The Maps

  IN THE MIDDLE OF AUGUST, SIM launched a widespread investigation in Pilón. When they got to the offices of the sugar mill and began to examine files, they came upon the empty folder with maps signed out by Celia Sánchez. The government’s agents quickly confirmed that these missing charts were those discovered on the Granma. Although the army had for some time accused her of supporting Fidel Castro, here in hand was concrete evidence. An order was issued to search Manuel Sánchez’s house. Soldiers arrived in jeeps and trucks; they confronted the doctor by holding up the empty map folder and—in a strange tactic of psychological intimidation—a girdle. The prop aimed at making Celia’s father think they had captured and raped her. Her father stood by as they searched his house, upending furniture, breaking things, and going through his medical files. Taking some papers, they departed. Dr. Sánchez stayed at the house just long enough to determine that the documents they’d taken were of no significance, and that taking them had been mere bravado. He got into his car and drove to Manzanillo.

  For the Sánchez family, the SIM’s discovery of the source of the Granma’s maps marked the end of an age-old way of life. Celia had been submerged some time in clandestine activities, but members of her family had not fully realized it, nor grasped just why she had sent her father out of the country. Nothing normal, or benign, would figure in the existence of this family for a long time to come.

  IN THE MIDDLE OF AUGUST, a farmer made his way to Fidel’s camp to report that forty to sixty soldiers from the Cuban army had pitched camp near his house on the Palma Mocha River. Fidel chose Crescencio’s son, Ignacio, to lead a small vanguard squadron and go with the farmer to the site. They were to make contact with the enemy, but Fidel sent them primarily to determine the location of the camp the farmer had reported. They left around 10:30 p.m. on August 18, 1957, taking with them the promising young fighter Pastor Palomares, who had been with Fidel and Celia in the Battle of Uvero in late May. Still just twenty, he’d served also in the Battle of Estrada Palma, under Guillermo García’s command. The guerrillas reached the mouth of the river at 2:00 a.m. on the 19th, but found no army troops camped there. The squadron advanced along the river until they saw army guards posted on the shore.

  Ignacio’s squadron launched a commando attack, and the army’s guards quickly abandoned the area. Following their surprise assault, the guerrillas moved farther along the river, to the house of another farmer. Finding abandoned weapons (including a bazooka) in the house, they were now well armed, equipped to overtake the enemy camp and force a surrender. They had to accomplish this before daylight, so as to get out of the area before the army’s planes could spot them.

  At first things went smoothly. Before sunrise, not having succeeded, they prepared to retreat. An order come from Fidel: hold their position as he was sending in another platoon. Although they had lost a man during the night’s battle, the squadron was strong; no one had injuries, and Batista’s soldiers seemed disorganized. When dawn came, however, the tables were turned: the enemy’s troops established order and the rebels saw they were facing far more enemy troops than expected. Around 250 army soldiers had been in the hills long enough to dig trenches. With light enough to see, those troops opened fire on the rebels from well-protected positions. In addition to such a disadvantage in numbers, the rebels faced a new weapon, a rifle grenade. Fidel’s troops took further losses: Juventino Alarcon, Yayo Castillo, and Pastor Palomares. Palomares was moving between several of Fidel’s squadrons, carrying their single and highly prized 50mm machine gun, when a grenade hit him directly in the legs and lower abdomen. His comrades carried him out of the battle, laying him by the river, and Fidel ordered a forced retreat. Efigenia Amerijerias, the rear guard platoon leader, knelt by the dying soldier as Fidel covered the retreat. Pastor whispered that his wife was pregnant and, with Amerijerias as his witness, asked that Fidel raise his child.

  Local farmers buried Pastor’s body several days later, after the army left. In doing so, they discovered that a hand was missing. The army had seen this tall, sturdily-built young man, moving among squadrons, and had been confident they’d killed Fidel Castro.

  BACK IN MANZANILLO, the Sánchezes convened a family council and drew up a plan of action. Manuel should behave normally. He should go about his business, taking his vacation in September, in Havana. Flávia, in Manzanillo with her family on holiday, volunteered to stay a few additional days and accompany him. She, her husband, and their daughters usually left before the end of August, so there was time to get the two girls ready for school. Flávia offered to stay until the 1st of September, when they could all take the Havana-bound train. Midway along the island she and her family would transfer to a branch line south to Cienfuegos, and Dr. Sánchez would continue on to the capital.

  On the appointed morning, Dr. Sánchez, Flávia, her husband, Rene Otazo, and their two daughters, Elena and Alicia, went to the railroad station, where military police arrested Dr. Sánchez. They took him to the army garrison within sight of Celia’s marabuzal, where they locked him in a cell. Flávia and her family were ordered to r
emain in Manzanillo. The union of physicians, alerted to the arrest, soon appealed for Dr. Sánchez’s release. Their respected colleague had, since 1925, been a delegate to the National Medical Assembly, representing Oriente Province’s entire southwestern coastal region. The city’s mayor arranged the release and, based on Dr. Sánchez’s age, the union negotiated a two-day house arrest, contingent on his departure thereafter from Manzanillo.

  The morning of September 5, 1957, the Sánchezes went again to the station. This time they boarded the early-morning train for Havana. Acacia had joined the party, to accompany her father all the way to Havana, once Flávia and her family changed trains for Cienfuegos. The Sánchezes were unaware that on this same day, a group of Batista’s naval officers in that city were initiating a mutiny.

  Frank had known about the planned uprising. Daniel mentions it to Fidel in a letter written on August 17; thus Celia must have known as well. Though she was in hiding, she had, according to Flávia’s daughters, been in contact with the family during the days after her father’s arrest. Yet she didn’t warn them of the impending mutiny. She must have known that Flávia and Rene were to return home, and find themselves in the army’s sights.

  Certain navy officers had joined with a few members of the army, plus other anti-Batista forces including members of the 26th of July Movement. For a few hours, the mutinying forces held the oldest part of Cienfuegos, the port area, but their plans had been discovered and their rebellion was cut short, crushed. History records that following the revolt the army brought in bulldozers and hundreds of unidentified bodies were buried in ditches.

  Word of the suppressed revolt reached the train by radio and the engineer conveyed the news to the passengers. “Right away, we knew the police would be after us if we went back to Cienfuegos,” Flávia explains. They had little doubt that the army would take revenge on them, linked as they were to Celia. Flávia recalls that after the announcement, she and Rene looked at each other, knew they’d have to go into hiding, and got off the train in Santa Clara. Through the railcar’s windows they could see soldiers on the highway en route to Cienfuegos, their home city.

  Flávia says they went to a friend’s house, to take cover until they could figure out what to do. She told me, as we sat sitting in her large, well-furnished penthouse apartment overlooking the sea, near the Hotel Riviera, that she could still not accept those losses, and had tried over the fifty years that had passed not to think about their house in Cienfuegos. In our conversation, she made a brief inventory of what “home” had meant, filled as it was with antique furniture inherited from both families, wedding gifts, important family papers like their wedding certificate and daughters’ birth certificates, mementoes such as baby pictures, furniture she and Rene had acquired carefully, cautiously. The last thing she spoke of was all the expensive, not-yet-paid-for, state-of-the-art equipment that had filled their dental clinic. They had in one morning lost their home and their livelihood, and had very little in savings. On September 8, they left Santa Clara, heading for the northern coast, to a spot near Havana where Rene’s brother owned a vacation house. They would live in “the green bungalow,” careful to give out no further details.

  22. SEPTEMBER 1957

  Chaos

  THE BATTLE OF PALMA MOCHA was one of the worst battles of the Revolution—and, from Fidel’s letters, it is clear that after he returned from this battle he’d anticipated getting a reply from Celia. He heard and received nothing and stopped writing for the ten days remaining in the month. But, on the 1st of September, when he heard that her father had been arrested, Fidel sent a man to Manzanillo to pick up Celia and bring her back to his camp. After this concerned gesture things started to fall apart. She left Manzanillo with Fidel’s man, confident that she was going to join Fidel, but because of the army’s crackdown following the mutiny traveling got tough. The army threw a cordon around the area and used aircraft. She couldn’t get to Fidel’s camp, and waited at a place he often went, expecting Fidel to come for her. But he didn’t show up. It is painful to read their letters, written in October, after it was all over, and when they were trying to sort things out.

  CELIA’S FATHER HAD BEEN ARRESTED on September 1 and on the next day she left Manzanillo with Rafael Castro (no relation to Raul or Fidel), sent by Fidel to guide her to a place she thought they’d meet. Because of the army’s reaction to the attempted mutiny on the 5th, they got caught in a place called La Maestra. Batista’s forces quickly retaliated by sending troops to “lay a dragnet”—block the highways. Planes began to drop bombs in various parts of the Sierra Maestra, as she explained to Fidel (in October): “On the 5th and 6th [starting] at 6:15 a.m., five planes bombed the area, and on the 7th and the 8th they continued to do so. By then I had no place to hide. On the 8th troops came up, according to the news [she probably means rumor] to make a siege. They shot mortars and machine guns all they wanted to.”

  She waited in La Maestra—which was a code name for the place in “The Sierra” and a general geographical location, not the name of an actual village, where Fidel often camped—and because, as she put it, “I didn’t want to leave, waiting to hear from you,” she stayed on after Rafael Castro left. Celia joined up with other fugitives who, like herself, were on the run. She was trapped there until the 17th of September. She and the fugitives lived in caves, and couldn’t leave the area because it would have required getting through the cordon of army troops set up to block all the roads. At one point, eighteen people made up what she called their “caravan,” barely armed, or if armed, without bullets. For nine days, between the 8th and the 17th of September she existed like that, and with little or no information. “We were not sure whether there would be troops on the road,” she would later explain to Fidel, “we heard that there were,” and thought about leaving, but one of the members of the caravan “deserted” and “we heard five shots and then I really resisted exploring the road.”

  So where was Fidel? On September 10, he and Che took their columns to a place called Pino del Agua, after receiving intelligence that the army was about to move into this place. Fidel and Che decided to set up an ambush, with Fidel marching his column into the area first, making sure everybody knew about it, then moving them out again. Fidel would create a lure while Che and his men quietly set up an actual ambush. They waited for the army to appear, which it did on the 17th; Che and his men captured a few trucks, which they burned, and some weapons.

  Going strictly by the documents, it appears that Fidel panicked when he discovered that Rafael Castro wasn’t with Celia, because he ordered Daniel and the Santiago Movement to find her. Daniel and his men did everything they could think of, couldn’t locate her, and were in despair. On September 15, Daniel reported to Fidel that they had failed. “With Aly missing and . . . the five army companies blocking the way to the area that we had been using for our communication route, we tried to make contact with Guevara,” thinking she might be with him. Then they exhausted other possibilities: “We tried to locate a girl here in Santiago who, according to what was reported to us, was the person who had delivered the letters. We couldn’t find her anywhere. Then we hunted for the person who had replaced Aly in Manzanillo.” The Santiago 26th men finally made contact with Celia on September 17, and, still expecting to be rescued by Fidel, she became rattled. Why was Santiago trying to find her? As she explained to Fidel weeks later, “When I received a note saying that Jorge [Sotus] urgently wanted to talk to me . . . I was filled with confusion.” But Sotus did not find her. She left the caves and made it to Santiago, apparently guided by her famous survival instinct. Celia got there on September 19, seeking out Frank’s old comrades. She learned that Jorge Sotus had tried to find her in Manzanillo. Sotus had been the one commander who’d been successful at the Battle of Santiago. He was a loner, from a bourgeois background—his father was a merchant—but he was a scrappy character, exceedingly tough, and a very good fighter. It is to Sotus that she turned when she got to Santiago, and to Daniel. They
filled her in. “After talking to Ulises [Jorge Sotus] I was even more confused,” she wrote Fidel, which prompted this query: “How come, if you had sent for me and paved the way for me to the Sierra, how could it be that it was Ulises who came looking for me in Manzanillo? I don’t understand these things.” She either didn’t understand or wasn’t going to let him off the hook.

  The Sierra Maestra, that September, was close to anarchy, with roving bandits; in short, it was a very dangerous place for Celia to be. If not caught by Batista’s army, she was “a temptation” to bandits, a wanted person attached to a nice reward for anyone who could capture her. I don’t know the amount, but the government had just placed a $100,000 reward on Fidel’s head. The reward on hers was less, but the army always thought that she was key to finding him.

  ONCE AGAIN, FIDEL SENT RAFAEL CASTRO to pick her up in Santiago and bring her to him in the mountains: “At 9:00 p.m. on September 19, he showed up saying that you had sent for me. . . . [I did not go because] for the first and only time someone had come to pick me up.” This was her way of saying, “He didn’t lead me to you the first time, why trust him now?” She didn’t go because, on the 20th, having sent Rafael Castro packing, she, Daniel, and Jorge Sotus sat down to compose a memo to Fidel.

  The preamble read: “In what follows, we are going to set forth a series of requests that we hope will be given special attention in view of the serious upheavals and troubles we have experienced in our work because of not having anticipated these small details that, at first sight, seemed insignificant but nevertheless, in practice, have caused very serious problems.” Six points followed. They addressed the poor quality of Fidel’s soldiers and their lack of discipline, and the fact that there were sixty men waiting in Santiago “from all over the island” (left over from Frank’s Second Front, needing to get out of Santiago and into the protection of the mountains) who wanted to join the guerrillas and could not because “[you] confer overriding powers on many people who have gotten to you by disregarding discipline and acting irresponsibly.” Celia, Daniel (Rene Ramos Latour), Sotus—Frank’s disciples—had decided that the time had come to be like Frank and to bring their (surviving) commander into line. “And so we ask that all individuals who are sent out on negotiations or special missions be sent to the Directorate, where we would gladly offer them our cooperation through our existing organization.”