One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution

by Nancy Stout

  Next, the three of them laid down the law on Fidel’s ad hoc messages as well, announcing that from then on, all his letters had to go through their hands to avoid spreading false or improper news. If the “General Staff” dismisses a soldier, the Directorate must be notified “in order that these people not be considered deserters.” Names of deserters, they said, must be reported immediately so this information could be circulated. Now, referring to him in the third person, they observed that “there are many cases of individuals who have taken advantage of Fidel Castro’s signature on papers of no importance, which, however, have been used by irresponsible parties to pass themselves off as direct representatives of our leader, simply by flashing his signature.” They concluded their memo with “For the triumph of the Revolution.”

  Celia left Santiago. You can almost hear her saying, “Forget him, I’m going home.” When she got around to explaining how she felt, she told Fidel: “On the 22nd of September, I reached Manzanillo,” but that was when they were on writing terms again. Once again dipping into her women’s network, she summoned Elsa Castro to come for her in Santiago (or at least Elsa describes a situation that seems to fit this date). After Celia telephoned, Elsa filled her car with young women and drove to Santiago, returning very late on Saturday night (which would have been the 21st); they were stopped at every checkpoint, and pretended to have been at a party. Elsa says they giggled a lot, asked one soldier if he’d like a piece of cake, and only once did a pair of soldiers actually shine flashlights directly on their faces. But the soldiers didn’t get a good look at Celia, who was crowded in the backseat, and the group got to Manzanillo before dawn Sunday morning, the 22nd.

  In Manzanillo, she faced an interesting problem. From Havana, her father wrote that he’d made friends with Lina Ruz, Fidel’s mother. Both parents wanted to come home, and Manuel Sánchez had written to Celia that he and Lina Ruz were going to travel back together and would like to visit their children in the Sierra Maestra. From Celia’s point of view, this was an awful idea. She asked him to stay in Havana because the army would arrest him again if he came back. She suggested, very gently, that he be patient.

  She was aware that such a message called for a carefully considered response, and she wrote to her father as if she were filing a report to her commanding officer. She describes life in the rebel army, reassures him that they are as secure and well organized as General Antonio Maceo (in the nineteenth century) had been, and includes detailed information. She writes as if she were an officer in the field, in a remote country, addressing headquarters, and thus better equipped to evaluate the situation and disabuse the recipient of any desire to journey to the front. Part general, part daughter, she claims she is safer than he is: “Today you are in much more danger than myself; no one can find me, whereas your situation is dangerous.” Flattering and to an extent true, since it is now thought that the army had wanted to use Manuel Sánchez, capture him, in order to extract a promise, in an exchange for his release, from Fidel Castro that the rebel army would not attack Pilón.

  Her father had enclosed a snapshot of himself and Fidel’s mother. Celia makes no comment about this memento, nor does she even touch upon their desire to visit the guerrilla army in the mountains. She had to deal with her father’s longings, and Fidel’s mother only complicated matters. Both these old parents were homesick for Oriente Province, plus they wanted to see a bit of action and hang out with their famous children. But she knew the desperation of such a trip and suppresses real news—and does not mention having been trapped by the army, hiding in caves, getting caught in places where planes were dropping bombs overhead, having no place to go, living hand-to-mouth, feeling a heart-sinking possibility that someone might betray her—and, having lied to her father about how nice and safe she was, stresses how well organized members of the rebel army all are.

  She waited a week in Manzanillo, until the 29th, before beginning to compose her messages to Fidel—the better to summon her ire and lambast him. The opening lines are completely professional, as if she were complying with rules of communication laid down by Alberto Bayo (the Spanish war veteran who’d trained Fidel’s guerrillas in Mexico), which required that the first section of reports contain weapons statistics. “You’ll receive 5,500—five thousand five hundred—M-1 rounds that came last night from Santiago in presillas [clips] of 10 bullets each,” she begins. But soon enough her thoughts are personal; she promises to enclose newspaper clippings from a Miami paper, send him a leather jacket (“I ordered one made in olive green, very light and warm”), canisters of calcium tablets (“Take them, they will be good for your cavities”) but isn’t above observing that he isn’t the only person with a toothache: “With the persecution that I’m under with these bandits I am forced to continue with this pain in my molar,” implying he might do the same. She tells him she’s well hidden (“More than hidden . . . I’m buried alive”) and gives him news of a shootout—two members of the Santiago 26th of July Movement have been assassinated. She mentions a bill she’s found in the mail for his eyeglasses (a reminder of his bad habit of breaking his glasses when he’s angry), the availability of a journalist, and what’s this about your having no money? He’s asked her for money. She reminds him that she has been sending him money all along. She signs off with “a hug” (abrazo) a typical way to close a letter among Spanish speakers, just as common as “Yours truly” in English, and not to be confused with a warm embrace.

  The next day, September 30, she wrote to Daniel: “My trip was very good, but upon my setting foot in Manzanillo, somebody informed [the police] of my arrival and they searched for me day and night.” Not finding her, the army went after her sister Griselda, surrounding her house and forcing her to leave Manzanillo. “Two trucks and two jeeps of soldiers went to my sister’s house. What a fuss!” In Celia’s “I’m so safe” letter written to her father, she doesn’t mention that his other daughter is being harassed by the police, was then run out of town, when in fact they had been searching for Celia herself. She employed the same type of thinking (or is it deception?) when she didn’t warn Flávia of the upcoming mutiny that Celia surely knew would be taking place in Cienfuegos. In other words, she’s safe. The Dove had returned to the Ark. The Dove’s keeper, Hector Llópiz, was finding safe places to hide her. With the paradoxical logic of a guerrilla, her attitude was, I’m okay, let them figure it out.

  Two days later, she started another note to Fidel, beginning with a few paragraphs about 26th of July business, then asking him to apologize to Raúl, his brother, for not sending film, and ending, ironically, with “Please write!” These two relatively short letters were a mere warm-up for a long letter she was composing simultaneously—a complicated, private manifesto that she’d been working on since she got back. It is dated on its first page October l, but midway through, she asks: “Have you noticed that we are almost at the end of September?” Here, she allows herself to describe being alone and on the run, to tell him what it’s been like, for her, between late July and the first days of October, including the arrest of her father. It’s clear that she is angry with Fidel, but she pours it all out. These two letters—one to her father, the other to Fidel—confirm how tough but diplomatic she could be, how good she was at masking her own vulnerabilities, standing up for herself, giving orders, and meting out criticism. It’s a pity Celia never had a turn at being president. She was educated for the job, particularly as relates to her knowledge of Cuban history, of medicine, her unwavering commitment to social justice, and her popularity. Combine these with her war experience, both in the underground and as a soldier, and you have a powerful package. She could talk like a politician: The Revolution is in motion but nothing can stop it now, is the central theme of the letter to her father. But her future role as presidential advisor emerges as she writes to Fidel.

  “HOW WE NEEDED A REVOLUTION,” she tells her father. “How we’ve struggled for recognition! But that’s history now,” because the people know what they think
, are aware of their feelings, and have given the Revolution priority. “Cuba always follows a leader. It is a fact of life,” she muses, and pragmatically observes that they’ve needed Fidel. “I was always afraid he’d be killed, and people would abandon us,” but claims this is old news “now that the people back the revolution.” As for coming home, “you know how to wait.” She asks him to have patience, be serene in his suffering, and promises that the day when he can return isn’t far away. Celia is too adroit to use such a contentious word as no.

  She doesn’t mention that the 26th of July had been having trouble exerting control over volunteers flocking to the Sierra in hope of joining the rebels, nor the problems they faced with the influx of paramilitary forces, under Rolando Masferrer, who were posing as 26th of July soldiers. Instead, she reassures her father that farmers had organized the territory into zones to protect the rebel army and were supporting the movement by stopping infiltrators, interrogating suspicious characters, taking them prisoner, and condemning them. Continuing in this “we are in complete control” vein, she writes that these same farmers have closed the zone to outsiders and nothing can be sent up to them, “not even a bottle of medicine.”

  Then she tells him a story about two of “our men” who with pistols—not rifles—shot at 150 armed men and slipped away before the army, confused, had time to take up position to return fire. “Fidel always used to dream about this sort of thing and I’d always argue with him, never thinking that incidents like that could take place.” For the rest of the letter she sticks to the joys of guerrilla warfare. There is some truth in what she says—rebel army commanders Escalona and Ochoa emphasized the huge advantage they had had operating alone or in pairs, always striking from higher ground—but she masks the fact that, at this stage in the war, they were completely trapped.

  As a way of further reassuring her father that they are okay, she claims, “We’ll never die of hunger because the ranches have pigs, fowl, and we have warehouses with food, but money is scarce,” and she admits that they have to figure out a way to solve this problem, the crux of the matter.

  Money to meet their needs had become a huge issue for Celia, who essentially was the supply officer of the rebel army. In the following paragraphs of the letter, she documents her plans for securing money. She suggests “threats,” that is, terrorism, which in my opinion gives her great credibility as a guerrilla leader. Cubans from the current generation remark that she wasn’t very political, just a good organizer, and cite Fidel as the catalyst of all radical ideas. But this letter refutes that. She tells her father that she can’t stand the idea that Cubans with money are unwilling to hand it over to the 26th of July Movement. How could they not? “I can’t forgive big capital,” she writes, because they won’t sacrifice for the country or for a just cause; on the contrary, they always take, and only give us what we ask for “through terrorism.” They’ll give to a colonel (referring to an officer in Batista’s army), they’ll pay for a political campaign “for any shameless individual,” she complains, but they won’t pay “to save the country.” Borrowing a theme from Fidel, she claims that “we” never wanted to make our revolution with dirty money, but don’t have enough weapons and that’s why this fight is costing so many lives. We don’t want to obtain money by force, she continues, because “it sets a bad example, especially to young people,” and we can’t get caught doing something we’re fighting against. But big capital doesn’t understand, so “I am encouraging us to begin to apply terrorism. It is what they are accustomed to.” All of this is an admission on her part that she has decided to threaten local big business—rice growers and ranchers as well as merchants, owners of sugar mills—in other words, some of the wealthiest men in the nation. As a coordinator of the 26th of July Movement for the Manzanillo region, Celia was in the position to make that call.

  Their victory, discussed so matter-of-factly here in 1957, is more than a year off. Yet to read this letter you’d think it had already happened. This attitude was verified in several interviews I made over ten years with soldiers who spoke of her prescience, marveled at her conviction they’d win even before they’d begun to fight. Start with Guerra Matos’s recollection of the days following the landing; everything indicated that Fidel might easily be dead, but she’d heaped scorn on Guerra Matos for his lack of faith. Yet her evidence was mostly instinctual. She describes their upcoming victory with confidence. What concerns us, she tells her father, is how to control “sentiment” (which really meant bloodbath and retaliation) after victory. Fidel has his platoon captains read Curzio Malaparte’s The Skin to prepare for the first moments after their triumph, and she assures her father that the rebel army must—at any price—avoid letting people lose their common sense. We want to control their passions; we do not want to create chaos, she writes. There will be no need for vengeance, since we are the ones who have suffered most of the cruelties, and we will set the example; there will be no “tomorrow’s heroes” (to use Malaparte’s phrase) on our side handing out vigilante justice.

  Returning to the present, as if it were a newsy aside, she asks her father what his views had been on the mutiny in Cienfuegos, but she does not mention Flávia, or Flávia’s family who lived there. Celia simply does not allow other members of her family to enter her war. She says she’s heard people expressing their shock that the army would bomb one of Cuba’s own cities, but what about the Sierra? Aren’t we people too? We’ve been bombed daily for ten months—forest, family homes. She tells her father that people had been collecting empty shells to show her. They were stacking them in their backyards, like trophies. Then Celia, like any good politician, closes by expressing pity for her opponent: “So many arms, so many troops, yet they are nothing compared to us.” She had come to this conclusion because the army had resorted to dropping flyers, offering reward money that she calls pitiful and “indecent” and predicts they’ll have no takers.

  Again, she addresses the impossibility of her father’s return, echoing his words, written after she escaped in Campechuela, when he advised her (along with a gift of his Colt 45 pistol): Don’t think you are the only one; don’t think for a minute that the way the army acts won’t be applied to you. “Stay on a little longer,” she urges, “you’ve done it before”—previously he’d extended his Havana vacation because he had been having a good time. Circumstance, she says, evoking a word used by Martíto to explain nearly everything, requires the high road. “Love and kisses, Aly,” her nom de guerre.

  After she’d finished this masterpiece to her father, she polished her letter to Fidel, a letter that is well over 4,000 words. She explains what happened in September, beginning with her father’s arrest, her leaving Manzanillo to find Fidel, and ending up being confined to the forest. In his August 16 letter, he’d sarcastically asked her: “When are you going to send me the dentist? If I don’t receive weapons from Santiago nor Havana, nor from Miami or Mexico, at least send me a dentist so my molars will let me think in peace,” and when she read this, after what she’d been through, hiding in caves, and so on, it clearly got on her nerves. He’d tried to be funny, too, but she failed to notice or acknowledge it: “Now that we have food, I can’t eat. Afterward, my molars will be okay and then there won’t be any food.” And he’d been sweet: “I don’t blame you. You do more than you can handle.” She was having none of it. She tells him she found a dentist who’d agreed to go into the Sierra but changed his mind (pero el se arrepinteo; the verb she used is “repented”) at the last minute, but promises she won’t go again without bringing along a dentist. And again she sourly reminds him that he is not the only person in the world with a toothache . . . but she is sending “calcium tablets, take them, they will be good for your cavities, I have a hundred of those cans.”

  The real trouble between them was money. While Celia was in the mountains and on the run, she’d come across undelivered letters containing money she’d sent Fidel at three houses located in the Sierra. From her viewpoint he had needed mo
ney and she had sent it. But the person Fidel sent to pick up the money (which didn’t arrive), was the same person Fidel had sent to rescue her in Manzanillo (and didn’t arrive). She takes this opportunity to say that the arms she’d taken into the mountains, when she went with Rafael Castro, had been distributed with the understanding that “when we got to you, we’d turn them over, and you’d hand them out as you saw fit.” But Rafael had selected a coveted M-1 for himself. And still has it, she says. “He and the rifle are still strolling the Sierra in search of you.”

  She was winding up this letter on the night of October 1 when Felipe Guerra Matos showed up in Manzanillo, sent by Fidel, to find her. So she pens, adding on the front pages: “What a surprise to see Guerrita, and even more to know why—because you hadn’t gotten any money for two months.” She explains that in the beginning of August, when he first asked for money, the banks were closed and she could only send $500 on the 7th. (The reason, of course, was the general strike following Frank’s assassination, when the banks were closed.) In Manzanillo, the banks reopened on Saturday, August 10, and she took out $1,000 that she sent him on August 11 via Rafael Castro. Then she edges into her main, or most obvious, reproach, the reason she, Daniel, and Sotus had composed and sent their memo. She tells Fidel that they’ve heard about the “famous group” that went into the Sierra on its own, and that he’d incorporated into “our rebel army,” and reminds him that it isn’t “his rebel army,” implying he can’t just make monarchical decisions. It was bad for me and bad for you, she points out: “You already know the consequences this had for me and they were bad for you”—using ustedes, meaning “all of you.”