One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution

by Nancy Stout

  (Map drawn by Otto Hernandez. Courtesy of Oficina de Asuntos Históricos.)

  Father Guillermo Sardiñas joined the guerrillas in late 1957 or early 1958. “Because people knew we had a priest among us, they would ask to be married, or to have their children baptized. And because Celia was present, they’d ask her to be the godmother, and she’d accept,” Rebel Radio’s Ricardo Martínez related, in describing his travels in the mountains with Column 1. (Courtesy of Oficina de Asuntos Históricos)

  Three priests, in particular, took turns going into the mountains to be with Fidel’s column: Fathers Chelala and Rivas from Santiago, and Guillermo Sardiñas from the Isle of Pines. Other priests did stints with the guerrillas, encouraged by their parishioners, laypersons active in the 26th of July Movement; but of the three, Father Sardiñas is the most famous. He is described as celestial (meaning absent-minded), and sufficiently so to be a handicap because Raúl Castro usually appointed a soldier to keep an eye on this priest. He might just start smelling the flowers—to quote Ricardo Martínez—wander off, get lost, and fall into a ravine. Sardiñas dressed as a guerrilla priest: his soutane was olive green, embroidered with a red star, and had been designed by Camilo Cienfuegos (who had worked in El Arte, a stylish men’s clothing shop located in Havana behind the Capitol, before becoming a guerrilla). Martínez told me: “Because people knew we had a priest among us, they would ask to be married, or to have their children baptized. And because Celia was present, they’d ask her to be the godmother, and she’d accept.” He says that Fidel would step in to take his place as the godfather (and here Martínez sighed, as he related this), causing a certain amount of fanfare every time they camped. Don’t forget, they all looked rather biblical, with their long hair and beards. Plus it didn’t hurt their glory that the “doctor’s daughter” was with them wearing mariposa blossoms, the old Mambisi army symbol of resistance and liberation pinned to her uniform. Nor did it hurt that the rebel army paid for everything in cash.

  Lydia Doce, four years older than Celia, managed Che’s camp, El Hombrito, near San Pablo de Yao. In September 1957, Che asked her to be his courier. (Courtesy of Oficina de Asuntos Históricos)

  Martínez described how each day ended: they were exhausted and footsore, having been on their feet for nine or ten hours, and wanted only to undress, bathe, and find a place to string up a hammock before dark. Most of all, he says, they were always desperate to know whether the cooks had started a fire, wanted to be reassured of having something to eat before going to sleep. Martínez returned to his theme: they’d be trying to make camp and people from the area would drift in. “They would ask Fidel if he would be godfather, and he would be godfather,” he recalled grouchily, but with fondness. “Other people would need a doctor,” and they could get no rest.

  Father Sardiñas officiated at weddings and baptisms and masses all over those hills while he traveled with the rebel army, even though there were no Catholics in the Sierra. The people who came to the rebel camp were spiritualists, primarily, and Seventh-Day Adventists with the occasional channeler. Spanish priests who were sent to Cuba had never bothered to go into these out-of-the-way villages, so there were no Catholics per se. But that didn’t matter, because as soon as someone spotted the guerrillas making camp, word went out, and country people would start to arrive from the surrounding area. Martínez pointed out, “You have to keep in mind that most of us were not communists then. I am confident in saying that we have all become communists along the way. All of us, with the exception of those who were Marxists, had chains with medals of the Virgin Mary. I still have the rosary that Father Sardiñas gave me that I used to wear on my uniform. Fidel had chains with medals. We weren’t the only ones.” Then, he added, after a long moment of silence, as if rousing from a somewhat bizarre memory, “This is a true story.”

  WHEN CELIA BEGAN LIVING with the rebel army in mid-October 1957 she was, in fact, following closely in the footsteps of another woman, Lydia Doce, four years older, who worked for Che. Lydia managed Che’s encampment at El Hombrito after he’d been appointed commander at the end of July, when he’d set off on his own, leaving Fidel’s column to make a permanent camp in another part of the mountain range. It was north of the areas Fidel usually frequented, on the other side of Bayamo. One day, Che went to the small town of San Pablo de Yao to find food, and later wrote: “One of the first houses we saw belonged to a baker’s family.” A month or two later, he asked the baker—Lydia Doce—to organize his second camp, where he’d hidden his men inside a coffee plantation.

  In late September, Che sent her to Santiago on her first mission. Che was unacquainted with Frank’s replacement and asked Lydia to make diplomatic contact with the new chief, Daniel (Rene Ramos Latour). Like a pro, she went to a friend’s house first for a complete makeover, changed the color of her hair, and put on a dress. She was plump but had a pretty face; and some photographs of her suggest seductiveness. Getting to Santiago meant navigating roads controlled by the army. And these she had maneuvered with ease, only running into problems in Santiago. There, the 26th of July rejected her because they couldn’t identify Che’s signature. But Lydia was resourceful; she found an outsider to introduce her to Daniel, and after this episode, Che decided that he wanted her to carry all his messages. She became an executive courier, and within the rebel army this was a high-status position.

  She became “radicalized by the experience,” as Cubans frequently comment when speaking of Batista’s coup d’ état. She had been living in Havana but left the capital when Batista took over in 1952. She moved back to Oriente Province in 1955, opened a bakery in San Pablo de Yao, where she encountered Che in 1957. She’d married at sixteen (in 1932) and had three children with her first husband, Orestes Parra (two daughters and a son named Efrain, who joined Che’s column). She divorced her second husband, Sebastian García, after fourteen years of marriage, before moving to Havana in 1952, and had been managing on her own for five years before working for Che.

  Che’s camp was stationary (unlike Fidel’s, which was always on the road), and Lydia took care of it. She secured food, medicine, and uniforms for Che’s men—much as Celia had been doing for her outdoor barracks in Manzanillo—was known in the community, and could do this underground logistical work discreetly. She oversaw about forty soldiers in Che’s Column 4 (named Column 4 because Fidel wanted to suggest there were more columns by skipping a few numbers). As Che put it, Lydia “could be tyrannical” and Cuban men found her hard to handle. One of his soldiers complained that she had “more balls than Maceo” because she was excessively reckless, and advised Che to watch out, she’d bring them all down. Che admitted that her audacity had no limitation.

  ANOTHER AUDACIOUS FEMALE was Celia’s oldest sister, Silvia (often spelled Sylvia in the archives). She had been living quietly in Santiago, in spite of Celia’s ever increasing notoriety, with her husband, Pepin Sánchez del Campo, a pharmaceutical salesman, and their two sons. Silvia taught at the Santiago Teachers College. It was a private school, and Frank País had been an intern in her classroom, and he had recruited her. Today, both of Silvia’s sons remember Frank, his sweet face and his charm, and chortle as they describe the first time they saw him. Silvia had organized a meeting in her house to introduce Frank to a prominent member of the Santiago community, so Frank could ask him to buy weapons, and they were there. Their father, Pepin, came home after work, and Silvia introduced him to Frank. As soon as Pepin got a chance, he pulled his wife into the kitchen to ask her, incredulously, “Are you planning to carry out a revolution with children?” Young Pepin and Sergio then started to discover things around the house: they found armbands in a drawer and surmised that one of the outlawed M-26 sewing circles must be meeting there, too, and decided not to confront their parents—better to keep their eyes open and discover more about what was going on. One day, Sergio, the youngest, came home from school just as Frank’s bodyguard drove up outside their house, got out, and removed a spare tire from the trunk
of his car. He knocked on their door and handed Silvia the tire (filled with pistols and ammunition) and told her to get rid of it. Without any pretense, she’d asked her eldest son, Pepin, then eleven years old, to help. She handed him the box of ammunition and told him he’d have to take care of this. She explained the route he’d take, which went right past a policeman, but said: “Don’t let him see it.” The box hadn’t been small; it had been about the size of a large cigar box, or a collegiate dictionary, but he managed.

  Soon after Celia went into the mountains, Silvia’s quiet life began to explode. “My father was arrested twice,” and Sergio began to describe his family’s odyssey. Through the spring and summer of 1957, Silvia was pregnant. In November, “my mother was in Santiago’s Los Angeles Clinic and gave birth to a daughter who died at birth.” (Silvia had been RH-negative and the baby was RH-positive, creating antibodies at birth; this was the second child she’d lost at delivery.) The day after she left the hospital, her husband was arrested. “We arrived home from school, my father wasn’t there, and a lot of neighbors were going in and out of the house. We asked our mother what was happening. She answered that our father was in Guantánamo, and that was all she said. Going to Guantánamo was normal, since he was a pharmaceutical salesman,” but when the neighbors left, she explained what had happened.

  That morning, the head of the army in Santiago, Col. José Salas Canizares, the man who officially killed Frank País, arrived at their house accompanied by soldiers. They searched all the rooms and found medical samples—no more than normal for a pharmaceutical salesman—and then arrested Pepin and took him to the Moncada. She’d telephoned the mayor, a friend of hers, who was high up in the pro-Batista government. The mayor, Maximilian Torres, and Silvia had been in school together and often chatted at social events. Torres drove to the Moncada and got Pepin released, but Canizares had been tough (according to Sánchez lore) and asked the mayor sarcastically, “What do you think you are doing at Moncada making inquiries about an arrest that is an army affair?” In other words, you might be the mayor of Santiago, but I am head of the entire eastern division of the country. Wasting no time, Canizares informed Mayor Torres that the army had finished their interrogation and were aware that Celia Sánchez had stayed in Pepin’s house at Alta Vista. Furthermore, they knew that Pepin was sending medical supplies to the Sierra Maestra, even though Pepin had denied everything. Still, Canizares said, he would release him. Torres, confused by the about-face, related all this to Silvia, who rejoiced that her husband was free.

  Three days later, soldiers arrived again. During this search, Silvia got a call from a doctor saying her husband had just been arrested while making a sales call. Silvia again telephoned Maximilian Torres, who went to the Moncada for a second time, where Canizares greeted him coldly, saying that “Pepin is alive only because there are no battles in the Sierra Maestra at the moment.” Again, the army released Pepin to the mayor’s custody, but Canizares warned, as Sergio Sánchez told me: “The next time you get here, you are going to find Pepin with ants in his mouth.”

  Nobody in Santiago at that time would have doubted the threat behind this kind of statement. Torres hurried to Silvia, related what had happened, and implored her to leave town immediately. It isn’t a threat, or even a warning, he said, “It’s a prophecy,” and urged them to leave Santiago that night, at the very latest.

  They didn’t actually get away until around five the following morning, and were accompanied by their next-door neighbor, Pepe Boix, because Boix actually had Pepin’s medical supplies, which he had been shipping to the Sierra Maestra. Boix, who owned a hardware store in downtown Santiago, also shipped all Celia’s supplies to the rebel army directly from his warehouse. For years, he had shipped Celia’s King’s Day toys, which she bought in bulk in Santiago, putting the packages on the coastal boat to Pilón. Nothing had really changed: Celia recruited him the way she recruited everybody. It was easy, and he was glad to help. This is a good illustration of how she developed her own personal network, through expediency mostly, often bypassing the 26th of July Movement. She would get her family and friends to buy oil, lamps, blankets, boots, plastic, and ammunition—all the things the rebel army needed—and let Pepe Boix do the shipping.

  On the night of Pepin’s second arrest, neither Rene nor Pepe knew if the army had discovered Boix’s involvement. They felt the army might know, but were turning a blind eye, temporarily, since Boix’s brother was a colonel in the army. Boix’s brother was the army’s public relations officer for the eastern region, a well-known officer in those parts, so Boix proposed they both get out of Santiago while he could still talk his way through Central Highway checkpoints by merely mentioning his brother’s name. Both families fled: four adults and four children, with luggage, crammed into Pepin’s car. Both families locked the doors of their fine Vista Alegre houses, hoping for the best, and when they reached the first checkpoint, Pepe did the talking. They passed through easily, as he’d predicted.

  Silvia was weak from childbirth, still bleeding, feeling sharp abdominal pains, and she was physically exhausted after having spent the night packing, getting her family ready to leave. Mollified from their checkpoint experience, they decided it was safe to stop at a roadside café outside the first major city they came to, Holguín. They settled down in a booth, when, through the windows of the restaurant, they saw armed jeeps and patrol cars racing down the highway. Obviously something extraordinary had happened. Holguín was famous for its violence, and reprisals were par for the course. They reckoned that this was something big, and they’d better get out of town, so they left the café immediately.

  On the far side of Holguín, all cars were being waved into the army’s garrison. Seeing this, Silvia took command and told her husband, who was driving, to stop the car so she could speak to the soldier directing traffic. “Don’t drive into the garrison, no matter what they tell us,” she ordered Pepin as they pulled abreast. She leaned forward, looking past the driver’s seat to sweetly inform the soldier that her children were about to have their tonsils removed and she was taking them to Havana. They had a long trip ahead, she reminded him “with a mother’s urgency,” Pepin remembers. Silvia started to describe the appointment schedule for the tonsil operations, quoting the hours, etc., and explain why they needed to get to Havana as soon as possible. Convinced, the soldier waved them on. “Our mother had lost her baby, and her house, but she was not going to lose her husband,” Sergio concluded, also saying that their mother “looked soft, but could be just as strong as Celia.” Later that day, tuning the car radio to Radio Reloj, the 24-hour news station, on the car radio, they learned that Holguín’s notorious army chief, Colonel Fermin Cowley, had been assassinated that morning, and had they pulled into the garrison, neither Pepin nor Pepe Boix would have come out again. I asked if that meant they would have been put in jail. “No,” Sergio and Pepin answered, incredulous at such a tepid suggestion. “They would have been killed, because the army didn’t ask questions.”

  Pepin burned up the highway, and 970 kilometers later, he dropped the Boix family at the Hotel Lincoln in Central Havana. Then he’d turned east, and drove another hour to Flávia’s hideout, “the green bungalow,” arriving on the night of November 22. Silvia’s family moved in with Flávia, Rene, their two daughters, the youngest sister Acacia, who’d arrived in late September, and Griselda with her small son, Julio César, who showed up in early October after the police ran them out of Manzanillo. Pepin drove into Havana the next day to meet the director of the Analec Pharmaceutical Laboratory, and told him their story. The director found an office for Pepin and put him to work immediately as a Havana salesman. Of the eleven people now living in the beach house, only Pepin was bringing in a salary.

  IN NOVEMBER, SOME “ACTION” MEMBERS from Guantánamo’s M-26 finally ran José “Gallego” Moran to ground; they assassinated him, carrying out the order Celia had assiduously avoided.

  By early December, the 26th of July Movement nati
onal director, Armando Hart, officially and pointedly asked Celia when she was going to return to Manzanillo: “I am tasting the bitterness of incomprehension. . . . Aly, we thought you were going to keep your promise to return. . . . Without your very able collaboration, they have had to make superhuman efforts to keep the supplies going to the Sierra.” He reminded her that Daniel was overworked while she was away (thus Hart did not know that staying there had been her plan). By December, the situation in the cities was quite dangerous. When the seemingly untouchable Colonel Cowley had been assassinated, the people of Holguín had rejoiced, and their reaction caused increased repression in all cities. In Santiago, when Salas Canizares heard that his Holguín counterpart had been murdered, he sent tanks into the streets. Celia’s clandestino colleagues were encouraged to keep up the pressure. The underground started a new campaign: to burn the sugar crops around the nation and heighten subversive activities. Around November 28 it began, and the movement operating within cities began suffering losses as many clandestine fighters were killed. Celia did not return to the underground and take part in this particular stage of the Revolution. She stayed in the mountains with Fidel, keeping his buttons from falling off, his mind engaged, his coffee brewed, and a box of cigars ever ready to keep his mind stimulated and his behavior mellow. Women’s work? Not if you speak to the retired comandantes and other alumni of Colunm 1. Everyone that I spoke to concedes that this work badly needed doing, to keep Fidel on an even keel, and is one of the crucial ways she helped win the war.