by Nancy Stout
24. JANUARY–JUNE 1958
Planning War
DURING THE FIRST MONTHS OF 1958, Celia and Fidel planned a defense strategy. The 26th of July had an informer within the Cuban army and knew it would be staging an all-out offensive in the upcoming summer months. This piece of intelligence gave Fidel time to make preparations.
By January 1958, the rebels held most of the mountains of southeastern Oriente. After a year of rebel army harassment, the Rural Guard had pulled out of nearly all the smaller garrisons in the Sierra Maestra. Now, with this geographical zone in their possession, it was up to the rebel army to look after all the people who resided in it. Fidel put Celia in charge of some managerial duties in the zona libre, or free zone. Her main responsibility was to figure out how they would acquire enough food to feed everyone in the zone should Batista’s army wage a long and effective blockade against them—a blockade lasting months, maybe even years. She already provided for about one hundred people, Comandante Delio Ochoa told me, rebel army soldiers and specific Sierra families who were working for the guerrillas. In January, with an eye to the future, when they would be under siege and she would be supplying everyone, she set about obtaining cattle from ranches outside the mountains. She began by canvassing ranchers south and east of Manzanillo, where she knew many of the ranch owners. She sequestered the herd on her family’s farm first—the Sánchez Silveira 40,000-acre ranch at San Miguel del Chino—but tapped all owners, demanded or bargained for cattle, which were paid for with a graciously written I.O.U. penned by Fidel promising payment after victory.
Fidel suggested setting up warehouses along the western slopes to store food and other supplies. In 1956, when Celia had been planning the landing, she’d urged farmers to buy extra kerosene and bury it. Now she began to visit mountain farmers in various places, asking them to grow food, encouraging fields of malanga—big plants with exotic leaves and edible roots—on mountain slopes. It was a plant that blended in well with the scenery. She ordered some families to raise livestock. “I started out with a small farm with pigs, hens, turkeys and pigeons,” she wrote her father a few months later. “They are now giving us such good results that we are going to develop them in each zone. We’ve got pens, chicken coops, grain tanks for corn. I found an empty house and a rebel couple to take care of it and do all the work. Each farm is going to have a corn field.” After gathering stats, taking one of her censuses, she drew up a plan for distributing the confiscated cattle by placing them in convenient places within the free zone. She tried to spread them equally among families.
None of this was easy; Celia had a lot of trouble getting those cattle from the ranches into the mountains. Soldiers from the rebel army borrowed horses to drive the cattle and didn’t return them to the owners. Her letters to Fidel provide a glimpse of what was going on. She complained that the guerrillas were getting to be as bad as Batista’s guards, taking whatever they wanted, and he shot back: “It is almost as though it is my fault that the people who borrowed the horses didn’t return them.” Humberto Sori Martín, the rebel army lawyer, was in charge of the civil government of the free zone. “Sori came to me with this problem,” she wrote Fidel, and “I thought it best that civilians [local people] under the order of Sori’s representatives [rebel soldiers, platoon captains] should be in charge of moving and looking after the cattle, protected by our troops, but [I told him] not to determine anything until Che arrives.” Fidel definitely did not like the idea of the locals being in charge, but went along with it. He let Celia and Che work it out.
Fidel decided that he, like Che, wanted an executive courier. He chose a farm girl, Clodomira Acosta, who, as a messenger for the rebels, had been caught and arrested, and famously escaped from the Cuban army. Celia, thinking Clodo was sixteen, was ambivalent about Fidel’s using someone so young (Clodo was actually 21), but still did everything she could to help her. In this picture, taken in Guayabol de Nagua in early 1958, Clodo, on the left, avoids looking at the camera; Pilar Fernandez is in the middle, and Celia, in doorway, listens to Luis Crespo. (Courtesy of Oficina de Asuntos Históricos)
She and Fidel developed a work pattern: she ventured out to take care of projects while he stayed in one spot, concentrated on planning the defense of the rebel army. Her presence, as members of the rebel army repeatedly told me, “freed him up to win the war.”
FIDEL SOON DECIDED HE, like Che, wanted a courier. He found the right person when a farm girl showed up at his camp in late January. Clodomira Acosta Ferrales was born on February 1, 1936, but looked much younger than twenty-two. (Celia thought Clodo, as she was called, was sixteen or seventeen and was ambivalent about Fidel’s using someone so young.) Her parents, Estaban Acosta and Rosa Ferrales, had an orchard farm on the Yara River. She was the third of eight children, and had briefly worked as a maid in Manzanillo, but hated it and returned home to help cultivate fruit trees. The nearest town didn’t have a school, so she was uneducated. She lived with Sergio Pena briefly, when she was about seventeen, in a common law marriage that lasted a few months before she left him. One day she saw a couple of Rural Guards arrest a boy and knew he helped the rebel army, so she had gone up to the Guards and shouted: “Let him go. Don’t you see that he’s nobody?” Like everybody else in the Sierra, she’d experienced Rural Guard brutality, saw how they treated farmers: stealing animals, raping women, burning houses, and probably experienced or heard about unreported incidents that had ended in murder. In the heat of the moment, this impetuous young woman had sealed her destiny, and become political. She joined one of the rebel army platoons, where they found a job for her as a messenger. Clodo was caught and arrested, interrogated, and locked in a cell. Her head was shaved, but Clodo managed to escape right under their noses after setting a couple of backpacks on fire with some matches she’d hidden on her person. In the smoke and confusion, she jumped out of a high window, but she landed safely, and traveled on foot through several towns, with a shaved head, until she could join another rebel army platoon at La Vega de la Yua. Once again, she worked as a messenger.
Clodo was arrested again, escaped once more, but this time—in January 1958—she’d headed straight for the commander in chief. Fidel and Celia had heard of Clodo, since her ability to escape had become legend. Story has it that she’d been caught carrying a wounded rebel army soldier, screaming dramatically, “Hang me! He can’t walk,” until one of Batista’s soldiers had threatened to hang him if she didn’t shut up.
In February, Fidel asked Clodo to scout the Sierra del Escambray, which is in the middle of Cuba, and make contact with the Revolutionary Directorate (Directorio Revolucionario, or DR) Echeverria’s group, which had barely survived after their attack on the Presidential Palace. Fidel was acting on information that its new director, Faure Chamon, had arrived in the Escambray on or around February 8, and gave Clodo a letter of introduction. It said, according to Faure Chamon in a document in the Council of State’s Office of Historical Affairs Archives: “To the Rebels in Las Villas in Escambray, the person carrying this message can fill you in on details and events of interest.” Fidel asked Clodo to find out what sort of people were fighting with the DR, and to try to get some idea of what they were doing there.
February 1958: European journalist Enrique Meneses takes this picture of Celia riding into camp, behind Juan Almeida, burlap sacks stuffed with food fastened to her saddle. (Courtesy of Oficina de Asuntos Históricos)
MEANWHILE, CELIA HAD BEEN TRAVELING around the mountains asking people to establish new vegetable gardens and build pens to raise chickens and pigs, and trying to explain, all the while, that the fruits of these labors wouldn’t be for them, personally, but for everybody. She tried to convince these farmers that should they all become isolated and cut off from the rest of the country, they’d be able to survive a siege if they had these surplus products. Although logical, it was not an easy argument. Later on, educating the Sierra farmers in the fine art of animal husbandry became the real test. When she tried to tel
l some of the host farmers that the cows she was giving them represented future food, and furthermore they could expand their herds by producing calves, some slaughtered their animals, giving the excuse that the cows had broken their legs. But she confiscated the meat, set up a curing house in a place called Jimenez, and took over two industrial-sized refrigerators (from a businessman who had decided it was best to leave the area). These were subsistence farmers, not used to being engaged in agricultural production, and always having trouble feeding their own. Many had been run off their property by the army or Rural Guard and taken refuge in the Sierra.
BY THE END OF FEBRUARY, nearly all of Celia’s sisters had moved out of the green bungalow. For six months, the four families had been trying to look normal living in the same house. Silvia’s husband had been their only envoy to the outside world. Plainclothes police watched the house from the beginning, according to Flávia, but the neighbors had always helped out by giving hand signals to indicate who the police were, and where they were stationed. There had been several house searches (after someone had thoughtlessly made a phone call to Santiago), which indicated that the phone was tapped, but nothing much happened. Yet, Flávia says, they were aware that the police wouldn’t be putting in all those hours without coming up with something to show for it, so they decided to go their separate ways. Flávia’s family left first; then Griselda and her small son, Julio César, slipped away. Acacia moved in with the Gironas in Havana. Silvia and Pepin waited, with suitcases packed, until the neighbors signaled one morning that the coast was clear: no police were on duty. Then Pepin quickly put his wife, boys, and their suitcases in the car and drove away. Flávia told me that she and Rene had reached the point that they needed to find an income, so they opened a dental clinic in Havana. They bought a house on a major artery road, Santa Catalina. It was on a corner, next to a fire station, across the street from a bar, and in such a completely busy neighborhood that no one had time to notice their two names hanging on the shingle and connect them with Celia. Like Frank’s red car, their house went unnoticed because it was so obvious.
CELIA WAS BACK IN FIDEL’S CAMP in February for the arrival of a European journalist they’d permitted to visit the column, but only because they wanted him to document the arrival of Dr. Leon Ramírez, senator from Manzanillo. Ramírez was making the journey to Fidel’s camp to propose a peace plan. “I noticed that something odd was going on,” the journalist, Enrique Meneses, later wrote. “The cooking smelled better, the rebels were polishing their boots and cleaning their arms with more care than usual. . . . Sentries were posted along the length of the road which Leon Ramírez had to take, and every so often the Senator and his guides were stopped and asked for their papers in order to give the impression of a territory under the control of a perfectly correct and well-organized rebel army. Leon Ramírez arrived. After greeting those present, he gave a pistol to Celia Sánchez. ‘I have met and have the greatest respect for your father, Dr. Sánchez. I had thought of bringing you a more feminine gift, but under the circumstances, I feel that this will be more useful.’”
MEANWHILE, HIDDEN IN THE ESCAMBRAY, Faure Chamon heard that a girl from Fidel’s Sierra was looking for him. He decided to make contact with her and suggested she come along with his group as they moved farther into the mountains, since they were constantly on the move. With Clodo, they headed into an area where numerous groups of anti-Batista guerrillas were hiding, and Chamon recalled that Clodo had asked him: “Who are you? What are you like? What do you call yourselves? Are you students? Who are the others? Where do they come from?” (These must have been, quite literally, Fidel’s questions.) Chamon recognized that she was bright—his description was “quick”—decided to take a chance, and explained his situation with transparency. Two or three days later, they were ambushed by Batista’s forces (at Cacahual), and Clodo became separated from his group. But she knew the geography of the Escambray well enough to make it on her own, ended up joining another section of the DR, led by Ramon Pando Ferrer, and questioned him for a few days. When she’d learned enough, she bade farewell and headed back to the Sierra Maestra. Fidel was delighted with the intelligence she’d gathered, and after this, began giving her assignments.
AT THE BEGINNING OF FEBRUARY, Fidel gave Celia jobs that were distinctly military. First, he decided to put in some fortifications in the spot he considered a possible “point of entry” for the enemy. This most vulnerable spot was near the village of Las Vegas de Jibacoa, farther down Pico Caracas. There she moved into a house with a family, oversaw trench digging, and then got to work establishing an armory. She found a building in El Naranjo that suited her needs, and began doing what Fidel asked of her: she procured land mines, detonators, cables, and bombs, and stored them there.
IN MARCH, COLUMN 1 “JOSÉ MARTÍ” broke up into separate columns, although Che had left earlier due to his frequent attacks of asthma and inability to be constantly out marching; but now, with several new columns, Fidel could expand their sphere of influence. All this was in keeping with Frank País’s goal when he established the second front: grow the rebel forces, confuse the army by occupying new locations, and, simultaneously, take the heat off Fidel’s column. Finally, the rebel army was ready to carry this out, and Raúl Castro left with his own column by March 16. He began networking with freelance guerrilla groups in the Sierra Cristal near Guantánamo, the same groups Frank had scouted earlier (in June 1957), reorganizing them to fit in with the rebel army. He noticed that—unlike his brother’s always-on-the-move column—these groups had never marched, always lived comfortably in houses, and he adopted their style. “I still miss him so much,” Celia wrote her father. “Raúl is the best and most affectionate person that anyone can imagine. . . . For me, for all of us, Raúl’s departure was sad.” In my favorite photograph (shot, it is thought, by Frank), Celia stands beside Fidel, but Raúl’s hand is on her shoulder. “Good officers stayed behind,” she writes, but “he departed with the best captains and the best men, chosen by him, as well as the best weapons.” She tells her father: “Their standard of living is higher than here, in the Sierra. They don’t use plastic, always [sleep in] houses and beds . . . they have telephones, cars,” she observes longingly, and, I suspect, is resolving to make a change to her own quality of life.
The authority of the 26th of July Movement guerrillas had expanded from the highlands, on the western flank of the Sierra Maestra, where Fidel was generally located, to the territories near Guantánamo, to where Raúl had established his second front “Frank País,” into the southern section of Oriente Province, where Juan Almeida’s new column held the mountain range outside Santiago. Eventually, the rebel army would grow to eight separate commands. Also in March, Che moved his camp to be closer to Fidel. This also meant that Che’s courier, the forty-two-year-old Lydia Doce, was nearby, and could take Clodomira under her wing.
Celia worried about Clodo, and thought the young woman was sixteen (when, in fact, she was 22); when she learned that Fidel was sending this young farm girl to Havana to liaise with Faustino Perez before he and Fidel began to plan a general strike scheduled for April 1958, she intervened. Celia declared Clodo too vulnerable, too young, and would stick out in Havana as a tomboy. She sent Clodo to Santiago to one of her friends (Maria Lara) with a note: “Take Clodo to a dentist and have her teeth fixed; then take her to a beauty salon.” Clodo returned to the camp to show Celia her new look before leaving for the capital. She had to cross through heavily enforced enemy lines to get to Manzanillo, but went with confidence: she walked into an army garrison and informed the chief officer that her mother was gravely ill in Manzanillo. He ordered a soldier to drive her there, and when she left the jeep, sang out, “See you later.” She took a plane for the first time in her life; found Agustín Guerra, the poet who was Celia’s father’s friend, who helped Clodo contact Faustino Perez; then went to see Flávia. Flávia told me that she had made a “general offer” to supply the rebel army with “some things” and had be
en a bit taken aback when Clodo appeared carrying a long wish list from Celia but resigned herself to filling Celia’s requests. Soon after this someone in the movement found a sympathizer who drove one of the Havana-Santiago long-distance buses. He’d agreed to haul materials, but not weapons, and constructed a false ceiling in his coach to transport Flávia’s items. She says she sent books for everyone; asthma medicine and inhalers for Che; plastic dishes, cups and saucers for Celia; yards of plastic for everyone—much loved as it kept their sleeping hammocks dry; and—not to be forgotten or left unmentioned—cans of peaches for Che, because Celia knew he loved them. Flávia thinks the bus driver left his cargo at a drop-off place somewhere along the Bayamo highway, and is under the impression that Camilo Cienfuegos would come down with a few of his men to pick it up all the parcels she sent.
IN EARLY APRIL, CELIA DEVELOPED her famous inter-mountain delivery network of mule teams. These teams, whose owners pledged absolute loyalty to her, played a big part in the Revolution’s success. With them, the rebel army could get all the essential materials up the steep mountains: guns, ammunition, gasoline, kerosene, oil, boots, uniforms, and medicine. The teams became the lifeline of the guerrilla army, and some were made up of as many as twelve mules. They transported freight as far as 100 kilometers (still within rebel army–held territory) allowing Celia, in certain instances, to provision the outer columns. Of course, now that the owners of these teams were working for her exclusively, this meant that the mules, owners, and their families had to be fed, paid, and kept happy. Along with being the guardian of all the precious items the teams hauled, she was in charge of goods in the warehouses she set up in private houses to be distributed later on, when the war heated up. Celia also used the teams to haul up furnishings she used to decorate command headquarters.
