One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution

by Nancy Stout

  IT WAS IN EARLY APRIL 1958, while Celia was away, that Fidel decided to set up a permanent headquarters. He quit moving his column through the countryside in order to fully concentrate on planning a defense strategy against the army. A summer offensive—the Cuban army’s strike against them—was fast approaching when Fidel broke ground on his new command post. He got a few soldiers to build a rough wood cabin: a place in which he could sleep and work. Ricardo Martínez, the former radio announcer, was on the construction team, although he knew nothing about building or carpentry. He followed the orders of a couple of local farmers who were helping them. Martínez says that the farmers cleverly picked trees in various parts of the mountains so no discernible clearing could be seen by army planes, and harvested enough boards to create a cabin. When Celia came back, she took one look at the building and declared herself architect. Thereafter, she exerted design control over all future structures (of which there were several), and although the men weren’t aware of it immediately, began to landscape the place as well. Martínez says she noticed that the hillside had become slippery, and that it was hard to get anywhere without falling down, so she ordered some of the guerrillas to construct handrails. She demonstrated how to do this, showed them where to make paths; then she suggested covering the paths with small, leafy branches. They were amazed that getting around could be so easy and then she proposed stairs. Doing this design work was a pleasure for Celia—for all of them, as they recall it now. She continued landscaping the new headquarters and never stopped: the final Commandancia, as the result, is a masterpiece. Even though fifty years, and many hurricanes, have whittled away at it, Fidel’s command headquarters at La Plata is a place of beauty.

  While Fidel worked on war strategies, Celia had quietly created a surprisingly large military complex, covering a square mile. First she concentrated on a field hospital, the largest building in the unit, and practically invisible as it subtly hugged the contours of a hillside, roofed in palm branches. It is camouflaged even today to those walking nearby, and completely blends into the landscape. She had proposed to the men that they construct an entrance that was a separate building—a kitchen set apart from the other structures, sort of a decoy. It links via a walkway to a dining pavilion and leads to the hospital. The objects in the foreground distract the eye from the large infirmary, surgery, and pharmacy that is pinned against the side of the mountain and nearly hidden under a thatched roof. The hospital was large by necessity: it had to accommodate rebel army wounded, plus soldiers from Batista’s army that they’d captured wounded, and function as a clinic for the local population as well. The hospital was rough but not primitive, because, thanks to the mule teams, there were standard metal hospital beds, assembled on-site, covered in white linen bedding. They named the facility Mario Munoz, for a doctor who was killed at Moncada. This hospital would be duplicated west of the La Plata River, at Habanita, and was called Pozo Azul, Blue Well.

  The next set of buildings to be constructed was quite a distance from the hospital: a civil administration building (the equivalent of a small courthouse) to deal with collecting taxes (a form of income) and judicial issues, plus a few small facilities, located farther up the mountain, under civil administrator Humberto Sori Martín. At about the same time, Radio Rebelde put up in the mountains an antenna that could be raised and lowered. The engineers often slept in Mountain House, where, starting in April 1958, the rebels transmitted radio programs.

  Celia was now architect plus supply chief, mule team jefe, and communications director. She had put herself in charge of taking care of all the messengers who were now threading their way throughout these precarious mountains to rebel headquarters, and her special couriers, a group of people she picked (mostly women, I think), began to supply intelligence reports. She’d leave the Sierra occasionally, to interview people, if she thought they had something to tell her, but mostly she communicated through little handwritten messages, carefully folded several times. “I asked her one day,” reminisces Comandante Delio Escalona (a veteran of Column 1, who would later be in charge of his own column in Pinar del Rio Province), “why do you write on these little pieces of paper instead of sending messages by word?” He thought her female messengers would be detained, her notes confiscated, and the rebel army endangered. “Escalona,” she replied, “they carry the message in a place where nobody can find it,” thereby ending the conversation. He chuckled and commented that Celia could be very mischievous.

  Celia had arrived in the mountains in mid-October 1957. By the following April, she’d become the voice of Fidel, confirms Escalona: “For us, she was like the boss.” He instantly modified this to: “For us, she was the boss; very sweet, but with a very strong temper.” A second commander, Delio Ochoa, said, “Most of us considered her to be second in command in the Sierra Maestra,” and supplied the reason: “Because Fidel never revoked her orders.” Ochoa explained that men had confidence in what she told them, because she was so in tune with Fidel’s way of thinking they couldn’t go wrong following her orders. Whereas “with Che, there was—sometimes—certain points where he and Fidel differed, and which Che would discuss even though Fidel had stated them, because Che was very analytical. But not with her.” His point: she knew what Fidel had in mind, and when she spoke, it was with understanding and authority, and he did not have to deal with what might be Che’s interpretation.

  Ochoa—Comandante Delio Gómez Ochoa is always referred to by his mother’s surname—said, “Let me give you an example.” He explained that in April 1958 Fidel had gone to Che’s camp. Celia stayed at the Comandancia and from there she ordered Ochoa to travel to the coast to meet an airplane that was going to land near Las Coloradas Beach. She handed him a written order, which she’d written on one of her small pieces of pink paper, to take all measures to ensure the plane had a safe landing and that, in his absence, Fidel’s headquarters was fully protected. “So I left some squadrons there, and put the rest of column 1 in trucks. We had to travel all day and into the night so that we could be there, waiting near the place where they expected the plane to land. We waited for about a week, then I got a note [from Celia] that the plane wasn’t coming. But I want to prove with this example, that I, myself, was second in command of the Column then, but I followed her orders, even though I knew that Fidel didn’t know about any of this.” Ochoa added that her name recognition, by that time, was national. “In Havana, people knew of Celia Sánchez, and Che. Not just Fidel.”

  May 1958: Celia is in the window of Bismark Reyna’s house in Las Vegas de Jibacoa, where she has moved in order to assist Fidel in preparations for the upcoming summer offensive. Here, she is midway between Fidel’s command headquarters and Che’s. In Las Vegas, she oversaw the digging of trenches and installed a telephone system to link Che and Fidel. (Courtesy of Oficina de Asuntos Históricos)

  By May 1958, Celia was in Las Vegas de Jibacoa—the locale thought to be the most vulnerable place in their territory—where she was midway between Fidel’s command headquarters and Che’s, overseeing trench construction. “What arrived here, for me, were picks, shovels, iron bars, a sledgehammer, files, machetes, pipes, 24 rolls of wire, and school supplies of all types in large amounts,” she wrote Fidel. She was setting up seven schools to instruct children, parents, and soldiers in and around the Las Vegas area. She tells Fidel that she is expecting there to be forty students in the morning, forty in the afternoon, and however many grown-ups show up for night classes.

  Celia celebrated her thirty-ninth birthday on May 9, away from the Comandancia, and received sad news from Fidel, written in a state of agony. The store, house, and coffee warehouse of one of his friends, Nassim Hadad, a Lebanese who immigrated to Cuba from the Dominican Republic, had been burned down by Batista’s soldiers. Nassim supported the rebel army but maintained a civil relationship with members of the Rural Guard, until they discovered that Nassim had been buying supplies for Fidel, and destroyed his property. Celia traveled, probably on horseback, to Nas
sim’s charred house at Guayabal de Naguas. Delio Ochoa arrived ahead of her, also sent by Fidel because Ochoa was nearby. He found the bodies of Nassim’s two boys in the ashes: a white boy, who was Nassim’s adopted son, and a black Jamaican boy Nassim had been raising. The black boy’s body had been tied to a post. She didn’t have to tell Fidel what had happened because Ochoa filed the report. She purchased Nassim’s herd of animals consisting of many species, and gently wrote Fidel that she’d acquired “a Noah’s Ark.”

  Either there, near the ruins, or somewhere en route back to Las Vegas, she wrote to her father. He had been moved to a special wing of Calixto García Hospital, reserved for members of the medical profession, which alerted her to the fact that he was entering the final stages of lung cancer. She gives him an honest appraisal of the war. “The reprisals are tremendous . . . we are living Malaparte’s La Piel, only our war is not on the road toward denigration.” She refers to the Italian Curzio Malaparte’s book The Skin, which describes Naples in all its deprivation at the end of the Second World War. The rebel army was using the book to anticipate the very worst that could happen. Ochoa told me they were developing their own set of rules based on ethics, a set of rules for that time when they’d be victors. La Piel was a kind of primer for how all their soldiers should not behave after victory. She writes: “Cayo Espino was bombed from two to six thirty in the afternoon.” And continues, “When the bombing was over we went [there], spent the night, took out the dead and wounded. . . . We did not find a house that had not been hit by bullets, some were like colanders . . . The small town of El Cerro was completely burned, some 32 houses. Another small neighborhood, San Juan, was burned, two kilometers from Estrada Palma. There, it was 36 houses. All of these families are coming toward the Sierra with nothing but themselves, grateful for having saved their own lives.” A young woman had come looking for a doctor: “A 17-year-old girl came to our camp in search of a doctor because she was injured. I asked her [what happened] and she told me that while she was breast-feeding, soldiers came looking for her husband, and because he is with the rebels, they shot her baby girl and the same bullet went through her breast.”

  When her father was first admitted to the hospital, Celia had sent Clodomira to see him. “What do you think of Clodo?” she asks. “You can believe the things she tells you.” Celia had discovered that Clodomira was illiterate. Clodo always kept a notebook in her breast pocket, which Celia had assumed contained their wish lists from Havana. But then she picked up Clodo’s shirt, which she saw lying somewhere, thinking she’d go over the list. Squiggles filled the pages, and Celia recalled that Clodo usually climbed a tree and sat on a limb when she wrote in her notebook. Celia talked to her, offered to send her to school, but Clodo declined. Celia promised to be silent, though Clodo continued to climb a tree whenever she made her notations. Celia wrote to her father: “She told me that if she knew how to read, she wouldn’t be so shrewd.”

  I think it very likely that Celia wrote this letter alone, perhaps accompanied by a bodyguard, while still in the vicinity of Nassim’s burned-out house. It is a letter of death and destruction. She, who avoided speaking of death, was looking it in the face. She made her way back, probably stopping in Che’s camp. Lydia Doce carried the letter to Havana and personally handed it to Celia’s father.

  THE NEXT PROJECT CELIA CARRIED OUT—miraculously—was the installation of a telephone system so Fidel could get in touch with the front from his headquarters. She began collecting equipment and managed to get cables, battery telephones, and other components needed. Ricardo Martínez, who was there, has no idea how she accomplished this. Probably, we decided, the same way she did most other projects: through her personal friends and contacts. She always had her own network of followers outside the 26th of July Movement, composed of people who wanted to help her personally. We deduced that in Las Vegas, she wasn’t too far away from the plains and her old subversive Bartolomeo Masó colleagues from her early 1950s action team and from the clandestinos who worked with her on the landing of the Granma. No sources are able to tell me. But I think I know how she did it. It seems very likely that the telephones were stolen from local sugar mills. The road that ran north of Pilón was so narrow that drivers had to stop and call ahead from one sugar mill to the next, and it’s not hard to imagine some of her friends sneaking out to “collect” a battery telephone or two, and any other “necessary” equipment she wanted. Martínez told me that she personally supervised the installation of the phone lines using 26th of July soldiers.

  The directors of the 26th of July Movement convened for a meeting in early May 1958 at El Naranjo farm in Santo Domingo. Among them is Nassim Hadad, Fidel’s friend. Seated, from the left, is Haydee Santamaria and behind her, Celia and Vilma Espín. In the center is Nassim Hadad, Fidel, and Faustino Perez. At the back, standing, are René Ramos Latour (aka Daniel, who succeeded Frank), Marcelo Fernandez, and David Salvador. (Courtesy of Oficina de Asuntos Históricos)

  Fidel wanted the telephone system to extend from La Plata to “key points” on the front lines, meaning wherever he thought Batista’s troops might be able to penetrate. At the time, the “key point” was Las Vegas, directly down the mountain from his headquarters. Although the telephone system was makeshift and the reception poor, it would prove to be immensely effective. During the offensive, these telephones connected Fidel to his spread-out forces and allowed him to reinforce his units at a moment’s notice by sending additional men into critical areas. By using the guerrilla army telephone he could effectively move equipment from one site to another. Martínez said that the rebels had only one 50-caliber machine gun. “That machine gun fought in all the different fronts. We would have it one place today, transport it to a different place tomorrow, and bring it back. Then we’d take it another place so that the enemy thought we had several.”

  In April, Fidel moved Radio Rebelde from Che’s camp to the Comandancia. Its purpose: to get coded messages to Fidel’s outlying columns. The radio’s weak signal traveled to Venezuela, then was beamed back to Cuba, much stronger. Ricardo Martínez says they never anticipated any other use, but before the offensive, on Mother’s Day (which was May 11), the engineers asked the Medina family of musicians (who lived—and still live—within the Comandancia La Plata complex) to perform, and Radio Rebelde soon had a popular following. Their style of music is known as punto cubano; singers make up their lyrics to suit the occasion. After that initial program, on Sundays Fidel would give the Medinas the war news, and the quintet did the rest, setting Rebel army news to popular music. The station was picked up and rebroadcast by Cuban stations around the region. Half the island was listening to Radio Rebelde, Martínez claims, by the end of May, when Batista’s summer offensive was supposed to start. Using their radio, the rebels, openly acknowledging that a bloody fight lay ahead, started asking for volunteer doctors and donations of medicine.

  Old soldiers and current-day historians are in agreement: the telephone was strategically important to the war’s outcome. The new, stationary command headquarters at La Plata with its communications system marked a qualitative change in the rebel army’s ability to carry out guerrilla warfare. Cuban historians go a step further: they say that Celia’s importance lies in the fact that Fidel by this point trusted her implicitly and could ask her to do things, and he would no longer worry about them. They feel confident that Fidel knew that whatever he asked her to do, she’d complete the task.

  She’d been instrumental in acquiring a permanent, strategically located headquarters (the location of which is attributed to Celia); an interlocking and complementary communications system of couriers (Celia); a telephone system (largely provided by her); warehouses of food and ammunition (ditto Celia); mule teams to supply the Comandancia (Celia); victory gardens around the mountains to sustain the rebel army and their followers (Celia).

  25. JUNE–JULY 1958

  The War

  CELIA WAS STILL IN LAS VEGAS when the enemy began to advance toward fr
agile, rebel-held territory. After a few days, in early June, the army had moved so close that she traveled back up the mountain to the command post for safety. There she helped Fidel contact his commanders as he sent orders to the various columns engaged in battle. Seeing how important it was to have someone at the front—Las Vegas, their most vulnerable location—he and she came to the conclusion that she’d go back. She went to Mompié, where she installed a battery telephone, and there, in Mompié, she became the person in the middle, the contact between Fidel and his captains who were fighting in the northwestern sector. Crescencio Perez and his company are one example; the old patriarch was operating close to the Las Vegas front, but mainly she went there to be closer to Che, so she could link him to Fidel.

  She was in Mompié on June 5, 1958, when Cuban air force planes, loaded with napalm-headed rockets supplied by the United States, destroyed the house of a farmer named Mario Sariol, Fidel’s friend. When this happened, Fidel wrote his most-quoted resolution: “Dear Celia, When I saw rockets firing at Mario’s house, I swore to myself that the North Americans were going to pay dearly for what they are doing. When this war is over, a much wider and bigger war will commence for me: the war that I am going to wage against them. I am aware that this is my true destiny. Fidel.”

  Aware of her own destiny, Celia seemed to harden her resolve to create an archive of their war documents. Subconsciously, perhaps, she is paying tribute to her dying father who taught her how to study history, the joys of discovering and collecting primary sources, and she’d learned from him how to manage records. In short, he’d taught her all the techniques as well as the pleasures of being a good historian. She’d been making copies of Fidel’s messages for quite some time, and now began to ask the other commanders to do the same, and give copies to her. This project was by no means rubber-stamped by Fidel. Nor did it go by without discussion by the others. If anyone were to capture these documents—an altogether reasonable argument against her project—it could be disastrous; it increased the vulnerability of the rebel army, therefore it was too dangerous. Maybe it was Fidel’s letter, declaring his destiny, and she reflected to herself that she knew her own contribution. Some commanders were already sending her material. Camilo Cienfuegos asked her to send him an accordion file so he could start collecting documents from his column, and she seems to have decided that the time had come to confront Fidel. “Tell me if you’ve taken care of this,” she wrote, and handed her letter to a messenger at 2:00 p.m. Fidel answered her letter at 5:00 p.m., probably as soon as he got her message, demanding: “What is all this sermon about papers, the archive?” But he didn’t say no, and she never let Fidel’s grumbling stop her.