One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution

by Nancy Stout

  Retired comandante Delio Gómez Ochoa, who became Pedro’s brother-in-law after he married Acacia, considers the decision Pedro made to have been cowardly—although he didn’t use that word. He said that Pedro’s behavior was “not good enough”—even in this unusual situation.

  Ochoa himself is something of a hero. In the first year, after victory, he led an expeditionary force against the Dominican Republic’s dictator, Trujillo. The first time I interviewed him, it was on the wide verandah of the Writers Union on 17th in the Vedado section of Havana. Filmmaker Lisette Vila, the union’s director, arranged for us to be at the front table, nearest the elaborate iron gate that marks the entrance. People appeared out of nowhere wanting to shake his hand: union members and people even came in from the street; they thought nothing of interrupting my questions to say hello to this old warrior. For the second interview, we sat in his sunny dining room in Playa, and were interrupted only once, by a messenger from Juan Almeida bearing a Christmas card.

  Ochoa reminded me that Manuel Sánchez Silveira had been an exceptional man, and an outstanding father. Speaking of history first, Ochoa pointed out that Manuel had had every chance to leave Manzanillo when he graduated from university: he could have spent his life in Havana. And, because he was so charming, Manuel would have become a rich, successful, urban physician. But Manuel had chosen instead to be a public health doctor. Dr. Sánchez had worked among Cuba’s most impoverished people, in one of the country’s most out-of-the-way places, and had spent a lifetime battling conditions that were the result of bad governments: malnutrition, addiction, and complete absence of social justice. He’d confronted these evils bravely, and had taught his children to face these circumstances head on. Since those elements are the mother of all revolutionaries (paraphrasing José Martí), Ochoa continued, winding up his explanation, by saying that he couldn’t understand how one of Manuel’s children could not choose to be near him at his death. No one who understood or admired Dr. Sánchez would have taken a vacation when they knew Manuel’s death was imminent—or that is how Ochoa felt about it.

  From Pedro’s point of view, it hadn’t been quite that easy. He had worked out a kind of compromise: he’d made an agreement with his wife before leaving Cuba that they’d fly home for the funeral if her father died. Various grandchildren filled in the rest. When the telegram arrived, Pedro didn’t give it to Chela, and she did not find out that her father was dead until they returned to Havana. Angry, she threatened to divorce Pedro. Sergio Sánchez says, “She became so intent upon divorcing him that the family intervened.” Pedro must have reasoned that if the police are so sure Celia will come to Havana, who am I to say otherwise? He probably envisioned her popping up in his apartment in the Focsa building, then the flashiest building in town. Chela, for her part, must have buried her head in the sand because she could have made telephone calls, if not to her sisters in hiding, then to the Girona family, or she could have phoned Calixto García Hospital from wherever she was vacationing in Spain. Chela simply did not, because her husband was in charge of everything. When I interviewed them in Miami in 2000, I would turn my head directly to face Chela and explicitly ask her questions, but Pedro would answer them.

  FROM JUNE 27 TO JULY 10, the rebel army held their ground against the Cuban army—but barely. Gradually, things began to change for the guerrillas; they were getting better, although they seemed to be worse. Attacks now came from two directions. Under the command of Major José Quevedo, the Cuban army now had a company of men directly below La Plata, and were going up the mountain toward Fidel’s headquarters. Numerous companies were closing in on the rebels on Che’s side of the mountain, coming from the north and east. As Quevedo and his men ascended the mountain, Fidel realized that here, at last, was a chance to pick them off, one by one. He sent for Celia on July 8 and they rendezvoused at the rebel army’s military academy in Minas del Frio. She stayed with him during the following month as he directed battles, she in a role akin to that of handmaiden to Mars. On July 10, they had reached the slopes above Quevedo’s soldiers, who’d established an enemy position at El Jigue; here, Fidel decided to establish a command post to battle Quevedo. Celia set up his headquarters on the 11th: she found the site, made sure Fidel had a table and chair, a lamp, a first-aid station, food, a safe water supply, cigars, extra pairs of glasses, etc., and was around to greet soldiers when they arrived, give them Fidel’s orders, and field their questions. That way, Fidel was free to think, to make plans for the hours ahead. It worked well, mostly because she was so adept at keeping people out of his hair. Commanders have told me that they got into the habit of speaking to her first.

  Two days later, on the 13th, she sent a message to Che: “I only had some change . . . and a one-thousand-peso note that someone took to change, and it won’t arrive [back] until Tuesday. Everything is quiet here.” The tables have turned: it is Celia who sends notes by messenger to Che, and he is the one with the telephone. “Tell Camilo to send us 20 pairs of shoes from the ones Medina purchased. He is the only one there who can give them out and do so exclusively to the troops and the messenger.” Che will call the Comandancia La Plata, which is being defended, in Fidel’s absence, by Camilo Cienfuegos, and discuss the shoes they’ll need for the upcoming battle.

  By the middle of July, the guerrillas had begun to operate from the advantage of a superior location. “One guerrilla soldier in the mountains is equivalent to ten regular soldiers,” Comandante Delio Gómez Ochoa said, trying to teach me guerrilla warfare conceptually. “Why? Because in the mountains, soldiers can’t disperse, they have to go in a single line, one after the other. One bullet that hits its target is more dangerous and can cause more disadvantage there.” In the heights above El Jigue, the guerrillas knew every inch of the mountain landscape. There, a handful of rebels began to pick off Quevedo’s men, one by one, until Fidel and his column were able to cut the company off, isolate them, and keep them from either retreating or being rescued. As the Cuban army moved other companies in—landed them on the beach and sent them up the mountain to rescue Quevedo—it, too, suffered the same fate. They were cut off. The paths up the mountain were narrow and the rebels were so well hidden that they could shoot at Batista’s soldiers from above and below the paths. On July 18, the army tried to come to Quevedo’s aid approaching from the opposite side of the mountain. A battalion composed of veteran troops made a forced drive from Estrada Palma. But this battalion was stopped by Che, who defended the Las Vegas side with several rebel army platoons that he would move very rapidly from one place to another. He’d have them strike in one spot, then another, back and forth through the valley. Che held the rebel army’s line. On the 19th, with change for the 1,000-peso note, Celia wrote: “Che: I am sending you $500 [pesos]. Last night we received the malanga [root vegetable] and it suited us perfectly. Irene is going to Manzanillo tomorrow in case you want to send something. I’m ordering cigars, pipe tobacco and other stuff for you and Fidel.” And though Che is commanding several platoons, and Batista’s soldiers are breathing down his neck, she tells him: “Olga Mompié’s husband wants to go to town for his wife’s operation. I’m sending him to consult with you first.” In the end, Che halted the Cuban army’s attempt to ascend the northwestern face of the mountain, saved the Comandancia La Plata, and presumably gave his best medical advice to Mr. Mompié.

  “FIDEL TOLD US, WE DON’T HAVE TO KILL any soldiers.” Ochoa emphasized this point as he lectured. “What we have to do is injure enemy soldiers. An enemy soldier who is injured has to be taken out of battle. They have to carry him in retreat. They have to use four men for each injured soldier, so you should ambush them from behind. They start screaming and this demoralizes the rest of their troops.” Then he asked if I knew why it is better to have five prisoners than one enemy dead. “Why? Because it generates more weapons,” he answered himself. And how? “You shoot for the legs.” They had done this as Quevedo’s soldiers climbed up the steep paths. “Of course, an injured soldier is
out of combat, and the first thing he does is leave his weapon behind. He starts screaming, ‘Don’t leave me behind!’ The others go to him, and it is then that the guerrillas come out of the trees and capture all of them.”

  Quevedo’s troops waited, trapped and isolated, for help to arrive. Planes dropped food, water, and medical supplies, but as soon as a helicopter dropped the packages, the guerrillas—hiding among trees—stole them. The army landed more replacement companies, but their fate was no better. The rebels just took more prisoners. In the end, they had hundreds.

  Quevedo explained his side of the story as we sipped tall glasses of cold water and drank tiny cups of black coffee one afternoon in 2000, in his house in the Nuevo Vedado section of Havana. Batista’s former officer wanted to make it clear that he came from a military family, that his father had been in the army, but mostly wanted to point out that when he knew he’d been defeated, his military heritage had made him reluctant to surrender. Surrender was too contrary to his upbringing. In addition, he felt he had “owed the rescue unit the right to do their part.” Therefore, he waited, cut off, without food or water. “But so did Fidel,” he softly pointed out.

  “Fidel’s strategy,” Ochoa explained, “was to wait and collect prisoners.” In the course of picking off Quevedo’s men, the rebels took over two hundred prisoners within a week. They had no place for them, so they created a holding area, called it a jail, and gave it the name Porta Malanga.

  “Fidel waited until he knew that we could hold out no longer,” Quevedo stated, and began giving statistics for how long a man can survive without food, without water. Both he and Fidel knew when the time had come for surrender. Using one of Quevedo’s captured soldiers as a messenger, Fidel had sent a letter asking for surrender. He’d also sent along some food (or maybe Celia did this) and a pair of horses. Quevedo said he ate the food “for strength to travel,” but, because he had not eaten in such a long time, had vomited. Feeling “very weak,” he had to rest “until I could get up enough strength to mount the horse and travel to make the surrender.”

  He and his aide set off. When they reached the rebel army, a battle was in progress: “Aircraft were bombing overhead,” and he had been surprised to see a woman standing beside Fidel—not because he hadn’t heard about Celia Sánchez, he assured me, because “every army officer knew about Celia Sánchez.” Rather, it had been her ease in those surroundings, and the calm she showed that dumbfounded him. He claims that a bomb fell nearby and she took no notice. He and his aide-de-camp accompanied Celia and Fidel to a cave, where they discussed the surrender. As they walked, he was struck again by how utterly unfazed she was by the noise and danger.

  Quevedo admittedly was rattled: not so much by the surrender (he says that he had resigned himself), but by the way Fidel was handling it. Fidel acted as if they were friends. This made Quevedo ashamed. He had taken law classes at the University of Havana in a special program for army officers (they worked from a reading list, with no lectures) on Saturday mornings. Each officer/student met with a teaching assistant to discuss the articles they’d read during the week. Quevedo’s teaching assistant had been Fidel Castro. Just as he was trying desperately to come to grips with surrender, Fidel was now asking him if he remembered their classes together. This is what flustered Quevedo most: “No one asks a question like that,” he snapped. He told me that his first reaction had been that Fidel was crazy. This chattiness had come at “the worst moment in my life,” when he was weak, sick, dehydrated, and emotionally devastated. But it had only been an opening, he admits, so that Fidel could take the opportunity to turn on his full personality. Quevedo had been defeated first; then humiliated by charm. But his story wasn’t over.

  After the official surrender, on the morning of July 21, 1958, the four of them, Celia, Fidel, Quevedo, and his aide, walked toward the Comandancia La Plata. Quevedo would be held prisoner there. They were taking the same path that Fidel had described to Pedro Miret, and they soon came to a place where the path forked. When Quevedo came to this part of the story, he sat back in his chair and stroked his chin, and his whole face relaxed into a wide, contented smile. Retired now, Quevedo has served Fidel’s government since the rebels came into power, primarily as military attaché for the Soviet Union. Every reason for his faithful service seemed—at least metaphorically—to spring from this moment that he was about to describe. When they came to a fork in the path, Fidel asked Quevedo if he wanted to visit his men—the soldiers the rebels had captured that were being held at Porta Malanga. And Quevedo had answered yes, he would like to do that. Fidel had sent him unguarded, accompanied only by his own aide, along one of those paths, while he and Celia took the other. Fidel let him keep his pistol, which simply follows military etiquette, but Quevedo thinks that, in this situation, it had been “a great kindness,” for it had allowed him to arrive at Porta Malanga with dignity, a commanding officer, unguarded and still armed. He had been able to stand before his men with self-respect, “like a gentleman.”

  Celia and Fidel took the path that led them home, to the Comandancia, triumphant. What they’d feared might be lost was now safe: Radio Rebelde, the hospital, their house, the various administrative buildings, and their land-mine and grenade factory had all survived intact. They didn’t stay at the Comandancia for long; Celia accompanied Fidel during negotiations that took place between Batista’s army, the rebel army, and the Red Cross on July 23 and 24, when she, Fidel, and Che went up in one of the army’s helicopters to verify the large number of prisoners they’d captured (which had grown to over 400) at Porta Malanga. The three rebel commanders witnessed the Red Cross making the exchange of prisoners in return for medicine. The Battle of El Jigue, and this exchange, is considered to be a turning point in the Revolution. They moved on. Celia soon set up another command post for Fidel, this time at González’s sawmill.

  From the sawmill command post, she describes to Che what is going on: “Fidel says that there have been some things that have been like scenes from a movie; for example, Duque [de Estrada] got lost last night with five men and ended up at one of the patrols thinking they were rebels, and the [army] soldiers thought they were soldiers. They even talked to each other; when Duque realized this, he was about to cock his machine gun when the guards jumped on him. He was in body-to-body combat downhill for more than ten minutes. He had been given up for dead [by us], but last night he appeared with a blow to the head and all mangled.” She wrote this on Monday night, July 28, at 10:30 p.m. In a few days she would take part in the Battle of Las Mercedes in the first week of August.

  The tide had turned. She continues to explain this to Che: “Fidel says that it has been a titanic effort to destroy Mosquera’s full battalion, which struggled desperately to save itself, leaving dead along the way. Today they got support from a reinforcement battalion on the outside, and cut through our siege at Providencia, fleeing in all directions. Mosquera had been evacuated by helicopter a little while before; the fighting has continued during the day.”

  She probably wrote this letter while waiting for Fidel to finish his plans. Most likely, he sat at a table with an oil lamp, smoking a cigar, while she wrote her letter to Che, a cigarette and a tiny glass or gourd of coffee at hand, holding a pen and describing their news. Then, when Fidel had decided what Che’s orders will be, she begins another paragraph. “[Fidel says:] Tell Che that we are going to surround, from the lower side, the troops that will advance from Arroyones and Las Mercedes toward Las Vegas, and, if possible, cut them from exiting in San Lorenzo. I cannot give you a full report of our losses because I am waiting [for] news from [Ramon] Paz who was located beyond Providencia, and who might have had a fierce struggle with the reinforcement. We’ve only had one dead and several wounded. We’ve taken weapons, bullets, mortars, etc.; [Batista’s commanding officer] Mosquera’s men burned many of their dead’s rifles.”

  The “one dead” was still too painful to mention by name. It had been Daniel, Rene Ramos Latour, Frank’s apostle
.

  After the Battle of Las Mercedes, which took place during the first week of August, Celia and Fidel returned to the Comandancia La Plata. Their prisoner, Quevedo, lived there for the next four months, and he told me that Fidel never spoke directly to him again, for the rest of the war. He’d send messages through Celia once or twice about military matters. She visited Quevado occasionally, and always made sure he had a box of habanos, fine export cigars, befitting an officer and a gentleman.

  26.

  The House that Celia Built

  EXCEPT FOR A FEW BREAKS to go into battle, Fidel and Celia stayed at the Comandancia from late July to November 1958. They lived in the third and final house, the only one that Celia completely designed and furnished. It is simple, quite beautiful, and you can see her hand in every detail.

  The military complex, which covered a square kilometer, was always being changed. They constructed new buildings and moved the old ones to more secure locations. The Cuban army still didn’t know the exact location of the Comandancia, yet knew, generally, where it was, and every day around 10:00 a.m., B-26s flew in from Guantánamo and dropped bombs. They’d start with a meadow that lay above the Medina family’s house, then they’d fly eastward toward Pico Turquino. The bombs never actually touched the Comandancia because planes could not fly that close to the side of the mountain, but constant air activity meant that the rebels couldn’t cook—and there were a lot of people to feed—without making sure that smoke would not escape above the trees. Ochoa says Celia counteracted this by giving out big protein pills she’d purchased from U.S. army surplus. After a while, they figured out the Cuban army’s bombing pattern and learned to live with it.