by Nancy Stout
Since the Cuban army’s best bet for finding Fidel’s headquarters was to get someone into it, there were always spies. Some visitors just showed up; others had proper clearance but weren’t who they claimed to be. Once, a so-called journalist arrived (described as a Cuban who was a U.S. air force veteran), and Fidel spotted him right away, knew he was there to spy. As soon as this person left, Fidel ordered the Comandancia “transformed.” Several people recall this incident because they actually moved a couple of buildings. But what sticks in everybody’s memory is a stand of trees they dug up and replanted on another part of the mountain. This clump of trees had always functioned as a guiding landmark, and they moved every one of those trees to another spot. The rebels were rewarded for their effort, because the next time bombers came in, they blasted the trees out of existence.
I WAS GIVEN PERMISSION TO VISIT the Comandancia in 2003, after three years’ repeated requests to the Council of State. In the interim, I kept trying to persuade prominent Cubans to speak on my behalf and did not give up, since every soldier I had interviewed from Column 1 spoke about the place in the most nostalgic manner. Architects Dolly Gómez and Mario Girona explained that it wasn’t necessarily the buildings the soldiers had been praising, it was the site, particularly the landscaping. Gómez said, “Celia was a great fan of the land. It was how she planted flowers at La Plata that you must see. That is how you will get to understand her.” When permission came, a letter arrived stating that I’d be escorted by the curator of the property, who would meet me in Manzanillo. Pedro Álvarez Tabío, director at the Council of State’s Office of Historical Affairs, inquired if I would need a mule to travel up the mountain. He explained that he’d need to book the mule in advance, as mules were not always available. I thought, if those clandestinos from Havana could walk up the side of that mountain, so could I, a New Yorker.
I had invited a friend along, and we met at the airport in Havana. By the time we left the city, the sun was setting, and it took us some time to find the right exit. We got lost on the belt road; there were absolutely no signs other than the ones that proclaimed “Victoria o Muerte”—Victory or Death. We could tell which were major roads by the intersections: people were standing by these, waiting for a lift on a bus, a truck, or a car. Eventually we found our way to Santa Clara, but it was pitch dark and raining heavily by the time we arrived, too late to get food at the hotel, El Caney, which replicates an Indian village and was one of Celia’s projects. The next day, we drove on a Soviet-era highway, with two lanes in each direction until it came to an abrupt halt: the end of the Soviet Union had materialized before us in a single lane. They came, they built, and when there was no more Soviet Union, there was no more road—an amazing image. A makeshift detour led to the old, American-built, east-west, two-lane Central Highway. By midafternoon, we were in Manzanillo.
Felix Zamora is responsible for the maintenance and well-being of the landmark. He met us in Cespedes Park that June afternoon and we made plans to meet the following day. He arrived in a jeep around 5:30 a.m. The hotel, built by the Revolution in the 1960s, is located on a steep hillside in the old Barrio d’Oro section of town and has a variety of Cuba’s native snakes—made of painted cement—artfully placed under the hotel’s raised foundation. We were soon into rice growers’ country, drove past La Rosalia, the farm that hid the marabuzaleros, and continued toward the mountains. Zamora, in his forties, is a member of the new generation that works for the Revolution (that is, the government). We picked up Erasmo Olivera, who took part in the Revolutionary War and has been designated as the Comandancia’s official guide. Soon, we were on the lower slope of Pico Caracas traveling on a road constructed by the rebel army after the 1959 victory. As we climbed upward the roadbed became deeply grooved; an ordinary car could not navigate this part of the route. At one point, the corkscrew curves became so vertical that all the passengers had to get out and walk. And then, out of the mist, from around a tight curve, a mule train appeared. Big reddish animals, whose bloodlines traced back to Celia’s mule teams. The road ran out, and the old Russian jeep (a Volga, I think, with two shift levers, one restrained by a leather belt) could go no farther; Zamora parked. We followed a rocky road for a bit then started up a so-called path. Erasmo apologized for being able to see the path and commented that it hadn’t been like this—meaning so visible—during the war. He grumbled that the path had grown too wide, was too obvious. But it seemed invisible to me, partly because I had to concentrate on each step I was taking, in places gingerly placing my weight on one wobbly rock, then another.
Starting in April 1958, Celia built a house for herself and Fidel. It was Fidel’s command headquarters and the heart and soul of the Comandancia La Plata military complex. During the war, the ledge, where they stand, was something akin to a miniature public square where Fidel issued orders to his soldiers and met visitors. In this photograph, Fidel works at a small table while Juan Almeida, standing, awaits orders. Another guerrilla, Manuel Fajardo perhaps, sits in Fidel’s willow chair and reads a newspaper. Quietly standing guard is Universo Sánchez, at the corner near Celia’s balcony, which begins beyond the open window in the side wall. Photograph by Andrew St. George. (Courtesy of Oficina de Asuntos Históricos)
Eventually, we arrived at the Medina house and sat on a porch while two members of the new generation (also musicians) sat with us as their mother made coffee. She began by grinding the roasted beans with a wooden pestle, pointing out the tree that produced the beans. At the time, I didn’t know that we’d reached the official entrance to the Comandancia. Zamora stayed there, handing my friend and myself over to Erasmo Olivera, who led us the rest of the way. It was at least another hour’s climb before we came to the open field that marks the entrance.
In 1958, by November, there were sixteen buildings. The rebels kept constructing as the war progressed. We visited the hospital first, since it was the nearest, almost invisible as it wraps around the mountainside, in various states of decay. Since my visit, several hurricanes have struck this part of Cuba. That day, the beams were strong enough that we could walk through the hospital’s rooms; marvel at the size; gaze at a few medicine bottles on cobwebby shelves. From the hospital, we began another steep climb, but suddenly I recognized stairs with banisters, saw hibiscus plants, grown leggy over all these years. The house where Celia and Fidel lived comes into view unexpectedly, and lies below the path. It is wedged against the side of the mountain. The site alone is wonderful: perched on a precipitous ledge, a simple house with a roof made of palm branches, near a gentle waterfall, like a poet’s house in an ancient Chinese painting.
During the war, the ledge was something akin to a miniature public square. It is just large enough to hold a couple of benches and a small group of people. Here Fidel would meet his visitors. He would take a table and chair out to the rock slab. Only one room is completely visible from the ledge, and only when both doors are open. After opening these, Erasmo got busy propping open windows up with sticks. That main room, which you see from the ledge, is furnished with the same furniture it had then: a table with two benches, a tall cupboard that served as a bookshelf and writing desk. There is a photograph of Fidel seated in front of this cupboard, its shelves decorated along the edges with gingham-checked paper and holding snapshots of his son. Everything about it shows a woman’s touch. The room also holds a big gasoline-fueled refrigerator with bullet holes in its door. Zamora said that the refrigerator was strafed by an airplane as mules hauled it up the mountain. Walk through this room, and you’ll come to Celia’s private room, or enclosed balcony, which is completely out of view from the ledge. The outer walls are covered by latticework—each strip of cedar sanded smooth and carefully joined together by a boat builder Celia brought from Pilón. A ladder drops to the ground and the path that leads to the waterfall. Erasmo showed me a trapdoor in the floor and lifted the lid so that we looked down into a vault where she stored the documents, the letters she collected to make a future archive. Then
he pointed to a rack on the wall that still held a set of glasses, each one thick and small, and told me that Celia used these glasses for coffee. He said that this is where she brought guests; and I noticed several nicely curved corner shelves. The view from Celia’s balcony looks directly onto the tops of palm trees growing far below on the steep side of the mountain. She could descend the ladder, step onto the path, and walk to the waterfall. Or she could climb down to enter a room directly below that is a bath house: spacious, cedar-paneled, with a tall ceiling. It felt fresh and light and clean, the wooden bucket sat on a shelf, ready to be filled or refilled. It felt as if the house’s old inhabitants had been there recently.
Fidel’s room is completely out of view. It is located in the part of the building that hugs the mountain; where windows, along one side, open into the tops of trees and sun bounces off shiny, bright-green palm fronds. Two chairs, crafted from willow branches—a big one for Fidel, a small one for Ceila—are stored here. They’d traveled wherever their masters went: on the balcony, out on the ledge, down to the waterfall. The rest of the space in this room is taken up by a big double bed.
This was the first presidential palace of a government that had not yet established itself. In the spring of 1958, when the house was built, the rebels had no way of knowing that the war would be over within a year. They thought it possible that the Sierra Maestra Free Zone would become a separate government, a virtual island cut off from the mainland, and that it might be in existence for several years, with the Comandancia La Plata as its capital and this tiny building its presidential palace. Erasmo asked if I wanted to go up to the mountain house used by Radio Rebelde, but I chose to sit by the waterfall instead. It had been their safe water supply, guarded day and night, beautiful and a lifeline.
Later in the day we returned to the Medina house and were reunited with Felix Zamora. We’d made a rapid descent, but we’d stopped at a place in the woods with a few stumps to sit on, their ritual resting place, where the two men responsible for the landmark, that is so close to the heart of Fidel, began to reminisce. Zamora commented that Fidel hadn’t been there in some time. Ten years, he calculated, looking at Erasmo, who didn’t contradict him. I saw them smile. Memories were washing up, as the two men recalled Fidel’s last visit. Finally Zamora broke the silence and declared, “Good. It’s a good thing. Whenever he comes, he gets far too emotional.” They both laughed, and with that, we got up and continued our way down the mountain.
But I knew I was missing something. “Look at the plantings,” Dolly Gómez had told me. It was the landscaping that had made the place sensational. I’d spoken with Otto Hernández, a former combatant and the official geographer at the Office of Historical Affairs, who pointed out: “During the war, while planes were bombing, you could walk into this place and be served coffee . . . Celia had her own special storage box with tobacco, cognac, wine, special food for visitors, only for visitors. But all the same, they were shocked by all these things. Planes overhead, and they were being offered a glass of wine. Celia knew it was politically important that those visitors feel the power of the installation. To see a refrigerator. To know that Fidel slept on a good bed. She was thinking about comfort all the time. She would write to Havana and ask them to send her this, and this, and this, anything to make the Comandancia comfortable; and to display that comfort.” When I spoke of orchids she’d cultivated there, Otto simply said: “It’s easy to have orchids in the mountains. But Celia had the feminine touch.”
“The whole idea of La Plata was Celia’s,” Hernández continued. “She knew the area, she knew the region . . . Celia’s father was interested in geographical issues: the land, the Indian settlers, the last Mambisas. Manuel had taught her how to love that type of life, living among trees, camping out. Manuel had loved nature. And she was very cultured. Many women become guerrillas, but only Celia knew how to make life better there. She knew the pleasure of living well, in camp, in war. Only Celia could create something like this.”
A film was shot at the Comandancia about a decade after Celia’s death. Hernández let me discover the final piece of the puzzle in this video. She had planted coleus along the long walkways. Each leaf shouted out for attention, from pink to deep purple to fire-engine red, and each plant glowed in that hot tropical light. I knew that coleus thrives well in shade, grows easily under trees, and grows quickly from cuttings. Like her soldiers in the marabu grove, planes couldn’t see these plants. They were blocked by the tree canopy. Celia had sent out a message that she planted cuttings, Hernández says, and women from all over Cuba sent them to her. There were hundreds, planted in straight rows. “It was all very military,” Hernández added, and he reminded me that she was appealing to people who knew military history, and that long lines of red flowers are in keeping with a proper military installation.
Ricardo Martínez, right, often confided in Celia. Before arriving in the mountains, he’d been a radio announcer in Havana, but was almost caught working for the 26th of July Movement underground. At the Comandancia La Plata, he was a member of small but highly successful guerrilla broadcasting team, Radio Rebelde. On the left is Luis Orlando Rodríguez, director of Radio Rebelde, and in the center, Orestes Valera, also an announcer. (Courtesy of Oficina de Asuntos Históricos)
THE FIRST HOUSE FIDEL BUILT, in early April, stood near that original clump of trees. Celia had instantly seen that it lacked even basic security and took matters into her own hands, organized the construction of house number 2, and moved Fidel’s bodyguards into the first house while the new one was being constructed. (Later, she would put members of the press in that vulnerable building.) The third house is the gem. It was constructed with the help of the boat builder from Pilón. She’d brought him in to do the job in May, and he helped her design the small building. He built it while she was overseeing the digging of trenches in Las Vegas and setting up warehouses around Mompié.
Nighttime was best for a really determined person to slip into their military area, so at night no lights were used, and no one spoke. Delio Ochoa says they got through the night “by not saying a word,” and listening to the forest around them. He and Ricardo Martínez both explained that, from the beginning, members of Column 1 spoke in very low tones even in the daytime, and only called out when there was a real calamity.
The army’s offensive finished on August 6, when Lt. Col. Fernando Neugart formally made the army’s concession: “You may have the mountains, but we are waiting for you in the valleys,” records historian Paul J. Dosal, who gives a vivid account of the meeting between Neugart and Fidel Castro. What I can add is information on the location: the two days of negotiations Dosal said took place “at Fidel’s headquarters” was not at his and Celia’s headquarters (the third house). They rarely allowed outsiders near the headquarters or needed to, because the guerrillas had the use of two farmers’ houses. Both were on the edge of the Comandancia complex, yet both were called Fidel’s headquarters. The Medina house is referred to as the first point of entrance, but there was a large house, farther west on the mountain’s slope, belonging to a rancher, known as the second point of entrance, or the Santa Claritan’s house. Most important meetings with outsiders took place at this large bungalow; the cease-fire negotiations with Neugart and the land reform laws were signed here after the war. Even after the war, Fidel protected details concerning the Comandancia La Plata from common knowledge, and only very special visitors or members of Column 1 would go there.
BETO PESANT WAS KILLED IN ACTION on August 8. He’d been at Celia’s side during the nerve-racking days as they waited for the Granma to arrive; he’d steered her home, to Manzanillo, after she escaped from La Rosa, the bar in Campechuela. Celia’s only consolation must have been that he had lived long enough to see the Cuban army retreat from the mountains.
On August 13, Fidel celebrated his thirty-second birthday, and Celia threw an elaborate surprise party for him in the intense heat and humidity of a Cuban tropical summer. On a mountain in the
middle of nowhere, she served him pieces of ice-cream cake delivered by one of the members of the 26th of July members from Manzanillo, packed in dry ice. This cake symbolizes Celia’s way of bringing spirit to a military life. Like Mariana Grajales, the mother of Antonio Maceo, who managed the field camps during Cuba’s guerrilla War of Independence, Celia was carrying on a Cuban tradition of women who went to war, and was adding her own footnotes to that history. She enjoyed doing things in style, but more than this she was making a point: the head of state, in the newly formed Capital of the Insurrection, was celebrating an official birthday, and she thought it imperative to mark the occasion suitably. It isn’t too hard to imagine the pleasure this brought Fidel.
RICARDO MARTÍNEZ PROVIDED a personal story about Celia at the Comandancia. He had been grateful to be alive and out of Havana, but nonetheless was terribly homesick for his wife and daughter. He often spoke to Celia of his longing, and had specifically lamented at not being able to see his daughter grow. One day a courier arrived on horseback with an amazing message: his child was going to be on a television program that night, Faustino Perez’s child as well. The woman messenger told him that the program started at 7:00 p.m. “I was excited and went to find Celia. She smiled, but in a way that makes me think she was behind all this. I asked her, but she wouldn’t say.” She and Fidel had a little television set in their house. “Tell Fidel that I need it,” and she told him he wouldn’t be able to get the channel featuring his daughter and he should take the TV set up to the mountain house: “Don’t worry. Take it. Go now. Get it set up there and I’m sure you’ll be able to see the show.” At seven everybody was there, and Celia was in the front row. “We all ended up crying. Even Celia. The host knew what was going on. He was from the 26th. He told my daughter and Faustino’s: ‘Give your Daddy a kiss. He’s in Miami.’”
