One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution

by Nancy Stout

  27. AUGUST 1958

  Mariana Grajales

  CAMILO CIENFUEGOS LEFT THE MOUNTAINS and headed west with his “Antonio Maceo” Column on August 21, and ten days later Che Guevara followed. Che’s column was fighting in the name of Ciro Redondo, one of the Granma veterans who had died in battle at Mar Verde on November 29, 1957. It was up to Camilo and Che to take the war outside the Sierra, to the plains, to meet Batista’s forces head on, and to cut the island in two—as Antonio Maceo had done in 1896—ensuring that the 26th of July would control the entire eastern side of the country. Fidel, Camilo, and Che would take on the western side. The old guard will tell you that Fidel let Raúl and Almeida (commanders of his second and third fronts in the Sierra) do whatever they liked, gave them his full trust, accepted (agreed to admire) whatever they did. During the preparations for the offensive, Camilo was at headquarters where he and Fidel talked all the time, every day; Fidel, at the same time, wrote to Che every day, because they—Che and Camilo—were his eyes and ears and anticipated everything. Now they were leaving him behind.

  Celia sent a letter to her youngest sisters, Acacia and Griselda, on August 17, carried by Lydia Doce: “I began this letter one day during the combat at Arroyones, when the troops at Las Vegas surrendered.” That would have been on June 20, four days before their father died. “I started it in a bomb shelter, things got complicated, and I couldn’t continue because there were endless things that had to be done.” It had taken Celia nearly two months to write because this meant coming to grips with her father’s death. “I haven’t written to you since April, Acacia. Only to Papa. During that time I got your letter about Papa’s illness, which paralyzed me completely.” She is forthright: “I was very cowardly and didn’t have the courage to write to you.” Then she repeats her old mantra that she used for the deaths of her Uncle Miguel, for Chibas, and for Frank: “What could I have said, what could I have done, and what consolation could I have given you if it was such a great pain for all of us?” She admits that she’d wanted him to die quickly when she thought about the pain, “even if I never saw him again, that wasn’t important anymore,” and is full of denial: “I was confused when I was told that he was better, that he was in the clinic,” then vents her anger: “You didn’t write, no one from there wrote me a line” she continues imperiously, “I still doubt all of you, although it absolutely doesn’t really matter to me what anybody thinks.” She doesn’t understand how confusing and overwhelming she can be for her younger sisters, who only wanted to emulate their superhero sister. They, too, worked for the movement. Celia barely manages to soften her tone, but finally assures them that she knew they would “behave well and do the right thing,” that her father wouldn’t have lacked anything, and mentions, “I received a very long letter from Silvia, and I was grateful for all the details. It allowed me to live through those moments that I wanted so much to know about.”

  Luis Mas Martín, editor of the Communist newspaper HOY visited the Comandancia in the middle of August (almost family, he was about to marry Inez Girona). He reported that so many people were traveling up there that the foot traffic impeded the mule trains bringing up supplies. The Comandancia was crowded with outsiders. Everybody wanted to see Fidel. Some wanted to join the war; others—farmers, Fidel’s commanders—went to La Plata to ask for things they needed; politicians came to plan the future; journalists wanted a good story. Celia channeled these emissaries much the same way she had scheduled her father’s patients. She decided who had precedence and set the parameters so they wouldn’t overwhelm Fidel. As more and more people arrived, she became alarmed at the situation, at Fidel’s vulnerability with Che, Camilo, and their well-seasoned soldiers gone. The command headquarters really wasn’t protected, and she pressed the issue. Instead of being disconcerted by the problem, Fidel became energized solving it. His commanders always like to say he leaned on history—and, evoking the memory of Mariana Grajales, he formed an all-women’s combat unit. Ricardo Martínez bluntly observes, “I, for one, didn’t like it. In those times, there was a lot of machismo, and it was not understood that women could do those things.” On the 3rd or 4th of September 1958, if Martínez recalls rightly, Fidel said: “I know what I’m about to suggest the majority of you are not going to like or agree with,” and told them to assemble the next night. Everyone gathered at the hospital. Fidel, inspired by adversity, became even more enthusiastic as some of the men argued against the unit. “There were still a few men without weapons,” Martínez explained, who “argued that they had priority.” The women spoke for themselves; most had carried out extremely dangerous actions, more so than most of the men present, so the debate came down to the weapons. Fidel ignored the men’s arguments, and a women’s unit was established.

  28. SEPTEMBER 1958

  Lydia and Clodomira

  BEFORE CHE LEFT, he told Lydia to get in touch with him as soon as he reached Las Villas. As he explained, she was going to be his primary means of communicating with Fidel at the Comandancia. He wanted her to go ahead of him to Havana, to set things up before he got there. The Office of Historical Affairs collected information about Lydia Doce and Clodomira Acosta well into the 1970s, and I have taken most of this account from OHA compiled reports.

  Soon after speaking with Che (who left the mountains on August 21), Lydia made her way to Havana. She went to the house of her brother-in-law, Carlos Parra, and was there on September 5, when 26th of July Movement action groups staged a protest against the government by stealing the Virgin of Regla statue. The black-skinned Madonna, with a white baby Jesus in her arms, is housed in one of Havana’s oldest churches. The protest was meant to humiliate the much-loathed chief of police, Estéban Ventura, who accompanied the statue in the annual festival-day parade and liked to think of himself as the Virgin’s protector. After stealing the statue, the action group hid it in a bodega located across the street from where Lydia was staying, at 3 Villalobos. That is how she heard about it. The festival took place on September 8 with a substitute statue Ventura purchased from La Nueva Venecia (a store on Neptune between Gervasio and Escobar, which is still there), although he had widely announced that the old statue had been found. But the people of Regla, who regularly prayed before the Virgin and left her offerings, knew he was lying. They, too, asked far and wide what good are police if they can’t protect our beloved Virgin of Regla?

  Lydia thought it important to find a better place to hide the statue than the bodega, although she was supposed to stay out of this sort of thing. Her position as an executive courier precluded her engaging in street activities of any kind, and much less with the Havana underground. But she helped Celia’s younger sister, Griselda, organize the removal to the statue from the bodega in broad daylight to the small, ancient church in central Havana known as the Caridad. Lydia Doce, Amado del Valle, Victor Tejedor, and Sergeant Blanco—who was actually in Batista’s army—were in the first car, with the statue; Griselda drove the second car with Ismael Suarez beside her in the passenger seat. On Pepe Antonio, the two-car caravan caught the eye of a policeman standing on a corner, so Lydia yelled: “Que paso mulatto, buena gente?” (What’s up, mulatto, you sweet guy?) to distract him. When they got to the church, a patrol car came alongside Griselda and Ismael’s car. Father Boza Masvidal (who later left Cuba) realized they were being followed and signaled them to go inside the church. Griselda posed as a Catholic whose Protestant husband wouldn’t let her wear a Caridad medal, but who nevertheless wanted to give thanks, having survived an operation. The police listened to some of this and left. Griselda was quite frightened because the lead car, carrying Lydia and the statue, was nowhere in sight. But Lydia had noticed two people doing an elaborate pantomime of taking down their license plate number and knew she was being warned that informers were around. They’d taken the statue to the Marinao section of town (to the house of Victor Tejedor, one of the people in the car), a densely inhabited pro-Batista neighborhood. At midnight, they moved the statue into the hous
e where it remained until Tejedor’s family refused to keep it any longer. Then a mechanic took it to Rancho Boyeros, where it stayed until the 26th of July Movement arranged a return.

  On Lydia’s last day in Havana, September 11, she followed departure protocol. She went to Delio Gómez Ochoa, Fidel’s representative in the capital, to report what she’d accomplished. She told him how she planned to return to the Sierra Maestra and he had her picked up and taken her to the movement’s treasurer, who gave her $50 for the trip back. At noon, she met several women (Ernestina Otero, Eneida Diaz, and Griselda Sánchez) at the 5 & 10 cent store at 23rd and 12th, where Humberto Sori Martín’s wife waited for them (probably with a letter for Sori). Ernestina Otero and Lydia went shopping; they went to El Encanto, the famous department store in central Havana, then decided to have lunch at a 5 & 10 across the street. Lydia told Ernestina that she was famished, and proceeded to order soup, an entrée, and dessert. The waitress brought everything to the table at once, including a Lolita cup made with two little custard flans side by side, topped with small scoops of ice cream—Havana’s reference to Nabokov.

  As soon as Lydia started the meal, she began to sob. Nudging her, Ernestina said, “Didn’t you say you were dying of hunger?” and she replied that “my people” in the Sierra have hardly anything to eat, “how selfish of me,” as tears ran down her cheeks. Finally, they left with Lydia’s food largely untouched, as the waitress commented, “That woman is crazy.” Ernestina took her to get her hair color changed on Concordia, then to an apartment at 27th and O, in Vedado, where Griselda and a 26th member, Reinaldo Cruz, kept her company until seven that evening. They drove her back to Carlos Parra’s house, and to Lydia’s delight, she found Clodomira Acosta sitting in the living room when she arrived. They hugged each other, caught up on news for the next couple of hours while Griselda and Reinaldo listened. Griselda left, reminding Lydia they’d meet the next morning at nine.

  At eleven, Lydia had an anxiety attack and said she couldn’t spend the night in her brother-in-law’s house. She was too afraid. She wanted to go to 451 Rita, the address of a 26th of July safe house in a nearby Juanello neighborhood. Reinaldo Cruz (who had stayed to guard her) called Gustavo Mas, who informed him that the house on Rita was off-limits. It wasn’t safe, and no one could use it, on movement orders. Finally, they settled on going to a bar called the Catacombs, on Virgen del Camino, where they could hang out for the rest of the night.

  El Joyero (The Jeweler), a well-known police informer, was assassinated that night and police started arresting anyone they could. Soon Lydia, Clodomira, Reinaldo Cruz, and Alberto Álvarez left the bar, frightened by the police activity. They went to 451 Rita just before dawn. Two boys (Onelio Dampier and Leonardo Valdes), on the run, showed up there and Lydia and the others let them in. It was a bad move; in the next hours—it was now September 12—Ventura’s men arrested José Antonio Pinon, called “Popeye,” who, under torture, gave them information including the address of this house. The police took him back to Rita, where Reinaldo Cruz recognized Popeye’s voice, opened the door, and was killed immediately by rounds from a machine gun. Everybody in the apartment was armed. They killed four policemen. Lydia got hit with a bullet in one buttock, and Clodomira alone came out unharmed. Reinaldo, Alberto, and the two boys were killed. The two women were taken to the 14th Precinct police station in Juanelo and kept there for the rest of the day.

  Lydia could barely stand, and one of the police gave her a shove where she’d received the bullet but she didn’t cry out. Infuriated, he picked up his club and hit her in the back of the neck, knocking her unconscious. Clodomira turned on the police, biting, punching, and scratching the policeman who’d hit Lydia. Both women were taken to the La Chorrera 9th Precinct, located near a fifteenth-century tower and the sea wall.

  The rest of this account was given by one of Ventura’s policemen, called Carratala, who was interviewed in his cell in La Cabaña Fortress after the January 1959 victory. Carratala stated that Ventura, chief of police, admitted that his “boys had gone a little too far” and recalled that Clodo had bitten him on the shoulder (the report states that he showed his scar to the interviewer). “She was a real beast, that one.” He then described how Lydia and Clodomira were placed in bags by 9th Precinct policemen who then filled these bags with sand, lowered them into the sea near La Chorrera and would then pull them out again. The third time Lydia was submerged she died; they gave Clodomira a coup de grâce. Then their bodies were thrown into the sea.

  This account was verified later, with only slightly different details, by one of the prisoners captured at the Bay of Pigs. A former member of the police (Calvino) said that Laurent, in charge of the precinct, had tried to get information from the women that “the others had not” by taking them in a boat offshore, where they were put in sacks into which sand was poured; and that Laurent had them dunked in the water and brought up again. Lydia, “whose eyes were almost out of their sockets,” had died right away but the “younger and tougher” one had resisted.

  When Lydia didn’t show up the next morning at the meeting spot, Griselda immediately got in touch with Monsignor Raúl del Valle, secretary to the Cardinal of Havana. He made arrangements for Griselda’s M-26 partner, Ismael Suarez, to go to the morgue, where he found Reinaldo Cruz’s body. He counted the number of bullet holes in his body—52 from the waist up—saw the bodies of the other three men, noticed that their hair was standing straight up since the bodies had been pulled by the feet down the stairs of the apartment building and the hair, already stiff with blood, dried upright. Suarez didn’t find Lydia or Clodo, so Monsignor de Valle made arrangements for Suarez to go to the cemetery. So many bodies had arrived that morning that some had already been covered, but the grave diggers were able to confirm that no one fit Lydia’s or Clodo’s description. Other reports say they had been sighted in a police car—which is possible—being given “a macabre tour of the streets,” as Che described it, to force them to give up information. Their deaths are usually dated September 17, but if you believe the prisoners, they died as early as September 13, 1958. Over the years, Celia’s staff at the Office of Historical Affairs collected evidence. A short biography of Lydia was published in 1974 as a pamphlet, which states that there are many versions of how she and Clodo were murdered and none is certain. The writers of this pamphlet were reluctant to quote—as I have done—anything from the mouths of batistianos, particularly policemen, or from a prisoner.

  29. NOVEMBER 1958

  The Triumph

  CELIA LEFT THE COMANDANCIA with Fidel and did not return there for the rest of the war. Neither seems to have regretted trading paradise for the battlefield. Fidel was about to command his final battle against Batista’s forces.

  They traveled slowly, stopping at the rebel army’s training school in Minas de Bueycito first, and on the 17th were approaching Guisa (inland and to the northeast of Pico Turquino). In that town the army maintained a significant garrison, which the rebels were ready to engage. On the 20th, Celia left Fidel to start receiving and assigning recruits, at a place called Mon Corona Farm. She had gone ahead to set up his field headquarters and chose the hamlet of Santa Barbara, just west of Guisa.

  The rebel army had grown enormously in the final months of 1958, and, at Guisa, Fidel deployed two of his all-women squadrons from the Mariana Grajales unit trained at the Comandancia. He’d be using five hundred troops, a major force for the rebel army, but they were outnumbered ten to one, and most of them were new to combat. But they had spirit. “The Battle of Guisa was one of those events that proved nothing was impossible for that small army,” Fidel said in 2000, when he commemorated the battle’s 42nd anniversary. The army’s 5,000 well-trained, well-armed soldiers were supported by air power and tanks. But Batista’s troops were low on morale.

  The Battle of Guisa, a bloody engagement and not easily won, was waged from November 20 to 30.

  THE ARMY GARRISON WAS LOCATED right on the main east-west highway.
By taking the Guisa garrison, Fidel wanted to demonstrate the vulnerability of the army’s headquarters, which was just down that highway, in Bayamo. Fidel’s troops didn’t attack the garrison directly; they ambushed the army’s reinforcements trying to reach it, and did so with small contingents posted along the route. Their most useful point of defense was a hill—not a large nor a high one—with just enough elevation to see Batista’s convoys as they came up the road. The rebel army lost and recaptured this hill many times during ten days of battle, but used it to strategic advantage; at one point, so the story goes, every fighter in one of the little rebel bands managed to fire his or her rifle in unison, and they brought down a plane. At the peak of combat, the rebels surrounded an entire enemy battalion loaded into fourteen trucks and protected by two light tanks, simply by attacking from every direction.

  “We have a strong line of defense between Bayamo and Guisa,” Fidel wrote to Ricardo Martínez (a letter he treasures) who had stayed at the Comandancia. “It’s like Jiguani, but at the doors of Bayamo. Here, our fight is against tanks; one has been overturned. The veterans aren’t with me,” he added, referring to former battles when Che, Guillermo García, and Crescencio Perez had been at his flank or elsewhere nearby. Now his most seasoned comrades were leading their own troops, in other parts of the country. “But the troops are behaving well. Cordolun has turned into a lion. He has opened more than 200 trenches. We have picks and shovels all over the place. The people are good. Everybody is anticipating being able to buy something, [because] in Guisa there are many goodies. An embrace for all of you, Fidel Castro.” He apparently handed the letter to Celia who closes with “A hug, Celia Sánchez.”