by Nancy Stout
Franqui had been in the Havana underground, and was sent during the war to the Sierra Maestra for safety. He was the editor of the newspaper Revolución, the organ of the 26th of July Movement, published in the first months of 1959, after they’d gained power. He was dismissed, but not for anything personal. In a media revamp, he emerged with a less favorable position, and complained about it. I did not interview Franqui before his death, but I know that Fidel rarely entertained objections—unless you’d been there at the beginning with him, at Moncada or on the Granma. Celia had given Franqui a job in the new office she’d set up, where they were seriously cataloguing the Sierra Maestra material. The office was located in a bank one block from Once. Franqui worked there, for her, before he went abroad. She was so confident of his return, although he kept extending his stay, that for two years she made sure he received a salary from her office, and sent money for his child’s operation. He began publishing the material in Mexico, Spain, and in the United States. Since she’d been preparing this material for publication herself, she naturally took this personally. From what I was told, she reacted in a quiet, refusal-to-discuss, heartbroken manner.
Cuban artist Wilfredo Lam, left, and Chilean painter Roberto Matta, center, raise their glasses in a toast with Celia and others, at a 1967 reception held in the Palace of the Revolution. (Courtesy of Oficina de Asuntos Históricos)
I came upon the Franqui conundrum inadvertently, through asking one innocent question: “People are shaped by their successes, but even more so by their losses. What were Celia’s greatest disappointments?” It was one question from a very small set that I asked every person I interviewed. Better than 90 percent of the answers had been just a name: Carlos Franqui. Writer Miguel Barnet simply comments, “Franqui is a fake. He re-created material.” Later, after I’d been given access to the archives, and to original documents, I began to see what Barnet meant by this somewhat enigmatic statement. A Franqui text I’d stored in my laptop differed significantly from the text in the original document. Mostly, it was conceptual content that was altered. One obvious example is Doce, Franqui’s early book about the “twelve” survivors of the Granma when he, better than anybody else, knew there had been sixteen (immediate survivors; or twenty-one, depending on how you count them). But Franqui evidently preferred a biblical metaphor; no doubt it sold better.
Julia Sweig, Senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, in Washington, researched documents in the archives in the Oficina de Asuntos Historicos, Office of Historical Affairs, in preparation for her doctoral dissertation. She hits the nail on the head regarding Franqui: “Because of my extensive access to the OAH collections, I had the opportunity to compare many of the original documents with the version published in the 1976 and 1980 collections and with those housed in Princeton University Library’s Carlos Franqui Collection, which contains the photostatic copies of the material that Franqui photographed. I found in many cases that the published documents omit substantively significant portions of the text in the original documents, but without the standard use of ellipses to indicate where text has been left out. In other cases, the published version of the document is misdated.”
I knew Franqui’s material well before I was permitted to use the archives, and have had the luxury of making my own comparisons. Other historians have not always had that privilege, since the archives have not been readily open to scholars—and likely will remain, as is the case with most archives, closed to the general public.
Franqui’s books leave most of us, desperate as we are to figure out what went on among those crazy revolutionaries, in a state of confusion. I pointed out to Barnet that Franqui is usually quoted as saying he left Cuba because the Castro government had turned Communist. “I met Franqui in Europe. He was there two years before he defected. He was the pro-Soviet one,” Barnet said, and laughed. “Later, he told everyone the opposite.”
When I was finally given permission to use these documents, one of the first questions I asked the director of the OHA, Pedro Álvarez Tabío, was about the material Franqui had been publishing for decades. He explained that the documents were never in jeopardy, but their publication is considered a theft—which, under international copyright standards, it undoubtedly was. Tabío also showed me a carbon copy of Celia’s book, never published.
While plenty of other people defected, or at least left the country, Franqui falls into a special category: the corrosiveness of the books he produced, filled with discrepancies in narratives, usually failed to explain their shared history, and Cuba’s, fully. Most Cubans I questioned see Franqui as a manipulator of friends, and of facts. The latter is unforgivable since it concerns their own history. “He’s not a good writer. He isn’t even a good journalist. He is an opportunist,” Barnet summed up Franqui’s faults. Then he added softly, “He was a friend of Celia’s.”
Photographer Lee Lockwood, whom I consider a reliable source, told me that sometime in the early 1970s (so not quite a decade after Franqui left the country), when he was in Cuba photographing Fidel, they were in a house outside Havana, and Franqui was there, at the same location, visiting Celia. Who knows what was said at that meeting. Was it reconciliation?
The problem lay very close to her heart, Celia’s nephew, Silvia’s son Sergio, suggested. “Every night Carlos Franqui came to Once, jacket thrown over his shoulders, when he was the director of the OHA. He had the combination to the vault. He took the Sierra documents.”
“Copies of them,” I corrected. But then I wondered, do I really know that?
39. THE 1970s
The Kids, Lenin Park
IN THE ELEVENTH YEAR of the Revolution, Fidel decreed that the country would bring in its greatest sugarcane harvest ever: the goal was 10 million tons. “Fidel would cut a lot of cane,” Tony laughed, recalling those days at Once. “He would get home at whatever hour, all full of red soil, and his boots covered in mud. We didn’t have an elevator then. He’d go up the stairs, and Roberto would boil. He’d just cleaned the stairs. Now he had Fidel’s boots to clean—and he would make them beautiful. And Fidel would put the boots on and leave, and five or six hours later, it would happen all over again. Roberto would roll his eyes and blow through his teeth. This would happen day after day, over and over. It wasn’t only Fidel. It was all his personal guards who walked upstairs with him.”
Everybody cut cane. Celia cut cane. She wore her old Sierra Maestra tunic with its wide belt, heavy gloves, and wielded a machete. There are many photographs of her in the cane fields, and not one with a smile on her face. The country cut 8.5 million tons, indeed the largest harvest in Cuban history.
THE SAME YEAR, construction began on Lenin Park, and Celia was in charge of this exceptional project. Its purpose was quite explicit: to protect a huge tract of land that sits above the city’s aquifer. There are three parks that protect the aquifer, and this section would make that protection complete. They needed to expropriate the land and get rid of a highly toxic textile factory discharging dyes directly into a stream. First, Celia shut down the factory and had it removed. Lenin Park was a huge undertaking, and the costs were spread through different ministries. She got it off the ground by using her power as a member of the Central Committee. Completing it required volunteer work from many different institutes and schools. Every member of Celia’s extensive family can tell you about doing volunteer work there.
IN 1970, CELIA TURNED FIFTY, and did so with a house full of teenagers to contend with. Besides the basic four (Eugenia, Teresa, Fidelito, Tony), there were three brothers named Luis, Ezekiel, and Jesus, who were scholarship students in the Cojimar house. Fidel had invited a fourth boy, Ramon Fuentes, whom the kids called Escambray, to join this group.
“What happened to Escambray was similar to my brother and me,” Teresa explained. “During one of Fidel’s visits to that area, he met a family and they talked. Fidel liked the boy a lot, and wanted to know what he wanted to be when he grew up. Escambray told Fidel that he wanted to work in
aviation. Fidel talked to the family, as he’d talked to my family.” He was one of thousands of farm children who came to the city to study. Few returned to the countryside, even though the government was building universities everywhere outside Havana, with the assumption that children would further their education in their own provinces and become leaders.
“When Ezekiel had a fever,” says Teresa, “he came to Once to be cared for.” Ezekiel was the youngest of all the children, and Celia kept her eye on him. “He stayed there, from then on. Luis, Ez, Jesus, and Escambray would spend the weekend in the house. Or go on Saturday or Sunday. It reached a point that Celia said, don’t go back there, stay here. This is when she built an extension on the Once house.” There were extra bedrooms with bunk beds. The three brothers appealed to Celia to let their sister come to Havana. Ondina Menendez Sánchez joined them (and still lives at Once), with lots of medical problems. She’d come to the right place: she had an operation on her legs after she arrived, one of many, and she was fifteen. In addition there was a boy named Arcimedes from Ecuador who stayed there briefly, joined by his two brothers. Today Jesus and Fidelito are dead; Escambray is a career officer in the military. When I thought I was going to meet him, he had to get permission to give an interview to a foreigner, which wasn’t granted. And I never managed to speak with Ezekiel. Teresa would set the interview up, and he’d equivocate.
Celia relaxes at her favorite beach hotel in Santa Maria del Mar. She sits in an aluminum chair, tape recorder in her lap, gold watch—a gift from the women of Manzanillo in 1959—on her wrist, her ever-present cigarette between her fingers. She is smiling, no doubt at antics by the teenagers she and Fidel were bringing up, outside the frame: Eugenia, Teresa, Fidelito, and Tony. (Courtesy of Oficina de Asuntos Históricos)
Eugenia recalls: “Usually, there were around eleven on the weekends.” They’d arrive home from school, settle into their rooms, go to see Ernestina in the kitchen. “We would take coffee up to Celia on the second floor, where all the offices were, where she kept her papers. We would take coffee up to her and she would take time to ask about school. She’d ask us what Ernestina was cooking. No matter how hard she was working, when we came she’d put it aside and talk to us.” When they were there during school breaks, longer than the usual weekend, Tony says Celia would spread signs around that said things like: Don’t make any noise, I’m working. She had a folder for signs.
On Saturday, they’d all share a midday meal. “There was plenty of food, because food came from the palace. In the beginning, Celia and Fidel were on ration cards. Four of us children were on [them as well]. Carmen Vásquez went to the store to pick up the groceries. We had a normal quota. Celia took the cigarette quota for everybody. Ernestina was on the card, too.” Ernestina cooked special Oriente dishes; Celia sometimes made desserts. “Ernestina had the touch,” Tony remembers. “I learned a lot from Ernestina. She cooked very well. Fidel wanted us to learn how to cook. Anyone interested would learn from her. She knew, by feeling, how much salt to use. She would just throw things in and it was delicious.”
Celia joined everybody for the Saturday meal. She’d serve herself, as everyone did, and sit on a step that separated the kitchen from the dining area. “I, Eugenia, would sit on the step to imitate Celia. I would rush to sit on the step. The boys sat at the table. Ernestina liked to eat standing up. Celia had a little stool she used as a table. Then she’d eat from a bowl.” Just as she had done in the Sierra Maestra.
Then they’d go out. “We would go to parties at other places,” Tony described how it had been. “At friends’ houses, friends we’d made at school. In Cuba, on Saturdays, kids meet in their friends’ houses. All you need is cold water and music to party. All you really need is music. We’d dance and tell jokes every Saturday.” Then they’d come back to Once. “Most people knew we lived at Once. . . . We were treated like everyone else because people were trying to be equal.” At Once, they were filled with self-importance. “You couldn’t get bored,” Eugenia says. “There were three phones at least in the house. The white phone was the guards’. It rang when Fidel was coming over. ‘Viene la gente’ was the message. We even started picking it up. We knew to leave the room if the phone rang and she started talking to someone other than family, and we never picked up a document to read it. There were three phones: black, green, and white. We’d answer them and call to her, ‘You have someone on the green phone,’ we’d tell her.”
For supper, they’d have eggs, bread, and any leftovers. “We had small suppers. The ration only covered one meal. Celia hardly ever ate at night.” She told the girls bedtime stories—she told them about Clodomira, about her life with her family among the orchards of their farm, and about her days with Column 1 in the mountains. Celia told them about Clodo’s notebook with the squiggles, and how she’d traveled to see Flávia, and about going to the hospital with letters for her father.
At some point, Celia decided to give the children lessons in table manners: she set the table and explained the uses for each piece of flatware, and demonstrated how to place a napkin in their laps. Then she sent them to a really good restaurant, and quizzed them when they got home.
On Sunday mornings, everybody lined up at the sink. Celia made them wash their clothes. Celia taught by example and lined up, too, as did the boys. “She brought us up to be independent,” Tony reported. “When I was small, I washed my clothes. We had to. When we were very small, Ana Irma did it. By the time we were ten, we washed our own clothes. At school we’d wash our socks.” If they didn’t, he told me, they were grounded, and couldn’t go to parties, movies, parks, baseball games. Teresa added that the same thing happened if they didn’t make their beds, or acted out in some unacceptable way. When this happened, Celia would ask that the child write a letter, addressed to her, describing what he or she had done, and why. Then she’d read through, correcting spelling and grammar, before handing the letter back for the child to make a clean copy.
Celia’s family, the Sánchezes, congregated on Sunday evenings after the kids had gone back to school. “They were younger than us, by at least five years,” says Silvia’s son Sergio. Sunday supper at Celia’s had been a tradition long before Eugenia and the other children arrived. Clever, the Jamaican gardener from Pilón (now buried in the Sánchez plot in Colón Cemetery) who had tended Celia’s garden and carried around her cupcakes to sell at people’s back doors so she’d have pocket money, came early on these Sundays to see the adopted children and stayed to see the Sánchezes and watch TV. Celia stocked up on aguardiente and cigars, which he’d finish off completely in the course of the long day. He sat on one of the two rocking chairs she’d kept from the house in Pilón and then be joined by Miguel Ugando, Ernestina’s ex-husband, who sat in the other rocking chair. Allegedly, Ugando came to visit his son with Ernestina, Pedro, but the kids think he came to see Ernestina, although they were divorced. Miguel and Cleever spent the afternoon watching baseball on television. Late in the afternoon and early evening, the Sánchezes would arrive. Everyone got the same treatment. “She was so informal,” Raysa Bofill, Griselda’s granddaughter, recalls. “She had banquettes, but she never used them. We would eat on the floor, which was red, burnt-red tiles from the original apartment. She didn’t make changes if she didn’t need to. She didn’t have time for keeping house.”
Alicia Otazo, Flávia’s daughter, remembers going there every Sunday. “Celia had sofas. Her house had wainscoting that was polished and varnished wood, and wood on the ceiling, too, like a typical cottage. And a ceiling fan in an old style. The sofas were upholstered in vinyl. Two sofas in a corner, with a two-tiered table between them where she put her papers. . . . She would always sit on the sofa that faced out, next to the table, and there were always fresh flowers in a vase. If mariposas were in season, it would be those. The walls were painted white.”
Raysa found a couple of snapshots to show me. Everything was as described except for the banquettes, which were handsomely covered in ver
y wide, black and white vertical stripes.
Eduardo Sánchez came to Once every day. “At Once, sometimes she would say to me, ‘Stay for lunch.’ She would sit on her step and I would sit on the banquette. She would tell whoever was serving food, ‘Give him a lot. He’s big,’ and feed me pieces from her fork. ‘Here, try this,’ she would say to me.”
Eduardo began to work for Celia in 1968, and worked for her for two years before actually meeting her. Rarely do people hire someone without meeting them, and certainly not Celia, who wanted to know everything about her staff: their health, their dreams, their expectations. So that piece of information sent up an alert in my mind. Eduardo explained that one of the rebel army commanders told Celia about him. “I was from Camaguey, from the city of Ciego de Avila. I had a hair salon there.” Celia told the comandante, “Send him, we need creative people.” She directed the Council of State to send a letter requesting Eduardo’s presence in Havana.
This corresponded with a period in Cuba in which male homosexuals were being hounded and persecuted. Celia would have hated this. I went to the OHA office to see Nelsy Babiel, who was hired by Celia and is now the director of her materials in the archives. She told me that Eduardo was one of several homosexuals Celia protected by creating jobs for them. As the atmosphere surrounding them became more dangerous, she kept a watchful eye over several men in the 1970s by asking them to stop by her house every day. “It was the only way she knew how to protect them,” Nelsy said.
