One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution

by Nancy Stout

  During that week, Celia was very unwell. She would try to get up, but soon go back to bed. Eugenia saw how ill she was and was filled with remorse; she decided to postpone her wedding. “I told Fidel, and he advised me not to. He said, ‘The invitations have been sent out. What are you going to tell people? What can be the reason to postpone your wedding? The enemy can’t know that she is sick.’” (I asked if he meant the CIA, and she confirmed that it did.) “Fidel told me: You must go ahead and get married. This is the only thing I have to give you.” And he pulled a few hundred dollars from his pocket and handed it to her. Then he went in to see Celia while his bodyguard, Pepin Naranjo, followed Eugenia into the kitchen, asked her, “Where are you going to live?” Pepin soon rejoined Fidel in Celia’s room, and Eugenia pressed her ear to the door.

  Eugenia continued: “They had all been speaking softly, but I wanted to know what they were saying, and tried to hear. I couldn’t, but found out from Migdalia what happened. Celia asked Fidel why he’d given me money because she was going to give me a week at the Marazul Hotel as a wedding gift. Fidel had replied: ‘Don’t worry; she can spend it on whatever she wants.’ Then Fidel said that he wanted me to spend my honeymoon at the Hotel Riviera, and it sounded like an afterthought.”

  Sometime that week, Celia recovered a little. She was able to move around. She met with some of her friends, talked to the Nico Lopez students who got together in the back apartment schoolroom. She read, went over some papers while reclining on the living room couch. Then she had a relapse and decided to go to the hospital. She switched on a lamp that lit the balcony. This was a signal, only done when there was an emergency, alerting the guards outside that they should bring a car to the door. She walked downstairs, told them to take her to Calixto García Hospital. An x-ray was taken and read before she was transferred to the small clinic within the palace, but soon she felt well enough to return to Once. After that, a member of the family stayed in her bedroom at all times, and Celia’s sisters returned to Havana. It was during this time that Celia asked Eugenia to tell her all her wedding plans. Eugenia says that she felt miserable, but described them, and “Celia told me that she’d didn’t want to see me in a veil. I’d like you to wear your hair loose, held by some combs, and put flowers in your hair. And wear a white dress.” Then they set about finding a design that they liked, and sent for Cuco. “All this was happening within a week,” Eugenia reminded me.

  ON THE AFTERNOON OF THE WEDDING, Fidel came to tell Eugenia he couldn’t attend. He had to be somewhere at eight. “I was packing my suitcase. I cried a lot. I felt terrible. Fidel tried to console me. ‘How can you be crying now? Are you afraid of the man? You’ve been going steady for four years.’ And I said, ‘I’m crying because my godmother is so ill.’ And he told me not to worry, and to remember that the enemy cannot find out that she is ill.”

  The ceremony took place at 8:30 p.m., only a few doors away. It was photographed by Raúl Corrales, at Celia’s request. Everybody waited hoping Fidel would come, but he didn’t, so they all continued on to a city park nearby, between 8th and 10th on the Malecón, for a buffet supper arranged by Ernestina, and attended by Eugenia and Victor’s colleagues and school friends. Eugenia took her wedding bouquet and placed it at the foot of José Antonio Mella’s statue, across from the steps of the university (Eugenia’s idea, not one of Celia’s). After the reception in the park, they went, by Fidel’s arrangement, to a formal sit-down dinner, held at a diplomat’s house, where two or three more photographers were present.

  At 4:00 a.m., the couple was ready to leave. “In spite of all the attention I received,” Eugenia admits, “I was a very independent person and I had asked my boyfriend to find a hotel for us. We chose the Capri. When we finished signing our papers, which were witnessed by Ana Irma before all the people of the immediate family, Victor and I received an order from the commander in chief.” Fidel had learned about the last-minute switch to the Capri, and had their luggage removed from the Capri and sent to the Riviera. She didn’t realize that Fidel picked the Riviera because it was so much closer to Once. “I wanted to go see Celia, so she could see me in my wedding dress, but Dr. Selman said no. It would be too emotional. So we left for the Riviera. Our luggage was there waiting for us.”

  During the following week, Eugenia went to visit Celia every day. Ernestina and Ana Irma had filled her in on the wedding details. “She knew everything about the wedding. She told me that I had looked just the way she wanted, with my hair loose, with combs. She knew that Victor had worn a blue tee-shirt under his jacket. She’d liked that. . . . I couldn’t keep from crying. Celia just looked at me and said, ‘How long is it going to take for us to get the photos?’”

  On her honeymoon, Eugenia was studying for an exam and attending classes every day; she became ill. “Looking back, it was probably from tension.” And disappointment: Victor’s apartment was a basement room next to a garage. “Like a janitor’s room. Cars parked outside the door. It was horrible.” I asked if she thought Celia had known where the apartment was. Eugenia thought a moment or two and said, “Celia would have known. She knew everything.” There was no running water; Eugenia had to draw water in a pail and carry it to the apartment. Eugenia hadn’t come very far from the days of her childhood, when she’d carried water in the Sierra Maestra.

  ON JANUARY 4, 1980, Celia went to the clinic in the palace, where she died on January 11. Alicia Otazo remembers: “Two guards took her. When they were carrying her out—she was taken in a chair—she told Flávia to remember to bring her slippers. These were pink chenille slippers she’d put aside for the hospital.” During her final week there, she ordered her loyal photographer, Raúl Corrales, to take pictures of the plants in the new garden nearby. He told me that she wanted photographs of plants growing. It had been difficult, but he had done the best he could to carry out this poignant request. He’d photograph the young seedlings, spend hours developing the negatives and making prints. He did this every night that week and would take prints to her in the morning, then leave and start all over again—until she died. Celia kept busy with at least one other project during that final week. She selected marble to be installed in some of the floors at the Convention Palace, and ordered some new landscaping. That is how she died: watching plants grow, adding finishing touches to her country’s newest piece of architecture.

  ALL THE FAMILY MEMBERS were with her except the children. In Celia’s delirium, she called out the names of Flávia’s daughters and of Sergio, Silvia’s son, who was in Angola. On January 6, the doctors decreased the sedation so she could speak to the family. “We saw her for a moment. She couldn’t speak well,” Alicia says. Not everyone could fit into the room, so they went in two groups: her brothers and sisters, her cousin Miriam Manduley, Ernestina and Ana Irma, and Flávia’s daughters. “It was a Friday, and she died the following Friday.”

  A day or two later, everyone assembled at Once. Fidel had asked them to be there, Alicia says, to tell the family the truth. “He said it was his responsibility that none of us knew that she was dying of cancer. Our feelings were very strong, because no one could understand what was the matter with her. A close person is in denial. We couldn’t think that she would die.”

  SINCE THAT TIME, Fidel has pained them all by not speaking publicly about Celia after her death, keeping her memory for himself. “Fidel was a jealous widow,” Alicia remarks. “He was a possessive husband. He compartmentalized all her illness for himself. He kept the family from knowing until three days before her death.”

  THE ARCHIVES HOLD THE CONTENTS of the tiny purse Celia carried to the hospital. It is a leather envelope with a zipper, and held the essentials of her existence: two cigarette lighters, four pens (gifts of friends), a vial of pills (with label obscured), an emery board, and a slender white plastic hairbrush.

  42. JANUARY II, 1980

  The Country Is in Mourning

  ON JANUARY 11, 1980, the newspaper Juventud Rebelde printed a 12:30 p.m. edition. Its
headline: THE COUNTRY IS IN MOURNING. “At 11:50 a.m. today la compañera Celia Sánchez Manduley, member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba, Deputy to the National Assembly, and Secretary to the Council of State, passed away.”

  The Council of State had declared that flags would fly at half-mast from 4:00 p.m. of that day, the 11th, until 6:00 p.m. on January 12. The casket would be placed at the base of the José Martí monument in the Plaza of the Revolution at 8:00 p.m., the paper announced, “where workers and all people are welcome to visit. Tomorrow, at 3:00 p.m., it will be moved to the Pantheon of the Revolutionary Armed Forces.” Another headline read: “She lived for the Revolution, she lived and will live on in the Revolution.”

  The next day, January 12, 1980, Granma, the official paper of the Communist Party, printed its masthead in black ink instead of the usual red ink.

  ALL THROUGH THE NIGHT OF THE 11TH, people arrived from all parts of Cuba and filed past the casket at the foot of the Martí statue in Revolution Square. The newspaper carried a picture of a line so long that it winds in a huge oval. On the front page, along with the headline “Celia Sánchez Is Dead” is a picture of her, in her uniform, taken on Pico Turquino. “The country is in mourning. She was one of the daughters most steadfast and loyal, a tireless fighter, a heroine of the Cuban Revolution,” and telegrams, on the inside pages, were printed that had been sent by people from Manzanillo, Pinar del Rio, and “heroic Santiago.” Messages continued to be printed throughout the week, along with editorials about her and poems. One poem described her as “a violet among the grasses.” This wildflower image would be the theme of Armando Hart’s funeral oration. He called her Cuba’s most authentic native flower. He did not assign a species, but the orchid and the mariposa are usually coupled with her image.

  Partnership with a wildflower, especially the mariposa, in Cuba’s collective memory, suits her well. Brought up in the philosophy of José Martí, Celia is still the embodiment of his particular form of Cuban patriotism; and she is referred to as martíana. She was true to herself, and to her country. She was a tireless worker who toiled until the day she died, a Catholic, a revolutionary, a communist, a tenaciously loyal friend.

  HER BODY LAY IN STATE for nineteen hours while special groups traveled from Manzanillo, Santiago, and the Isle of Youth to participate in the funeral. Juventud Rebelde reported that during those nineteen hours millions of people had walked past the casket to honor “a revolutionary woman.”

  Eduardo Sánchez, the young hairdresser she’d brought to Havana, went to see her body reluctantly because “I felt it couldn’t be true. I hadn’t done her makeup or anything. I was so upset, I couldn’t eat or bathe or anything.” But he had gone, and when Celia’s sisters saw him, they’d lowered the velvet rope and asked him to stay with the family who were in an adjoining room, and with Fidel. They all sat in rocking chairs throughout the night. “When you see any man cry, it is very impressive, but to see Fidel Castro cry. . . . I was on the other side of the coffin and Fidel was facing me. He was very red, like a pomegranate. And tears flowed down both sides of his face. I saw everyone who passed: priests, beggars, night people, from every sector of the population. Military—even members of the military would embrace the coffin. They didn’t leave the plaza. The people stayed. Everything was quiet, and when the cortège left at three, it was a sea of humanity that you saw there. It was a human wave.”

  TV channels were scheduled to carry a documentary film at 2:00 p.m. of the interview Celia made with Santiago Álvarez, describing her arrest at the La Rosa bar in Campechuela, and her escape into the marabu. And funeral coverage began at 3:00 p.m.

  At 2:30, the cortège began to move from Revolution Square. The vanguard carried a huge straw wreath covered with hundreds of orchids with the words, on a satin ribbon, “For Celia from Fidel.” (In 2000 I attended a commemorative service on the 11th of January marking the 20th anniversary of her death. Old combatants carried in a huge round wreath of orchids, but the banner on the wreath read “Council of State,” which amounts to the same thing since Fidel was president, but was less intimate.) Her funeral procession was made up of five groups, and reflected the new revolutionary Cuba. In the vanguard were members of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, ministers of state, followed by chiefs of other state organizations. Next were ex-soldiers and collaborators of the rebel army, and this group contained many of her women couriers, members of the underground, men and women from Manzanillo, Campechuela, Pilón, and from the Sierra Maestra.

  The last three groups, those closest to the coffin, began with members of the rebel army—Faustino Perez was among this group. There were survivors of the Granma and of combat in the Sierra Maestra. The penultimate group was entirely political, and Jorge Risquet was in this group. It was followed by the honor guard, composed of Fidel, his brother Raúl, Juan Almeida, and Ramiro Valdes, leaders of the 26th of July Movement and the rebel army. Celia’s old friend from Media Luna and member of her Farmers’ Militia, Guillermo García, walked there, as did Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, leader of the Communist Party. The honor guard also included the former president of Cuba, Osvaldo Dorticos; the 26th of July Movement’s national director, Armando Hart; Sergio del Valle and Pedro Miret, for whom she’d stolen those maps for Fidel of the Cuban coastline; and her colleagues in the Politburo.

  The honor guard and the casket were the last to leave the square. At 3:00 p.m., the procession moved out to the wide empty streets skirting Nuevo Vedado; it went past her new garden and turned in the direction of the sea, of the archives, of Once, but stopped short of these to pass directly in front of her stained-glass workshop before entering the gates of Colón Cemetery. At 3:43 the casket was placed on the marble floor of the FAR (Forces Armadas Revolucionarios) monument in Colon Cemetery, as the “26th of July March” was played at a slow and mournful cadence. At 3:52, the body of Celia Sánchez Manduley was sealed in tomb No. 43, next to the tomb that holds Haydée Santamaria. Armando Hart began his eloquent and heartrending speech, in which he called Celia Fidel’s “alter ego”—his trusted compañera, his second self.

  EUGENIA ALSO STOOD INSIDE the monument along with members of the family, and with Fidel. They gathered around Celia’s coffin. To her amazement, she saw tears fall from Fidel’s lowered head and splash on the floor. There were no sobs, just huge tears falling to the stone floor in an outpouring of grief. She was shocked. “Nobody dared look at him.”

  Eduardo Sánchez recalls this: “The nightmare started when she died. I felt so bad that I went home and made a big thermos of coffee. I asked a friend to take me out of there. We’d visit people, and I’d ask them to replenish the coffee. I walked the Malecon, crying, and saying I didn’t want to go home. Then I drowned all that in work. I kept the storeroom at Verano better than I ever had, did my best work ever, and did it in honor of Celia.”

  IN 1982, TWO YEARS AFTER CELIA’S DEATH, Fidel contacted Dolly Gómez and Mario Giróna to ask them to design an orchid garden in her honor.

  That year, Teresa Lamoru Preval got married. “My brother and I stayed at Once after Celia’s death because we were the only unmarried ones. He got married in 1980, and I in 1982.” Fidel made all the arrangements for their two weddings, just as Celia would have done. “I got married in Ana Irma’s house. Cuco, Celia’s tailor, who made all our clothes, made my wedding dress. I had him make my daughter’s quinceanera dress.”

  After two years of living in her husband’s apartment, Eugenia asked Fidel if he would help her find a place to live. She felt that Celia would not have wanted her to live in that miserable room with no running water forever. “She wanted me to live a normal life, didn’t want to punish me. Celia solved everyone’s problems, and she would have gotten around to solving mine, too.” Fidel replied with a note. He wrote: “First thing, don’t pick a mansion. And above all, put the house in your name, not your husband’s.” But Eugenia says, “I didn’t understand it was good advice. I was still in school. My husband was wo
rking. He had to pay the rent.” So she informed Fidel of her opinion on the matter, and he didn’t budge from those conditions. Only then did Eugenia grasp that the check she got every month, part of a scholarship to continue her education, could be the basis of budgeting; she could put the lease in her own name and pay rent to the state, from her monthly student’s stipend. “My husband was very upset. He couldn’t understand it. So I would just say, ‘These are Fidel’s orders.’” She and Victor divorced not long after that, and Eugenia raised her two sons in that apartment, of which she is now the owner.

  IN 1996, FLÁVIA WENT TO MIAMI. “I woke up one night and my father was on my mind. I was reminded of the unification he taught us to practice, and that I hadn’t seen Chela for thirty-three years. Only she, Silvia, and myself were still alive then. And I decided I would go and see her. Chela was eighty and her husband eighty-four.”

  Flávia spent about a month in Miami and the trip went as well as can be expected, considering the fact that no one had changed their politics. According to Pedro, “One day she told me, ‘I am a Fidelista, a Raúlista, and an Internationalista.’ I didn’t know what to say.”

  Although Flávia enjoyed being with her sister, she saw no point in staying in Miami. What Miami had to offer was not enough. She missed Cuba. “I’ve complied with all my duties of the Revolution,” she declared. Then she tried to explain what she’d meant by this: “I am not a militant member of the party. I believe in God. I believe in the spirit of my father. And I can die and say that I was there at the beginning [of the Revolution].” Then, laughing, she added, “I will never step out of Cuba again.”