She also threw herself into the revolutionary spirit of communal enterprise. “I was very daring,” Lilia recalled. Though the Luceros grew up poor, their church social network and educational aspirations had caused them to identify with Cuba’s middle class. “I used to go with the students who were the sons of shoemakers … to cut sugarcane and pick coffee … We were passionate. Fidel was very charismatic. At the beginning, the masses were very enthusiastic about Fidel.”
Then, Lilia said with a sigh, “there came a time of problems for people of faith.”
Cuba’s young revolution had been idiosyncratic, allowing Baptists and many other constituencies to enjoy freedom of assembly and other rights as long as they supported the government. Increasingly hostile relations with the United States and alignment with the Soviet Union pressured the Revolution to adopt a more orthodox Communist approach.
“Churches were essentially shut down,” Maricel remembered. “On Sundays, they would hold these big Communist parades and demonstrations around our church, so we couldn’t get in.”
The Baptists had been essential to the Revolution, but the church’s strength may have threatened the state. “The thing about my church,” Lilia said, “is that we were very united. There were revolutionaries and others who did not want change, but we were all Christian, we were united regardless of how we felt politically.”
Lilia, Reynaldo, and many other teachers “were replaced … because the country was declared atheist. The government did not want us to influence students with our behaviors and attitudes.” It was painful, because Lilia “loved my students and the students loved me, very much … Teaching was my vocation.
“It’s hard to believe, maybe, but the affection we felt toward the Revolution was such that, despite what they did to us, we were still loyal to it.”
“Weren’t you disappointed in the Revolution?”
“Entiende,” she said, fixing my attention. “Understand … Oscar and so many others had just given their lives for it. I understand that there are errors. We are only human. Yes, there were many difficulties, because many people were removed from their positions. But the Revolution did not abandon us. I used to make two hundred forty pesos, and in those days that was a good salary. We lived well. They never stopped sending us our salaries, although we stayed at home … In time they found other positions for us. Not as teachers, but at a workshop dedicated to the development of teaching materials.”
And despite the disapproval of an increasingly authoritarian state, the Baptists of Oriente refused to stop witnessing for their faith. “Since I couldn’t teach for the state,” Lilia said, “I spent thirty years teaching future pastors for the church. I had to instruct them in how to talk, to express themselves properly. They were very poorly groomed and prepared. We had our problems, but Christ supported us, gave us strength.”
For a while, the Baptist church that had nurtured so many heroes was forced almost entirely underground. At last, the Soviet collapse forced Castro to make grudging gestures toward religious freedom. These days, churchgoing is usually permitted, as long as churches stay focused on individual salvation and avoid politics. Christians understand that they are disqualifying themselves from the higher rungs of any state-supervised career. Like dissidents, poor blacks, and homosexuals, many Christians feel they’re more vulnerable than other citizens in any confrontation with authority. And in Cuba, where every neighborhood has its overt and covert informers and the police presence is immanent and aggressive, authority is almost impossible to avoid.
In retirement, Lilia increased her commitment to the church, becoming president of the women’s association and director of sixty-five churches in her region. She coordinated the distribution of clothing, medicines, and educational materials donated by Stateside churches and other organizations (including the goods collected and transported by Maricel and the Feminine Tone). Lilia has traveled to Nicaragua and all over the eastern United States, escorted from city to city by brothers and sisters in the church.
Oscar’s siblings all stayed in Cuba, remaining loyal to the Revolution despite its problems and failures. But Blanquita and many other revolutionaries were irrevocably alienated by the government’s turn toward atheistic communism. The martyr’s widow protested that she and her husband and countless others had fought for a democratic Cuba, for freedom of expression and other rights being usurped by Marxist ideologues.
Neither her service in the underground nor Oscar’s secular sainthood could protect her. She was branded a “traitor to the Revolution,” a label as damning as “martyr of silence” is heroic. Blanca wasn’t imprisoned, but it was clear that she had no future in the new Cuba. In 1968, she and her new husband applied for permission to leave the country.
Blanquita was told she was free to go—but not with Oscar’s daughter.
The government set a condition. To take Maricel, Blanquita “had to have permission from all of us, from Oscar’s family,” Lilia says.
One member of the extended family, a politically connected cousin, was angry with Blanquita. That relative’s denunciations gave the government a chance to be vindictive in the name of protecting Maricel. But Oscar’s surviving brothers and sisters, all in good standing with the regime, sided with his widow.
Lilia put it simply. “Of course, we said, ‘Yes.’”
So Maricel moved to the United States, returning to Cuba—against her mother’s wishes—only in 1997.
“My mother thinks it’s a betrayal of my father’s memory to visit … She doesn’t want me to support the government by giving aid to people here,” Maricel said. “But that’s on the surface. I think below that, there are layers of her own grief.
“Every time I go, it reminds her of my father’s death. I think maybe she’s afraid something will happen to me, because of the government being the way it is. So there’s fear, there’s grief …”
Lilia offered me more Cuban coffee, brewed her special way, with sugar percolating right in the pot “so it isn’t grainy.” It was delicious, blending bitter and sweet so smoothly that I couldn’t say which was at the heart of the cup.
Herbert Pérez Concepción, professor of history at the Universidad de Oriente, had kindly invited me to his home. Pérez’s specialty is the work of Cuba’s national hero José Martí; a paper he presented at a Latin American Studies Association conference in Miami in 2000 was titled “David’s Sling: José Martí’s Strategy for Confronting the United States’ Ascent to World Power.” Pérez has a profound understanding of Martí’s nineteenth-century revolutions, but he’s also deeply versed in la lucha, the 1950s struggle against Batista. As a scholar and a santiaguero, he could tell me how a century of revolution created rebels such as Oscar Lucero.
We sat in the kitchen of Pérez’s dimly lit bungalow. The shutters were drawn against the day. A single bulb shed tired, pinkish light on last year’s calendar, still up, perhaps, for its bright image of a saint. The professor’s wife was away, and he seemed a bit depressed. He moved slowly, his big-boned frame weighed with authority.
The interview proceeded stiffly at first, and I understood Pérez’s wariness. He’d met plenty of Americans who don’t know their own history in relation to Cuba. His English was superb, my Spanish rudimentary; he was a scholar, I was a runaway journalist. Why should he take me seriously? He perked up, however, when I mentioned the Luceros. Telling tales of la lucha, he spoke with unexpected frankness about the Revolution’s factions and fakes.
For starters, he confirmed that most of the 1950s luchadores were liberals progressing toward socialism—not solid socialists, and not at all Marxist.
“They were mostly lower-middle-class and mostly white, with a large number of mulattos and some very few blacks,” he said. Blacks were underrepresented not because of racism—the movement was composed mostly of Cubans such as Oscar, who abhorred prejudice—but because “people working so hard just to survive are not as able to abandon other duties.”
Whatever their color a
nd class, “they were patriotic Cubans,” he said. “In confrontations with the United States,” they would align themselves “in keeping with their upbringing and social experience.” Like the Baptist Luceros, many were fully conscious of the iniquities U.S. corporations and the U.S. government had perpetrated in Cuba, but also felt connected to liberal U.S. ideas and organizations, from the Constitution to the civil rights movement. They understood the connection between U.S. imperialism and Cuban poverty, but they didn’t want to break off relations with the United States. They just wanted Cuba to be truly free.
“José Martí had two basic teachings,” Pérez told me. “You side with the poor, and you side with your country. So [the luchadores] were anti-imperialist, as Martí was anti-imperialist. I think George Bush hasn’t read José Martí, though he quotes Martí. He, Martí, was working for a country with a different balance of the rich and the poor. He believed you have to raise up the poor” until their basic needs are met and their power can counter that of the rich.
In April 2001, George W. Bush told the dignitaries assembled at the Summit of the Americas in Québec that Cuba was the hemisphere’s only undemocratic nation. The president expressed his hope that Cuba would soon be free, and opined, “José Martí said it best: ‘La libertad no es negociable.’” Liberty is not negotiable.
The president used the same line over and over, and Professor Péréz seemed to be referring to Bush’s similar remarks to the Organization of American States General Assembly in Fort Lauderdale on June 6, 2005. One month before the OAS assembly, Bush issued a message to the Cuban people commemorating Cuban Independence Day, May 20, the anniversary of the day the United States, having forced the Platt Amendment on the Cuban Constitution at gunpoint, released the island into a pretense of self-government. Bush saluted “the enormous courage of the Cuban people and the statesmanship of leaders such as José Martí.”
Martí would surely be disappointed by the human rights violations, the censorship, and the economic constrictions of Castro’s Cuba. But he would surely have been sickened by neocolonial Cuba’s abject servitude to U.S. interests.
In his own time, Martí was a radical revolutionary, but like Thomas Paine, he saw radicalism as the stringent application of common sense. Ser radical es ir a la raiz, Martí wrote: To be radical is to get to the root of the question. In the 1880s and ’90s, Martí lived in exile in New York, traveling all around the nation and especially to Florida to raise support for Cuban independence. He loved the entrepreneurial, improvisatory energy of U.S. culture and admired the people’s insistence on their rights. But he saw racism and economic inequality as persistent threats to democracy, and he understood that these same forces made the United States a threat to its neighbors.
Martí saw “the nature of the North American government … gradually changing its fundamental reality. Under the traditional labels of Republican and Democrat … the republic is becoming plutocratic and imperialistic.” He understood that the rich and powerful might use such foreign adventures to distract voters from domestic problems.
The title of Professor Pérez’s presentation, “David’s Sling,” is taken from Martí’s final, unfinished letter. By the time he succeeded in organizing the uprising of 1895, Martí had come to see that defeating Spain would likely be the easy part of creating an independent Cuba. “It is my duty,” he wrote, “inasmuch as I realize it and have the spirit to fulfill it, to prevent, by the independence of Cuba, the United States from spreading over the West Indies and falling, with [Cuba’s] added weight, upon other lands of Our America. All I have done up to now, and shall do hereafter, is to that end … I have lived inside the monster and know its entrails, and my weapon is only the slingshot of David.”
“Most of the leaders of the clandestine movement would have read a lot of Martí,” Pérez told me. “Martí was a symbol of the things we had to make right and the things we had to discard.”
The professor claimed Martí for the Revolution, but made clear that the revolutionary and the regime are not one and the same. “Martí was not a Marxist, but he was a bridge to the Revolution, to Marxism.”
The professor is a true believer, but he doesn’t worry too much about political correctness. Referring to his peers at the University of Havana, he noted that the History Department there is “more or less associated with the [Communist] Party, but that doesn’t mean they’re not doing good work.”
He wasn’t criticizing the Party, but educating me about very specific differences in the ways Cubans see their history and society. Santiagueros observe that Havana’s memories of the Revolution somehow tend to place Havana at the struggle’s center. Yet the years-long campaign that ended in parades through Havana’s streets was fought almost entirely in old Oriente Province. The urban war was largely a secret war; the jungle war was screened by Batista’s media blockade, which discouraged most journalists from leaving Havana. The conflict was all but invisible to newspaper and TV cameras until its final days. Consequently, for most Cubans—and for the rest of the world—the war began with triumphal images of Camilo, Che, and Fidel riding captured tanks and jeeps into Havana, and ended almost immediately with pictures of los barbudos taking up the business of government in army barracks, government ministries, and El Capitolio. Memory attached itself to the only images available. The capital was used to imagining itself at the center of Cuban life. The amazing changes emanating from the new regime’s Havana headquarters helped erase the idea that the Revolution had been born elsewhere.
Santiagueros, Pérez wanted me to understand, remember la lucha in a way not often fully appreciated from a Havana perspective. In this small town of a city, war was personal, intimate, a matter of trust.
I asked the professor about Frank País.
I’d visited the M-26-7 leader’s home, a tiny house in one of Santiago’s oldest neighborhoods. The house is a museum; visitors move from room to room, following a timeline of País’s brief life. The objects on display—schoolbooks, a poor boy’s Sunday best, photos of murdered comrades—construct a character of intense but practical piety, a young man with a teacher’s determination to better the world and a martyr’s willingness to die trying. In the last room, I saw pictures of Frank lying dead in the street on July 30, 1957, his blood flowing into the gutter. Batista’s police shot him; the entire city shut down for his funeral. I stopped to look at a photo of sorrowing faces. There was Frank’s fiancée, the Baptist santiaguera he would have married if he’d survived. She had the face of a Madonna. Her name was America.
In memoirs of the Revolution, Frank País is often referred to as inolvidable, “unforgettable.” I asked the professor what made Frank such a charismatic figure.
“People talk about his piercing eyes,” Pérez said. The professor’s brother attended clandestine meetings with País and other leaders. País led, not by dominating the discussion, but by saying only what most needed to be said. “My brother said it was the other leaders who did all the talking, but he knew País was really the leader.”
Like the Luceros, Pérez’s family took great risks to support la lucha. His sister hid top M-26 leaders in her home. “Today,” he said, “you’ll meet many people who claim to have been revolutionaries … But of militants who were actually in danger, there were only a few thousand. So some of the ‘revolutionaries’ can’t have been …”
It was clearly a sore point. The war had ended almost half a century back; too many of the real heroes were dead and gone, and too many impostors were claiming credit for their achievements. “It’s galling sometimes to see people try to outrevolutionary you,” he said. “I’m trying to be more understanding. It’s not good for anybody to carry that much anger to the grave.”
Of the struggle’s real veterans, Pérez said, “You wouldn’t find many who would agree with everything about the Revolution. They’re very independent people, but nearly all are in essential agreement with the Revolution.”
I pointed out that many revolutionaries joined the e
xodus for Miami. While some didn’t leave until the country turned toward communism, many were shocked by the execution of scores of Batista officials right after the Revolution’s triumph.
Revolutionaries who really understood the nature of the struggle, Pérez said, understood how dangerous the survivors of the old regime would be. Cuba had experienced revolutions before, only to see fragile democracies destroyed by reactionary countercoups. Batista’s torturers and mass murderers deserved to die, but more importantly, the new Cuba deserved a chance to live.
The leaders who carried out those quick trials and executions—chief among them Che Guevara and Raúl Castro—were men of a generation that had lost faith in nonviolent opposition to tyranny. Batista had twice seized the presidency by force of arms. Iran had lost its elected government to a CIA-backed coup in 1953; Guatemala in 1954. The Revolution’s resort to violence was “a different doctrine of defense,” Pérez said, “reflecting a society trying to better itself … Does the United States forget its Revolution’s banishment of the Tories?”
I asked about relations between Castro’s guerrillas and the urban underground.
Sierra y llano, the professor said, with something like a sigh. “The mountains and the plain.”
The guerrillas in the mountains, fighting to stay alive, learning how to soldier by paying for lessons in blood, practicing ruthless discipline, their leadership increasingly dominated by the Communist hard men, Raúl and Che.
The conspirators in the cities of the plain, hiding in plain sight, smuggling guns and money, practicing sabotage and assassination, distributing leaflets, plotting coups. Their leaders and fighters are mostly young, democratic, and Christian idealists, but the men of the llano also include wannabes and informers, as well as politicians who would rather make deals than fight.
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