One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution

by Nancy Stout

  2. JANUARY 6, 1956

  Planning the Landing

  ON ONE OF THE LAST DAYS OF 1955, following Fidel’s orders, four men drove south from Manzanillo to meet Celia and have her show them landing points along the coast. They followed the old coastal highway from Manzanillo to Campechuela, then continued south on a road branching inland and across the southwestern peninsula to Pilón. This last section was not a highway, it was more like a network of farm roads for trucks and equipment, chiefly connecting sugar mills but also used by the public. Over considerable stretches the road was too narrow for vehicles to pass, so drivers would stop at each plantation and phone the plantation ahead to see whether the road was clear, and wait if it wasn’t. The sixty miles would have taken three or four hours; had it been hurricane season the road would have been even slower, or simply impassable. The only other way to get from Manzanillo to Pilón was by a coastal ferry that ran just a couple times a week—too long a wait between arrival and departure on the south coast, and the police took note of the passengers. Celia’s new associates were in the government’s “armed and dangerous” category.

  Pedro Miret had been in Fidel’s original military movement. He had recruited soldiers for the 1953 attack on the Moncada and was caught by Batista’s army, tortured, and became one of the few to survive and face imprisonment on the Isle of Pines. Now he was moving back and forth between Cuba and Mexico, selecting soldiers, getting ready for Fidel’s return.

  Frank País, from Santiago, was known as an agitator, an accurate if mild characterization. He had begun his career as a student leader and had organized a militant group. Recently, between Fidel’s release from prison and travel into exile, Frank had been appointed the 26th of July Movement’s “national director of action,” a euphemistic title for the job of planning military strikes, sabotage, urban guerrilla warfare, and reprisals. He was Celia’s new boss. They knew of each other but had not yet met. Manuel Echevarria and Andres Lujan were also Fidel’s men. They were with the 26th of July Movement in Manzanillo. Echevarria had been sent to Pilón earlier to meet and, in a sense, vet Celia. She had passed all the tests.

  They came to Celia for her knowledge of the region. She knew the coast; they didn’t. In the period leading up to this meeting, her organizational skills had been noticed and admired by one of Fidel’s most-trusted followers, Antonio “Nico” Lopez, who had traveled to Bayamo and Manzanillo during the first days of November, visiting all the 26th of July organizations. He had met with the clandestine leaders from all the towns in the region: San Ramón, Campechuela, and others, but by November 1955, he knew that Celia’s zone was so well organized that it wasn’t necessary to check in there. Frank knew another thing that Fidel’s four delegates coming to Pilón did not: Celia Sánchez was the one person seemingly acquainted with practically everyone in this end of Cuba.

  The party arrived in Pilón around one o’clock, on a sunny day. She showed them coves, inlets, and beaches. But first, right after giving the visitors lunch, she spoke privately with Frank under the canopy of the big mango tree over the patio. It was the first time they had met face to face, and this meeting only enhanced the esteem in which they held each other.

  The group left the house around three o’clock and boarded a motorboat Celia had arranged to borrow from the sugar mill. They traveled close to shore, first going east to El Macho, Celia’s primary recommendation for a landing point. It was secluded, a secret cove that she knew well from years of fishing; from here, the guerrillas could land on the beach, follow the Macio River inland, and move straight into the mountains to the west of Turquino. Then she showed them Marea del Portillo, between El Macho and Pilón. Less wild, it even had a road away from the beach. Loaded into trucks, Fidel and his men could be in secluded mountain areas in a matter of minutes. This part of the coast was miles from the Rural Guard in either direction, as well as close to the mountains. As they traveled westward, she showed them other good landing spots, past Pilón in the general direction of the large port, Niquero, close to the tip of the peninsula that was Oriente Province’s western extreme.

  They got back at dark, wet from a storm that had blown up, and her guests changed into dry clothing from a stock of vacation clothes left behind by Celia’s brother-in-law, brother, and father. Celia served dinner that night in the Mango Bar, as they called their stone-paved dining terrace under the giant tree. She had selected a traditional but special Cuban meal: puerco ahogado (piglet, deep fried), congri (black beans cooked with tomato sauce and spices added to rice, which came to Cuba from the Congo via Haiti), tostones (green plantains cut into rounds, then crushed and deep fried), and salad, followed by guayaba con queso crema (a dessert of local white cheese accompanied by guava paste), and coffee. Her visitors slept in the mill’s guest house and had breakfast the next morning at the Sánchez house before setting off for Manzanillo. From there, Frank headed east to Santiago, while the others drove Miret west to Havana.

  Celia’s life was never the same again. Soon after that meeting, Fidel gave her the go-ahead to develop the plan for the landing, and ordered all directors of 26th of July groups in the coastal region to help her.

  After the meeting, Celia walked across the street to get her younger second cousin, Elbia Fernández, to help tidy up the mill guest house. As they were stripping off the sheets, Celia casually mentioned that Frank País had spent the night there. “No, Celia!” the younger woman told me she exclaimed. Elbia describes being covered by goose bumps: “I knew he was important and that the whole thing Celia was involved in was dangerous.” Because Celia’s house had been full of Christmas guests, family members, she had gone some days earlier to the mill manager’s house and, as Elbia recalled, “told him that she was expecting some visitors soon from Santiago and her house was full of family. She asked if she could put them in the guest house. He said, ‘Yes, of course, Celia. But you’ll have to find the Jamaican who takes care of the guest house to be sure it’s clean.’ Celia never once mentioned who those visitors were.” She and Elbia had cleaned the place themselves, brought sheets to make up the beds. I asked Elbia what she had thought of Frank País, and she replied, “He was just divine.”

  SOON AFTER THIS, Celia went to the mill and removed a set of nautical charts from the office. The mill was an easy walk from her house, and she was on friendly terms with most of the people who worked there. If they noticed her poking through the files, I get the impression that nobody thought it suspicious. At any rate, no one chose to mention it.

  The mill office would have been in something of an uproar. The harvest started sometime in early December, with cane arriving at the mill even before the machinery was in working order. After that, the Cabo Cruz mill was running day and night, from mid- or late December through February. This was the start of the season, and when a handful of executives, plus one or two chemists, would arrive from Havana. The owner of the mill, Júlio Lobo, widely referred to in Cuba as the Czar de Azúcar (Sugar Czar), showed up at the beginning of the harvest as the mill’s machinery was put in place to negotiate the sale of last season’s sugar in order to make room in the warehouses for the new crop. This little mill, the Cape Cruz, always produced more than its quota of sugar and he could sell the surplus at pure profit.

  Lobo’s executive staff circulated among his various mills throughout Cuba, and one of them, an economist named Ramiro Ortíz—described as second in command after the manager—was Celia’s boyfriend. He was a little older. They had a good relationship, and she would sometimes stay with his mother and brother when she visited Havana. Berta Llópiz, one of Celia’s closest friends, explains that Ortíz was a man she might have married (Berta called him “her last chance at a normal life”), but that Celia wasn’t in love with him, or not in love enough to put Ortíz through the double life she was starting. Yet he knew what she was up to, was supportive, and for that reason, Berta had urged her to get married. “I would tell Celia, it is because you are in the M-26 that Ramiro Ortíz can help you,
” which I took to mean “protect you.”

  We don’t know whether the charts were stored in Ramiro’s office; they probably weren’t, but Celia knew the office staff and left with the charts she wanted. Maybe she gave a plausible reason; in any case, she took the charts straightforwardly and signed them out, leaving her signature in the file. The mill didn’t have everything she needed, so she went aboard a Portuguese ship anchored in the harbor to get more. The ship came regularly to pick up sugar, and she had been on it several times with her father. She found the charts she wanted in the ship’s collection. When the officers of the Portuguese ship discovered that some of their charts were missing, they filed a report with the Cuban Coast Guard.

  The Servants of Mary took advantage of the extra harvest prosperity, and handing out toys on January 6, the Feast of Epiphany, was a tradition, so Celia was not the only one to officiate in such an event in Cuba—Mrs. Batista gave out toys in Havana. But it is safe to say that no one interpreted the custom in quite the way Celia did. She brought intensity, commitment, and a degree of detail to this project that no one had imagined. She initiated the toys project a few years after she moved to Pilón, at Christmastime in 1941 or 1942. In the beginning, her friends say, she gave children numbered tickets and told them to collect a gift at her house, but it became clear that small, poor rural children couldn’t come into town to pick up a present. Their parents were working virtually around the clock in the harvest (most for the first time in nine months) and were too busy, too exhausted, or too drunk to accompany their children to town. So she began taking a “census.” She drove to every plantation in her father’s old Ford convertible, would stop and take out her notebook, write down each child’s name, age, where he or she lived, and clothing sizes.

  This census and those toys are keys to comprehending Celia’s part in the early stages of the Revolution. Every year she raised money with exceptional dedication to purchase toys that, people point out, were of the same quality she received as a child, and purchased from the same vendors. Many in Pilón loved her for this. By 1955, Celia, with her annually updated census (which by now consisted of several hundred children’s names, addresses, sexes, ages, and sizes), was buying toys for a second generation.

  Celia’s charity, the Servants of Mary, raised money on New Year’s Eve. Traditionally, she’d go to Havana one or two days later to purchase toys to distribute on January 6, Epiphany. This photograph, showing her in Havana with a friend in 1941, may document such a trip. (Courtesy of Oficina de Asuntos Históricos)

  This means that when she walked into the mill, as several people mentioned to me, the workers “would go crazy over her,” because they recalled receiving toys themselves, and were now relying on her to give a similar gift to their children. When she went to filch the charts, it would have been no different, the workers being thrilled to see her.

  Until she could take the maps to Miret in Havana or consult with Frank in Santiago, she had to behave normally: participate in the church supper, dance, and raffle held each New Year’s Eve. To withdraw from these duties after so many years would have drawn attention.

  Several weeks prior to the annual fiesta, Celia divided the Servants of Mary committee women into teams; each visited different stores and asked the owner to donate a bag of beans, rice, vegetables, or whatever they could give. Local families also participated; they would cook, serve the food, collect money, and as Elbia said, “supervise discipline.” The beer and rum companies were donors, so everything they made that night would go to the Servants of Mary’s efforts. Men paid for dances, and, Elbia remembers, “Celia would tell us to eat a lot and dance a lot so that our partners would have to spend money.” Celia had tapped a new demographic: the people who came to the supper weren’t townspeople as much as farmers and ranchers from outside town. The event gave country people an excuse to celebrate New Year’s Eve with their friends rather than stay at home, isolated. They were landowners and had money, thus bought raffle tickets generously. A young cattle buyer with a good eye, Guillermo García, had given Celia a calf to be raffled off, and farmers were happy to purchase tickets with the dream of adding a fine piece of livestock to their herd.

  The event was always a success, and for over a decade people had admired Celia for spearheading it. The New Year’s Eve party to ring in 1956 gave perfect cover to all the subversive things she was doing.

  Traditionally, money now in hand, Celia would go to Havana or Santiago the day after the raffle to pay for her purchases, and it was then, I think, that she took the nautical charts to Miret in Havana. The bulk of the toys had been selected months in advance, so these last-minute trips were made to pay for prior orders, and most of the toys were purchased in Santiago. In Havana, she usually headed for the Hotel San Luis on Belascoain, on the block between Animas and Lagunas; it was a familiar place (her father liked its atmosphere and had taken his children there when they were young), affordable, and appropriate to her mission. The owner, Cruz Alonso, was a Spanish refugee who had created a hangout for Latin American revolutionaries and political activists living in exile.

  This year, she probably returned to Pilón, then took the bus to Santiago, and after she paid for her purchases at two or three factories, arranged to have the toys shipped to Pilón on a boat that took cargo along the coast. Arriving a day or two after New Year’s Day, Celia would likely have stayed the night with her sister Silvia in the fancy Alta Vista neighborhood. When she got home to Pilón, the Servants of Mary wrapped the toys. Elbia recalls, “I remember being on the porch of her house where the gifts were separated and wrapped, each with the name and address of the child. Many times we started this work at night and ended at dawn, tired and satisfied.”

  Once back in Pilón, she set her sights completely on January 6, when the toys were distributed. Truck drivers who worked for the mill would load all the gift-wrapped packages and distribute them to the various settlements that dotted the landscape and edged the sugar plantations. That year, due to the union-organized strike that had involved the cane-cutters, many families had no income, so Celia had purchased wholesale hundreds of pairs of shoes to give out as well—and because her census was so up to date, she could match recipients to sizes. Her colleagues grumbled. Berta Llópiz says she protested when Celia announced that they were going to be giving out shoes to the cane-cutters’ children in addition to the toys. Celia simply replied that there was “no comparison” between the plantation children and the town children, “because the town ones have shoes. The others don’t. The others use alpargatos.” When Berta told me this, we laughed at the irony, since the rope-soled shoes were what Celia herself mostly wore.

  Berta estimates that they gave out about a thousand gifts in January of 1956. She didn’t know it then, but Celia was making a special appeal to the striking cane-cutters. The trip to Santiago (to pay for and collect the toys she’d put aside) presented a perfect cover to talk with Frank and find out if Fidel had given the go-ahead to plan the landing that would kick off the revolution. Her boss, a teacher of fourth-graders, told her how she should go about it.

  A GLIMPSE OF THE TOUGHNESS in Celia—which common sense told me had to be there for her to have done what she did in the Revolutionary War—was revealed by Elbia Fernández, the younger second cousin. At times, Celia’s father was away overnight. When this happened, Celia often asked Elbia if she would stay with her. On one such night, the two cousins were talking in a bedroom at the back of the house, across the hall from the bathroom, which had a big window overlooking the patio. Suddenly, Elbia noticed a man looking in the bathroom window. She quietly let her cousin know. Celia, no change in her voice or calm demeanor, suggested that they go to the kitchen and get some coffee. As they passed the door that led to the patio, Celia said, “Open it. I am going to shoot him.” Elbia opened the door and Celia fired a pistol into the night. The peeping tom disappeared, but Celia wasn’t content. She turned to Elbia and said, “Let’s search the patio.” But the young woman refused,
frightened, so Celia went out alone to search the dark and shadowy space. When she came back inside, Elbia told her that if she wanted someone for protection, she had picked the wrong person.

  Pilón, 1952. Celia is surrounded by friends and is seated with José Larramendi in front of his house. Behind her, in the white dress, is her young second cousin, Elbia Fernandez, whom Celia affectionately called “The Teacher.” (Courtesy of Oficina de Asuntos Históricos)

  I asked Elbia whether Celia had appeared to take aim, but she answered that she had been too frightened to notice. How much of this was bravado or a bluff? I got the impression that Celia was invigorated by the encounter; she certainly didn’t fall to pieces, and drank her late-night coffee with gusto, happy that she’d followed her instincts and sent a clear warning. Evidently she kept a small pistol under her pillow, or at least Elbia thinks she must have, since it was at the ready. This seems surprisingly dangerous, and therefore uncharacteristic of Celia, but it’s clear she did keep a weapon someplace close at hand.

  Like Elbia, people around Celia were unaware of what might be going on in her mind. She was secretive to the extreme, and of course, that was part of what made her brilliant as a member of the underground.