by Nancy Stout
BY THE MIDDLE OF 1956, Celia had signed up another member of the Pérez family, Ramon Pérez Montane (called Mongo), Crescencio’s brother, who owned a house, store, coffee farm, and granary near Purial de Vicana in the Sierra Maestra. His place could be approached from Niquero by going directly east via several farm and seasonal roads to the region of the Vicana River. This put him about ten miles north of Pilón as the crow flies. From her viewpoint, Mongo was ideally situated. She liked his place because its location, just inside the Sierra Maestra, provided a natural protective barrier. Plus, it was a place of business and therefore a legitimate destination. Anyone stopped by the Rural Guards had a reason to be there and could say they were purchasing coffee from Mongo’s warehouse. Mongo’s coffee trees provided a place where Fidel’s men could camp out undetected. And finally, she trusted Mongo. Celia recommended his farm as the place for Fidel’s guerrillas to assemble after they’d landed, and designated it the “point of departure” for the mountains. Mongo’s farm was called Cinco Palmas, five palm trees. For the revolutionary forces, it would become a landmark.
Celia had a particular respect for country life. The Sánchez family owned three farms covering about 40,000 acres—in the foothills above Campechuela, known as San Miguel del Chino, named after a Chinese man who owned the first store in the region. This was mostly a cattle ranch, but also planted heavily in fruit orchards. Júlio Girona, her cousin, spent a summer there in the 1930s and described how all the Sánchezes convened on the weekends with their guests, around eighteen people of all ages. After-dark entertainment lit by kerosene lamps consisted of storytelling while the very young caught fireflies, and during harvest season, they watched cane fields set on fire (a method used to facilitate the harvest) in the valley. The house was two stories with a palm-thatched roof—two houses, actually, the front house had bedrooms and a second building, of the same height, was a kitchen and dining room. All the furniture, of pine, had been made on the farm by the cowhands—beds, tables, and dressers, chairs covered in cowhide. A tin tub filled by buckets of hot water (up until then, he’d only seen this in American westerns) was used for bathing in one’s room, but the younger generation always washed en masse in the river, though the sexes were separated by a clump of apple trees—“with only the blossoms between us,” Girona notes. Mongo knew Celia’s appreciation for country furnishing and country places, and when she asked him to jeopardize his house, coffee plantation, pasture lands, and warehouses, he surely realized that she did so fully respecting his property, his livelihood, his way of life.
BY APRIL, CELIA WAS INVOLVED in something that, even after numerous conversations with her sisters and study of the liturgical calendar, I cannot fully explain. Over two days (it could have been April 2 and 3, or April 3 and 4), the Archbishop of Santiago came to Pilón on an unprecedented Holy Week visit. He served Mass, officiated at marriages and first communions, events organized in advance by the Servants of Mary. It was more than unusual that during such a busy part of the year an archbishop would elect to go to a complete backwater. True, Pilón was within his archdiocese, but its church wasn’t even operating, and no regular Mass was held. Moreover, this trip bypassed large cities like Bayamo, Manzanillo, and Holguín that were clamoring for his attention. The question thus naturally arises what prompted him to come to Pilón.
What makes the situation even stranger is that during the week of the Archbishop’s visit, huge cracks began to appear in the armor of Batista’s regime. On Tuesday, April 3, some of Batista’s professional officers who had not taken part in his coup, and who therefore questioned his means of authority, mutinied. They called themselves “Los Puros” (the Pure Ones). Their uprising was squelched immediately. If the Archbishop knew about it in advance (and I have no evidence of this, but heard of other instances where secrets were passed via the confessional), he may have been happy to get as far away as possible from Santiago and its garrison, the second-largest military installation in the country.
Whatever his motives, the Archbishop was in Pilón at the moment Los Puros tried unsuccessfully to take over. A great deal of planning had gone into the mutiny, as it had into Celia’s two-day event: 115 of Pilón’s children received their First Communion and 58 couples got married. According to several of Celia’s friends, in particular Carmen Vásquez Ocaña, whose parents were married at one of these mass ceremonies, Celia simply provided the opportunity; she telephoned local people, gave the date and place of the event, and asked whether they wanted their names on the list. Carmen, who was about fifteen when her parents got married, explained that due to the shortage of priests in the vicinity, very few couples were married. Priests came from Spain, and when they retired they went home and were not replaced. Celia adamantly thought that the Catholic Church wasn’t doing its job, and promoted these ceremonies because, as Carmen put it, people felt better about themselves if they could be married in the Church. Celia not only put people’s names on her list, she took care of the details, using her own money to purchase marriage licenses ($2 each, a significant investment for most rural couples). Ernestina had just had her baby and Celia was the cook. She wrote to Flávia’s daughters, Alicia and Elena: “I was out all day in the streets performing marriages and baptisms and in the afternoon preparing the children for First Communion and every five minutes I would come in and look at the pot on the stove.”
The Archbishop’s trip to Pilón may have had multiple motivations, but was surely more than just a coincidence. Did he want to get out of Santiago in advance of the mutiny by Los Puros? Did he come to Pilón to vet Celia? Within two weeks, the military had restructured itself. Batista’s closest supporters arrested over two hundred officers, leaving the army “cleansed” of its moderate members. The new, hard-line army presented itself in Santiago, when a group of students mounted a protest, lining the sidewalks around the courthouse during the noon break of a trial involving two students, Eduardo Sorribes and Andres Feliu. One or two cars passed, carrying members of the military who fired shots directly on the protestors; two students were killed and others wounded. The date of this attack was April 19, 1956, and marks the moment, to some people’s way of thinking, that the 26th of July Movement became a real army. It was then that Frank País decided the military had gone too far, and it was time for the movement to retaliate, as told in a stringent account by a 26th of July member who was with Frank on that day.
On April 19, students were on trial in Santiago, and, as Carlos “Nicaragua” Iglesias describes it, a few army cars drove slowly by the courthouse and fired into the crowd of protesters during a recess. In addition to the two young men killed, Carlitos Diaz Fontaine and Orlando Colas Carvajal, several were wounded and hundreds were arrested. Lawyers, court police, and the press were present and saw it all; this didn’t faze the army. Frank, seeing that the 26th of July Movement had to show fortitude, went through the city that afternoon, contacting twelve members. Nicaragua worked as a bank teller. Frank had gone to his bank, waited in line at his window, then handed Nicaragua a deposit slip with a handwritten message: “Tonight we are going out.”
They stole cars “because we didn’t own cars,” Nicaragua says, and, with four members in each, and carrying M-1 machine guns, they divided up the city so one car would meet up with another. “And we started shooting anything in uniform.” They killed three soldiers that night; Nicaragua pointed out that Frank’s decisiveness had been reassuring because, until then, Frank looked soft, talked quietly, was very smart but seemed to be a dreamer. In responding to the April 19 attack on the demonstration, he comported himself “militarily . . . and this behavior allowed older people to accept him.”
Also at about this time, Frank put Lester Rodríguez in charge of administration of Santiago’s 26th of July Movement organization, to free himself to concentrate on the coming landing. Lester was Fidel’s age, thirty, but many in the Santiago organization were older, at least in their forties: head of propaganda Gloria Cuadras, legal adviser Baulilo Castellanos, a tri
al lawyer who defended Fidel after Moncada, and treasurer María Antonia Figueroa. All were professionals and well known in Santiago. Figueroa describes herself as “a very prominent person in the community and the director of a school.” She had no trouble raising funds after Frank’s bold retaliation (“I was raising thousands of dollars”) and claims she had too much money to keep in her house or to justify easily in her bank account. She flew to Mexico and asked Fidel to appoint a new treasurer to take over her work.
While these events had been taking place, Celia, at work in Pilón, added a sophisticated intelligence source to their operations. She recruited Randol Cossío, the brother of her favorite grade-school history teacher, but also the personal pilot of Colonel Alberto del Rio Chaviano. In charge of the first regiment of Santiago, Chaviano was one of Batista’s most trusted men; he had participated in the 1952 coup and was the commanding officer behind the Moncada massacre. In June, she sent Cossío to see Frank and, starting in that month, Cossío began to keep a diary annotating all shipping activity that took place in Santiago’s harbor. He paid special attention to Coast Guard activity, as she and Frank requested, and was able to provide surveillance reports for the entire southern coastal region, from Santiago to Niquero. Months later, as the landing approached, Celia and Frank would be increasingly equipped with statistics, thanks to the seven months’ intelligence from Cossío; they were able to project the best time of day, day of the week, and even the optimum day for Fidel to return to Cuba.
5. JUNE AND OCTOBER 1956
Final Plans
ON JUNE 24 A NUMBER OF FIDEL’S MEN were arrested in Mexico. They had been there for a year, training under Alberto Bayo, a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, when the Mexican police arrested them on charges of preparing to attack another country. Fidel got most of his men released on July 3 by negotiation and by making a large payment. But he was alarmed, and rushed the purchase of the Granma, a twenty-year-old 64-foot diesel-powered cabin cruiser built to accommodate no more than twenty.
By now, Randol Cossío’s surveillance showed that navy planes’ reconnaissance was confined to a corridor about 13 miles wide, along the southern coastline between Santiago and Cabo Cruz, never flying farther off shore than this narrow route. It became clear that if Celia and Frank switched locations to a spot around the point of Cabo Cruz, between the peninsula’s tip and the active shipping lanes at Niquero, the Granma could land outside the navy’s circumscribed reconnaissance. Celia, however, saw the problem with that right away. Her region along the southern coast was still a better candidate because it had many hidden coves and shipping canals, and, most important, greater proximity to the foothills of the Sierra Maestra, leading to the heights around Turquino. The coast between Cabo Cruz and Niquero was appealingly remote as a place to land, but also far removed from the final destination. Landing where Celia recommended would permit them to make a quick flight to safety in the surrounding highlands. Her preference—the coves east of Pilón, El Macho (closest to Turquino), and Marea del Portillo—would ensure that the rebels could get into the Sierra on foot. Even from Pilón itself, with its web of shipping canals, she could load the guerrillas into a few trucks and get them into the Sierra Maestra’s foggy forests in a matter of minutes. But in Pilón, they would have the Rural Guard garrison to contend with, whereas El Macho and Marea del Portillo were far safer. The next-best place was Boca del Toro, also free of the Rural Guard’s observation, located west of Pilón. Guillermo García lived there, and his network of sympathizers could get the rebels under cover in their sheds and pastures until trucks could move them farther into the upper foothills and to Mongo’s farm.
She had a point, but Las Coloradas Beach was chosen, a very small port on Oriente’s western coast. The light at Cabo Cruz would be their landmark; then they’d travel very briefly north and land just below the powerful beam that came from the Niquero lighthouse. There was some logic to this; but rather than the twenty miles from a more eastward landing point to Mongo’s Cinco Palmas, Las Coloradas made the trek to the rebels’ first waystation a good deal longer.
Cubans traditionally compare their huge island to an alligator facing southeast, its back toward Florida, and its head and forefeet oriented toward Haiti, Jamaica, and the open Caribbean. Celia had advocated a landing on the alligator’s chest, within striking distance of the Sierra Maestra range at the shoulder and collarbones. Now the landing was to take place on the top of the alligator’s right front toes. The boat would come through the Yucatán Channel, pass south of Cuba at some distance, traveling in open waters, and reapproach the island at Cabo Cruz; sighting the beacon there, the rebels would travel up the coast only a short way, land, be met on the beaches by Celia’s operatives, and be moved out of the area in waiting trucks. Under the new plan, Celia saw that her truck drivers were going to be even more important—the greater distance from the landing point to the mountains made the transport leg a much more crucial part of the operation.
In a perfect scenario, some of the rebels would join Celia’s militants (who would don uniforms and assume weapons brought on the Granma); together, they would knock out the small military garrison at Niquero, capture more weapons, and then travel straight for the mountains through the plantation roads to Mongo’s Cinco Palmas.
Having fished off these coasts for twenty years, mostly at night, she could think through and plan for every contingency. The southwestern point of the peninsula, where they would be landing, was a triangle. It was almost uninhabited. South of Las Coloradas, the best land was planted in cane and there were some woodlots owned by rich Cubans and North Americans. When these lands ran out, the vegetation gave way to cactus and sea grapes as the terrain elevated in terraces forming the western ridges of the Sierra Maestra.
East of Las Coloradas and north to Belic were some small, poor settlements of woodcutters and colliers. They transported their goods on horseback and foot to Las Coloradas and from there ferried in motorboats up the coast to Niquero or down to Cabo Cruz. Celia went there to look around and was faced with a new group of very humble people to enlist. Little seems to be known about how she handled this. Aside from the meager income they had from their wood and charcoal sales, they subsisted on small parcels of land and by fishing. Guillermo García would not likely have visited these farmers on his trips to purchase cattle, so he was not in a position to help her, and Crescencio Pérez had no relatives in this area. She was almost certainly on her own. She went fishing, probably before the end of August, made sketches of the coastline, and had conversations with fishermen. Celia took into account the possibility that the Granma might overshoot its goal and land north of Niquero, at Media Luna or even Campechuela.
In August 1956, Frank tried to dissuade Fidel from his plan to return to Cuba within the year. He flew to Mexico to lay out his case. In his view the 26th of July Movement wasn’t ready, not in Santiago nor in the other cities where he wanted to stage uprisings. And he would surely have conveyed Celia’s misgivings about the new landing spot. The imminent return of the guerrillas was no secret in Cuba, especially for those who took Fidel’s promise literally: by the end 1956, he had vowed, he would begin the liberation of the country, or would die trying—“We will be free or we will be martyrs.”
CELIA, ALONG WITH FRANK, understood that Fidel was not going to be dissuaded or long delayed. She was confronting the difficulty her involvement in the coming fight could mean to her family—in particular for her father.
Her father had brought her up. The way she thought was instilled by him, and she admired him immensely. In 1911, having earned both his M.D. and a degree in dental surgery, he elected not to stay in Havana, although that would have been the normal choice for a young doctor with two medical degrees. He returned to Oriente Province and took his first job in Niquero, considered an outpost at the time, got married in 1913, and moved to Media Luna to assume a position as doctor for the sugar mill. From his arrival, he set himself apart from the others, ignoring the advice of Media Luna
’s “smart set” and buying a house in the working-class neighborhood of New Town, on the main highway, and only a few blocks from the sugar mill. Nobody could understand why he’d do such a thing: the mill owners certainly couldn’t fathom why he wanted to live near the workers. Although his bosses admired him, Dr. Sánchez continued to have run-ins with them for nearly three decades.
He educated Celia the way men educate a son: taught her to hunt and fish, let his heroes be her heroes, and instilled in her a love of Cuban history, which essentially is colonial and military history. She learned about Cuba’s struggle against Spain; against the United States; that Cuba had always been occupied by foreign powers; that theirs was a country where the poor and the dispossessed had been at the mercy of imperial powers. He hired tutors. When, as a small child, she produced what must have been very dusty meringues (baked on the patio, in a mud oven over ashes), he ate them, declared them fabulous. He carefully cultivated her awareness of art and literature, and personally enhanced this through his own friendships with a leading painter of the time, Carlos Enríques, and the poet Agustín Guerra. The most affirming aspect of this singular father-daughter relationship had been her work in his medical office. He had taken her into his world and began preparing her for the future, the way a more conventional father trains a son. It does not seem he gave the same opportunity to his oldest son, Manuel Enrique, possibly due to the fact that he was at school in Santiago, along with Silvia and Chela, and later went to the United States; in other words, Manuel Enrique was not around, and the youngest son, Orlando, simply did not have his sister’s aptitude. When the family discovered Celia’s interest in sewing, her father hired a woman to teach her how to make patterns.
Dr. Sánchez couldn’t manage his accounts, and left this to the women of the family. Celia graduated into the job of money manager in 1939 when her grandmother died, making him dependent on her in this way. She soon organized his life completely, including planning his occasional vacations abroad down to the last detail, writing letters to shipping lines, corresponding with hotel managers, sending telegrams to alert or confirm her father’s arrival. She even packed his suitcase, suggested what to wear in each city based on weather or some other criteria that she, sitting there in Pilón, had carefully researched, read, or heard about. She would write out notes suggesting where to go, what to see, what to shop for. While he was away, she stayed at home to run his office, advise his substitute, another doctor who took care of his patients, often a member of the Girona/Fernández family. These substitute doctors, however, weren’t also dentists, and Celia is known to have extracted a tooth on more than one occasion. Meanwhile, she had to keep the house filled with flowers, tend her garden, and, as Carmen Vásquez Ocaña remembers, did these things with absolute pleasure.