One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution

by Nancy Stout

  In the end, the leaders came to terms: the movement would supply Fidel with an army, but its soldiers would be selected by Frank. Frank would send the recruits to Celia for initial training; he would provide arms and uniforms; she would do the rest and get them into the mountains. Fidel’s job, for the time being, was to sit tight and wait for these new men to arrive. Once his army was restored, he could resume his hide-in-the-mountains, swoop-down-and-raid, lure-the-enemy style of warfare. Frank would continue to command the urban front.

  Arriving at this deal had taken two days of debate. Celia was the oldest person present, three months shy of thirty-eight, fully mature; perhaps even an accomplished practitioner at deception to further the cause. Loyalty, diplomacy, these were her traits, and she knew how to keep her eyes on the prize. Everything I’ve learned about her indicates that Celia was unquestioningly loyal to Frank. Despite the strong pull of Fidel’s personality, she was Frank’s partner and I’m sure she felt as he did. Yet in this debate Celia must have been careful not to contradict Fidel, who came away convinced she was on his side.

  The directors were still in the guerrilla camp on the 19th. A little after twelve noon, according to Hart, they heard a shot, from close by. Panic and fear struck. The army had found them by following the steps of Eutimio. Faustino bundled together the papers he’d been holding, to destroy them. Fear subsided into confusion as the directors and guerrilla soldiers, as a group, quickly discovered something quite different. The shot had come from inside the guerrilla camp. José Moran had shot himself in the leg. Confusion was replaced by suspicion. Was this an accident? What were they to make of this situation? The same soldier had gone AWOL before their ambush ten days earlier. What were they to conclude? That Moran is a coward, that he had shot himself in order to desert and get out of the Sierra? Che, suspicious of Moran already, now stepped into his role as a doctor. He came forward to dress Moran’s wound and observed that the bullet had passed through the muscle without touching the bone. He announced that Moran was in no real danger. Che could not say, for sure, based on the angle of the bullet, whether the shot had been an accident. Che, just days before, had stepped forward to shoot Eutimio when the others hesitated to do so, but he became circumspect here, less certain of what should come next. Traitors are shot. In war, that is the fate of deserters also. Were they to shoot everyone? Had this injury not been called into question, the course of action would have been automatic: a wounded man can’t function as a guerrilla, always on the march, so Moran would have been billeted in some farmer’s house to recuperate. Naturally, in light of the suspicion, they couldn’t keep Moran in the mountains. Thanks to Che’s tough mentality, we know they made another choice here: as guerrillas, justice may require that you shoot people, but there are situations with no perfect solution. Where was proof? Do we kill on assumption or suspicion? Are we that kind of people? Are we an army who blindly follows rules out of fear? Their actions came largely without discussion. Rather than become cold-blooded killers, they were willing to choose an uncertain fate.

  Frank País in his 26th of July uniform on Epifánio Díaz’s farm, February 17th or 18th, 1957. The photograph may have been taken by Celia. (Courtesy of Oficina de Asuntos Históricos)

  This is where Celia stepped in. She offered a morally acceptable option. She told them that she’d arrange for Moran to be treated in Manzanillo by doctors running a clandestine 26th of July clinic. She’d be putting those doctors in jeopardy, but she offered Fidel and the movement a way out; and it would come back to haunt her in days to come. By doing so, she had taken on—for herself and for Rafael Sierra, Manzanillo’s July 26th director—the obligation to absorb Moran into their organization. It was a huge risk, and caused problems later. But it was a defining moment in the Revolution. As a measure of how antagonistic the atmosphere in the camp was that day, Guerra Matos told me, he refused to transport Moran to Manzanillo. (Yet, as a member of the Manzanillo movement, he’d have to work with Moran there.) In the end, Nicaragua drove Moran to the underground clinic.

  HERBERT MATTHEWS STAYED AN EXTRA DAY in Cuba to interview José Antonio Echevarria. That extension of his visit was somewhat in defiance of Matthews’s editor, who’d urged him to get out of Cuba as quickly as possible. He and Nancie had gone to dinner at Mary and Ernest Hemingway’s house outside the city on Monday night, near the village of San Francisco de Paula. The next morning, the 19th, as he got ready to leave for the airport, Matthews would note, he was filled with anxiety. He was afraid he’d be searched, that Batista’s officials would take one look at his passport, which clearly stated he was a journalist, and go through his luggage. If this happened, they’d confiscate his notes. Hearing him express this concern, Nancie said, “Let me carry them.” She slipped some pages of notes plus the little black book with Fidel’s signature inside her girdle. When their plane was well outside Cuba’s airspace, she went into the lavatory and took out the notebook. Matthews began working on his story while still on the plane.

  IN THE MOUNTAINS, Celia spent the night in Epifánio’s house. By then, the guerrillas had moved to a coffee grove, closer to the farmhouse. Guerra Matos showed up on the morning of the 20th to drive Celia back to Manzanillo. There, she set her sights on building the new army for Fidel. But, before leaving the mountains, she’d written a thank-you note to Ruby Hart Phillips, the Times stringer, and got Fidel to sign it. She sent it in a hand-woven basket lined with moss and filled with orchids.

  14. FEBRUARY–MARCH 1956

  The Marabuzal

  WHEN FRANK RETURNED TO SANTIAGO—after the Matthews interview and the meeting of the movement’s directors—he informed his cells that he’d be selecting combatants to fight with Fidel in the mountains. Celia did the same, contacting operators in all the cities along the coast. Frank’s guidelines were extremely clear: priority was going to members of the underground who had been detected, were in hiding, and no longer effective for clandestine work. Yet the recruits had to be capable soldiers, strong enough mentally and physically to withstand the rigors of guerrilla warfare. They had to have been “proven in action,” to have a history of carrying out dangerous missions for the movement. And finally, Frank wanted only those men who were politically sophisticated.

  Celia, in Manzanillo, expected the new men to arrive in twos and threes, and planned to hide them in private houses until she hit upon another solution. In the end, she devised a way to base her operation in a single location, with an imaginative approach much admired by the old revolutionaries. Celia’s induction center operated throughout the war and was never discovered. Even after the Revolution, it remained something of a mystery.

  Just days after her own return from the mountains, during the week of February 20, 1957, she was in the process of moving from one house to another, with help from her guardian angel, Hector Llópiz. Hector decided to pay a quick visit, during the move, to his brother, Rene, who worked only a few kilometers outside Manzanillo. He took Celia along, perhaps to give her some time out of hiding, or maybe because the indirect route made moving her less suspicious.

  They headed for Finca Rosalia, the rice plantation Rene served as manager. Hector and Celia drove out of town via the main highway, going east toward Bayamo. The land in the region is high and flat, with a view of the foothills and the distant mountains. They turned onto a county road, then into a private, perfectly straight driveway that led up to the farmhouse. The house was large and square, in full view of the highway.

  Standing amid the vast openness of the rice fields, Celia took in her surroundings. Among the people of Manzanillo, the owners of these rice farms were well respected. For one thing, they were rich: these outbuildings sheltered expensive machinery, large U.S.-made tractors and other farm equipment. Celia was familiar with the properties in this area (often referred to as plantations), and the one she was visiting that day with Hector was similar to that owned by her brother-in-law, Pedro Alvarez. This farm’s owner, like Pedro and his wife, Celia’s older sister Chela, l
ived in town. The farmhouse at Finca Rosalia was not actually occupied as a dwelling by anyone. No one dropped by casually. Anyone arriving here came on business. Prosperous real estate encourages respect and remoteness.

  Celia took stock of all this as she looked around her. The unoccupied house sat in full view of the highway, yet far enough off that no one driving by would see much of what went on there. There were no neighbors within sight. About a quarter-mile from the house, where the property was bordered by the highway they’d taken out of town, stood an imposing building she recognized as an army garrison. This facility was always active, as the army operated a prison there. Finca Rosalia felt safe, in part, and ironically, because the garrison stood so close.

  The lone point on the property where anyone might lurk was a grove of trees behind the house. This grove held the one piece of the finca’s lands not under cultivation. Celia always viewed her surroundings through the eyes of a country woman, and she quickly grasped that this stand remained intact because it consisted of marabu, the same kind of thorn tree she’d hidden among after she escaped from the soldiers in Campechuela. But this was an unusual marabuzal. Its trees grew exceptionally tall and dense; she knew she was looking at a grove at least a century old. These old trees, covered in thorns, had been left alone because they were just too nasty to deal with, and would have presented a huge job to clear.

  She’d found the right place to assemble, train, and house the new recruits. It was in plain sight of the army (“Let them protect us” was her way of thinking), an ideal distance from town, on a farm where trucks arrived and departed constantly, and conveniently located near the county road into the mountains.

  She explained her plan to the Llópiz brothers. They agreed to her smart, albeit eccentric, proposal to house the soldiers inside the marabuzal. The trees rose over thirty feet and provided a thick canopy of leaves, guaranteeing that her soldiers would be hidden from small planes, no matter how close aircraft might fly overhead. The grove was extremely large; when Celia set forth her proposal, it covered an area about the size of a football field. And every branch and root was covered in thorns. Hector and Rene must have looked at her with consternation. She insisted that she could make the grove inhabitable. Right away, Rene sent his two sons into the grove with Celia, to help her carve out enough space for her soldiers’ billets and their preliminary training.

  She knew that wild animals moved within these groves, made paths over and under their spiky root systems, so there had to be a way in. She found a path, and Rene’s boys, under her direction, widened it with their machetes, gaining access to the grove’s interior. Inside, she found a spot that suited her, and had the boys clear underbrush and make space enough to string up hammocks. Because the grove was so dense, extensive clearing didn’t change the way the grove looked from the outside. The boys cut out a series of open-air “rooms,” and Celia rain-proofed them with large sheets of plastic suspended overhead.

  Soon they had established four main trails: the first was the entrance; two more were for guard duty; and the fourth led to the “cafeteria.” This was a clearing wide enough, just inside one edge of the grove, to let a horse pull in a cart loaded with food. When the time came to feed her troops, Celia did not prepare their meals—not Celia, who had had a cook all her life—although I’ve often heard this story expressed. From Elsa Castro, I learned that Celia got Rene’s wife, who dropped off a container of food for her husband’s midday meal, to prepare the troops’ food as well. Since Mrs. Llópiz left Rene’s meal in a bucket by the mailbox at the foot of the long drive each day, she’d do the same when Celia’s men arrived. She’d arrive at the usual hour, with her sons along to help her drop off a few large containers, and her husband would come down the drive with his horse and cart to pick up the containers. It would be unlikely that anyone passing on the highway would notice the difference.

  (Map drawn by Otto Hernandez. Courtesy of Oficina de Asuntos Históricos.)

  JUST AS CELIA WAS PUTTING the finishing touches on her marabuzal, Matthews’s article appeared on the front page of the February 24, 1957, edition of the New York Times. The movement had achieved a major goal: Fidel’s photo and signature documented the presence of the guerrilla forces in the Sierra Maestra. Batista immediately denied that Fidel was alive, and pronounced the photograph a fake. The Times countered Batista’s protest by publishing a second photograph of Fidel, sitting next to Matthews.

  Two days following the article’s appearance, the first group of soldiers arrived at Celia’s marabuzal. They were guided by veterans Jorge Sotus and Alberto Vásquez, sent by Frank to train them. A miner named Eloy Rodríguez, who had been in hiding since participating in Frank’s uprising, arrived a few days later. He and the soldier who came with him were driven to the rice farm by two young women, Vilma Espín and another one of Frank’s female collaborators, Acela de los Angeles. “We reached Manzanillo—or the area near Manzanillo—and went to Guerra Matos’s house,” Eloy told me. “He had organized a party, or something similar, with cake and refreshments. We only stayed there about half an hour. Guerra took us in an open van along the highway, and then we took a detour and went to the marabuzal.” Once inside the grove, Eloy spotted Sotus, who had led a successful offensive against the Customs House during the Battle of Santiago. He found the veteran’s presence reassuring. “Sotus told me, ‘Sleep here. Tomorrow I’ll introduce you to your squadron.’”

  Eloy says Celia, who was staying in the farmhouse, came to the marabuzal the following day and gave each man a tetanus vaccination. As she administered the injection, she talked quietly with each soldier. “She told us that in the Sierra, there was very little food and that the few men who were there were having a hard time of it. ‘You are going to live the life of a nomad and I want you to be aware of the hardship.’” What she had to say shocked Eloy, already disconcerted by the marabuzal. “I was astounded by Celia’s words because earlier, the American journalist Matthews had been up there, and he’d given the idea that there were lots of columns. No one knew there weren’t.”

  Celia also explained that they would speak in whispers, in the mountains and especially here in the marabuzal. She emphasized that sotto voce would be the norm. Later, she’d brag that her men in the marabuzal were “quiet as mice.”

  Frank arrived in the first week of March, driving a truck and wearing a khaki uniform. Hidden under a cargo of oranges was a load of weapons, uniforms, and backpacks. Eloy was greatly heartened by Frank’s appearance. “I had known Frank for a long time. I met him in 1953 or 1954. He used my group a lot. We were miners, and, as miners, we had access to dynamite, and we provisioned the 26th of July.” Eloy explained that Frank was always concerned about his well-being, that Frank worried about all his men, and mentioned that he had started working with the movement at the age of fifteen. So at the time he came to the marabuzal he would still have been under twenty.

  Frank stayed a few days, working with his recruits and making further plans. The time had come for Celia to leave the underground and go into the mountains, along with Frank’s new recruits. Celia had always wanted to be a guerrilla and had been watching for an opportunity and this moment, when Frank was selecting recruits, presented itself as a natural, logical time for Frank to make the decision to send her. She and Frank were making good their commitment to replenish Fidel’s army, and with this complement he’d have 82, the same number of men he’d had at the landing of the Granma. Celia was to be the 83rd. It was an important move within the 26th of July Movement since she would be swapping roles, from clandestina to guerrillera. But not unprecedented; women had served in the guerrilla camps in Cuba’s wars of independence, about sixty years earlier. Aside from historic precedent, there were plenty of practical reasons Celia needed to get out of Manzanillo. She was in danger, more than ever since Matthews’s articles had appeared and angered the military, and by leaving town she’d get away from Lieutenant Caridad Fernández, recently appointed Manzanillo’s chief of police, specifi
cally to capture her. Her prolonged presence in the underground was endangering others, most notably the entire Llópiz family, for Hector had enlisted his siblings Rene, Angel, Angela, and Berta plus their spouses and children to protect Celia. As far as the Movement was concerned, this was a good time for closure: her job was completed, she’d brought Matthews up to the guerrilla camp, she’d set up her clandestine induction center and could leave it in someone’s hands—Guerra Matos, perhaps—although I get the impression that the marabuzal at this point was conceived as a single-use facility, to be decommissioned after the group left. Her departure meant Hector no longer had to move her every day; all those households could breathe a sigh of relief. Getting Celia out of Manzanillo would quell all their fears that some unreliable person, or wrong move, would uncover her whereabouts or inspire a betrayal. Closing down the marabuzal operation would get Rene off the hook, too.

  But I suspect there was something else at stake here, maybe even tacit, in Celia and Frank’s thinking. Someone realized one of them would have to go into the mountains and sort those guys out. It was a long-term, highly specialized job, and couldn’t be left to a proxy (Crescencio, for instance). Since Frank could not leave Santiago, where he needed to be in order to run the underground, Celia had to do it. Celia understood the gravity of the situation. She had to serve Fidel, but also to influence and protect him. Finally, having been one of them, she understood the psychology of the underground. Fidel’s new army of guerrilla fighters was going to be made up of former members of the underground, who had been trained in covert operations but not in guerrilla warfare. Celia could shepherd these troops.