by Nancy Stout
FRANK LEFT ON MARCH 9TH, driving the truck alone back to Santiago. Just outside the city, the Rural Guard pulled him over. He was carrying false identification, according to Nicaragua, and a gun. Nicaragua’s account features the gun as a major character. It was an expensive little handgun, decorated in gold and silver, bearing the country’s seal in enamel. It had been stolen, Nicaragua claims, from a high-ranking officer in Batista’s army. Frank, found in possession of this distinctive weapon, was arrested and put in jail. Eloy’s account is simpler: Frank had been arrested several times before, as a student organizer, and “they were looking for him.”
Any hopes that Celia had of going into the mountains with the recruits were dashed when she learned of Frank’s arrest. Shortly after a courier got the news to Fidel, she received new orders from the commander in chief: take over all of Frank’s work and continue to supply him with an army. Celia would have to remain in Manzanillo, in the hazardous, frustrating role of the clandestina.
Part II
MANZANILLO
15. MARCH, APRIL, AND MAY 1957
Clandestinos
DURING THE FOLLOWING MONTHS, the heat was centered on Celia. The new and embarrassing revelations by the foreign press only caused Caridad’s police to step up their hunt for her in Manzanillo. One day, when Lilia Ramírez was looking out of the second-floor window at the telephone company, she saw a group of police leave headquarters. She quickly alerted Hector of a raid. Very likely, this was the day the police raided Angela Llópiz’s house, only to find that Celia wasn’t there. Ana Irma Escalona, who worked for and lived with Angela, describes the raid. 26th of July documents were hidden in the house, buried in the pockets of a couple of jackets hanging in a back-bedroom closet. Ana Irma was careful to say that Celia was never careless about leaving things around that might implicate the house owners, and that these particular documents were not important. Ana Irma had been ironing when the police arrived and left her ironing board momentarily to get the jackets. She placed them on a temporary clothesline she’d strung up, along with her freshly ironed clothes. The police searched everywhere, but didn’t think to check her ironing, and when they found nothing, “made a fuss.” They’d made a big show of finding a small statue (she thinks it was a bust of Mozart or Beethoven), but didn’t take it with them, “just kicked over some small tables” and left.
Celia continued to stay in the farmhouse off and on. With Frank in custody, she had to pay house calls and lean on her network of friends to provide supplies he’d formerly given her, such as armbands. This meant that the Llópizes got further into trouble since the armbands were made at Angela’s house for the new recruits. These armbands were carefully controlled items, being the guerrillas’ means of official identification, and sewing them was akin to a covert activity. The task was relegated to the back of the house where the red and black material was kept well hidden, as was the sewing machine that was used to stitch M-26-7 in white thread. (In Santiago, there was a much-lauded sewing machine capable of producing circular stitches, and those armbands are today highly collectible items. That machine, during the Revolution, was guarded as if it were the Queen’s diamonds.) Ana Irma casually mentioned that ammunition belts were also sewn at Angela’s house, and transported to the farm “in the usual manner.” When I asked what “usual” meant, she admitted that they were taken there “by a couple of young women,” who turned out to be herself and “somebody else.” Two slender young women had left Angela’s house wearing twenty bandoliers wrapped around their hips under “our wide skirts,” to step into Felipe Guerra Matos’s station wagon. (When I asked Guerra for details, he denied it ever happened.)
Wringing information from these former clandestinos is like getting water from a stone. Until this interview, Ana Irma says she has never mentioned having participated in anything to do with the marabuzal, and only recently have people from the underground begun to talk to one another, and to tell their stories. From others, I’d learned their silence has something to do with the pride, or what boils down to clandestino etiquette, which goes something like this: everybody took chances; you were given a job to do, were highly trusted, therefore, it is out of place to brag or speak too much about what you did personally. I wonder why clandestino protocol is so markedly different from that which applies to the rest of the rebels, about whom a whole industry of lore and aggrandizement came into existence?
Elsa Castro is more forthcoming about her work with Celia. Even she didn’t know about the marabuzal, although she knew, at the time, that Celia was outfitting a new group of soldiers selected from former clandestinos. Celia had enlisted her help, and Elsa started buying hammocks, toothbrushes, combs, and knives from a cousin who owned a small bodega and “didn’t ask questions.” Rafael Sierra (the director of Manzanillo’s 26th of July) gave her shirts, blue jeans, and work pants from his family’s store. Elsa got blankets from another source, and would put all these things into backpacks, never assembling more than two at one time. Someone would pick them up—sometimes this was Hector, other times Felipe Guerra Matos—everything wrapped like any other product going out of her father’s stationery store. If anyone noticed, Elsa says she would have told them that she was making them up for the Boy Scouts.
CELIA HAD ACCOMPLISHED her obligation to Frank and Fidel. At La Rosalia farm, a.k.a. El Marabuzal, two trucks rolled up the driveway on March 15, 1957, and 53 marabuzaleros loaded into the back. The trucks lumbered onto the county road. Eloy Rodríguez described the specifics of this rarely described trip: “We went in a truck. We crossed rice fields, we took roads. We reached Cason, where we left the truck. We walked to Monte La O on foot. From Monte La O, we started up real mountains.” They were headed for Epifanio Diaz’s farm, Los Chorros, where Fidel had met Matthews. Che was waiting for them. He’d been instructed by Fidel to greet the new soldiers, bring them up the mountain slowly, while giving them some training en route. It took two weeks. At the end of the month, the new recruits met up with Fidel—or so goes the usual story. But it didn’t happen as smoothly as that. When they got to Epifanio’s farm, Che informed them that he was in charge, and Jorge Sotus had countered that “under Frank’s orders” he was leader, therefore the only person responsible for turning these men over to Fidel.
Finally, the new men, and their feuding platoon leaders, got to a small hill named Dereche de la Caridad where, Eloy says, they waited for Fidel. As soon as he showed up, Che told him what had happened, stating that Sotus had been insubordinate. Fidel listened to Che and decided to hold a trial, did so, but took no action against Jorge Sotus. Instead, Fidel made Sotus a platoon leader, and for Eloy, and the others, this seemed to be a very fair resolution. “I personally think that Sotus was right,” says Eloy, author of a book about this historic event. He has been reviewing his memories, talking to others, and shaping his thoughts on the issue. “Frank was head. Fidel had asked for these troops, but Frank had organized, selected, and sent them. With all the respect we gave Frank, I personally feel that Sotus was right, and Che accepted this.”
While Fidel mulled over this conundrum, a state of shock, which Eloy openly describes, quickly set in among the new arrivals. Quite beyond the dispute, each of these men had been profoundly rattled by the situation they found themselves in. “Many of us,” says Eloy, “thought that the war was going to last eight or ten months. A year, maybe. When we got up there, Fidel told us that this war is beginning now, with our arrival, and may last five, ten, fifteen, twenty years. ‘The only thing I can guarantee, here, is that you aren’t going to be run down by a bus,’ is what Fidel told us. This was like a pail of ice water. It was so totally different from what we’d expected. We were shocked.”
Their expectations, by and large, had been shaped by Matthews’s Times article describing life for the guerrilla in the Sierra Maestra—that, and the sense of fulfillment at having been chosen by Frank. As Eloy explains it, being picked by Frank meant a very great deal. Each man was proud that he had met criteria Frank
had set, had been selected because he could resist the hardships of the Sierra, and felt honored to be among the first clandestinos to join Fidel’s army. Plus, it was a relief to leave the underground. “But we had to face a new life,” Eloy sums up. Still, so much had depended on what Matthews had written, no one realizing that Raúl had organized the few men Fidel had into small platoons, marched them in to report to Fidel, then marched them out to march in from another direction. After Eloy read what Matthews had written, that there were several columns, he “thought there were going to be hundreds of soldiers there. We found only about 17, and these men had long hair, beards, ripped uniforms, a sack for a backpack. It was a deplorable situation. This made us sad. Then, what Fidel said [about the bus] killed us. But it was momentary. We got there with a uniform, an armband, a beret, a backpack. We looked like an organized army. We saw them, however, and our hearts sank to our feet.”
CELIA, FILLED WITH PERSONAL ANGUISH over Frank’s arrest, was unable to go to the mountains with the new recruits. With nowhere to go, she stayed on in Manzanillo, mostly at the farmhouse. There she received a second group of men Frank had picked before being arrested. She had to do everything alone, for now she was without his guidance, and probably felt like a boat that had lost its rudder. Just when she needed a partner, Felipe Guerra Matos was arrested one day, driving back from Los Chorros. Felipe’s lawyers, who represented all members of the influential rice-growers association, immediately got him out of jail. But nothing remained the same after that arrest. He was being closely watched by the police, so driving to confer with Celia at the farm, for example, was out of the question.
IT WAS DURING THIS PERIOD, while Celia was at the farm, that the owner unexpectedly paid a visit to consult his manager, Rene Llópiz. The owner rarely came to the property. He knew nothing of the transformation of his marabu grove and unwittingly walked into the farmhouse to find Celia. He knew perfectly well, of course, that she was being hunted by the chief of police, and reacted as would any normal person: told her to leave his house because she was putting him in a lot of danger. Celia fired back that she had no intention of leaving. In fact, she said that he was the one who should go.
From his point of view, although he must have known that Celia was tough, being a guerrilla leader, she was still Dr. Sánchez’s daughter. She was also the sister-in-law of a fellow rice grower, Pedro Álvarez. The owner was not going to turn Celia over to the police or military, but that didn’t mean he wanted her to stay. From Celia’s viewpoint, she had to throw him out of his own house. She had to get him out of there before he grasped what was going on. She was aware that he probably thought she was only hiding there, considered her to be a regrettable but temporary fugitive, an inconvenience. He could live with that, but if he stayed for any length of time, he’d figure out that she and Rene were involved in an organized operation. She must not allow him the opportunity of even sensing this. One of the upstairs bedrooms was what she called her “central warehouse” for storing uniforms and medicine. Of course, she also had a substantial number of men hiding in his formerly abandoned marabu grove, something he’d never figure out if she’d didn’t let him. Therefore, he could not stay and she could not go. She threatened him. Historian Pedro Álvarez Tabío writes that “she insinuated fierce consequences that would supposedly come about if he used indiscretion or denounced them to the enemy.” I never found out what those “fierce consequences” were.
WHEN THE FIRST GROUP OF SOLDIERS left the marabuzal, the nation had been focused on Havana because two days earlier, on March 13, José Antonio Echeverria’s militant organization, the Revolutionary Directorate, had attempted to assassinate Batista. The attack was quite large in scope. It took place in two parts of the city. Echeverria and a small group of men stayed close to the university, which is located in the Vedado section of Havana. There they captured Radio Reloj (Clock Radio), which continuously broadcasts news bulletins every minute, punctuated by an announcement of the time of day, followed by the words: “Radio Reloj.” Echeverria told the nation what was taking place, over the airwaves, as his soldiers machine-gunned their way into the Presidential Palace several miles away in Habana Vieja, the old part of the city. In order to defend two parts of the city, the army sent out over a thousand troops from Camp Columbia. By the time the army’s soldiers and tanks got to the palace, the Directorate’s men had gained access to the door leading directly to Batista’s apartment (an elevator door, off the main courtyard). The Directorate’s men were killed and the assassination attempt ended, but only because the elevator car happened to be at the top, according to historian Hugh Thomas, who tells us that had the elevator door opened immediately, Batista would have been killed. The attack at 3:30 p.m. was planned to coincide with Batista’s lunch with his family. It lasted several hours, and various small battles took place in those two parts of town. The Directorate had snipers on the roofs of all the tall buildings near the palace, and these fired down on the army’s troops. The same happened in Vedado, where small battles, generated from sniper fire, prolonged the conflict. Echeverria left Radio Reloj when he knew they’d failed at the palace, but he was gunned down on a street just outside the walls of the university. (A bronze plaque marks the spot on Jovellar, just off Calle L, and is covered in flowers every year on March 13.) A few of his men escaped and went into hiding.
AS CELIA WORKED TO ASSEMBLE a second group of soldiers, Fidel asked her to take on a new assignment. Robert Taber, a producer for CBS and a journalist, had sent word that he wanted to interview Fidel for television. This was a wonderful opportunity for the movement. Everyone with a television set would be able to see Fidel, in the flesh. Celia began making arrangements for Taber’s trip, and elicited Felipe Guerra Matos’s help. She devised a plan for Felipe to drive Taber and his cameraman, Wendell Hoffman, in and out of the mountains.
ON APRIL 15, Taber and Hoffman arrived in Havana. It was the beginning of Easter Week. They had to wait in a hotel until Maundy Thursday, when Haydée Santamaria arrived to pick them up. Armando Hart and Faustino Pérez were arrested as she watched through the windshield. Haydée acted as if nothing unusual had happened, even though she was married to Hart; she could do nothing but drive the journalists to Manzanillo.
CELIA WAS IN MANZANILLO WAITING for Haydée and the TV journalists. Pancho Saumell and his wife, owners of a rice plantation, had agreed to let her meet the journalists in their beautiful home, just off Manzanillo’s Cespedes Park. She sat in the living room under Moorish arches, walls wainscoted with cobalt and bronze-luster tiles, with Nicaragua, who had been sent by Frank. (Frank, by April, was keeping up his general’s role from jail.) Nicaragua would accompany the group, and when they reached Fidel inform him of a large shipment of arms that Frank had just purchased from the Revolutionary Directorate. Nicaragua’s mission was to ask Fidel to name the best place for delivery of the weapons.
As Celia and Nicaragua sat there, expecting the journalists to arrive at any moment, there was a knock on the door. Enrique Escalona dashed in with the news that Armando had been arrested in Havana. The owners of the house, the Saumells, had been hovering and were having a change of heart. Perhaps their intention of doing something to help Celia had waned with Nicaragua’s arrival, especially if they overheard phrases like “extra guns” or “weapons left over from the assassination attempt” or “attack on the Presidential Palace.” Expressing their reluctance, the Saumells, asked Celia and Nicaragua to leave before Escalona’s arrival. What happened next must have confirmed all the worst flights of the Saumells’ imagination. Just as Enrique was telling Celia and Nicaragua what he’d heard about Armando, a bomb exploded outside on the corner. Within minutes, the police poured out of headquarters, close by Cespedes Park, and began to enter all the houses in the vicinity. At first, Celia and Nicaragua tried to climb over a back wall, couldn’t manage it, and came back inside. They left the house through a small side door that opened directly from the living room into the street, which was filled with policem
en and patrol cars. They walked past all this activity very naturally, appearing to be curious but uninvolved onlookers.
Felipe Guerra Matos came out of a building nearby. He was unaware of what was going on. Later, the police found his car parked on the square with a pile of political pamphlets on the backseat. Escalona had borrowed Felipe’s car earlier in the evening, had parked on the square “for a minute,” thinking he’d just dash into the Saumell house with news for Celia about Armando’s arrest. The police confiscated the pamphlets, and started hunting for Felipe Guerra Matos. (At this point in my interview with him, Guerra Matos, still angry about Escalona’s carelessness forty-five years before, jumped to his feet. He had to walk around the room several times before he was calm enough to finish the story.)
Celia and Nicaragua returned to the Saumells’ house when police activity died down, reasoning that it was the safest place to be since the police had already been there. By now the owners were adamant. Mrs. Saumell asked Celia to leave, and Celia, of course, objected. The two women were in the middle of their heated debate when another knock sounded at the front door; this time it wasn’t the police, but a soldier. Celia and Nicaragua disappeared through the same side door. They returned at midnight. By this time, the owners were beside themselves and, according to Nicaragua, Pancho Saumell paced the floor, going around in circles and holding his head, but stopping fairly often to peek through the shutters to check the street, while his wife lurched back and forth in a rocking chair, sobbing and moaning that she was going to die. Celia took one look at the situation and announced that she was going to bed, leaving Nicaragua to deal with the distraught owners. When she got to her room she found the Saumells had dismantled the bed, so she simply went into the nursery and crawled into bed with their child.