One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution

by Nancy Stout

  Rosario García went to the coroner’s office, accompanied by one or two of her friends. She found a small crowd gathered outside, and the coroner released Frank’s body to her. She took it home. Maria Antonia Figueroa insists that when Frank’s mother saw the bullet holes in her son’s body, she cried out, “My son was a teacher, not a gangster!”

  BY DUSK ON JULY 30 Santiago had turned into a ghost town. After 10:00 p.m., the streets were so free of police that Frank’s girlfriend America and her brother Taras moved his body to their house. The police had withdrawn from the streets, confined to their barracks, which Vilma Espin calls “the one sensible thing they ever did.” People are still stunned by this. “Just imagine,” Maria Antonia remarks, “the police were afraid,” although considering what they’d done and the feelings of the populace at the time, it seems almost like common sense. She added, “They fled. They hid.”

  At the Domitro house, America and Rosario dressed Frank’s body in his white linen jacket, a white shirt, and a maroon tie. Then Vilma arrived and insisted on his 26th of July Movement uniform, the same green-gabardine uniform he’d worn on the 30th of November, when he commanded the Battle of Santiago. They did, and laid a beret on his chest, adding a white rose.

  A death mask—plaster cast—was made. Photographs of this mask are in the archives. They reveal that his face was almost a perfect oval, with the widest part at the cheeks. Heavy eyebrows arched over eyes that were wide apart, and he had a normal nose, straight but not too long. His disguise, the tiny mustache that grew over his wide and beautifully shaped mouth, was left unshaved. His hair was cut short, except for a small wave just above the forehead.

  That morning, friends, members of the press and of the movement began to fill the street outside; they all wanted to see Frank’s body. One writer noticed a slight smile that had appeared on Frank’s face (which the writer attributed to rigor mortis), and mentioned this in an obituary, published the morning of the 31st, titled “El Universo no es Ajeno”—“The Universe Belongs to Everyone.” This clipping, without a byline and surely from an underground publication, is archived at the Council of State’s Office of Historic Affairs, with “by Miguel Angel Sague?” penciled in the margin. The author establishes that Frank wrote poems and composed songs based on Galician folktales and music that his mother taught him. He mentions Pablo Neruda’s poems, the love songs Frank had asked the author to read while Frank played the organ and they both sat in the empty Baptist church. “So there he was in his olive-green uniform and his black tie. The sign on his chest was red and black, 26th of July in white letters. The three stars [his rank equaled that of Fidel] were shining. Later, they replaced this with his beret. Then his lips formed a slight smile. Death dressed him in greatness.”

  The obituary’s continuation speaks to me in the collective voice of the movement: “His vision and comprehension of the revolution was not mediocre. For him, the end or the final goal was not the overthrow of Batista. This was, in reality, only a transition. His vision went much further. As a lover of Martí’s work, he saw Cuba in its broader sense, welfare for all Cubans. Our generation’s revolution is a compulsion: its mission is to carry out the work of the Independistas [referring to Cuban, mostly guerrilla, soldiers who fought in the Wars of Independence] of the past century. Cuba today, long freed from Spain, has to get to know herself, and has to use her natural assets. She has to be Cuba, definitely Cuba. Cuba needs to retake her historical evolution: the need for militarism and despotism has to disappear. . . . The mission of the present generation’s revolution is getting Cuba out of this chaotic phase of the West in which we are immersed. It should reduce the influence of the problems of Europe and Asia. . . . The revolution has a national objective, without hostility to any other nation, and an international position to maintain. Cuba has to convert its smallness into a continent.”

  This statement ends: “Frank knew, with the delicacy of his soul, the seriousness of these problems. He knew that our Cuba needs integral reform; that she should acquire full autonomy. The fall of Batista (with all the evil that was brought on by his coup d’état and those that followed) is the definite step that has to be taken. After this, the road will be clearer. The vanguard will start an incessant forward motion. The past will dissolve into oblivion. . . . Cuba’s liberty will exist. Even beyond the international idea of home[land], it will be a fact.” And the final thought is this: “The universe is not somebody else’s, it belongs to everyone. It is still his. . . . Democracy is far from a police state under which the universe is only one small part. Where heroes fall, the universe is also ours.”

  MANY OF SANTIAGO’S BANK TELLERS, on the morning of July 31, announced they’d be leaving early to attend Frank’s funeral: without tellers, bank managers were forced to close their doors. Since nearly all banks in Cuba were foreign, mostly U.S.-owned, their locking up before the standard 3:00 p.m. closing time, people often told me, made quite an impression.

  At midmorning, the crowd outside America and Taras Domitro’s house had changed, no longer limited to members of 26th of July or the press. This was the first indication of just how large Frank’s funeral might be. All through town, members of all the Masonic lodges and civic institutions let it be known that they were going to take part in Rene Pujol’s funeral and pay proper homage to this well-respected businessman. By midday, the two groups had decided to join their two processions: Pujol’s coffin and mourners would follow Frank’s on the route to the cemetery.

  QUITE INDEPENDENTLY, a protest was to take place in Santiago that morning, having been planned before the assassination. The demonstrators planned to confront the newly appointed U.S. ambassador to Cuba, Earl Smith, who was making his first appearance in the city that day, at a reception held in Government House, on Cespedes Park. Various women’s groups, working in secret, were going to greet Smith with placards demanding an end to violence, and a stop to U.S. support of Batista. All morning women arrived downtown, ostensibly to go shopping, but dressed in black. In photographs, they appear to be wearing high heels, carrying purses, in dark glasses against the glare of the sun, and clearly come from Santiago’s upper classes. When Smith and his wife came onto the balcony, only then did the women materialize and raise their placards. One photograph shows firemen on the balcony with the ambassador, not in the street, as one would expect, turning hoses directly on the women demonstrators from above. As soon as the first dozen protesters were arrested and led off to jail, another group, who’d been quietly waiting in another part of the park, walked over and took their place. Around two hundred women joined the protest that morning, and by noon fifty were in jail with more still arriving. For his part, Smith was astounded at what he saw and his wife was horrified. He protested to his hosts, arguing that such force was hardly necessary—and was told to mind his own business; it was an internal matter.

  “The only thing that worried the arrested women,” Vilma Espin reflected many years later to Armando Hart, “who were soaking wet and bruised, was that they would not be set free in time to attend the funeral.” Espin had pronounced Frank’s funeral—in her 26th of July internal report—the most important and colossal demonstration of mourning ever seen in Cuba. Not exactly, since 300,000 had reportedly marched behind Chibás’s casket in Havana in 1951, but it was not hyperbole; even by the most conservative estimate 60,000 marched behind Frank País’s and Rene Pujol’s caskets. While Havana’s population was 1.5 million, per the 1953 census, Santiago’s was only 163,000. Such a turnout was colossal, with one of every twenty citizens taking part, walking or riding behind the cortege that day.

  Six young women led the procession, schoolteachers who had studied with Frank. They carried garlands of flowers linked by a band of wide silk ribbon. The procession wound through the oldest part of the city, entering Heredia, an ancient and narrow street. Here, people began to throw flowers from the balconies onto the procession below. In photographs, the crowd seems endless. Civic groups, made up of members of various lodges an
d business organizations, filed behind Pujol’s coffin. Many were on foot, but hundreds of cars eventually joined the cortege.

  “For hours during the route, people sang the Cuban national anthem, thus breaking the absolute silence that had filled Santiago de Cuba for months,” Francisco Vallhonrat wrote. Mostly, he was surprised at the range of people he saw there: “boys, adolescents, young people”—the very groups usually not seen at public demonstrations for fear of reprisal—“middle-age and old people of both sexes, white, Negroes, yellow, mestizos, tall, short, all marched together as if a violent decision was pushing them.”

  Many people sympathized with Frank’s mother whether they agreed with the movement or not. Here was a woman who had lost two sons in the course of one month. Rosario García walked at the end of Frank’s cortege; behind her, a group of Catholic women, dressed in mourning, said the rosary for the entire route. Inevitably, as the marchers increased in numbers, political sentiment escalated. “People kept calling out ‘Death to Batista and His Regime,’ slogans against the army, alternating this with ‘Long Live (Viva) Fidel Castro and the 26th of July Movement,’” wrote Vallhonrat. When they reached the cemetery, even before entering, people could see the outlawed 26th of July flag (half black, half red) flying from the tallest monument. The procession brought all traffic on Central Highway, the east-west road that runs the length of Cuba, to a standstill, outside the gates of the cemetery. Furthermore, at the end of the day, the city did not go back to work. “Movie houses were shut, store windows dark, cafes were closed, even kiosks. Even the shoe shiners’ chairs were empty,” Vallhonrat observed. This response—the equivalent of a general strike—had been Frank’s dream and his invention as much as the Civic Resistance had been. Frank had always advocated general strikes and armed warfare as necessary urban guerrilla strategies. On this, he had been very clear, feeling that one couldn’t exist without the other. He’d never managed to pull it off in his lifetime, but his death became the catalyst, and the city, without him, seemed to declare a strike on its own.

  Unions stepped in where business owners and members of Civic Resistance ended: transportation halted, buses pulled over and simply stopped. By evening, city after city had joined Santiago; the next day, there were strikes in Holguín, Camagüey, Santa Clara, and Matanzas. Only Havana failed to respond as members of Havana’s Civic Resistance ignored what was happening across the rest of the nation. According to Enrique Oltuski, a member of the 26th of July who tried to raise interest in a strike there, businessmen left town, to spend the weekend at their beach houses or on the golf course at the country club. They alone seemed indifferent to Frank’s death.

  Most demonstrations were repressed. On July 31, the first day of the strike in Holguin, the notoriously cruel local army chief, Col. Fermin Cowley, responded by shooting nine people he had accused of causing a power cut. In Santiago, the police eventually emerged, laying low, but killing a few people when they got the chance. (“Took some as they could,” as one of the old residents described the situation deftly, “knowing they could not shoot everybody.”) The strike lasted five days in Santiago, during which time, generally speaking, the police were subdued. The real test came on Monday, August 5, when people had to return to work. Only then did the western end of the island—Havana and Pinar del Rio—join the strike, and only, according to Oltuski, because television and radio stations had been discussing what happened throughout the weekend. Havana, Oltusky says, wanted to catch up. In Santiago, Vilma Espin claims, the 26th of July Movement’s directors came to the conclusion that a prolonged strike would only reap repression. They ordered all members to return to their jobs on Tuesday. Some went back in tears, Vilma recalled.

  In Cardenas, the strike crippled the sisal industry; in Matanzas, students led the strikers, stores closed, followed by spontaneous acts of sabotage, such as burning tires, setting cars on fire, even buses; in Manzanillo there were similar acts of resistance. People often call this general strike “Frank’s last battle,” and remark that it had been won because Cuba’s general population realized it had the power to topple the regime. After experiencing the general strike, they learned—or perhaps you could say, felt within their hearts—that it was possible to get rid of their government. They just had to do it.

  20. AUGUST 1957

  After Frank

  WRITING FROM THE MOUNTAINS, Fidel instructed Celia to take over. “For the moment you’ll have to undertake, in regard to us, the better part of Frank’s work,” and carry on with “all the things that you know more about than the others”—this until the 26th of July Movement could designate a replacement. She—numb with grief, and on the very day of Frank’s funeral—duly began to compose a report for the movement’s national office. Over three days, she added to her draft, finally completing the letter on the 2nd of August. She addressed her thoughts to Haydée Santamaria. At first, she apologized for not communicating earlier, then tried to clarify certain things that had gone awry—such as the chaos caused by the messenger Fidel had entrusted with the Manifesto. That covered, Celia touched on national affairs. The tone of her letter is warm but businesslike, without the newsy tales of threats and treason or the gossipy style she had used in correspondence with Frank. She acknowledges her pain over Frank’s death, but adds almost dismissively, “Why talk about it if I know that we are all in pain?”

  Celia had, since her childhood, consistently dealt with the death of people she deeply loved by stiff-arming grief. She experienced her first trauma of separation at age six, with the loss of her mother. Her near-refusal of death can be traced from then on, chiefly through her letters. Family members say that when the Sánchez Manduley children’s mother died, their father carefully explained what had happened. While Celia verbally acknowledged the fact, the older children discovered her frantically searching all the rooms in the house to find their mother. While this reaction is far from unusual in such young children, Celia became ill, developing a temperature and symptoms of anxiety. When, at seventeen, she had watched through a hospital window as her boyfriend, Salvador Sadurni, die on the operating table, she denied her grief the opportunity to surface. Confusion over this reaction had caused relatives to debate her love for Sadurni. When her favorite uncle Miguel (Sánchez) died in 1950, she informed her brother, Orlando, then living in New York, that she didn’t want to talk about it; a year later, when Eddy Chibás shot himself, she wrote to Orlando, that she could not accept the suicide and “I don’t want to remember.”

  Fidel, not yet well enough acquainted with Celia to understand this dynamic, wrote a letter in which he poured out all his grief and compassion. “It’s hard to believe the news. I can’t even begin to express my bitterness, my indignation, the endless sorrow that overwhelms us. What barbarians! They have no idea of the intelligence, the character, the integrity of the person they’ve murdered. Not even the people of Cuba are aware of who Frank País was, what greatness and promise there was in him. It’s painful to see it happen like that, finished off in full flower.”

  His vehement emotion only angered her. And she was no doubt hurt, when, on the following day, edited a bit, the text of this ostensibly personal letter formed part of Fidel’s radio broadcast. He changed the ending, closing with an appeal to all Cubans to unite against the dictator. It would be many months before she could acknowledge Fidel’s private communication to her about Frank’s death—and when she did, it was to berate Fidel for thinking he could approach the subject.

  In early August, while she remained trapped in Manzanillo in what she describes as “deep hiding,” her colleagues one after another getting locked up, Fidel was out in the forest, living in relative insulation, surrounded by armed men. While he, too, faced danger, his life bore no comparison to those of the militants outside the Sierra, nor to the dangerous life Frank had led. Yet Celia, intelligent and (usually) rational, knew that in guerrilla warfare, the underground fighters in the plains were the dedicated support system to the guerrillas in the hills. Both e
lements of the movement knew this. A great many members of the July 26th movement felt this inner conflict. Historians speak of it as the battle between the mountains and the plains (sierra y llano), but I am willing to venture that Celia and Fidel were playing this battle out personally.

  Among colleagues, and in all her actions, she nonetheless focused on the war’s eventual outcome and the necessity of Fidel’s leadership.

  Current historians suggest that during the week or so following Frank’s death the movement’s balance of power shifted. Fidel favored Faustino Pérez to step into Frank’s role, but the national directorate put forward Rene Ramos Latour (Daniel). In this extended moment of crisis, Celia mediated for both sides. While she might have been grief-stricken to the extent that her emotions were a bit crazed, her loyalty to Frank made support for Fidel as fundamental and unlimited as it would have been for Frank. Frank had been Fidel’s confidant and military partner; now, whether she wanted it or not, the role of Fidel’s confessor became hers. While she would discharge this role strictly in a secular sense, her letters written over the rest of that summer spell out the conflicts she faced, and it is from them that I get my sense she had landed a role she hated. It was a bequest she’d inherited, and an obligation no one else could fulfill. Among the leadership she alone was up to the job. Mentored by Frank, she was one of Fidel’s few intellectual equals (in the old guard, Che and Camilo belong on that list, but their close relationships with Fidel were to evolve later). Celia, as well as a skilled communicator, was a natural diplomat.

  Her qualifications for this reluctantly accepted new role included Fidel’s admiration for her, and the respect the underground had for that admiration. It is clear that, even before Frank’s death, following Celia’s adoption of the name Aly, members of the 26th began to defer to her as their best conduit to Fidel.