by Nancy Stout
The couple could stay for whatever time they needed; these were never quick, turnaround trips. On Celia’s orders, Carmen would automatically schedule a complete medical examination, because built into the visit would be complete physical recuperation. This could take between one and three months at no cost to these visitors. If, after an evaluation of their health, the doctors determined they needed surgery or extensive therapies, these were also scheduled. “Nothing was denied.” They might be sent abroad, if that were necessary, and Carmen made all travel arrangements.
Automatically, on that first day of arrival, Carmen also scheduled facials, manicures, shampoo, and hairstyling, and trips to purchase clothes for the farmer’s wife; there were similar appointments for the husband. Carmen says that these visitors (and there were several per week) were treated like friends. She’d arrange for them to go to the Once apartment early in their visit, so that Celia could catch up on Sierra news, because Celia was interested in all the marriages, births, and deaths that had occurred, plus current opinions that were circulating in those hills she’d lived in. It seems that none of these medical procedures or elaborate therapies was viewed by Celia as an obligation, or a perk. She believed in good health; that looking good was part of being well; and the happiness and personal dignity of the people from the Sierra was something she wanted from the Revolution. Carmen told me that Celia followed each recovery, every operation, and all the makeovers closely, taking an interest in every detail. Cronyism, favoritism, Evitaism—call it what you like—Celia had the power and resources to set up this office to take care of health, housing, jobs, and provide start-up loans to the veterans who had assisted the rebel army.
She attended to women affected by the war though her own office, which was also located in the palace. “For Mother’s Day and Christmas, she’d send for things to give to all the mothers of Martyrs of the Revolution, like Frank País’s mother. She attended to this personally. She’d sometimes send to Europe for presents to give to them on Mother’s Day,” my translator, Argelia Fernández, told me, because during those years, Argelia had been the wife of Cuba’s ambassador to France. “One time, while I was in Paris, we were asked for eiderdown quilts. There would have been hundreds of these coverlets. Celia personally took care of this. It was always something really nice she wanted, something the women could really use. Nobody bragged about doing this. In fact, this isn’t known. Only the ambassador and his wife knew about this, and security.” Celia would send for presents from these countries to give to war widows and to the mothers who had lost their sons and daughters; and Argelia says that the job was usually placed in the hands of security, but she had elected to buy them herself because they were female things. Argelia thinks Celia was brought up Catholic and gave these presents “because it was consoling.”
IN 1959 THE NEW GOVERNMENT began literacy programs, and Celia educated her staff like everyone else. “In 1959, Celia sent for people from Pilón and placed us in jobs that were needed here in Havana,” said Elbia Fernández, Celia’s old friend and younger cousin from Pilón whom she called “La Maestra” (The Teacher). “She sent for my brothers, one by one. They all worked in the sugar mill. . . . Celia told my father: ‘Please tell La Maestra to come with her husband and child, and she can have a large house for all of you.’” Celia had already set up a schoolroom in one of the apartments at Once for the house employees, but she wanted Elbia to oversee the literacy program for her employees who worked at the palace. Elbia says that Celia already had teachers to instruct this staff, but she wanted her friend, La Maestra, to give up a very pleasant and worthy life teaching in Pilón, to move to Havana.
In Santiago, on November 30, 1959, Celia and María Antonia Figueroa celebrate the third anniversary of Frank’s Battle of Santiago. The living room of María Antonia’s house, where they are pictured, has its walls decorated with portraits of Fidel and Chibás. (Courtesy of Oficina de Asuntos Históricos)
“It wasn’t easy,” says Elbia. “The students were all adults who had come from the country. The majority were from the Sierra. It was in the palace buildings, in the center building. I started out in the Consejo de Estado, and then took over the Central Committee.” (This would have been the staff of the two highest offices of the government.) Celia wanted Elbia to prep her staff for what was called the “Battle of the Sixth Grade.”
Everybody worked hard and worked long hours, like their bosses. The biggest problem was scheduling classes a variety of people could attend. Elbia and Celia came up with a solution: the same classes would be taught three times a day, and if one of the students missed one session, he or she could catch the next one. When Elbia arrived, Celia’s staff was already literate, meaning they’d passed their literacy test a year earlier. But to get a sixth-grade diploma, they “were taught in three levels of achievement.” When they had passed each level, they would be in sixth grade; and to reach sixth grade, they had to take tests that were given by the Ministry of Education. Elbia’s job was to get them ready for these tests. She began by teaching all the subjects (in sets of three) in 45-minute increments; and at the end of this campaign, they’d pass the tests and be ready to move on to the “Battle for Ninth Grade.”
Everybody had to attend the classes: cooks, waiters, chauffeurs, security—and Elbia says the staff attended enthusiastically but were always extremely tired. “There was a cook. She would sleep in class. Some were so tired that I would let them sleep. If he sleeps, he will revive, I thought. And I’ll repeat the class. If you repeat, you learn more the second time. So the cook became literate and got his diploma.” Celia felt that she must lead by example, and her employees must not fall behind, and was aware of her responsibility to the nation. The syllabus was put together by advisors in the Ministry of Education, and on Saturdays the instructors would go to special schools where they learned what to teach the following week. These classes lasted all day Saturday. “We would go in the morning, have lunch there, then would have an afternoon session,” Elbia sighed. It had been a very hard job, six days a week, and she had missed Pilón.
33.
Turning Havana into Pilón
WHEN CELIA FIRST MOVED TO ONCE, most people from Oriente Province who’d gone into exile in Havana were headed home. In her own family, only Flávia and Rene stayed because they’d established a new dental clinic in Havana. Chela and Pedro went back to Manzanillo, and Silvia and her family returned to Santiago. Celia (and Fidel) started off in the ground-floor apartment at Once No.1007 in February, but whenever an apartment became available, Celia would take it and move close friends or family members in.
She started with her cousin Miriam Manduley and Miriam’s husband, Pepito José Argibay, a commander; they took over the original ground-floor apartment as soon as Celia was able to move up to the first floor. On the floor above that, Lydia Castro, Fidel’s sister, lived with a woman called Mima (who had been Raúl’s nanny), or at least they lived there for a time. Orlando, Celia’s younger brother who had been living in New York City, and his Puerto Rican wife, Aleida, also moved into an apartment on that floor (before he left her and their son, Gustavo, who was born in 1961 or ’62). Celia hired the building’s former janitor and moved him onto the roof.
There were four apartments on each floor. Celia started to contact the owners, carefully asking them if they wanted to move. If they did, she made sure they would find better apartments in other parts of town. “Celia didn’t insist,” Sergio Sánchez, Celia’s nephew, pointed out. She found out what each person wanted and “if the owners of two-bedroom apartments preferred to have four bedrooms” in her conversation with them, she offered them more. “The word spread, and people left.”
Next, Celia turned to the block; she moved people out of houses and replaced them with people she liked, people she could trust: in short, people from Pilón. Her guardian angel, Hector Llópiz, was one of the first. He’d returned from exile, and she urged him to move with his family to her street; then his sister Berta and her husban
d moved into the upstairs apartment of the same house, a stone’s throw from Celia’s front door. It took several years, and Sergio says it finally came down to the couple who lived in a “very pretty house” directly across the street from the entrance of Celia’s apartment building. He described them as “a couple who were rich and unfavorable to the Revolution.” By then, he says, security had increased whenever there were attempts on Fidel’s life, so “Celia talked to them herself, and pointed out that with all the police cars in front of their house, they must be experiencing a complete loss of privacy. She asked if they wanted to leave the country and, if they did, she would help. If they didn’t, and wanted to move, they could look for a house any place where they’d feel happy and comfortable. They left.” But they stayed in Cuba, in a much grander house in a better location.
SECURITY WAS THE ISSUE. Their revolution couldn’t survive without Fidel. “The Eisenhower administration had been contriving to overthrow Castro by force since March 1960. The CIA recruited groups of Cuban exiles in Miami and trained them in various parts of Central America, especially Guatemala,” writes the Mexican historian Jorge Castaneda. Fidel survived because he was elusive, did not barricade himself in the classic manner—in a presidential palace with a tall fence surrounding it. Forever the guerrilla, he stayed on the move; yet many people on that block told me that he lived in Celia’s apartment, arriving often in the middle of the night.
“Security here is relative,” said a longtime resident of the neighborhood, Pedro Ugando, who lives in a building directly behind Celia’s. He explained the reality of the post-victory situation. “This is what in Spanish we call a zona helado, a frozen zone. You can’t just move into this neighborhood. Before people are given permission to move in, they are investigated. It is about two complete blocks. In the years 1960 to 1963, cars would drive by and machine-gun or shoot this area. It happened in other areas, too. . . . Some of the people whose houses and goods had been taken away from them were counterrevolutionary. Even though this is a frozen zone, they would come by in their cars and shoot. . . . I think that espionage started in ’59, and we still have it.” In the early years, the building was guarded, but not particularly heavily.
The security system at Once, in hindsight, barely existed. There was one policeman at night and two militia members. As it turned out, the militia members were schoolgirls who came from the Lydia Doce Militia. Although they’d been trained at a military school, they were volunteers. I interviewed Sonya Bedoya, who was fifteen when she protected Once. She’d been assigned to a police precinct where she’d go to receive her evening’s assignment. The police would select two young women each day and put their names on the roster. The girls would check the bulletin board, then get into olive green pants and a gray jacket with an olive green stripe down the sleeve (uniforms designed by Celia and similar to the tunic she wore in the Sierra), a loaded “bullet belt” about two inches thick plus a magazine of ammunition that fit into a leather pouch. They’d be handed a Czech rifle, or at least that was always what Bedoya was allotted, and they’d go, with their policeman, to their assigned location, which wasn’t always Once; sometimes they stood watch over convents.
The first time Sonya guarded Celia and Fidel’s apartment house was toward the end of 1959. “I don’t remember, but I think guard duty was six hours. We guarded the entrance to the building. I saw everyone who came and went in those days, Fidel included. The first time I saw Fidel was in the middle of the night. I had to wake up the other girl on duty, but the policeman and I were awake. Same as with everyone else, when you see an important person, you never tire of seeing him. He was younger then, straighter, seemed even taller. He said good evening warmly. Now he looks tired. Has too many things on his mind.” Bedoya told me this in 2006, before Fidel underwent a couple of operations. Her account simply proves that, in the early years, Fidel counted on his bodyguards to protect him; but after the CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion, in 1961, state security took over. Now, some members of state security occupy the house.
FIDEL’S PERSONAL LIFE BEGAN playing itself out in a public drama: Naty Revelta, with whom he’d had an affair in the mid-’50s and fathered a child, was trying to reestablish a relationship and regain some of her former significance. Meanwhile, Dr. Vexel-Robertson moved to Havana and edged out the young Marita Lorenz, still living in the Havana Libre. Miffed, Lorenz took part in a conspiracy, under the influence and guidance of Frank Sturgis, who worked for the CIA. Most of these dramatic events were played out at the Havana Libre between early 1959 through 1960. In other words, his personal life became hectic. Longing for a simpler life, in 1960, Fidel and Celia rented (for a dollar a year) a large villa in Cojimar, a village outside Havana. They had to drive around the bay then (the tunnel under Havana Bay had not yet been constructed), via the eighteenth-century villages of Regla and Guanabacoa. The Cojimar property was on a hill, with woods and a stream. It was, in that aspect, reminiscent of the Sierra Maestra, as well as a romantic fishing village. From the hill, they could see the wharf area, where fishermen set out each day in small boats and returned to use the town’s big set of scales to weigh their catch; the famous small marina where Hemingway kept his boat, the Pilar, and its pilot, Gregorio Fuentes, lived in the village. Hemingway sponsored the village’s fishing contest in 1960, and it was won by Fidel, a highly competitive sportsman. According to village lore, he took this opportunity to tell Hemingway that he’d gotten some ideas on guerrilla warfare from reading For Whom the Bell Tolls. The weekends at Cojimar were pleasant.
Celia opened a house for boys in the village. Some came from the Sierra Maestra, a few were orphans, some were godchildren from among the dozens of children whose baptisms she and Fidel had witnessed, performed by Father Sardinas and other priests who came into the Sierra. All were scholarship students new to Havana. She and Fidel were trying to give these children a home, an education, and a sense of belonging. She furnished the house with her father’s things: among them were his collection of canes and walking sticks that had decorated the porch in Pilón, and a few surviving pieces of his furniture.
Celia opened a house for boys, many orphans from the Sierra Maestra, in the village of Cojímar. Some were godchildren from among the dozens of children whose baptisms she and Fidel had witnessed during the war in the mountains. Here she speaks to students of the Escuela Sierra. (Courtesy of Oficina de Asuntos Históricos)
Photographer Raúl Corrales, a Cojimar resident, speculates that she was starting a family—although when he told me this it sounded too abstract, too super-socialistic, but now I can see that this may have been what she was doing. Corrales, who worked with Celia for years, claims that the villa and the children were good for Fidel. It was a private, quiet place where he could get away and do some thinking; and there was a stream on the property that he liked to walk along, be close to nature. Corrales felt sure that Celia proposed this house in order to get Fidel away from the Habana Libre. It worked for a time. The house at Cojimar had to be abandoned because it was on the coast, and no matter how well guarded, it was vulnerable from gunboat attack. There was only one road in and out. They put in another road, but negatives mounted, and the weekend getaway no longer measured up, since Fidel’s life, at this point, was clearly in peril.
COMMENTS MOUNTED, across the country, that Fidel should marry her. “Everyone thought he was going to marry her. If he didn’t, it was only going to cause Celia to lose face,” one woman explained. “This reached him, and it reached her. They talked it over and Fidel proposed they get married. Celia told him that it’s only gossip. And if the essential feelings aren’t between us, we shouldn’t carry it out. She also told him: these people don’t know what it is we have together.” And then, my source—within the family, who asked that I maintain her anonymity—says that Celia explained her reasons: “She told him that she felt older now. When she was young, she’d had marriage on her mind, but now, she wasn’t so interested. He understood what she was telling him.”
Celia was far too smart to accept an arrangement of the type she was being offered: a life filled with his present and past women. She would not have wanted to be put in the position of asking that age-old question: where were you last night? I know she believed in marriage, but not for marriage’s sake. Long before this, she’d often comment to her friends that married women end up being subordinate. If Fidel stayed with her, at her urban command post, that sort of question need not come up. She may have been disappointed with this solution, but not jealous. She could see right through Fidel—and that’s not very romantic. This solution was a defining moment: together, they would be partners and play out this moment in the history of their country.
IN 1960, CELIA FOUND her developer’s legs. She’d work all day at the palace in Revolution Square and take up her design projects at night, working from home. Notorious for her late-night confabulations, she was no different from the men; all were workaholics, taking care of the nation by day, shunning sleep in favor of regenerative pet projects after dark. If you worked for Celia, you had to keep her hours. The best example of what this meant came from Maria Victoria Caignet and Gonzalo Cordova, Celia’s interior design team, who told me that a man from the telephone company appeared at the door of their apartment announcing that he’d come to install a new line. This was extraordinary because AT&T had been banished from Cuba by then, and getting a new telephone was impossible. They had had no idea what was afoot. It remained a mystery until the phone rang in the small hours of the morning on their new line and Celia said, “Now you can’t escape me, even in the dead of night.” They were forewarned. She called them anytime, but usually between 2:00 and 4:00 a.m., when she had time to work on one of the architectural projects. “Celia was so nice about it. She offered such good excuses,” Caignet said, laughing, “that we didn’t really mind. You’d work from night into morning. It was like a party. It became contagious to work all hours.” Over the years, working for Celia turned out to be a huge plus for anyone in the design field. Her projects were completed, buildings got constructed, good materials were used in the construction—no matter what crisis or stringent cutbacks were affecting the rest of the country. And her buildings were well maintained, even during the Special Period of the 1990s they were noticeable for their good repair. “Thanks to Fidel,” Caignet commented.