One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution

by Nancy Stout

  ANA IRMA ESCALONA HAD COME to Havana in hopes of getting a scholarship, and Celia had asked her to stay at Once. Ana Irma, who worked for Angela Llopiz and did some courier work for Celia during the days she was hiding in the underground, took charge of all the apartments: Celia’s public one, where everybody congregated around the kitchen and dining area, and Celia’s private apartment that contained her bedroom and office. Celia asked her to be Fidel’s housekeeper, too, taking care of the new apartment on the roof. Mainly, Ana Irma took care of his clothes, since he showed up every day to replace his uniform and put on a hand-laundered, carefully pressed one. These uniforms were hung in large closets in a separate dressing room created for him in one of the back apartments on the first floor. Ernestina González, Celia’s cook, also became Fidel’s cook.

  ON EUGENIA’S FIRST MORNING at Once, as soon as she saw Celia, she ran and gave her a kiss. Again, she asked for “your blessing, Godmother,” and Celia seemed to consider this, but chose instead to remain silent. But she hugged Eugenia, and kissed her, and asked her how she’d slept. Miffed, “I didn’t answer her question,” Eugenia says. Then Ernestina served breakfast, which included bread and butter, new to the little girl’s palate; she was not consoled by food. Ernestina then handed her a glass of cold water from the refrigerator, which Eugenia set on the floor, in a corner, copying her grandmother, who used a glass of water as a talisman. Things improved later in the day when Celia presented her with a big doll. “It was my first toy. In the hills, dolls were made from rags.” And sent her shopping for new clothes.

  When Fidel arrived, Eugenia was with Celia, Ana Irma, and Ernestina in the kitchen. He came in and Celia introduced them, “Look Fidel, this is Palomares’s little girl.” Fidel sat down, pulled her onto his lap and asked, “How are your folks?” and Eugenia told him they were well. “How are your studies?” She replied, “Well.” So far, two short answers. “Then he asked me if I knew how to cook. I answered yes, and he said, ‘Well, tell me, what do you know how to cook?’ I said, ‘Mostly I know how to roast coffee.’ Then and there, he asked me to tell him how I did this. I told him that my grandmother would stand me on a chair near the stove and I would move the coffee beans around inside the pot, and that it took a lot of time. When the beans got dark, and had a strong smell, we’d put in a little bit of brown sugar.”

  Fidel encouraged her to tell him what else she was able to do, so Eugenia explained how she’d help her grandmother when a pig was slaughtered. “Two or three of us would go to the river to wash the intestines. We’d come back and my grandmother would make blood sausages and we would braid the small intestine. All this seemed to interest him, so he continued to ask questions, especially about the seasonings.”

  On the following day, Celia sent her to see Dr. Álvarez Cambra, an orthopedist. Eugenia revealed, with his prompting, that she always carried pails of water from a well to her grandmother’s house, walking on a very narrow path with a heavy pail in her right hand, and carried wood the same way. “I’d take wood to the river where my grandmother went to wash clothes twice a week.” One of Eugenia’s hips was higher than the other, which called for therapy. After that, Celia’s nurse, Migdalia Novo, picked Eugenia up at 5:30 every morning, and they’d go to the gym at an orthopedic hospital. At 7:00 they ate a packed breakfast, and Migdalia would take her to school and show up again to bring Eugenia home, to Celia, at the end of the school day. “Celia gave me a kiss every day when I came home from school. She’d ask what I’d learned that day.” But it was Fidel who could easily spend hours talking to her.

  BY THE END OF 1963, Celia had nearly finished setting up her own parallel security system. She had been moving her old friends from Pilón into houses around her building on Once as they became available since she didn’t fully trust state security. She was creating her own safety zone.

  “Half of Pilón came to live on Once Street. Gente de confiance. Eventually, her Pilón friends lived on the street all the way from Paseo to 16th, or eight city blocks. You might say that she planted the street with people she could trust,” Celia’s nephew Sergio Sánchez told me, chuckling.

  His parents had moved to Havana and occupied a house on 12th, but the back door opened onto the end of Once, and the kids in the family—Flávia’s, Silvia’s, Acacia’s, and Griselda’s children—often entered Celia’s house via Silvia’s, going in her front door and exiting out the back. They describe how Celia concentrated on landscaping in the ’60s, always having trees planted. She put in lots of fruit trees, choosing large ones, so people couldn’t see her building from the street. “There were three nispero [sapodilla] trees with small fruit, brown on the outside and light purple or red violet fruit. When they bloomed, Celia would put a net, a mosquito net, over them so the bats couldn’t eat the fruit. They were big trees. This created a stir, and a lot of comment in Vedado, since these trees came up to the first floor.” Raysa Bofill, Griselda’s granddaughter, recalls Celia’s garden, as do several of the children. There was a tangerine tree with lovely fruit that Celia wouldn’t let them pick because “they’re for Fidel.”

  When I visited Berta Llópiz, we sat on her balcony and could see Celia’s building, but not clearly because the trees were in the way. Berta assured me that Celia planted trees of all kinds to camouflage the building, particularly from above, to keep it out of view of U.S. planes flying overhead. And since security guards block the street, Berta and I could not stroll over to inspect the building.

  With Fidel living there, on a permanent but slightly ad hoc basis, state security moved into the two back apartments on the ground floor. Celia preferred her method to theirs, thought they called too much attention to the place, and in the first few years claimed everyone knew when Fidel was there from the number of cars outside. So she built a garage so Fidel could drive into the building—she did this by knocking down the next house and building an addition to the apartment building.

  IN 1963, FIDEL STARTED TO PLAY basketball again. In high school, he’d been the star of his team, so he started using the court at the Ranchos Boyeros arena every day. This large, circular-shaped facility is located on the highway to the airport, and Celia thought it was too dangerous for Fidel to go there, but carefully refrained from mentioning this; instead, she lauded his exercise. She asked a well-known architect, Joaquin Galvan, to design a multistoried gymnasium with a basketball court and a bowling alley, and the huge, poured-concrete building was constructed near Once. (Later, she had a swimming pool complex built, facing 12th Street.) But, in many ways, the gym was a great success. Raúl Corrales saw Celia nearly every day then, and says, “Evenings, he would work with her. Afterward, he would play basketball, or bowl. He began to use this ‘sports time’ to discuss things with people. She would say, ‘Come to my place tonight,’ and people knew that they would have an opportunity to speak with Fidel.” These appointments, surrounded by the camaraderie of sports, were casual and extended far into the night. It seems that everybody liked her solution.

  In my lifetime, women in a similar position, that is, first Ladies, have redecorated rooms, but none to my knowledge have ordered major pieces of construction. But Cubans don’t see this as presumptuous. She was a hero, and her war record afforded her “the right,” as Cubans like to say, to make high-level decisions, particularly those that enhanced the safety of Fidel.

  Celia organized a party to celebrate Fidel’s 37th birthday on August 13, 1963. While she cuts the cake, and the President of Cuba, Osvaldo Dorticos, watches from behind her, someone has just placed a straw hat on Fidel’s head. (Courtesy of Oficina de Asuntos Históricos)

  CUBANS WERE NOW FIVE YEARS into the Revolution. Concerned people (not to be confused with conservative people) still thought their leading couple should have gotten married. This sentiment is still voiced by people from Oriente Province who think of Celia as their hometown girl. They continue to be displeased with Fidel. Celia, to them, was straight out of an adventure story: they’ll tell you that they knew about
her before they’d even heard of Fidel. She’d been their beauty queen, their Madonna (Sisters of Mary chairwoman), their benefactress (the King’s Day toys), Angel of Mercy (nurse in her father’s no-fee medical office), and when she turned into an outlaw (worked against Batista’s government and escaped arrest) and became their own “Most Wanted Person” (after the landing), even the least risk-taking citizens had loved her and hidden her in their houses. People of Oriente prayed for her, celebrated her survival, watched her become a war hero, saw her take her rightful place in Havana. They followed her on television, would see her in parades or taking part in conferences. Fidel is great, they told me, but what is the matter with the guy? She risked her life for him. He should have married her. To this day, they want to see the fairy tale come to its proper conclusion, and feel gypped at the outcome. In Oriente, it is the people who love Celia. The unresolved relationship is still a bone of contention, one without resolution.

  FLÁVIA TOLD ME THIS: “There was no amor, like people say. It was a relationship that was neither romantic nor platonic.” Celia would brush off questions by saying that she and Fidel were “work comrades.” No amor is precisely the age-old recipe for good marriage. Affection and not romantic love is what it takes to make the long haul. If popular psychoanalysts, such as Ethel Spector Person or Stephen Mitchell, are right, romantic love, in most cultures, is considered to be too catalytic and confrontational for the day-in and day-out requirements of marriage. They write that society stays away from romantic love, this “act of the imagination” where the rules of engagement become inventive and passionate, set by only two people, the two that are involved (presumably blocking out all those other people, like in-laws, who want to be in on it). Yet both Person and Mitchell have found that cool and rational partnerships fall so far short of emotional expectations that, increasingly, people are willing to have a period of too much amor even if it usually doesn’t last forever. Or, as Mitchell writes, it doesn’t last forever because, out of fear of losing it, they essentially kill romance. Only the very brave and inventive make it last forever.

  Brave and inventive—Fidel Castro and Celia Sánchez Manduley were that, and much more. I suspect they had exactly what it takes, and chose not to go public with it. They absolutely did not relinquish their loyalty to each other, or their day-to-day contact. They forged a bond to weather all storms. Maria Antonia Figueroa called it a life made up of “days of treason, days of deception, sometimes followed by days of glory and happiness.”

  I see it as an unbreakable friendship. They may have been taking a stab at being utopian, but I doubt it. Their highly private, dovetailed alliance started in the Sierra Maestra. Why would these two, of all people, think they had to account to anyone for their private lives? They were revolutionaries creating a new society, and as guerillas had been more than ready to lie about whatever must be protected. In the 1960s, what had to be protected, above all, was the Revolution, and that, it seems to me, is the tie that binds.

  36. 1964

  The Archives

  IN 1964, CELIA ESTABLISHED the Office of Historical Affairs, officially founding the archive on May 4, simply by announcing it in a conversation with a group of people at her house. I don’t know who these people were, but she informed them that she had decided to create an office that would function as an institution responsible for the documents. It would operate under the direction of the secretary of the presidency (herself). “In this manner, characteristically informal, and from her living room,” historian Pedro Tabío Álvárez writes, “the Oficina de Asuntos Historicos was born.”

  Some of the material is transcribed, some are facsimiles; all the original materials were copied on microfilm and onto 35mm film, starting in 1964, by Raúl Corrales; the documents are organized by author and date: “It was the custom of Fidel and other guerrilla chiefs to note the date and hour of their writing,” Tabío noted. Next, Celia hired a small staff (friends from the underground, like Elsa Castro) to visit soldiers, make interviews and record them, and she built up a photo collection.

  The entire project was eventually adopted by the Council of State. This is the highest governmental body in Cuba, generally numbering 10 to 15 members. Not all those on the Council of State are politicians—some are scientists, farmers, writers. Today, her great trove of primary source materials serves as the country’s official archive of the Revolution, and as its presidential library. Unofficially, it’s called Fondo de Celia, Celia’s Archives.

  Celia never forgot the 26th of July Movement’s debt to the people of the Sierra Maestra. Here she is in late 1963, waiting to board a plane to make one of her many trips to Santiago de Cuba. (Courtesy of Oficina de Asuntos Históricos)

  She was not a diarist, although she longed to record her days in the Sierra, and bought a diary for that purpose. According to Nydia Sarrabia, Celia started a diary on March 1, 1958, but other than the date, left the opening page empty; then, on March 6 she wrote, “Never did I think I’d write a diary. My life never seemed interesting enough to write trifles. The war and these circumstances oblige me to note things of interest to make sure that the history of Cuba is true. Raúl has recorded all the facts since the beginning of the Revolution.” But in the end, she filled only the first few pages.

  In the mountains, however, she began to make copies of Fidel’s letters and started keeping her own notes; she began to develop the collection, starting with herself and Fidel first, then, within a month or two, requested materials from the other commanders. Some records, at her suggestion, were buried in mason jars, and these, according to the curator of Celia’s documents, Nelsy Babiel, still turn up under farmers’ plows in the Sierra Maestra spring.

  37.

  The Florida Story

  CONSEQUENCES OF THE REVOLUTION persist in nearly every Cuban family. When the prisoners taken at the Bay of Pigs finally left Cuba in late December 1962, Celia’s sister Chela and her husband, Pedro Álvarez, were on the same boat, emigrating to Florida. As with all Cuban families, their story is seen across the 90-mile divide.

  The Álvarez family had returned to Cuba in 1959 to participate in the Revolution, and that is when the boys went to the Jesuit-run Belén school and stayed in Celia’s apartment. The Álvarez family hoped—at least for a time—they could live within the Revolution. Celia must have hoped that Pedro could help the 26th of July Movement government by heading up the Rice Institute. But as seen from the Cuban side of the divide, the Álvarez family was not “mentally prepared” for what was taking place, and left. And in this, Celia’s extended family mirrors nearly every Cuban family at that time, many of which are divided into two parts: those who stayed, and those who decided to go. The typical Cuban family may not have such dramatic characters, nor assassination as a plot, but it would be hard to find a family with 100 percent of its members remaining in Cuba.

  Celia’s sister Flávia, from her penthouse overlooking the Malecón, told me the following in 1999: “Pedro Álvarez was a millionaire, the owner of a rice mill in Manzanillo. . . . And when the Revolution triumphed, Fidel proposed to make him the head of the Rice Institute of Cuba. But he didn’t accept because they were already talking about Communists, and it was like a four-letter word. He was afraid, but kept working until his business was nationalized.”

  “We lived in the Focsa Building, in Havana, in a large apartment on the twenty-third floor,” Chela explained from her nice though modest house in suburban Miami, and “were asked if we wanted to trade the apartment in exchange for coming here. We came. We didn’t have to pay. Three of our children, our sons, were already here. As soon as they closed the Colegio de Belén, our sons came. Our daughter stayed in Havana with us.”

  “All of the family, including Celia, advised Chela to go,” Flávia confirmed. “Her children had left. Only her husband and one child remained. The boys had left Cuba. It was not a time like now, when they could come and go. Then, it was a matter of forever. . . . They wanted to leave because the priests had advised them.
. . . You know the position of the Church in those days.” The boys had been in an evacuation of children to Miami, now known as Operation Peter Pan, which took place between 1960 and 1962. A Roman Catholic priest in Miami, aided by the U.S. waiver of visas for children under sixteen and fueled by CIA-planted rumors that all Cuban children would be sent to the Soviet Union for their education, flew 14,000 Cuban children to Florida. Although their children had gone ahead of them to Miami, Flávia assured me, “It was very hard for Chela and Pedro to leave the country and go to live there.”

  A realist, Celia never held out much hope for Pedro as a revolutionary. Flávia says that Celia simply said to Chela, “You can stay here, but your children are there, and you will be separated. So you had better go to be with them.” Flávia continued: “They went in the boat that came to pick up the Giron [Bay of Pigs] prisoners. Celia arranged to have them taken with the mercenaries. When they arrived in Miami, their son was already in a training camp of the CIA.”

  “WE WENT ON THE PLAYA GIRON exchange ship,” Pedro Álvarez, in Miami, said, confirming what had been reported by his sister-in-law. “When I took the luggage, when I got onto the ship, I said nothing will harm us again. Then, one of my sons was a patriot, in favor of the [counter-] revolution.”

  WHEN THEY ARRIVED IN MIAMI, Flávia continued, “Pedro and Chela went in search of him because they were shocked at what he’d done. They arranged to take him out of that camp.” The young man’s name was Guillermo (he was also referred to as William) and joined a paramilitary group when he was eighteen years old. He’d been recruited and trained by a Florida-based terrorist group that carried out missions in Cuba.