One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution

by Nancy Stout

  IN MIAMI, PEDRO SPOKE ABOUT the group, confirmed that it was sponsored by the CIA, and said his son had been attracted to them. “They had infiltrated before. They had been on these missions. They’d done this stuff before. The people who infiltrated Cuba openly talked about it.” Pedro and Chela brought Guillermo home and thought that that would be the end of it.

  “AFTER THAT, HE STARTED to work in a parking lot,” Flávia said, to fill in some of the story. “The only one in the family who wrote to him was me. There was no regular mail between the two countries, so if I knew someone was going to Mexico, I’d send him letters. Celia knew. When I got Chela’s mail, Celia would ask, ‘What did she say?’ and I would go over to Once and show Celia the letter. Fidel appreciated their attitude. He appreciated that they didn’t make any statement to the press when they arrived.” Another member of the family commented dryly, “Fidel behaved elegantly because Pedro left four million dollars in the bank.”

  The family thought that Guillermo had broken ties with the CIA, but one day, in May 1966, he casually mentioned that he was going fishing and, instead, went on a mission to Cuba, where he was killed. The operation’s lone survivor, named Tony Cuesta, identified the others, including Celia’s nephew.

  GUILLERMO’S PARENTS are understandably filled with anguish, although four decades have passed since his death. Chela lamented sadly, “People said: ‘Don’t take these young boys.’ But Tony Cuesta went to a party and told them: ‘We have a mission.’ And Guillermo went.” Pedro was fatalistic: “If they hadn’t killed him that day, he would have gone back [to Cuba]. . . . He was very tough, since the day he was born. He wasn’t afraid of anything or anybody.”

  In Havana, I spoke to his uncle, Comandante Delio Gómez Ochoa, who confirmed all the parts of the story. “I knew the boy William—Guillermo. I knew all the children. In 1961, when I came back to Cuba, I met them.” (Ochoa led a column in the Sierra Maestra, became Fidel’s liaison in Havana during the last months of the war. In 1960, he went on a mission to overthrow General Trujillo in the Dominican Republic. When he returned, he married, and eventually divorced, Celia’s youngest sister, Acacia.)

  Ochoa is retired from the army now, and we spoke at his house in Playa, which is not far from the sea. “The landing was close by. It was an operation set up by the CIA in order to attack the president’s house; the president was Dorticos. He lived near the Chateau Miramar. . . . There was a large area between 5th Avenue and the beach, where the Hotel Havana has been constructed, on the other side of 5th Avenue. All of that area was known then as El Monte Bareto. It wasn’t a mountain. There were a lot of trees and a lot of growth that extended from the other side of 5th Avenue all the way to the coast.

  “They came in a very fast boat. We didn’t have boats with that speed. They landed. Those who remained on the boat were discovered by the Cuban coast guard. A militia unit nearby were the ones that encountered them.”

  The small fast boat from Miami landed on the beach with enough time to set up missiles before the Cuban militia attacked them. Some members of the party went into the Monte Bareto woods, but Guillermo got back into the boat. By that time, Cuban units—Ochoa said these were small boats with radios—closed in, and they exchanged fire; then two other units of the Cuban coast guard intercepted the boat in which Guillermo was alone, at the wheel. When the coast guard arrived, they ordered the boat to halt, but it didn’t. “So the coast guard started shooting, and one of the shots hit the gasoline tank of the boat, and it exploded. That is how the action ended.”

  “He was blown to pieces,” is Flávia’s version. “Pedrito, his father, called his cousin to . . . request [that] the government give them the remains.” There were none. Flávia says that Celia could do nothing, although she tried. “She told the cousin to go to the general staff of the navy, to be officially informed. They told her that they had not been able to find anything at all because the boat had carried a huge amount of explosives.”

  Tony Cuesta, hit by a grenade, survived. Ochoa recalls, “He lost one arm and one eye, and was in prison for a long time here in Cuba, [and] when he was captured, talked about it. . . . For about four or five days they looked for the remains of the boat, and they could find nothing, and felt that the Gulf Stream took it out. They even sent divers to look for it. They traced the exact spot and sent divers down, but didn’t find anything. The navy divers searched for days.”

  Another relative, who had work in the Ministry of Foreign Relations, told me that it is generally assumed that Guillermo had been recruited because he knew Celia’s apartment on Calle Once. He’d also come to Cuba to participate in one of the CIA’s attempts to kill Fidel.

  Guillermo’s older brother, Jorge Álvarez, lives in Miami and supplied an important detail no one else mentioned: “I spent two weeks with Celia in Havana when I was twelve. My father sent me to Havana with her, asked her to get me into the boarding school Belén. While I was in boarding school, Guillermo and I spent a lot of weekends with her. We slept there once a week for a period of six or eight months.” When he went to Miami, Guillermo would have been fourteen. It would be unusual for a fourteen-year-old not to mention that Fidel Castro lived in his aunt’s apartment, and even stranger for a CIA agent to ignore this information.

  The family was shocked by Guillermo’s death. For a time, no one spoke about it. Still grieving, Pedro Álvarez said to me in 2000, “And there is another thing: when they killed our son, we knew that all of them [in Cuba] were crying, but no one bothered to send us a cablegram. They were afraid of what would happen to them there. No one sent an expression of grief. This child was one of Celia’s favorites. She didn’t even call.”

  BACK IN HAVANA, I confronted Flávia with Pedro’s assertion. “We didn’t call Chela because we didn’t know what we could say to her,” she lamented. “In the first moments, I was heartbroken. It happened in the midst of a general mobilization that was happening here in Cuba. . . . Every time Kennedy made a speech, there was a general mobilization to get prepared. Years later, the telephone rang. Rene [Flávia’s husband] answered it. He said it was Chela . . . that her voice was trembling. I said, ‘You know we all love you, as always, and we know that you feel the same way about us.’ We talked about many things but we did not speak about Guillermo.”

  “MY BROTHER WAS KILLED IN 1966,” Jorge Álvarez Sánchez told me, “and for ten years we lost connections with Cuba. Then they started calling back and forth, and writing. Flávia is the one that started that scenario.”

  “THEY WERE VERY NICE CHILDREN,” Ochoa added softly. “They had the same personality of the mother, because the father was not someone you could speak to. Even while we were up in the Sierra Maestra, the boys’ father, who lived in the Manzanillo area—a rice grower—was an enemy of our procedures before the triumph of the Revolution. . . . Like all the other rice growers, he had to pay a tax, but Celia had to pressure him.”

  “FIDEL DIDN’T OFFER MY FATHER the job at the Rice Institute,” Jorge Álvarez clarified. “Celia is the one who told my mother to have him go see Fidel. It was in the first two weeks that he was in Havana that she wanted my father to meet with Fidel. But my father didn’t like what he saw. He is a very straight person. My father sees things in black and white. Gray is not his color.” Pedro Álvarez, according to his son, would have been unwilling to serve in the Castro government—not even as an advisor on rice production.

  Jorge is the child who returned, the first in the family to take a step toward reconciliation. He began to tell me his own story. “I am an engineer. In 1979 I was working in Libya, and one of the guys I worked with, an Italian, was going to Cuba. I gave him Flávia’s telephone number, which I’d never forgotten.” They were each on their way home, and stopped in Italy. The other engineer urged Jorge to come along with him to Cuba, and so Jorge placed a call to Flávia.

  “In 1979, one of Guillermo’s brothers, Jorge, called from Italy.” Flávia recalls this moment with a fresh delight, as if it were yesterday.
“He was on his way home and wanted to come to Cuba.”

  Jorge filled in more details: “Celia sent me a visa. I didn’t have a Cuban passport. The consulate [in Italy] stamped it in my American passport. And she paid for all my expenses.”

  “I got very excited anticipating Jorge’s trip,” Flávia continued. “He stayed at the Riviera Hotel. I went there to see him and, from there, I called Celia, who told Jorge that she had asked a friend to get some cassava from Manzanillo and that she was going to bring roast beef. The dinner was at my house, with all the typical Manzanillo food. Kiki [their oldest brother, Manuel Enrique] came with his wife and children. Orlando was still married then. Silvia and our cousin Nene came with her two girls. Celia was already ill.”

  FLÁVIA FORGOT TO MENTION that Julio César, Griselda’s son, who had played with Jorge when they were children, also came. Jorge said they’d been delighted to meet again, and that he had loved meeting Julio César’s children, Raysa and Ariel. Jorge says he enjoyed the trip—“They treated me well, and they looked happy”—and claims he asked Celia, “Are you still taking care of your child?”—referring to Fidel. She didn’t answer. He admits that Celia was very kind to him, and says that she ate nothing and left the party early. Celia could not have been particularly happy with his question, but on the other hand, she probably took it for what it was: Jorge was speaking for Miami.

  Everyone concurs that the families had been separated by Guillermo’s death, but it was Manuel’s memory that held them together. “My grandfather was a beautiful person,” Jorge said.

  CHELA AND PEDRO WERE NOT PREPARED for the new government, even though it was run, in part, by Celia. “They did a lot of horrible things to us,” Chela remembers. “We went to Vedado. We still had our house in Manzanillo. They took the house in Manzanillo and converted it into a military garrison. Celia didn’t do anything to avert that.” Pedro immediately softened his wife’s remark by saying, “I know she was sorry about the way we were treated, but she didn’t do anything for us. We think she didn’t do anything because she thought that everybody was going to be equal. Everything was going to be good. This property was going to be given out equally.” To this Chela quickly added: “I love her a lot, but I am still resentful. We left everything there. And all of us who came here without a penny—we all had had maids.”

  While Julio César was trying to sort out the chronology of an event, he said—in clearly a slip of the tongue—that the date in question took place “after we lost Celia to the Revolution.” Many relatives, like the Gironas, regret that they didn’t spend more time with her, and say that she seemed to be too busy for them to interfere. She was busy, no doubt about that, but Fidel was possessive. If Celia was with her friends and Fidel arrived, they left. Inez Girona recalled one particular occasion when she and a group of friends were at Celia’s and Fidel came in. He’d said, loudly, to Celia: “Who are these people?” although he knew all of them. They left. How many members of the family felt that they had lost her, I asked Pedro. “She always loved us. We didn’t lose her to the Revolution,” Pedro said. But, he went on, “if somebody had said to Celia, ‘Someone has to die. One of your sisters or Fidel,’ it would have been one of her sisters.”

  Taking into account all the people who were close to Celia and were affected by the role she played in the Revolution—and this included her seven siblings, their spouses and children, her numerous cousins and their families, and if you add in her friend, Fidel, the biggest target of them all—it is amazing that all these people (around forty, I calculate) survived the Revolution and the counterrevolution, too. So far, they’ve died only of natural causes, with the one exception: Chela and Pedro’s son, Guillermo.

  38. HAVANA, 1965–1970

  The Household and the Coppelia Ice Cream Parlor

  IN HAVANA, CELIA’S DUTIES were overtly governmental, since she held several ministerial posts as secretary to Fidel Castro on the Council of State and the Council of Ministers, the two branches that lead the country. In 1965, she was elected to the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party. As a member of the Central Committee, she had come to wield considerable—one might think complete—political power. Yet the most frequent reply when I asked people about it was that she was not political: her real power was her ability to help people. Exactly what she did on the Central Committee, I do not know, and I was advised by Pedro Álvarez Tabío that I’d never get access to documents held by the party. But she did gain extensive power and, by 1978, was a member of the Politburo.

  In 1966, Fidel increased the household by bringing home two more children. He had serendipitously discovered Teresa Lamoru Preval and her brother on a trip to Oriente Province. He was on his way to give a speech, and his driver stopped to help a truck that was stalled on the road.

  “I was eight years old and going to a place in Mor County that was far away. My uncle’s wife had just given birth and I was going to my uncle’s home to help out with the new baby. My uncle was the manager of a grocery store in La Melba, and the truck was full of goods for his store. Fidel came by with his caravan of vehicles, stopped and tried to help us. He asked what he could do. They couldn’t fix the truck. Finally, he said he’d take us to town. My uncle told him that he had to stay with the truck, because it was loaded, but to take me, Teresita.”

  Fidel struck up a conversation straightaway: asked what grade she was in school, how she helped around the house, about members of her family, whether she could cook and what she cooked, and how she helped her mother clean house. “The conversation lasted until we reached town. When we got to my uncle’s house, Fidel asked me if I wanted to come to Havana to study. I said yes, but I told him that my brother, who was older, also wanted to study. I asked if I my brother could come too, and Fidel said yes. He said that anyone in the family—any of the children—could come. But the others were too young.”

  Two issues were at work here, one relating to the Revolution on a grand scale, the other highly personal. The first is the enthusiasm felt in Cuba, at that moment, about giving children an education. The government—Fidel, Celia, Minister of Education Armando Hart, and others—had decided to bring children to the capital and educate them there. By 1963, there were 70,000 scholarship students in Havana and the other main cities, the majority the children of farmers. By 1966, educating rural children in Havana was the norm, and an honor for those involved. Second, Fidel was probably thinking about Eugenia, who was very lonely living in the Once house filled with adults.

  There were plenty of nieces and nephews running in and out of Celia’s apartment in those days, but never once did they mention Eugenia in all the times I interviewed them. Eugenia was giving Fidel and Celia some trouble, was acting out, and admits now that she was very rebellious, would misbehave, and Celia would say, “I am going to tell Fidel.” Likely he thought that other children, closer to Eugenia’s age, would be a solution.

  Fidel continued to his destination, but he sent one of his men to the Lamoru household to carry his invitation to take Teresa and her brother to Havana and discuss it with their mother. “My mother cried a lot. Everybody had been surprised. All afternoon the house was filled with all of our neighbors. Some urged my mother to let us come to Havana; others said the opposite.” Teresa and her brother were excited at the prospect. Finally, that evening they got into the jeep and met Fidel at the hall where he’d given his speech. It was late at night, and they traveled with him to Holguín, where a plane was waiting to take them to Varadero. They landed just before dawn. Fidel, the children, and his entourage, spent a night in a hotel, and from there he telephoned Celia to tell her that he was bringing two children to live at Once.

  “We arrived in Havana in the afternoon. Celia was there and he introduced us, told her our names.” It was August and extremely hot. Teresa says Celia was wearing Bermuda shorts, a sleeveless blouse, and espadrilles, that she had her hair pinned up and wore no makeup. Teresa recalls that she was “very loving,” and talked to both of them.
“Then she left us with Ernestina and Ana Irma, and went to talk to Fidel.”

  Teresa is such a self-confident adult that I suspect Fidel saw a spunky, outgoing, well-grounded child and concluded she would be good company for Eugenia. Eugenia says she was wildly happy when the other children moved in. Teresa’s brother’s name was Fidel, and he was around nine years old; Celia called him Fidelito, and “I became Teresita,” she says. Celia’s relatives think it was entirely Fidel’s idea to bring children to live at Once, and Celia went along with it. This seems likely; after all, Fidel, not Celia, was always the one who could spend hours talking to children. His bringing in children, and coming to visit them, was part of how Fidel domesticated the household Celia was creating.

  The first day, Ana Irma taught the children how to make their beds, and even though they were fairly young, Fidel insisted that Ernestina must teach them how to cook. Each child was given a permanent household task. Fidelito was introduced to Robert, who cleaned floors and carried out various janitorial tasks, and was taught how to polish Fidel’s boots. Ana Irma sat the two little girls down and demonstrated how to pick lint off Fidel’s socks.

  NEXT, CELIA AND FIDEL turned to a somewhat unlikely project, though it is one that makes perfect sense in the context of a house full of children. “Again, I was summoned to her apartment,” Mario Girona said. “Fidel was there. Celia said, ‘We are going to make an ice-cream factory. We have lots of flavors and we want to sell the ice cream in a special place.’” The building of the Coppelia Ice Cream Parlor was driven by the desire to transform a rundown park into a respectable location. The leadership wanted to construct it in time for an important international conference soon to take place, which Girona recalls as happening in the National Radio and Television Institute’s Yara Theater, located in the heart of Vedado on the corner of L and 23rd. At the time, the Yara was considered the city’s best piece of modern architecture. Girona thinks that the project may have been sparked by the fact that the Russian delegation would be attending the conference and staying at the Hotel Havana Libre diagonally across the street from the site.