One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution

by Nancy Stout

  “It was a Monday. I asked Celia about capacity. She told me that their ice-cream parlor would be for one thousand people. I want to make sure you understand the shock of hearing such a thing. Up to this time, an ice-cream parlor was a small place with a counter, a few tables and chairs, with a capacity for maybe forty people. A thousand people! So I asked her, ‘At one time?’ and she nodded and said, ‘Next Monday, I want to see your ideas.’”

  The location they’d picked had been a city park, covering more than a full city block. It had once been the site of the Reina Mercedes Hospital, demolished years before. The grounds, though still lovely, had deteriorated. By 1966, the park consisted of a few ramshackle concession stands of a down-at-the-heel beer garden with drinking and dancing. Everything about the place was unkempt, derelict, and slightly dangerous. Girona called it “a problem spot on an important artery.” Soon the new ice-cream parlor would transform this park.

  On the appointed Monday, Mario Girona met Celia at the Ministry of Construction. “I made a presentation of drawings. There were some photographs of the site and I showed some sketches. Celia said, ‘I think it’s wonderful. Fidel will probably never say no to what I like.’”

  The story goes that Fidel had found, or perhaps confiscated, the recipes for thirty-seven flavors (the numbers in this story vary) and sent technicians to Canada to learn the science of manufacturing them. He wanted a very good product; he wanted to make the best ice cream in the world. And for this ice cream to be produced in the world’s biggest ice-cream parlor, served to, in his opinion, the world’s greatest people.

  “We only had six months to make the Coppelia. Six months for everything: the drawings, the structurals, the equipment. I put together a strategy. I picked the best engineers, and, to gain time, we needed to make prefabricated elements—elements that could be repeated and made on the site. It was going to be a roof—a dome—on columns. All the columns would be prefabricated; each with a ‘holding’ for the upper floor. The beams could be made on the site. We covered the roof with asphalt. Everything was from Cuba.”

  THIS TIME, IT WAS CELIA who decided to bring another child into the household, a boy whose mother had been killed in an automobile accident. Celia waited about a month and then sent someone to Santiago to pick him up; he was almost seven years old.

  Antonio (Tony) Luis García Reyes had already met Celia. “I met Celia in Santiago. My mother’s job was to take care of visitors’ houses for the party. Celia stayed in one of these houses, spent four or five days. I was very small.” The father consented to Tony’s going to the capital. But he and the other children, Teresa and Eugenia, assume that Celia initiated this adoption by speaking with his uncle, Jorge Risquet, a member of the Central Committee.

  During the week, the children boarded at the José Martí School in Santa Maria del Mar. Tony explained their life as schoolchildren: “On Sunday afternoon a bus picked us up in the Parque Central across from the Hotel Inglaterra. We took the 27 bus from Once to Parque Central. No cars drove us. There were no privileges. Saturday morning we were sent home. We’d go back to the scholarship school on Sunday afternoon, from September to June.” The children were forbidden to tell anyone who they lived with or to reveal their home address. Tony continued: “When the school year was over, you could go home—to your parents’ home. But I preferred staying here, because Celia would send us to the beach at Varadero. She paid for this from her own money. Sometimes we’d go for fifteen or twenty days, the other kids and I, Fidelito, Maria Eugenia, and Teresita, the four of us from the house in Once.”

  THE COPPELIA ICE CREAM PARLOR remains one of Celia and Fidel’s greatest projects. The block enclosing it is covered in trees and large bushes, and all paths lead inward, winding gently through a dense landscape of lush vegetation to converge at a two-storied, circular ice-cream palace. This building, even during the Special Period of austerity in the early ’90s, was kept freshly painted a dazzling, spun-sugar white. The rooms are open to the air. At the core of the building is a dome, and this section has an upper floor decorated with red and blue “jewels” as Cubans sometimes affectionately call the panes in stained-glass windows. These sparkle because the sun hits them directly above the trees. On the ground floor, Girona put in very long counters, with stools, to accommodate several hundred guests; there, you are hidden from the outer world.

  The Coppelia project forged ahead. Girona worried that they wouldn’t make their deadline. He says they were still tearing down the old concession stands on opening day, as they inaugurated the new one. “We finished for the June event. Celia came.” Characteristically, she kept a low profile.

  THE CHILDREN DID GO HOME to their families, but Celia also presented them with an option: she could bring their parents to Havana instead. Eugenia liked to go home. She claims that since Fidel always asked about her grandparents, she’d developed the habit of staying in contact with them in order to have a ready reply for Fidel. The first time she went back to Oriente, Celia sent gifts to her grandparents: a sewing machine with lots of fabric, thread, and needles for Eugenia’s grandmother, a saddle for her grandfather. “Celia sent a battery-run radio, which was very large for the house. Of course I took along a suitcase with all my new clothing.” One of the security guards took Eugenia to the airport, and asked the stewardess to care for her. She was met in Manzanillo by party members and driven to Providencia. From there, she went by mule cart. “I was a new girl. I was thin, still crooked, all hair. They called me La Niña, everyone wanted to see me. I was like the mascot of the town. People came from all the nearby places: Santa Dominga, Minas del Frio, all the campesinos came to see La Niña. They brought me letters for Celia.”

  FILM DIRECTOR TOMÁS GUTIERREZ ALEA told me that Coppelia was created to represent the utopian aspects of the Revolution, that it was supposed to be a place where the new members of society who were supporting the Revolution—young, old, black, white, urban, rural, rich, poor, gay, straight—could congregate. The architectural setting acted as a kind of social arbitrator, he explained, which was why he made Coppelia the setting of his Oscar-nominated film Strawberry and Chocolate, where two antagonists meet to bury their differences. As presented in the film Coppelia entirely fulfills its mission. In Havana, it has long been the place where you go on your first date; it is jokingly called a schoolgirl’s Tropicana; it’s where you take your mother on her birthday, where you meet up with your friends. Since the Coppelia opened, on June 4, 1966, it has served up to 35,000 people daily.

  ON THAT FIRST TRIP HOME, Eugenia began giving her clothes away. “When I got back, Celia was waiting for me and opened the suitcase. She asked about my clothing, and commented, ‘You are going to have to go around with one hand in front and the other in back.’” Her suitcase was filled with letters, and Celia answered all the letters, solved all the problems. “One had a problem with his farm; another needed a wheelchair; others needed operations.” On the next vacation, Celia explained that personal things shouldn’t be given away. “You can give people presents, but not personal items. Those are not to be given away. Also, don’t bring letters. You are not a courier, and she gave me an address so they could write directly to the palace.”

  THE NAME COPPELIA was derived from the ballet of that name, which the National Ballet of Cuba was particularly famous for performing. The accountant on the project, Roberto Fernández, told me Celia designed plaid skirts for the waitresses (the ballet is set in an alpine forest) and selected slender young women who resembled ballerinas to work there. But the Coppelia Ice Cream Parlor was a wildly successful venue from the very start, and the svelte young waitresses couldn’t physically cope with the job of carrying several thousand scoops of ice cream on a daily basis. Artist Rita Longa designed Coppelia’s first sign: a ballerina with fat legs in fishnet stockings looking like a sugar cone, a frothy tutu as the ice cream, outlined in neon.

  Coppelia did make very good ice cream, which was entered in international food fairs and sent abroad as dipl
omatic gifts. A member of the foreign ministry told me that pint cartons, packed in dry ice, accompanied diplomats everywhere; anyone traveling to Chile in a certain era took a container of coco glace for Salvador Allende. Right after Coppelia opened, Fidel sent three flavors to Ho Chi Minh.

  Time stops when you eat ice cream; sometimes memory takes over. One wonders how many times Fidel recalled the ice-cream birthday cake Celia served him in the Sierra Maestra. This ice-cream factory kept inventing new flavors, and reached a total of about sixty by 1980. It has always been a successful enterprise. And it is the place that pleases as much as the ice cream.

  COPPELIA HAD ONLY JUST OPENED when Mario Girona got another call from Celia, asking him once again to come to her apartment. He found her alone, because this project was a secret. Fidel had a shack outside Havana, where he went to clear his head, and the only thing in it was a camp bed. Celia decided to fix the place up, covertly. She wanted it to be a surprise. According to the Cuban journalist Soledad Cruz, “She tried to smooth him out”—she viewed part of her role as sanding off Fidel’s rough edges. She wanted to make the presidential retreat—perhaps in a rare concession to public opinion, but certainly out of fondness for Fidel—acceptably presidential.

  “It was a very rustic place. I designed a bathroom. We put in a bar.” Girona kept it simple, and says it was a very small bar, more like a stand-alone cabinet. When the work was finished, Girona contacted Fidel and they drove to the place together. “And when Fidel saw it, he hated it. He threw the bar out the door. ‘Who did this?’ he wanted to know.” But, as usual, Fidel changed his mind when he heard it had been Celia’s idea. Mario went into the weeds to retrieve the bar and haul it back inside. “He was never critical of anything she did.” When they got back to Havana, Mario telephoned Celia, who’d been waiting for Fidel’s reaction. In the end, the battle of upgrading the shack had been settled relatively easily. Fidel liked to be taken care of, and Mario says Celia explained that she only wanted him to be comfortable.

  Years later, Celia telephoned Mario Girona and Dolly Gómez, Girona’s wife and architectural partner, about another clandestine project. She wanted to reconstruct Fidel’s ancestral home, the house his father built in Biran, Oriente Province, which had been destroyed by fire. The architects traveled to the site and easily found the foundations. Although the house had been made of wood, enough had survived for them to take measurements. They set about collecting photographs from others in the Castro Ruz family, relying primarily on Fidel’s siblings Ramon and Juanita. They recorded family members’ recollections of the place, and spoke with neighbors. The early photographs provided them with details and scale, and soon the architects worked up a plan. They gave the blueprint to Celia, and she took it to Fidel. He was pleased. She reasoned that he could take visiting dignitaries there, as nearly all expressed a desire to visit the Sierra Maestra. He gave his consent, and construction began. The result is a large plantation house, set on high posts that rise above ground-floor stables, and surrounded on all four sides by verandahs. The president now had a homestead. Celia Girona told me that Celia felt Fidel needed to have a tangible connection to his emotional past, which rebuilding his family home gave him.

  THE YEAR 1966 WAS A SUCCESSFUL ONE for projects. Celia capped it with the Cohiba cigar factory, El Laguito, which she established to produce Fidel’s favorite cigar, the lancero he’d been enjoying since 1959. “I found a man who rolled a good cigar,” Fidel explained at the thirtieth anniversary party for Cohiba at the Tropicana nightclub in 1996. “It was slender but long, and made of good leaf. He dressed his cigar in a pale [tobacco leaf] wrapper.” One of the trademarks of the Cohiba cigar is its blondness, compared to the dark, sweet cigars of the past: the new cigar was pretty to look at, seemingly mild but deceptively strong. The Cohiba’s inner leaves are given an extra stage of fermentation and are, compared with those of standard cigars, more powerful.

  Celia had overseen the production of Fidel’s cigars from the beginning, and those for other leaders. (Che’s were rolled in the Cabaña fortress.) She did this for reasons of security. Gradually, however, her products took on a new role. Whenever Fidel’s entourage traveled abroad, they handed out Celia’s cigars. Later, she sent them abroad, in hand-carved boxes produced in her wood workshop, and soon they had become widely appreciated state gifts.

  She set up the small cigar factory in a vacated mansion in a rich suburban area. This splendid villa, set in a large garden, has all the departments of a regular cigar factory. The bundles of tobacco are aged there, in a small former guest house located in the garden, at the end of a long, palm-lined path; leaf selection takes place in a cabin, a place that may have been used for cooking, or storage; rolling takes place inside the villa proper, amid some of the original pieces of furniture.

  Celia’s secondary reason for opening the factory was to give work to as many women as she possibly could. Under her direction, all the rollers in this factory were women (and continued to be until the early 1990s when, for the sake of equality, a few men were admitted to the rolling room). El Laguito takes its name from a section of Havana that was the most glamorous part of town in the old days. She was breaking real ground in this endeavor by placing the factory in this district, and by giving some of the tobacco industry’s very special jobs exclusively to women. In the 1950s, women everywhere had been elbowed out of the work force as good jobs in factories were reserved for men. Women had always been part of the cigar industry, however: they helped with the fermentation of the leaves, but rarely got the best jobs rolling cigars. At El Laguito, women did everything (except for one role in management, held by Eduardo Rivero, who had created the cigar). At the time of the thirtieth anniversary, Emilia Tamayo González was named director and the first female chief executive of any Cuban tobacco factory. By then, she’d been at El Laguito for twenty of its thirty years.

  The success of the Cohiba brand lies in the selection of the leaves, of the specific farms where the leaves are grown, and in the extra fermentation. Fidel glamorously promoted the lancero, but by 1968, they produced two more shapes (vitolas) and had lanceros, especiales, and panatelas. After production of these was perfected, robustos, esplendidos, and esquisitos were added. The members of the new government were paying homage to certain growers of excellent tobacco who, historically, had been short-changed. Cohiba’s trademark pale outer leaf, the wrapper, has been exclusively grown by a family of tobacco growers on the privately owned Robaina farm in San Luis, Pinar del Rio Province. This family has produced tobacco since 1846. “I come from a long line of tobacco growers,” Alejandro Robaina told me. “My grandfather was an excellent grower and my father, Maruto Robaina, was the best in the country.” Yet, year after year the old Spanish buyers would tell him that his leaf was not quite up to par that year in order to lower the price. Cohiba uses Alejandro Robaina’s pale “shade tobacco,” and it has brought Fidel much needed income for his government. When I visited Robaina at his family’s farm, “Fidel spent over thirty minutes here,” he told me jubilantly.

  In many ways, Cohiba is the biggest project of them all. Celia’s business cards in the 1960s were engraved on very thin pieces of cedar, the kind used to separate the rows of cigars in a box of export habanos. And she encouraged a line of clothing (produced in a fashion workshop named Verano, which also produced sugar-sack dresses worn with “Cuba” belt buckles) made of the gauzy fabric used in the fields to cover high-grade wrapper tobacco.

  CELIA LOVED ARTISTS. And at the beginning of 1968, Danish abstract artist Asger Jorn painted murals in her office at the Archives. Jorn had come to Cuba to participate in an exhibition at the invitation of Wilfredo Lam, whom he’d met in Paris in 1946 when they were young unknown artists and Jorn worked for Fernand Leger and Le Corbusier. Their friendship deepened in Italy, where they shared a ceramics studio in Abisola.

  After the exhibition was over, Jorn wanted to stay on and do something more for revolutionary Cuba, and just how sincerely he meant this can
be illustrated by the fact that just a few years earlier, in 1964, Jorn was given a prestigious Guggenheim award for $2,500 but refused it. Only recently has his telegram to Harry F. Guggenheim become public. It read: “Go to hell bastard. Refuse prize. Never asked for it. Against all decency mix artist against his will in your publicity. I want public confirmation not to have participated in your ridiculous game.”

  Jorn contacted Celia at the suggestion of Carlos Franqui, who was in Paris. He found a sympathetic home at the Office of Historical Affairs; it seems likely that he painted Celia’s office first, then moved on to the walls in the large room on the ground floor (formerly it was a bank), hallway, stairwell, and mezzanine. Late one night Celia jokingly painted a little mural of her own. Using cans of paints he’d left on the floor, she drew a scene from the Sierra Maestra, with a tank and some palm trees, expecting him to paint over it. But he didn’t.

  IN THE FIRST EIGHT YEARS of the Revolution, Celia authored at least three truly great projects: Coppelia, Cohiba, and the archives. In the last of these, she was betrayed by one of her carefully selected staff members, a man she’d appointed director, who copied the archive’s contents and left the country in the late 1960s. Carlos Franqui—almost always referred to by her family and colleagues as “a traitor to Celia”—went abroad on a project at Celia’s behest and took, without her knowledge, photographs he’d made of documents she was preparing to publish in a book. This was to have been the archives’ first publication of primary correspondence and other documents from the war. What exactly Carlos Franqui did remains subject to debate, but one thing is clear—he was not a “whistle blower,” stealing material and divulging it to set a record straight. He simply wanted to scoop the archives, and get the glory for bringing these materials to public view.