by Nancy Stout
“One day, it was January 18th, my birthday, I went to the archives and saw her at a distance, through a glass pane,” Eduardo told me. The archives is housed in a 1950s bank with a fair number of glass partitions. He happened to speak to Celia’s sister Acacia and said, “Today, I’ve had the loveliest birthday present, because I’ve just seen Celia from afar. A week later, I went back. Acacia called me over, and behind one of the columns was Celia. I met her face to face.”
I interviewed Mariela Castro, the director of the Cuban National Center for Sex Education. “Celia didn’t know how, but she found a means to protect homosexuals.” She went on to say that Celia did not have an institution to work with, and she wasn’t in a position to make legislation. All she could do was protect them. “Institutions were being created to develop the country, the party, the government; to defend ourselves, and to learn to survive in our sovereignty. At the time, nobody worried about the rights of homosexuals. . . . Nobody’s creative imagination would have led to this institution, not at the time.”
Eduardo continued: “One time I was at Once, and Fidel came in with Pepin Naranjo. Fidel put his hand out to get something and touched me. I flinched. I felt like a mouse under an elephant’s foot, and I told Celia: ‘I don’t know where Fidel ends and God begins.’ She answered, ‘For heaven’s sake, don’t tell him that.’”
In 1968, Eduardo began to work in one of Celia’s workshops and in 1970 began restoring furniture for Las Ruinas, an exclusive restaurant being built in Lenin Park. Celia made the architectural design of Las Ruinas very modern but used groups of antique chairs restored by Eduardo and other teams in her many workshops to decorate it; she also used antique pieces of stained glass.
LENIN PARK OPENED IN 1972, a far cry from the old Spanish parks that were so much a part of Celia’s life in Manzanillo, but not unlike the rolling fields outside Pilón. She was neither working quickly nor taking the easy way: she was behind the epic task of planting 80,000 mature trees, each with an extensive root system. And it was her idea to import birds from the not-too-distant province of Pinar del Rio, only to have most of them fly back home. She worked with many architects, but gave a start to a young architect, Juan Tosca, who helped her lay the foundations for a wonderful urban park where no buildings could be taller than the vegetation. She commissioned works of art from Portocarrero, and supplied his paints and rum while he worked on the project. On opening day, Celia made sure everybody who lived in Once was there as well as nieces and nephews. She introduced them to everything the park had to offer, sent the kids on hikes and trail rides. Eugenia fell off a horse.
The park reflects Celia’s good taste and practical nature, but just as much her eccentricities. Critics immediately point out that there are no paths. “People will make paths where they want paths,” she told her project manager, Lucy Villegas. Here, people walk wherever they want (although not always conveniently). Leaves are allowed to lie where they fall from the trees. When she discovered gardeners raking them up, she told them to let them fall and see the patterns they made on the ground. Celia disliked the topiaries in other Havana parks, because topiary took up too much time, and was unnatural. She would likely have labeled it unCuban.
Today, Lenin Park is a swath of gently rolling hills and open spaces, a refuge from the city center. The park lies on the southwestern edge of Havana, but along well-established roads linking the capital to the ancient tobacco fields that stretch from Havana Province to Pinar del Rio. Slightly to the west lies José Martí International Airport and its newest terminal, No. 3, which opened in 1998 and was designed by Mario Girona (his last project before his death) and Dolly Gómez. Lenin Park’s eastern boundaries touch on La Mantilla, home of Detective Lt. Mario Conde and his creator, the writer Leonardo Padura. Today Lenin Park has sixty or so restaurants, numerous food stands, art galleries, a narrow-gauge railroad, a rodeo, baseball diamonds, swimming pools, fields and wooded areas, a bust of Lenin in white marble, a garden that is a gift from Japan, an amusement park that is a fairly recent gift from China, and at least a million visitors a year.
40.
Life at Once
THE CHILDREN LOVED SPENDING HOLIDAY time at Once, especially the week-long school holiday to commemorate the Bay of Pigs victory, Semana de Girón, which was celebrated every year. They didn’t go on vacation “like everybody else,” according to Tony. Celia would take them to work in the fields. “Volunteer work. We’d clean cane fields. The people who worked in her office did this, too. It was in the countryside outside Havana. We’d go in the morning and come back home.”
It was those stay-at-home, stay-in-Havana vacations that gave Celia time with the children. She taught them how to cook. She made sure they knew how to debone a chicken or a turkey, which they all learned how to do, and were surprised to hear that she’d learned the secrets at Macy’s, where she had taken cooking classes during her long stay in New York City in 1948. She taught them traditional Oriente recipes, like corn pudding made with the milk squeezed from the kernels and stirred constantly over a low flame. She made sure they all knew how to dance, and taught the girls how to use makeup. “We all had boyfriends and girlfriends,” Eugenia explained.
Tony elaborated on Celia’s approach to their social lives. “If anyone had a girlfriend or boyfriend, Celia would talk to us. She wanted to know who they were, where they lived, if they were revolutionaries, and what their parents did for a living. She asked us to find out this information.” When Eugenia met a boy on the Isle of Youth (formerly the Isle of Pines) on a school outing, she related, “I told Celia that I had a boyfriend, and she asked where he lived. I told her San Francisco de Paula.” Celia told Eugenia to bring him to Once. “Celia was lovely. We were very young. Twelve years old. We went steady for two years. He’d given me a ring and Celia gave me a gold ring to give to the boy.”
Pilón, 1972. Celia continued to return to Pilón to fish with Gustavo Navea Torres. She has a tape recorder in her lap and is wearing a T-shirt she designed sporting Mella’s, Camilo’s, and Che’s portraits. The fisherman was a storyteller. Sometimes, when Fidel was overworked, she’d bring Navea Torres to Havana to tell Fidel jokes. (Courtesy of Oficina de Asuntos Históricos)
She continued: “I lost interest in my boyfriend and fell in love with somebody else. I didn’t know how to break it off, so I asked Celia. She said, ‘You have to be sincere, be frank, tell him that you like him, but that you don’t love him anymore. Tell him the truth. Ask for the ring back. Give him back yours.’ Celia didn’t know it was because I’d fallen for someone else. Celia wouldn’t have liked that.”
“We asked her if we could go to Oriente with our boyfriends,” Teresa said. The girls were around fifteen at the time. “Celia told us, ‘I don’t think it’s the correct thing to do, but I’m going to talk it over with Fidel.’” (When Celia was fifteen, she and her girlfriends would walk in their favorite park in Manzanillo and invite boys to the beach. She surely recalled those happy trips to the Sánchez farm with her boyfriend, Sadurni, but also how they had traveled there with a chaperone.) A few days later, after she’d spoken to Fidel, Celia gave Eugenia and Teresa the answer. “She said, ‘If the boys want to visit you while you’re there, you could leave first and they can visit you.’ And when Fidel heard this he said, no, ‘It sounds too much like a honeymoon.’ So, the boys didn’t go. We were like a normal household.”
But it wasn’t a normal household. For one thing, the children didn’t give reciprocal parties, because Teresa told me that “at Santa Maria del Mar, we’d met Olivia, the niece of Commander Calixto García. We asked if we could bring her home and she came, but after she left, Celia explained why we couldn’t bring people into the house. She gave us examples, told us stories of people she thought she could trust: ambassadors, ministers, important people she’d trusted, who had attacked them. ‘We have to be very careful. We have to take care of Fidel.’ After that, we never asked to bring guests again.”
Eugenia finally got up the c
ourage to tell Celia that she was going steady with someone Celia didn’t know about. “Is he a militant?” meaning: Is he a party member? Celia wanted to know where he lived and what he looked like. “Ask him for a photo and bring it to me.” Eugenia’s boyfriend was on the judo team, “He was strong, elegant, a mulatto, and wearing a swimming suit in the picture I showed her. She didn’t like him from the photo.” Yet Eugenia says that Celia admitted she might get a better impression from meeting him in person. “I brought him to the house. He was completely frightened. His hands were trembling.” Meeting Victor, Celia sent Eugenia off to make coffee and asked about his job, about sports. When Eugenia brought out a plate of pastries with the coffee, he declined both, and Celia teased him by saying, “You’re so overweight.” He was extremely body conscious. Celia gave him a little tour of the kitchen, and then Eugenia’s room (“It was always neat. It had to be. Celia demanded this”). Then Celia asked about their plans for the rest of the day, and they told her they were going to the movies. She asked Victor to bring Eugenia home early.
“I felt things had gone well. When I got back that night, Celia was waiting for me and told me that she did not like him. And she listed the reasons. She’d had him investigated! She had all the information on him. He lived in Luyano. He had a son with a woman. His parents were divorced. There had been problems of violence between them.” Celia told Eugenia: “This man won’t be good for you.”
Even though Victor had not informed Eugenia of any of these facts, she was eighteen and resisted taking advice from Celia. “I told her I was in love. I told her I was going to go steady with him. Celia told me he couldn’t come to Once.” This was in 1975, and the relationship continued for a couple of years. “Celia knew. I thought she didn’t know, or was just being discreet.”
One day in 1977, Eugenia was leaving the apartment as Fidel was coming in. He said, “Where are you going all dressed up?” and Eugenia says she couldn’t lie to him. “I answered, ‘I’m going to see my boyfriend.’ And Fidel said, ‘Are you still going steady with him? Where’s he taking you?’ and I told him to Restaurant 1830. Fidel said, ‘He’s taking you there? It’s so expensive.’ The restaurant was a lie. Instead we went to the tower next to it, and sat outside at the café.”
Fidel talked to Celia. “She’s in love with him, let her go steady,” and mentioned that Eugenia looked very good, and seemed to be happy. This exchange was reported to Eugenia later that night by Migdalia, the nurse, who had listened to Fidel and Celia’s conversation. Celia agreed, but said, “I don’t want him here.” So, on that basis, the relationship continued.
TERESA GAVE A FULLER PICTURE of those years: “We all had boyfriends and girlfriends, but with Ezekiel, Celia really suffered. He was the youngest, and he started an affair with a woman named Orquidia he met at Varadero, on the beach,” where Celia sent them for a summer holiday every year for a couple of weeks. “His relationship with Celia was wonderful [because] the rest of us children would accept whatever she said, but he’d argue back.” At this point in our conversation, Teresa and Eugenia conferred, and decided that Orquidia had been between eighteen and twenty years older than Ezekiel. Teresa continued: “She looked good, physically. And there was a big drama about this relationship, which lasted quite a while—all of it followed closely by Celia, of course, who would talk to me every day to find out how it was going.” In about four or five years, Ezekiel fell in love with somebody else. After that, he got married. But his new wife was nervous, and went into the hospital just before their wedding. Teresa shook her head, “His love stories were terrible.”
Tony went AWOL over love. “I had a big problem with Celia,” Tony told me. “When I was doing my military service in the navy, in the Marina de Guerra, I left without permission. I was in love with a girl, with blue eyes. Head over heels. I was crazy to see her. I was stationed at Mariel, the 2746 military unit. We were on lookout for submarines. I was a radio telegrapher. When I left my post, Celia was shocked. She found out about it, and when I got home, she was waiting for me.”
Tony was about sixteen when he committed this dereliction of duty. He went home to Once several days later. “When she saw me she said, ‘Sit down in the living room, I have to talk to you. I know what’s going on, so don’t lie to me.’ So I answered yes, I’m AWOL. I’m in love. And she said, ‘Don’t move from here. Tomorrow, early, they are going to pick you up and take you back to the unit.’” Celia held the rank of major; she was, and always would be, a comandante, so Tony was really putting her to a test. His godmother was still, mentally no less than technically, a soldier. I doubt she gave much weight to his declaration of love, or his style of declaring it, since Cubans are much given to jumping off the cliff in matters of love. “In the morning they picked me up. When I got up, she was waiting for me, and she said, ‘You have made a very big mistake and you are going to pay for it.’ When I got to my unit, the chief told me I’d be put in prison for six days. I had been there for only three days when they took me out to a military judge, who talked to me, and took down my statement, my testimony, from which I was to be judged. The judge said that Celia had called to ask about me, and she’d asked if six days were the normal sentence for what I’d done. They told her no. So Celia said, ‘Then apply the normal sentence.’ It was eight months.”
He was sentenced to eight months, not in prison but in his unit without leave. By this time, he said, he was near the end of his three-year military duty. “Altogether, I spent three years and eight months. They asked me if I wanted to go to Angola. I went. I don’t want to brag, but I was good on the radio. Good at my job.”
IN 1974, CELIA WENT BACK TO SCHOOL. The six children were grown, although they still lived at home; Tony and Fidelito were in the military but still came to Once whenever they could get passes. She wanted to study Marxist philosophy at the Nico Lopez School, a four-year course leading to a university degree. Comandante Delio Gómez Ochoa was also studying there. He’d married her sister Acacia, and lived in the neighborhood, on Linea and 10th. He was studying economics. Every Saturday afternoon they would go to hear two lectures, covering various issues, delivered between 2:00 and 6:00. They taped the lectures and listened to them again later in the week, when they completed the study assignments. Celia set up a classroom in one of the empty back apartments where she met with her study group of five women, which met every night during the academic year. Delio met with a separate group, mostly at the Once schoolroom. Through the rest of the ’70s, Celia studied the Marxists and took exams.
AFTER FIFTEEN YEARS OF ANTI-COLONIAL STRUGGLE, Portugal, having just overthrown its dictator, withdrew from its African colonies. Cuba came to the aid of Angola’s MPLA government led by Agostinho Neto, which faced domestic and foreign opposition, including from South Africa and Zimbabwe. Cuba sent 480 specialists—one of them being Tony.
Tony was living in Luanda with his uncle, Jorge Risquet Valdes. “A car came to tell me that Fidel wanted to see me. . . . I went to see Fidel, who was in a visitor’s house [for foreign dignitaries] in Luanda. He hugged me. I had long hair at the time, and Fidel asked me if I’d left my barber behind in Cuba. ‘Is this an Afro you’re wearing?’” Tony has blue eyes with a sharp, but playful gaze—he looks a bit like Frank País.
In March 1977 Fidel made a somewhat jubilant victory tour, accompanied by Celia, of several African nations. (Staff and friends say that Celia didn’t like traveling then, so I think it likely she wanted to visit Tony.)
“When Celia got to Angola, she sent for me. She was in a neighborhood called Fotungo de Belas. Celia liked to mix with people, wherever she was, but it was the most godforsaken place. When I went to see her, she asked me, ‘Do you know this place well?’ and I told her, ‘Like the palm of my hand.’ So she said, ‘Let’s go for a walk.’” And they had walked around in this barbed-wire-encircled community, largely empty yet still dangerous, a place where people were ambushed. “She couldn’t go around there. It was forbidden.”
In Marc
h 1977, Celia accompanied Fidel to Angola, where she visited Tony, serving in the Cuban navy and living in Luanda. She is seated here between two Angolan women. (Courtesy of Oficina de Asuntos Históricos)
The next day, she showed up at his unit to take him out. “She came by and said ‘Let’s go.’ We got into a car and left fast, without anybody seeing her. We reached a kimbo, a poor part of town, and she stopped the car. She got out. She greeted everybody. She ate oranges. It was at night, after eight or nine. I was around nineteen at the time. She was alone. [There was a curfew.] It was not allowed. The people were very poor, without schooling.” Celia took Tony back to his post and dropped him off, but kept an eye on him as her driver left. “When I got back to the unit, I was dressed down. But she saw what was happening. She overheard the officer,” who was shouting at Tony because he’d disappeared. “So she came back, identified me—singled me out. And then she said to the officer, ‘This is the end of this discussion.’ She was saying this to the military! She was giving orders to a commanding officer! But nothing more was said about it.”
Clearly, Celia wasn’t above pulling rank and, aside from the fact that she was always impatient with bureaucracy, as she gained more and more power, she became explicit about it. She could be counted among a rare breed: a recusant. But in this instance, she acts like a mother—a Cuban mother who is visiting her son in Angola, off the battlefield, making sure she would see her son. She didn’t see any reason for him to get flak about it.
A COUPLE OF MONTHS LATER, Celia was in the emergency room. “One day she went into the room that was a storeroom with all Fidel’s clothes. The air conditioning was up high. Suddenly, she couldn’t breathe. They took her to the emergency room at Calixto García Hospital. They called Flávia and asked her to come immediately.” Alicia Otazo, Flávia’s daughter, and I spoke in a small conference room adjoining her office as dean of the School of Biology at the University of Havana, in December 2006.