One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution (29 page)

WHEN JULY 26 ROLLED AROUND
, Elsa Castro says that she and Celia needed to let off steam. They went onto the roof of the house where Celia was hiding and released a bunch of balloons they’d gleefully marked up with “M-26-7” in black ink, to commemorate the date of Fidel’s attack on the Moncada. They were near Cespedes Park and wanted the balloons to float down in front of police headquarters.

To commemorate the 26th of July, Frank wrote to Fidel on that day, “Give my thanks to all the officers and comrades for their sincere and brave note; it was especially meaningful to me.” All the men in Fidel’s column had signed a letter of condolence over Josué’s death. This would have been a very revealing document had the army gotten hold of it. It was a brave document, indeed.

CELIA FINALLY SENT FRANK
a long report on her own investigation of why the one group of
marabuzaleros
had gone haywire. She laid out what had taken place, factually and psychologically, explaining bad choices and how she’d resolved the solution. She takes the blame, but points out how vulnerable those new men had been. “They saw themselves under siege, mortar fire, airplanes overhead, etc. . . . Of the 88 or 89 men, only 20 were armed. Ten of the rifles weren’t working,” and assures him that “we’ve sent them to be repaired.” We are the guilty ones, she argued. “They found themselves in a terrible situation, under the influence of the surrounding environment. Weight is heavy when one is not accustomed to walking a lot, 40 pounds feels like 80 [up] hills and [carrying] weight. . . . What I cannot forgive is that they threw away bullets. Why didn’t they throw away the food, the blankets, etc.? For that, I find them all guilty.” They hadn’t had enough food, had eaten their rations too quickly, got lost; fifteen days passed and they were starving. “As far as one meal [a day], I find this natural,” she continued, “nothing was lacking; later, yes, they had to start thinking about becoming accustomed to discipline.” Frank must have seen through Celia’s observations about food—she herself seemed to eat almost nothing. After reading her report, Frank, her boss, explained the situation to Fidel, without being critical of Celia. She solved her problems characteristically; she’d stuck with the people she trusted. She’d sent Felipe Guerra Matos into the wilds to take charge of the men. She asked him to wait with them until a new guide arrived. Then she had the guide escort them to the old patriarch himself, Crescencio Pérez.

For all their pitfalls, Fidel and Company appeared to be on a road to success when the new issue of
Bohemia
came out on Sunday, July 28, with the Manifesto story. It appealed to all manner of people throughout Cuba, asking them to back the new front, the Civic Revolutionary Front. The response to this appeal was immediate. Suddenly, even very bourgeois institutions, such as garden clubs, began to support the 26th of July Movement.

19. J
ULY
31, 1957
The End of an Era

IN SANTIAGO, DURING THE FIRST TWO WEEKS OF JULY
, the police started daily searches, apparently looking for Frank, as if intending to cover the whole city, neighborhood by neighborhood, house by house. Fidel, listening to the radio, wrote Frank: “I am overcome by a feeling of suspense every time I listen to the radio and hear that some young man was found murdered in the streets of Santiago. Just today they announced they had found the unidentified body of a young man, about 24 years old, with a mustache, etc., etc. This will worry me for hours until I know the identity of the man.” Frank had been switching from one house to another, always protected by young men and women from lookouts posted throughout the city, who would let him know the exact location of the police at any given moment and based on this, would make a decision where he had to move.

Then, mysteriously, the hunts stopped. In the last days of the month, Frank had been staying with a couple and the wife was pregnant, according to an account given by Vilma Espin. When Colonel Salas Canizares suddenly resumed neighborhood raids again, during the final week of July, the woman became overly anxious, tormented that Frank was going to be caught. He worried about her condition and made the decision to leave there and go to the home of a member of the Civic Resistance, businessman Raúl
Pujol. Pujol, with his wife and child, lived in a quiet neighborhood only a few blocks away from Maria Antonia Figueroa’s. Pujol’s house was off limits to everybody in the Santiago 26th of July Movement as too dangerous—there was only one way out, through the front door, to the street. The proscription had been issued by Frank himself. As word spread that he’d gone there, members of M-26 became confused and disturbed: why was Frank staying in this house he’d expressly forbidden everyone from using.

Maria Antonia Figueroa told me Frank sent her a note on July 30, instructing her to send money to Pedro Miret. Miret had been living in Mexico for some time, and Figueroa, the treasurer, always sent him money via a movement member (Rodríguez Font), who flew via Caracas. At the bottom of this note, Frank added, “Stay by the phone, I want to speak to you.”

Rene Ramos Latour, a.k.a Daniel, went to see Frank that morning. Daniel’s mission was to get him out of Pujol’s house. It was a month to the day since Josué’s murder. Frank was lonely, homesick, and acutely aware of being separated from his mother, Rosario, and his girlfriend, America. In the last house where he’d stayed, he’d been able to see them, although from a distance. He’d ask his mother and girlfriend to stand on a particular street corner, where he could see them through an antique spyglass.

A photograph shows Josué’s body covered in blood, lying on the ground by an automobile, with a few members of the police (or paramilitaries) standing nearby. Maria Antonia told me that Josué didn’t die right away; and when the police discovered this, they dragged him behind a car.

Daniel left, and another July 26th member, Demetrio Montseny (now a general in the Cuban Revolutionary Armed Forces), arrived almost immediately in a pickup truck. He told Frank to get in, that the neighborhood was being surrounded, but Frank refused, calmly explaining that he’d already heard about this from Pujol, who was coming in a taxi. “I’d better go with Pujol,” Montseny recalls him saying, “you go first.” When Pujol arrived, Frank remained inside. Pujol had to go into the house to look for Frank and precious minutes were lost. Maria Antonio, at home awaiting Frank’s call, heard the shots as they echoed through her neighborhood.

Frank’s death, to Cubans of a particular generation, is similar to that of John F. Kennedy: they can tell you exactly where they were
and what they were doing when they learned that Frank País had been assassinated. At the scene, there were several people present (Pujol’s wife and thirteen-year-old son walked right behind the two men), yet details are mixed up, and there’s no clear consensus of what exactly happened. Emotions are still just as ragged today. It seems that Frank and Pujol were struck by rifle butts, pushed into an unmarked car and driven two and a half blocks. Nena Pujol ran after the car, screaming, and people came out of their houses. Reaching an alley, the police took the two men out of the car and killed them. Witnesses say that Rene Pujol tried to cover Frank’s body with his own.

People began to gather, seemingly coming from every direction, before Colonel Salas Canizares arrived. The army brought in someone to identify Frank’s body (incredibly, they still weren’t sure). An old classmate named Randich (whom the 26th of July would later assassinate), confirmed it was Frank País. The police cordoned off the area and ordered everyone to leave.

Maria Antonia says she went out on her porch thinking that the shots came from the next block, and that her messenger (on his way to contact Font) had been shot. “When I heard no more, I went back inside my house. Someone came and said, ‘Frank País has just been killed.’ I picked up the phone and called a man who was close to Frank. I said, ‘Has anything happened to Frank?’ But, of course, I used another name, I used Cristian. He answered, ‘No,’ and to this day, I cannot forgive that person. If he didn’t know for sure, why would he say that?” Her final comment—expressing a grudge she has carried for fifty years—sums up the pain, guilt, and remorse people still feel when they speak of Frank’s death.

Daniel sent Celia a written report within hours, stressing that Frank was fully aware that Pujol’s block was being searched and since two police cars were parked in front of the house, had decided to leave on foot. Daniel was under the impression that Frank would have passed unnoticed, had it not been for one critical element of bad luck: the ex-classmate who worked for the dictatorship and recognized him. “This is the version we believe and it is backed by Mrs. Pujol’s statement,” Daniel informed Celia. Over the years, various pieces of information have surfaced. Armando Hart recently reconstructed Frank’s death as it likely took place, including additional information supplied by Vilma Espin. When
Frank moved into Pujol’s house, a woman on the block—described as the mistress of well-known
batistiano
Laureano Ibarra—saw him enter and called the police. They took time to protect their informer (therefore the lull in the searches), transferred the mistress to another house, and waited until they could find a ship about to depart. When they found one bound for Santo Domingo, they put Ibarra’s mistress aboard and then went after Frank.

“If I’d been there, I wouldn’t have let Frank stay in the apartment,” Nicaragua claims. “I was in a high-security prison in solitary confinement on the Isle of Pines when he died. I was next to a hospital ward. A male nurse told me that a ‘colonel of the revolution’ had been killed, and that the population had filled the street. I knew then that it was Frank.” Nicaragua spent several hours on this interview with me, but couldn’t hold back his tears when we got to this part, and was mortified. Apologizing, he began once again to explain what had happened. “He was in a house that I had forbidden him to use. When they killed his brother, he felt isolated. That was a contributing element. He was still grieving. This didn’t contribute to his safety. It is my personal opinion that the people around him should have known his manner and ways [seen his depression] and said no.” If he’d left in the pickup truck, he might have outfoxed them.

July 30, 1957, was extremely hot. The midday sky had bleached to white, as word spread through the town. Civic Resistance—“bosses and workers, everybody”—was the first to suggest that businesses shut down, says Vilma Espin. Owners began to lock up. “At last I got Rosario on the phone. I told her: ‘You have to go down and fight any way you can, with your teeth—anyway you can—so that they hand over Frank’s body to you.’” So Frank’s mother, “a woman of great courage, went down there with enormous forcefulness.”

Acute anxiety about recovery of the body had to do with the death of William Soler, still on everyone’s mind. In January of that year, the fourteen-year-old, acting alone after school, put a firecracker in a milk bottle and placed it in the gutter on a street corner, a few yards from his house. He and his mother lived in the same neighborhood as Figueroa and Pujol. When the firecracker didn’t go off, William went to inspect it. The police picked him up. They took him to headquarters and he never returned home.
For the record, William Soler was a white, middle-class schoolboy, the child of a single parent—his mother, Maria Louisa Ledea, was divorced. Did the police really think this juvenile had been making a Molotov cocktail? They never gave an explanation. William Soler was tortured to death. In police custody, he suffered the pressing of hundreds of tacks into his body. His young mother demanded an open coffin, making all of Santiago witness to what had happened to her son. Now, only six months later, people felt sure the same police would mutilate Frank. The sanctity of his body always figures in accounts of his murder.

Rosario García went to the coroner’s office, accompanied by one or two of her friends. She found a small crowd gathered outside, and the coroner released Frank’s body to her. She took it home. Maria Antonia Figueroa insists that when Frank’s mother saw the bullet holes in her son’s body, she cried out, “My son was a teacher, not a gangster!”

BY DUSK ON JULY 30
Santiago had turned into a ghost town. After 10:00 p.m., the streets were so free of police that Frank’s girlfriend America and her brother Taras moved his body to their house. The police had withdrawn from the streets, confined to their barracks, which Vilma Espin calls “the one sensible thing they ever did.” People are still stunned by this. “Just imagine,” Maria Antonia remarks, “the police were afraid,” although considering what they’d done and the feelings of the populace at the time, it seems almost like common sense. She added, “They fled. They hid.”

At the Domitro house, America and Rosario dressed Frank’s body in his white linen jacket, a white shirt, and a maroon tie. Then Vilma arrived and insisted on his 26th of July Movement uniform, the same green-gabardine uniform he’d worn on the 30th of November, when he commanded the Battle of Santiago. They did, and laid a beret on his chest, adding a white rose.

A death mask—plaster cast—was made. Photographs of this mask are in the archives. They reveal that his face was almost a perfect oval, with the widest part at the cheeks. Heavy eyebrows arched over eyes that were wide apart, and he had a normal nose, straight but not too long. His disguise, the tiny mustache that grew over his wide and beautifully shaped mouth, was left unshaved. His hair was cut short, except for a small wave just above the forehead.

That morning, friends, members of the press and of the movement began to fill the street outside; they all wanted to see Frank’s body. One writer noticed a slight smile that had appeared on Frank’s face (which the writer attributed to rigor mortis), and mentioned this in an obituary, published the morning of the 31st, titled “
El Universo no es Ajeno
”—“The Universe Belongs to Everyone.” This clipping, without a byline and surely from an underground publication, is archived at the Council of State’s Office of Historic Affairs, with “by Miguel Angel Sague?” penciled in the margin. The author establishes that Frank wrote poems and composed songs based on Galician folktales and music that his mother taught him. He mentions Pablo Neruda’s poems, the love songs Frank had asked the author to read while Frank played the organ and they both sat in the empty Baptist church. “So there he was in his olive-green uniform and his black tie. The sign on his chest was red and black, 26th of July in white letters. The three stars [his rank equaled that of Fidel] were shining. Later, they replaced this with his beret. Then his lips formed a slight smile. Death dressed him in greatness.”