One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution (4 page)

Celia and Flávia in a photographer’s studio in Manzanillo, c. 1926. (
Courtesy of Oficina de Asuntos Históricos
)

ON THIS PARTICULAR DAY
, she sits at the big worktable in the kitchen, reading the paper while she makes telephone calls: simultaneously talking, reading, planning, eating lunch, raising money for Epiphany, or
Día de Reyes
, on January 6, when members of her Catholic charity would be giving out toys to Pilón’s children. She had launched this activity in 1940, when she was twenty and new in town, setting a bit of a trend because the Catholic Church had never been active there, and not all that many of the area’s residents were Catholics. Pentecostalists and Spiritualists thrived in Pilón and in the surrounding hills.

As 1956 approaches, it is again time to sell raffle tickets and prepare for the church supper on New Year’s Eve. She’ll go, before that, to Santiago and buy toys in bulk. This year, because the sugar workers have been on strike, there is little money around. Calling merchants, Celia reminds them to donate items for the raffle, or make pledges of food, pointing out that parents with little or no work are counting on these gifts.

Sometime on this day, she gets a message. If it comes by telephone, it is almost certainly coded. More likely it is spoken, by one of those who wait on the porch, who otherwise appear as patients to see the doctor. Fidel Castro sends word that his right-hand man, Pedro Miret, is coming to Pilón. He will be accompanied by the 26th of July Movement’s national director of action, Frank País. Castro wants her to show them locations along the coast where he and his guerrilla fighters, returning from exile in Mexico, can land.

However it reaches her, the message is a tap on her shoulder, an invitation to become one of the instigators of the revolution that Castro had put in motion last July. Clearly Celia is not solely what she appears to be: a father’s daughter, a civic-minded and
house-proud woman, a member in good standing of the provincial gentry. Although, she is those things as well. It might be tempting to say she is unique in her place and time.

She was, in fact, fairly representative: a thirty-five-year-old woman in 1950s Cuba, looking for a person (it could have been nearly anyone), or political party, or any movement whose objective was to remove Fulgencio Batista from power.

Since Batista seized the presidency by a
coup d’état
in 1952, Fidel Castro had emerged in the minds of many as the person most likely to end the dictator’s reign. He fearlessly, even rashly, had led an attack against the Moncada garrison, the national army’s command headquarters in Santiago. The army reacted with extreme force, summarily executing most of the participants, but Fidel escaped the massacre, aided, in part, by the Archbishop of Santiago, Monseigneur Enrique Pérez Serrantes, Spanish, sent to Cuba in 1922, who had personally tried to protect the few survivors of the 26th of July attack. The Archbishop even went so far as to search for the young revolutionaries hiding in the hills, dressed in his cassock, carrying a cross, and (some say) using a megaphone. Fidel argued his own defense at trial, was imprisoned for a time, and released in May 1955. Less than two months later, he went into exile. Between his release from jail and his exile in Mexico City, he founded his revolutionary 26th of July Movement, named for the day in 1953 when the Moncada was attacked, and took on one goal: removing Batista. Celia had decided to join Fidel and his movement.

After the 1952 coup, she, along with everyone suspected of opposing the dictatorship, was put on the list of organizations considered dangerous. This wide range included her fellow members of the Orthodox Party, formed legitimately in the late 1940s and led by the popular Eduardo Chibás. Not intimidated by being listed, she became an activist. She joined two clandestine anti-Batista groups, headed by men in the coastal towns of Campechuela and Manzanillo.

Even before the attack on the Moncada or the formation of these groups, she and her father had carried out a personal project that had its own seditious element. On May 21, 1953, along with a small group of Martí scholars, they erected a statue of Martí on the top of Cuba’s highest mountain, Turquino Peak in the Sierra Maestra.
This range extends along the southern coast. They approached from a small wharf on the Caribbean, from the southern side, where the land dips below sea level then soars to an elevation of 6,560 feet. The military had been intent on the packing case the group hauled up, imagining it held guns, so had kept up surveillance as it was transported to the mountain. But Manuel Sánchez’s resistance project was conceptual: to place José Martí on the highest plane so he could reign over Cuba. The feat’s oddity, as much as its symbolism, made an impression on military officials, who deemed all the participants suspicious. Later—during the Revolutionary War—Fidel would favor the lofty heights of Turquino’s western companion, a peak called Caracas, and make his command post there, just above the La Plata River.

Those who became activists in response to Batista’s seizure of power had already been struggling over more than a decade to reform Cuban politics. Ramón Grau had become president in 1944 through fraudulent elections. In 1947, a new political party was formed, officially named the Cuban People’s Party but generally called the Orthodox, and Manuel Sánchez established a branch in Pilón. The party leader, Eduardo Chibás, even stayed in the doctor’s house in 1948. He began his presidential campaign in Oriente Province, and there is a photograph of Celia wearing a hat, quite properly, sitting among the bigwigs on the platform. The new party showed its strength in the 1948 elections, increasing its power. Still, Carlos Prio Socarras, who succeeded Grau that year, was not appreciably better. It became obvious to Batista, who had ruled Cuba in the 1930s and was living in retirement in the United States, that even if he returned he would be unable to win the 1952 fall elections. It was that year he staged his coup. By the next year, police arrests and station house beatings were common. The police were out of control whenever and wherever they chose. Torture by police agents was so widespread, writes British historian Hugh Thomas, that Batista was compelled to give his “personal assurance” that it would be investigated.

The process by which Celia became a political person is not an unusual one. It is the story of how revolutionary and national liberation movements begin. It is precisely those without power—teachers, nurses, housewives, secretaries, telephone operators, cane workers, bus drivers—but with intelligence and self-esteem
who quite legitimately make the decision to fight for their cause. The language of these movements addresses loss of freedom (this means free press, free speech, religious freedom, adequate incomes, adequate health care, access to a stable system of justice), and without access to those rights or freedoms, the participants come to the conclusion they have nothing to lose. So, they take chances. They organize. They become members of movements that are as passionate as they are imperfect.

HER VARIANT OF THAT STORY
began in 1940, when Celia arrived in Pilón and embarked upon a rarely mentioned period of mourning. At fifteen, she had fallen in love with a young Spaniard, a Catalonian named Salvador Sadurní. He had arrived in Manzanillo after attending a U.S. business college, paid for by his uncle who planned to leave Sadurní his profitable hardware store in that city. Both Celia and her sister Flávia had left their father’s house after outgrowing the local school in Media Lunato to attend the Institute, a private school for girls, in Manzanillo. There Celia started a club she called
Los Pavitos
, whose members were mostly her sisters, cousins, and their friends. They went to their favorite park, walking in groups of three or four, and when they saw someone they wanted to get to know, they would invite him to a beach party or picnic, which they then organized with elaborate care.

Salvador Sadurní, from Barcelona, was older (nineteen to Celia’s fifteen), with a well-defined future. From friends, cousins, and a few photographs I’ve been able to piece together this relationship. Celia’s friend Berta Llópiz has no doubt he was “crazy, crazy for her,” and her Girona cousins added the telling detail that he and Celia, along with their friends, avidly followed the news of the Spanish Civil War, discussing whatever they’d read or heard on the radio. This was a cord that bound them all together, tightly; no matter where they were, these young friends—spunky, attractive, confident—would whip out a donation can that each carried along with school books, picnic baskets, and all their other paraphernalia, to collect money to support the Republican cause. I found out a bit more by probing Celia’s brother-in-law, Pedro Álvarez, husband of her sister Chela. He affirmed that Sadurní was a great guy, “one of the best,” but said that Salvador and Celia were each too independent to be a good couple. I pressed for a reason, and we agreed that Celia was still pretty young, only fifteen when she met Salvador, but they had stayed together and created an affectionate and devoted friendship. Pedro added that Sadurní spent his nights “singing to other women,” and at this point Chela broke into the conversation to remind her husband that Salvador had performed several pieces of music written and dedicated to Celia on a local radio station. Slowly, another image of the young man began to emerge: he had been a businessman-musician who spent his free time writing and performing songs. He played the guitar, would hire and rehearse musicians, then take them with him like troubadours, to serenade under people’s windows and perform the music he’d written. His group played at houses all over town. The families would send somebody down to the street with money and to thank the leader of these musical bands for including their household. He was flirting with tradition, strictly speaking; a man only serenades the girl he is in love with, and he had extended his serenades to an alarming number of women. Even at the age of eighty, Pedro still allowed a certain jealousy to creep to the surface when he spoke of Sadurní. But I could almost feel Chela’s pride as she spoke of the midday or lunchtime radio programs when Salvador performed. At least two pieces of Sadurní’s music had been for her sister: a tango called “Celia” and “Los Pavitos,” named for her group of girlfriends, “those illusive queens who dance one day, swim the next, and that’s the way they enjoy life.” It was a good description of how the singer was charmed by this vibrant young girl who had a life of her own, championed her friends, and was, above all, busy and independent. In a world where a woman was supposed to be in tune with “the man who might be her future husband” and learn very early to be quietly available—“there for him”—she had at fifteen already turned the tables. She, and everyone else, seemed to be happy with Salvador. The couple was often seen together, and Celia was pleased with all this recognition in Manzanillo, at the time the third-largest city in Oriente Province.

Celia with Salvador Sadurní in Media Luna, 1937. (
Courtesy of Oficina de Asuntos Históricos
)

Cousin Olga Sánchez and her boyfriend, León Moreno, spent many weekends with Celia and her boyfriend, Salvador Sadurní, at the Sanchez farm in San Miguel del Chino, where this picture was taken in 1937. (
Courtesy of Oficina de Asuntos Históricos
)

She went home on weekends to work for her father in Media Luna, and Salvador Sadurní would come down the coast to visit her on Sunday, the day when both the hardware store and doctor’s office were closed. Sometimes he came with his friends—bronzed, muscled, smartly dressed in bathing suits, on a yacht he had rented; a less glamorous boyfriend would have taken the coastal ferry—and they often went to the Sánchez family farm in the highlands of San Miguel del Chino. Celia’s friends say she took it for granted that life was going to be wonderful.

SALVADOR DIED ON JUNE 9, 1937
, when he was twenty-one and Celia had just turned seventeen. He injured his knee in a sports accident, and it ballooned up and required surgery. The swelling turned out to conceal an undetected aneurysm, and he bled to death on the operating table. As she watched him die through a window in the operating room door, he called out her name.