One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution (43 page)

Nighttime was best for a really determined person to slip into their military area, so at night no lights were used, and no one spoke. Delio Ochoa says they got through the night “by not saying a word,” and listening to the forest around them. He and Ricardo Martínez both explained that, from the beginning, members of
Column 1 spoke in very low tones even in the daytime, and only called out when there was a real calamity.

The army’s offensive finished on August 6, when Lt. Col. Fernando Neugart formally made the army’s concession: “You may have the mountains, but we are waiting for you in the valleys,” records historian Paul J. Dosal, who gives a vivid account of the meeting between Neugart and Fidel Castro. What I can add is information on the location: the two days of negotiations Dosal said took place “at Fidel’s headquarters” was not at his and Celia’s headquarters (the third house). They rarely allowed outsiders near the headquarters or needed to, because the guerrillas had the use of two farmers’ houses. Both were on the edge of the
Comandancia
complex, yet both were called Fidel’s headquarters. The Medina house is referred to as the first point of entrance, but there was a large house, farther west on the mountain’s slope, belonging to a rancher, known as the second point of entrance, or the Santa Claritan’s house. Most important meetings with outsiders took place at this large bungalow; the cease-fire negotiations with Neugart and the land reform laws were signed here after the war. Even after the war, Fidel protected details concerning the
Comandancia
La Plata from common knowledge, and only very special visitors or members of Column 1 would go there.

BETO PESANT WAS KILLED IN ACTION
on August 8. He’d been at Celia’s side during the nerve-racking days as they waited for the
Granma
to arrive; he’d steered her home, to Manzanillo, after she escaped from La Rosa, the bar in Campechuela. Celia’s only consolation must have been that he had lived long enough to see the Cuban army retreat from the mountains.

On August 13, Fidel celebrated his thirty-second birthday, and Celia threw an elaborate surprise party for him in the intense heat and humidity of a Cuban tropical summer. On a mountain in the middle of nowhere, she served him pieces of ice-cream cake delivered by one of the members of the 26th of July members from Manzanillo, packed in dry ice. This cake symbolizes Celia’s way of bringing spirit to a military life. Like Mariana Grajales, the mother of Antonio Maceo, who managed the field camps during Cuba’s guerrilla War of Independence, Celia was carrying on a Cuban tradition of women who went to war, and was adding her own footnotes to that history. She enjoyed doing things in style, but more than this she was making a point: the head of state, in the newly formed Capital of the Insurrection, was celebrating an official birthday, and she thought it imperative to mark the occasion suitably. It isn’t too hard to imagine the pleasure this brought Fidel.

RICARDO MARTÍNEZ PROVIDED
a personal story about Celia at the
Comandancia
. He had been grateful to be alive and out of Havana, but nonetheless was terribly homesick for his wife and daughter. He often spoke to Celia of his longing, and had specifically lamented at not being able to see his daughter grow. One day a courier arrived on horseback with an amazing message: his child was going to be on a television program that night, Faustino Perez’s child as well. The woman messenger told him that the program started at 7:00 p.m. “I was excited and went to find Celia. She smiled, but in a way that makes me think she was behind all this. I asked her, but she wouldn’t say.” She and Fidel had a little television set in their house. “Tell Fidel that I need it,” and she told him he wouldn’t be able to get the channel featuring his daughter and he should take the TV set up to the mountain house: “Don’t worry. Take it. Go now. Get it set up there and I’m sure you’ll be able to see the show.” At seven everybody was there, and Celia was in the front row. “We all ended up crying. Even Celia. The host knew what was going on. He was from the 26th. He told my daughter and Faustino’s: ‘Give your Daddy a kiss. He’s in Miami.’”

27. A
UGUST
1958
Mariana Grajales

CAMILO CIENFUEGOS LEFT THE MOUNTAINS
and headed west with his “Antonio Maceo” Column on August 21, and ten days later Che Guevara followed. Che’s column was fighting in the name of Ciro Redondo, one of the
Granma
veterans who had died in battle at Mar Verde on November 29, 1957. It was up to Camilo and Che to take the war outside the Sierra, to the plains, to meet Batista’s forces head on, and to cut the island in two—as Antonio Maceo had done in 1896—ensuring that the 26th of July would control the entire eastern side of the country. Fidel, Camilo, and Che would take on the western side. The old guard will tell you that Fidel let Raúl and Almeida (commanders of his second and third fronts in the Sierra) do whatever they liked, gave them his full trust, accepted (agreed to admire) whatever they did. During the preparations for the offensive, Camilo was at headquarters where he and Fidel talked all the time, every day; Fidel, at the same time, wrote to Che every day, because they—Che and Camilo—were his eyes and ears and anticipated everything. Now they were leaving him behind.

Celia sent a letter to her youngest sisters, Acacia and Griselda, on August 17, carried by Lydia Doce: “I began this letter one day during the combat at Arroyones, when the troops at Las Vegas surrendered.” That would have been on June 20, four days
before their father died. “I started it in a bomb shelter, things got complicated, and I couldn’t continue because there were endless things that had to be done.” It had taken Celia nearly two months to write because this meant coming to grips with her father’s death. “I haven’t written to you since April, Acacia. Only to Papa. During that time I got your letter about Papa’s illness, which paralyzed me completely.” She is forthright: “I was very cowardly and didn’t have the courage to write to you.” Then she repeats her old mantra that she used for the deaths of her Uncle Miguel, for Chibas, and for Frank: “What could I have said, what could I have done, and what consolation could I have given you if it was such a great pain for all of us?” She admits that she’d wanted him to die quickly when she thought about the pain, “even if I never saw him again, that wasn’t important anymore,” and is full of denial: “I was confused when I was told that he was better, that he was in the clinic,” then vents her anger: “You didn’t write, no one from there wrote me a line” she continues imperiously, “I still doubt all of you, although it absolutely doesn’t really matter to me what anybody thinks.” She doesn’t understand how confusing and overwhelming she can be for her younger sisters, who only wanted to emulate their superhero sister. They, too, worked for the movement. Celia barely manages to soften her tone, but finally assures them that she knew they would “behave well and do the right thing,” that her father wouldn’t have lacked anything, and mentions, “I received a very long letter from Silvia, and I was grateful for all the details. It allowed me to live through those moments that I wanted so much to know about.”

Luis Mas Martín, editor of the Communist newspaper
HOY
visited the
Comandancia
in the middle of August (almost family, he was about to marry Inez Girona). He reported that so many people were traveling up there that the foot traffic impeded the mule trains bringing up supplies. The
Comandancia
was crowded with outsiders. Everybody wanted to see Fidel. Some wanted to join the war; others—farmers, Fidel’s commanders—went to La Plata to ask for things they needed; politicians came to plan the future; journalists wanted a good story. Celia channeled these emissaries much the same way she had scheduled her father’s patients. She decided who had precedence and set the parameters so they wouldn’t overwhelm Fidel. As more and more
people arrived, she became alarmed at the situation, at Fidel’s vulnerability with Che, Camilo, and their well-seasoned soldiers gone. The command headquarters really wasn’t protected, and she pressed the issue. Instead of being disconcerted by the problem, Fidel became energized solving it. His commanders always like to say he leaned on history—and, evoking the memory of Mariana Grajales, he formed an all-women’s combat unit. Ricardo Martínez bluntly observes, “I, for one, didn’t like it. In those times, there was a lot of machismo, and it was not understood that women could do those things.” On the 3rd or 4th of September 1958, if Martínez recalls rightly, Fidel said: “I know what I’m about to suggest the majority of you are not going to like or agree with,” and told them to assemble the next night. Everyone gathered at the hospital. Fidel, inspired by adversity, became even more enthusiastic as some of the men argued against the unit. “There were still a few men without weapons,” Martínez explained, who “argued that they had priority.” The women spoke for themselves; most had carried out extremely dangerous actions, more so than most of the men present, so the debate came down to the weapons. Fidel ignored the men’s arguments, and a women’s unit was established.

28. S
EPTEMBER
1958
Lydia and Clodomira

BEFORE CHE LEFT
, he told Lydia to get in touch with him as soon as he reached Las Villas. As he explained, she was going to be his primary means of communicating with Fidel at the
Comandancia
. He wanted her to go ahead of him to Havana, to set things up before he got there. The Office of Historical Affairs collected information about Lydia Doce and Clodomira Acosta well into the 1970s, and I have taken most of this account from OHA compiled reports.

Soon after speaking with Che (who left the mountains on August 21), Lydia made her way to Havana. She went to the house of her brother-in-law, Carlos Parra, and was there on September 5, when 26th of July Movement action groups staged a protest against the government by stealing the Virgin of Regla statue. The black-skinned Madonna, with a white baby Jesus in her arms, is housed in one of Havana’s oldest churches. The protest was meant to humiliate the much-loathed chief of police, Estéban Ventura, who accompanied the statue in the annual festival-day parade and liked to think of himself as the Virgin’s protector. After stealing the statue, the action group hid it in a bodega located across the street from where Lydia was staying, at 3 Villalobos. That is how she heard about it. The festival took place on September 8 with a substitute statue Ventura purchased from La Nueva Venecia (a store on Neptune between Gervasio and Escobar, which is still
there), although he had widely announced that the old statue had been found. But the people of Regla, who regularly prayed before the Virgin and left her offerings, knew he was lying. They, too, asked far and wide what good are police if they can’t protect our beloved Virgin of Regla?

Lydia thought it important to find a better place to hide the statue than the bodega, although she was supposed to stay out of this sort of thing. Her position as an executive courier precluded her engaging in street activities of any kind, and much less with the Havana underground. But she helped Celia’s younger sister, Griselda, organize the removal to the statue from the bodega in broad daylight to the small, ancient church in central Havana known as the Caridad. Lydia Doce, Amado del Valle, Victor Tejedor, and Sergeant Blanco—who was actually in Batista’s army—were in the first car, with the statue; Griselda drove the second car with Ismael Suarez beside her in the passenger seat. On Pepe Antonio, the two-car caravan caught the eye of a policeman standing on a corner, so Lydia yelled: “
Que paso mulatto, buena gente
?” (What’s up, mulatto, you sweet guy?) to distract him. When they got to the church, a patrol car came alongside Griselda and Ismael’s car. Father Boza Masvidal (who later left Cuba) realized they were being followed and signaled them to go inside the church. Griselda posed as a Catholic whose Protestant husband wouldn’t let her wear a Caridad medal, but who nevertheless wanted to give thanks, having survived an operation. The police listened to some of this and left. Griselda was quite frightened because the lead car, carrying Lydia and the statue, was nowhere in sight. But Lydia had noticed two people doing an elaborate pantomime of taking down their license plate number and knew she was being warned that informers were around. They’d taken the statue to the Marinao section of town (to the house of Victor Tejedor, one of the people in the car), a densely inhabited pro-Batista neighborhood. At midnight, they moved the statue into the house where it remained until Tejedor’s family refused to keep it any longer. Then a mechanic took it to Rancho Boyeros, where it stayed until the 26th of July Movement arranged a return.

On Lydia’s last day in Havana, September 11, she followed departure protocol. She went to Delio Gómez Ochoa, Fidel’s representative in the capital, to report what she’d accomplished.
She told him how she planned to return to the Sierra Maestra and he had her picked up and taken her to the movement’s treasurer, who gave her $50 for the trip back. At noon, she met several women (Ernestina Otero, Eneida Diaz, and Griselda Sánchez) at the 5 & 10 cent store at 23rd and 12th, where Humberto Sori Martín’s wife waited for them (probably with a letter for Sori). Ernestina Otero and Lydia went shopping; they went to El Encanto, the famous department store in central Havana, then decided to have lunch at a 5 & 10 across the street. Lydia told Ernestina that she was famished, and proceeded to order soup, an entrée, and dessert. The waitress brought everything to the table at once, including a Lolita cup made with two little custard flans side by side, topped with small scoops of ice cream—Havana’s reference to Nabokov.

As soon as Lydia started the meal, she began to sob. Nudging her, Ernestina said, “Didn’t you say you were dying of hunger?” and she replied that “my people” in the Sierra have hardly anything to eat, “how selfish of me,” as tears ran down her cheeks. Finally, they left with Lydia’s food largely untouched, as the waitress commented, “That woman is crazy.” Ernestina took her to get her hair color changed on Concordia, then to an apartment at 27th and O, in Vedado, where Griselda and a 26th member, Reinaldo Cruz, kept her company until seven that evening. They drove her back to Carlos Parra’s house, and to Lydia’s delight, she found Clodomira Acosta sitting in the living room when she arrived. They hugged each other, caught up on news for the next couple of hours while Griselda and Reinaldo listened. Griselda left, reminding Lydia they’d meet the next morning at nine.