One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution (49 page)

Luis Crespo and Celia speak with Antonio Nuñez Jiménez while Raúl Corrales, on the porch, with camera held ready to make a shot, keeps an eye on Fidel. They have returned to the
Comandancia
La Plata, the rebel army’s headquarters during the war. They have convened here to sign the Agrarian Reform Law, on May 17, 1959. (
Courtesy of Oficina de Asuntos Históricos
)

The couple could stay for whatever time they needed; these were never quick, turnaround trips. On Celia’s orders, Carmen would automatically schedule a complete medical examination, because built into the visit would be complete physical recuperation. This could take between one and three months at no cost to these visitors. If, after an evaluation of their health, the doctors determined they needed surgery or extensive therapies, these were also scheduled. “Nothing was denied.” They might be sent abroad, if that were necessary, and Carmen made all travel arrangements.

Automatically, on that first day of arrival, Carmen also scheduled facials, manicures, shampoo, and hairstyling, and trips to purchase
clothes for the farmer’s wife; there were similar appointments for the husband. Carmen says that these visitors (and there were several per week) were treated like friends. She’d arrange for them to go to the Once apartment early in their visit, so that Celia could catch up on Sierra news, because Celia was interested in all the marriages, births, and deaths that had occurred, plus current opinions that were circulating in those hills she’d lived in. It seems that none of these medical procedures or elaborate therapies was viewed by Celia as an obligation, or a perk. She believed in good health; that looking good was part of being well; and the happiness and personal dignity of the people from the Sierra was something she wanted from the Revolution. Carmen told me that Celia followed each recovery, every operation, and all the makeovers closely, taking an interest in every detail. Cronyism, favoritism, Evitaism—call it what you like—Celia had the power and resources to set up this office to take care of health, housing, jobs, and provide start-up loans to the veterans who had assisted the rebel army.

She attended to women affected by the war though her own office, which was also located in the palace. “For Mother’s Day and Christmas, she’d send for things to give to all the mothers of Martyrs of the Revolution, like Frank País’s mother. She attended to this personally. She’d sometimes send to Europe for presents to give to them on Mother’s Day,” my translator, Argelia Fernández, told me, because during those years, Argelia had been the wife of Cuba’s ambassador to France. “One time, while I was in Paris, we were asked for eiderdown quilts. There would have been hundreds of these coverlets. Celia personally took care of this. It was always something really nice she wanted, something the women could really use. Nobody bragged about doing this. In fact, this isn’t known. Only the ambassador and his wife knew about this, and security.” Celia would send for presents from these countries to give to war widows and to the mothers who had lost their sons and daughters; and Argelia says that the job was usually placed in the hands of security, but she had elected to buy them herself because they were female things. Argelia thinks Celia was brought up Catholic and gave these presents “because it was consoling.”

IN 1959 THE NEW GOVERNMENT
began literacy programs, and Celia educated her staff like everyone else. “In 1959, Celia sent for people from Pilón and placed us in jobs that were needed here in Havana,” said Elbia Fernández, Celia’s old friend and younger cousin from Pilón whom she called “La Maestra” (The Teacher). “She sent for my brothers, one by one. They all worked in the sugar mill. . . . Celia told my father: ‘Please tell La Maestra to come with her husband and child, and she can have a large house for all of you.’” Celia had already set up a schoolroom in one of the apartments at Once for the house employees, but she wanted Elbia to oversee the literacy program for her employees who worked at the palace. Elbia says that Celia already had teachers to instruct this staff, but she wanted her friend, La Maestra, to give up a very pleasant and worthy life teaching in Pilón, to move to Havana.

In Santiago, on November 30, 1959, Celia and María Antonia Figueroa celebrate the third anniversary of Frank’s Battle of Santiago. The living room of María Antonia’s house, where they are pictured, has its walls decorated with portraits of Fidel and Chibás. (
Courtesy of Oficina de Asuntos Históricos
)

“It wasn’t easy,” says Elbia. “The students were all adults who had come from the country. The majority were from the Sierra. It was in the palace buildings, in the center building. I started out in the
Consejo de Estado
, and then took over the Central Committee.” (This would have been the staff of the two highest offices of the government.) Celia wanted Elbia to prep her staff for what was called the “Battle of the Sixth Grade.”

Everybody worked hard and worked long hours, like their bosses. The biggest problem was scheduling classes a variety of
people could attend. Elbia and Celia came up with a solution: the same classes would be taught three times a day, and if one of the students missed one session, he or she could catch the next one. When Elbia arrived, Celia’s staff was already literate, meaning they’d passed their literacy test a year earlier. But to get a sixth-grade diploma, they “were taught in three levels of achievement.” When they had passed each level, they would be in sixth grade; and to reach sixth grade, they had to take tests that were given by the Ministry of Education. Elbia’s job was to get them ready for these tests. She began by teaching all the subjects (in sets of three) in 45-minute increments; and at the end of this campaign, they’d pass the tests and be ready to move on to the “Battle for Ninth Grade.”

Everybody had to attend the classes: cooks, waiters, chauffeurs, security—and Elbia says the staff attended enthusiastically but were always extremely tired. “There was a cook. She would sleep in class. Some were so tired that I would let them sleep. If he sleeps, he will revive, I thought. And I’ll repeat the class. If you repeat, you learn more the second time. So the cook became literate and got his diploma.” Celia felt that she must lead by example, and her employees must not fall behind, and was aware of her responsibility to the nation. The syllabus was put together by advisors in the Ministry of Education, and on Saturdays the instructors would go to special schools where they learned what to teach the following week. These classes lasted all day Saturday. “We would go in the morning, have lunch there, then would have an afternoon session,” Elbia sighed. It had been a very hard job, six days a week, and she had missed Pilón.

33.
Turning Havana into Pilón

WHEN CELIA FIRST MOVED TO ONCE
, most people from Oriente Province who’d gone into exile in Havana were headed home. In her own family, only Flávia and Rene stayed because they’d established a new dental clinic in Havana. Chela and Pedro went back to Manzanillo, and Silvia and her family returned to Santiago. Celia (and Fidel) started off in the ground-floor apartment at Once No.1007 in February, but whenever an apartment became available, Celia would take it and move close friends or family members in.

She started with her cousin Miriam Manduley and Miriam’s husband, Pepito José Argibay, a commander; they took over the original ground-floor apartment as soon as Celia was able to move up to the first floor. On the floor above that, Lydia Castro, Fidel’s sister, lived with a woman called Mima (who had been Raúl’s nanny), or at least they lived there for a time. Orlando, Celia’s younger brother who had been living in New York City, and his Puerto Rican wife, Aleida, also moved into an apartment on that floor (before he left her and their son, Gustavo, who was born in 1961 or ’62). Celia hired the building’s former janitor and moved him onto the roof.

There were four apartments on each floor. Celia started to contact the owners, carefully asking them if they wanted to move. If they did, she made sure they would find better apartments in
other parts of town. “Celia didn’t insist,” Sergio Sánchez, Celia’s nephew, pointed out. She found out what each person wanted and “if the owners of two-bedroom apartments preferred to have four bedrooms” in her conversation with them, she offered them more. “The word spread, and people left.”

Next, Celia turned to the block; she moved people out of houses and replaced them with people she liked, people she could trust: in short, people from Pilón. Her guardian angel, Hector Llópiz, was one of the first. He’d returned from exile, and she urged him to move with his family to her street; then his sister Berta and her husband moved into the upstairs apartment of the same house, a stone’s throw from Celia’s front door. It took several years, and Sergio says it finally came down to the couple who lived in a “very pretty house” directly across the street from the entrance of Celia’s apartment building. He described them as “a couple who were rich and unfavorable to the Revolution.” By then, he says, security had increased whenever there were attempts on Fidel’s life, so “Celia talked to them herself, and pointed out that with all the police cars in front of their house, they must be experiencing a complete loss of privacy. She asked if they wanted to leave the country and, if they did, she would help. If they didn’t, and wanted to move, they could look for a house any place where they’d feel happy and comfortable. They left.” But they stayed in Cuba, in a much grander house in a better location.

SECURITY WAS THE ISSUE
. Their revolution couldn’t survive without Fidel. “The Eisenhower administration had been contriving to overthrow Castro by force since March 1960. The CIA recruited groups of Cuban exiles in Miami and trained them in various parts of Central America, especially Guatemala,” writes the Mexican historian Jorge Castaneda. Fidel survived because he was elusive, did not barricade himself in the classic manner—in a presidential palace with a tall fence surrounding it. Forever the guerrilla, he stayed on the move; yet many people on that block told me that he lived in Celia’s apartment, arriving often in the middle of the night.

“Security here is relative,” said a longtime resident of the neighborhood, Pedro Ugando, who lives in a building directly behind Celia’s. He explained the reality of the post-victory
situation. “This is what in Spanish we call a
zona helado
, a frozen zone. You can’t just move into this neighborhood. Before people are given permission to move in, they are investigated. It is about two complete blocks. In the years 1960 to 1963, cars would drive by and machine-gun or shoot this area. It happened in other areas, too. . . . Some of the people whose houses and goods had been taken away from them were counterrevolutionary. Even though this is a frozen zone, they would come by in their cars and shoot. . . . I think that espionage started in ’59, and we still have it.” In the early years, the building was guarded, but not particularly heavily.

The security system at Once, in hindsight, barely existed. There was one policeman at night and two militia members. As it turned out, the militia members were schoolgirls who came from the Lydia Doce Militia. Although they’d been trained at a military school, they were volunteers. I interviewed Sonya Bedoya, who was fifteen when she protected Once. She’d been assigned to a police precinct where she’d go to receive her evening’s assignment. The police would select two young women each day and put their names on the roster. The girls would check the bulletin board, then get into olive green pants and a gray jacket with an olive green stripe down the sleeve (uniforms designed by Celia and similar to the tunic she wore in the Sierra), a loaded “bullet belt” about two inches thick plus a magazine of ammunition that fit into a leather pouch. They’d be handed a Czech rifle, or at least that was always what Bedoya was allotted, and they’d go, with their policeman, to their assigned location, which wasn’t always Once; sometimes they stood watch over convents.

The first time Sonya guarded Celia and Fidel’s apartment house was toward the end of 1959. “I don’t remember, but I think guard duty was six hours. We guarded the entrance to the building. I saw everyone who came and went in those days, Fidel included. The first time I saw Fidel was in the middle of the night. I had to wake up the other girl on duty, but the policeman and I were awake. Same as with everyone else, when you see an important person, you never tire of seeing him. He was younger then, straighter, seemed even taller. He said good evening warmly. Now he looks tired. Has too many things on his mind.” Bedoya told me this in 2006, before Fidel underwent a couple of operations. Her
account simply proves that, in the early years, Fidel counted on his bodyguards to protect him; but after the CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion, in 1961, state security took over. Now, some members of state security occupy the house.