One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution (5 page)

“Celia was horribly affected by his death,” her cousin Nene states flatly. “She was in love with him, but only realized she was in love with him after he died.” Others have said the same, but less succinctly. She lived in the moment; and that moment ended almost before she was fully aware it had arrived.

There were various suitors in the ten years after Salvador Sadurní’s death, and, inevitably, some were boring and one or two were heartbreakers. Chela, who has lived in Miami forty years, is confident she would have married Sadurní “for sure, for sure.” Flávia, in Havana, who was able to view the complete spectrum of Celia’s life including her long friendship with Fidel, said that no one had been able to touch Celia’s heart after Sadurní, that his ability to show his love for her became the gold standard. Flávia, who thinks carefully before speaking, added an astonishing comment: “I am under the impression that she really fell in love with Sadurní, and when he died, she was inoculated against love.”

Celia became something of a widow. Outwardly, she developed a rash, a skin ailment that lingered. People felt sorry for her; they already viewed Manuel’s children tragically, as their mother had died young. The year after Sadurní died, when the town held its festival, the Feast of St. James, she was sponsored as festival queen by
Los Pavitos, Alianza Feminista
, the Women’s Club, and several of the top social clubs: the Yacht and Fishing Club of Guacanayabo, the Spanish Colony, and the Manzanillo Circle. She won hands down amid all her tragedy and pathos.

She performed the ancient Spanish rite of looking for a mate by going to Cespedes Park, just as her father and mother had done—although Flávia remarked that it seems impossible that in 1938 women still kept to the segregated paths walking in one direction while men (to view their faces) walked in the other. That summer she dated a young man who disappeared in the fall, off to study at the University of Havana.

The next man literally arrived on her doorstep as a full-blown infatuation in August, Manzanillo’s hottest month, when being indoors was so unbearable that the Sánchez women placed chairs outside on the narrow sidewalk. Someone noticed a young man passing the house again and again and finally brought out a chair for him. They recognized Pepín Artime, the son of a local hotel owner (Celia’s aunt Amanda Manduley’s husband was the proprietor of the Hotel Casablanca). It didn’t take long to discover that Pepin was interested in Celia. She was surprised at the sudden interest, tried to ignore him, but Artime continued to arrive daily. At parties he’d only dance with Celia. Her friends began to tease her about this budding romance until Pedro Álvarez, then Chela’s boyfriend, stepped in because he knew that Artime was engaged to the daughter of a rice grower. He invited Chela and Celia for a drive in the country to test a new car (his father owned the local Ford dealership); in enforcement of the strict social rules, he drove them past the house where the Fluriach sisters lived when he knew Pepin Artime would be sitting on the porch with his fiancée. Celia did not ride by silently, or wave at him, or simply stare, which probably would have been enough to make him squirm, but called out loudly: “Hello, Pepin. Good-bye, Pepin,” furious she’d been drawn in. The next morning he was in the street in front of her house, but Celia refused to see him; in the days to come, he was there, asking to speak with her. Her sisters were astounded at the depth of her anger, since they knew she really didn’t care for him. They may have missed what she was saying: I will not be played around with.

She exhibited this shift to an iron will in other aspects of her life as well. During their last year at the Institute, in the late spring of 1939, Celia and Nene took a final exam and the teacher, Rodríguez Mojena, also the superintendent of the school, returned everyone’s bluebooks except for theirs. He pronounced them unreadable. “We had difficult handwriting,” Nene concedes. I obtained a sample of Celia’s handwriting as it was then: girlish, filled with loops and floating circles, but quite readable. “I was so embarrassed,” Nene said, “that I gave my school uniform to someone else.” A few days later, the director sent a summons. They were to come in separately and take an oral exam, but by that time Celia had stopped going to school. “I took the exam, but it was two months later,” Nene says. “My father made me do it.”

As long as she refused to take this exam, Celia could not graduate. The most influential person in her life, her father, was very unhappy at her stubbornness and tried to explain to her what was at stake. “Let Rodríguez Mojena be who he is,” he had argued, “you are only hurting yourself.” Her aunt, Amanda Manduley, a teacher and upholder of the glorious profession, thought the world had come to an end. Even Uncle Miguel, who had frequently demonstrated, by word and gesture, that Celia could do no wrong, became disgusted with her behavior. Nobody came out well; withholding the diploma from a daughter of one of the leading families in town wasn’t in the Institute’s best interest. Nene says that a private joke in their social circles was that Celia couldn’t graduate because her professor couldn’t read and she couldn’t write. When Nene finally took her exam, Mojena told her this kind of writing might be acceptable in high school, but not at university.

Celia had been an uneven student, excelling only in what she liked (history), and maybe she was afraid of going to university. “We all assumed we were going to university,” Nene confirms. “If someone studied baccalaureate, they were going to go to university.” Weeks passed, and Celia did not go back to school. The crisis at home mounted but she never relented. Her real diploma, one might say, had been questioning authority, and this huge rebellion is the badge that symbolized her education. Her family was highly educated; by skipping college, Celia was taking her first big step toward nonconformity.

THE DIPLOMA DEBACLE
is so uncharacteristic and implausible that Pedro Álvarez Tabío, while director of the Council of State’s Office of Historical Affairs, investigated the Institute’s records to see if they actually did let Celia Sánchez graduate retroactively, but he did not find her name on the list of alumnae. In other words, Mojena did not reconsider at the time (this would have required opening the bluebook and reading her answers), nor were the records changed later, after Celia became one of the country’s leaders.

She had fallen from grace, gone from top to bottom, from sweetheart (
novia
) to beauty queen (
reina
) to black sheep in rapid succession. She, so self-assured, had been used to getting what she
wanted, so coming up against the Institute must have shocked her. It was her first big confrontation with both authority and the fact that she wasn’t perfect.

It was in the aftermath of all this that she arrived in Pilón. There, having convinced herself that she could achieve what she longed for by just being herself, by doing her own thing (for which a university degree isn’t a requirement), she became a doer. In this new location she came into her own. This was manifested in caring for her father, decorating his house, developing the garden, working with her charity, the Servants of Mary, teaching herself to drive, exploring every inch of the region, making friends, showing those friends what she’d discovered, accompanying her father on horseback into the Sierra Maestra, and finding all the great places to go fishing. Leaving behind her adolescence and Manzanillo allowed her to quietly mourn Sadurní. She was able to get away from the ghosts of her on-again, off-again Romeos. In Pilón, she could make a fresh start.

2. J
ANUARY
6, 1956
Planning the Landing

ON ONE OF THE LAST DAYS OF 1955
, following Fidel’s orders, four men drove south from Manzanillo to meet Celia and have her show them landing points along the coast. They followed the old coastal highway from Manzanillo to Campechuela, then continued south on a road branching inland and across the southwestern peninsula to Pilón. This last section was not a highway, it was more like a network of farm roads for trucks and equipment, chiefly connecting sugar mills but also used by the public. Over considerable stretches the road was too narrow for vehicles to pass, so drivers would stop at each plantation and phone the plantation ahead to see whether the road was clear, and wait if it wasn’t. The sixty miles would have taken three or four hours; had it been hurricane season the road would have been even slower, or simply impassable. The only other way to get from Manzanillo to Pilón was by a coastal ferry that ran just a couple times a week—too long a wait between arrival and departure on the south coast, and the police took note of the passengers. Celia’s new associates were in the government’s “armed and dangerous” category.

Pedro Miret had been in Fidel’s original military movement. He had recruited soldiers for the 1953 attack on the Moncada and was caught by Batista’s army, tortured, and became one of the few to survive and face imprisonment on the Isle of Pines. Now he
was moving back and forth between Cuba and Mexico, selecting soldiers, getting ready for Fidel’s return.

Frank País, from Santiago, was known as an agitator, an accurate if mild characterization. He had begun his career as a student leader and had organized a militant group. Recently, between Fidel’s release from prison and travel into exile, Frank had been appointed the 26th of July Movement’s “national director of action,” a euphemistic title for the job of planning military strikes, sabotage, urban guerrilla warfare, and reprisals. He was Celia’s new boss. They knew of each other but had not yet met. Manuel Echevarria and Andres Lujan were also Fidel’s men. They were with the 26th of July Movement in Manzanillo. Echevarria had been sent to Pilón earlier to meet and, in a sense, vet Celia. She had passed all the tests.

They came to Celia for her knowledge of the region. She knew the coast; they didn’t. In the period leading up to this meeting, her organizational skills had been noticed and admired by one of Fidel’s most-trusted followers, Antonio “Nico” Lopez, who had traveled to Bayamo and Manzanillo during the first days of November, visiting all the 26th of July organizations. He had met with the clandestine leaders from all the towns in the region: San Ramón, Campechuela, and others, but by November 1955, he knew that Celia’s zone was so well organized that it wasn’t necessary to check in there. Frank knew another thing that Fidel’s four delegates coming to Pilón did not: Celia Sánchez was the one person seemingly acquainted with practically everyone in this end of Cuba.

The party arrived in Pilón around one o’clock, on a sunny day. She showed them coves, inlets, and beaches. But first, right after giving the visitors lunch, she spoke privately with Frank under the canopy of the big mango tree over the patio. It was the first time they had met face to face, and this meeting only enhanced the esteem in which they held each other.

The group left the house around three o’clock and boarded a motorboat Celia had arranged to borrow from the sugar mill. They traveled close to shore, first going east to El Macho, Celia’s primary recommendation for a landing point. It was secluded, a secret cove that she knew well from years of fishing; from here, the guerrillas could land on the beach, follow the Macio River
inland, and move straight into the mountains to the west of Turquino. Then she showed them Marea del Portillo, between El Macho and Pilón. Less wild, it even had a road away from the beach. Loaded into trucks, Fidel and his men could be in secluded mountain areas in a matter of minutes. This part of the coast was miles from the Rural Guard in either direction, as well as close to the mountains. As they traveled westward, she showed them other good landing spots, past Pilón in the general direction of the large port, Niquero, close to the tip of the peninsula that was Oriente Province’s western extreme.

They got back at dark, wet from a storm that had blown up, and her guests changed into dry clothing from a stock of vacation clothes left behind by Celia’s brother-in-law, brother, and father. Celia served dinner that night in the Mango Bar, as they called their stone-paved dining terrace under the giant tree. She had selected a traditional but special Cuban meal:
puerco ahogado
(piglet, deep fried),
congri
(black beans cooked with tomato sauce and spices added to rice, which came to Cuba from the Congo via Haiti),
tostones
(green plantains cut into rounds, then crushed and deep fried), and salad, followed by
guayaba con queso crema
(a dessert of local white cheese accompanied by guava paste), and coffee. Her visitors slept in the mill’s guest house and had breakfast the next morning at the Sánchez house before setting off for Manzanillo. From there, Frank headed east to Santiago, while the others drove Miret west to Havana.

Celia’s life was never the same again. Soon after that meeting, Fidel gave her the go-ahead to develop the plan for the landing, and ordered all directors of 26th of July groups in the coastal region to help her.

After the meeting, Celia walked across the street to get her younger second cousin, Elbia Fernández, to help tidy up the mill guest house. As they were stripping off the sheets, Celia casually mentioned that Frank País had spent the night there. “No, Celia!” the younger woman told me she exclaimed. Elbia describes being covered by goose bumps: “I knew he was important and that the whole thing Celia was involved in was dangerous.” Because Celia’s house had been full of Christmas guests, family members, she had gone some days earlier to the mill manager’s house and, as Elbia recalled, “told him that she was expecting some visitors soon from
Santiago and her house was full of family. She asked if she could put them in the guest house. He said, ‘Yes, of course, Celia. But you’ll have to find the Jamaican who takes care of the guest house to be sure it’s clean.’ Celia never once mentioned who those visitors were.” She and Elbia had cleaned the place themselves, brought sheets to make up the beds. I asked Elbia what she had thought of Frank País, and she replied, “He was just divine.”