One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution (58 page)

Celia relaxes at her favorite beach hotel in Santa Maria del Mar. She sits in an aluminum chair, tape recorder in her lap, gold watch—a gift from the women of Manzanillo in 1959—on her wrist, her ever-present cigarette between her fingers. She is smiling, no doubt at antics by the teenagers she and Fidel were bringing up, outside the frame: Eugenia, Teresa, Fidelito, and Tony. (
Courtesy of Oficina de Asuntos Históricos
)

Eugenia recalls: “Usually, there were around eleven on the weekends.” They’d arrive home from school, settle into their rooms, go to see Ernestina in the kitchen. “We would take coffee up to Celia on the second floor, where all the offices were, where she kept her papers. We would take coffee up to her and she would take time to ask about school. She’d ask us what Ernestina was cooking. No matter how hard she was working, when we came she’d put it aside and talk to us.” When they were there during school breaks, longer than the usual weekend, Tony says Celia would spread signs around that said things like: Don’t make any noise, I’m working. She had a folder for signs.

On Saturday, they’d all share a midday meal. “There was plenty of food, because food came from the palace. In the beginning, Celia and Fidel were on ration cards. Four of us children were on [them as well]. Carmen Vásquez went to the store to pick up the groceries. We had a normal quota. Celia took the cigarette quota for everybody. Ernestina was on the card, too.” Ernestina cooked special Oriente dishes; Celia sometimes made desserts. “Ernestina had the touch,” Tony remembers. “I learned a lot from Ernestina. She cooked very well. Fidel wanted us to learn how to cook. Anyone interested would learn from her. She knew, by feeling, how much salt to use. She would just throw things in and it was delicious.”

Celia joined everybody for the Saturday meal. She’d serve herself, as everyone did, and sit on a step that separated the kitchen from the dining area. “I, Eugenia, would sit on the step to imitate Celia. I would rush to sit on the step. The boys sat at the table. Ernestina liked to eat standing up. Celia had a little stool she used as a table. Then she’d eat from a bowl.” Just as she had done in the Sierra Maestra.

Then they’d go out. “We would go to parties at other places,” Tony described how it had been. “At friends’ houses, friends we’d made at school. In Cuba, on Saturdays, kids meet in their friends’ houses. All you need is cold water and music to party. All you really need is music. We’d dance and tell jokes every Saturday.” Then they’d come back to Once. “Most people knew we lived at Once. . . . We were treated like everyone else because people were trying to be equal.” At Once, they were filled with self-importance. “You couldn’t get bored,” Eugenia says. “There were three phones at least in the house. The white phone was the guards’. It rang when Fidel was coming over. ‘
Viene la gente’
was the message. We even started picking it up. We knew to leave the room if the phone rang and she started talking to someone other than family, and we never picked up a document to read it. There were three phones: black, green, and white. We’d answer them and call to her, ‘You have someone on the green phone,’ we’d tell her.”

For supper, they’d have eggs, bread, and any leftovers. “We had small suppers. The ration only covered one meal. Celia hardly ever ate at night.” She told the girls bedtime stories—she told them about Clodomira, about her life with her family among
the orchards of their farm, and about her days with Column 1 in the mountains. Celia told them about Clodo’s notebook with the squiggles, and how she’d traveled to see Flávia, and about going to the hospital with letters for her father.

At some point, Celia decided to give the children lessons in table manners: she set the table and explained the uses for each piece of flatware, and demonstrated how to place a napkin in their laps. Then she sent them to a really good restaurant, and quizzed them when they got home.

On Sunday mornings, everybody lined up at the sink. Celia made them wash their clothes. Celia taught by example and lined up, too, as did the boys. “She brought us up to be independent,” Tony reported. “When I was small, I washed my clothes. We had to. When we were very small, Ana Irma did it. By the time we were ten, we washed our own clothes. At school we’d wash our socks.” If they didn’t, he told me, they were grounded, and couldn’t go to parties, movies, parks, baseball games. Teresa added that the same thing happened if they didn’t make their beds, or acted out in some unacceptable way. When this happened, Celia would ask that the child write a letter, addressed to her, describing what he or she had done, and why. Then she’d read through, correcting spelling and grammar, before handing the letter back for the child to make a clean copy.

Celia’s family, the Sánchezes, congregated on Sunday evenings after the kids had gone back to school. “They were younger than us, by at least five years,” says Silvia’s son Sergio. Sunday supper at Celia’s had been a tradition long before Eugenia and the other children arrived. Clever, the Jamaican gardener from Pilón (now buried in the Sánchez plot in Colón Cemetery) who had tended Celia’s garden and carried around her cupcakes to sell at people’s back doors so she’d have pocket money, came early on these Sundays to see the adopted children and stayed to see the Sánchezes and watch TV. Celia stocked up on aguardiente and cigars, which he’d finish off completely in the course of the long day. He sat on one of the two rocking chairs she’d kept from the house in Pilón and then be joined by Miguel Ugando, Ernestina’s ex-husband, who sat in the other rocking chair. Allegedly, Ugando came to visit his son with Ernestina, Pedro, but the kids think he came to see Ernestina, although they were divorced. Miguel and Cleever spent
the afternoon watching baseball on television. Late in the afternoon and early evening, the Sánchezes would arrive. Everyone got the same treatment. “She was so informal,” Raysa Bofill, Griselda’s granddaughter, recalls. “She had banquettes, but she never used them. We would eat on the floor, which was red, burnt-red tiles from the original apartment. She didn’t make changes if she didn’t need to. She didn’t have time for keeping house.”

Alicia Otazo, Flávia’s daughter, remembers going there every Sunday. “Celia had sofas. Her house had wainscoting that was polished and varnished wood, and wood on the ceiling, too, like a typical cottage. And a ceiling fan in an old style. The sofas were upholstered in vinyl. Two sofas in a corner, with a two-tiered table between them where she put her papers. . . . She would always sit on the sofa that faced out, next to the table, and there were always fresh flowers in a vase. If mariposas were in season, it would be those. The walls were painted white.”

Raysa found a couple of snapshots to show me. Everything was as described except for the banquettes, which were handsomely covered in very wide, black and white vertical stripes.

Eduardo Sánchez came to Once every day. “At Once, sometimes she would say to me, ‘Stay for lunch.’ She would sit on her step and I would sit on the banquette. She would tell whoever was serving food, ‘Give him a lot. He’s big,’ and feed me pieces from her fork. ‘Here, try this,’ she would say to me.”

Eduardo began to work for Celia in 1968, and worked for her for two years before actually meeting her. Rarely do people hire someone without meeting them, and certainly not Celia, who wanted to know everything about her staff: their health, their dreams, their expectations. So that piece of information sent up an alert in my mind. Eduardo explained that one of the rebel army commanders told Celia about him. “I was from Camaguey, from the city of Ciego de Avila. I had a hair salon there.” Celia told the comandante, “Send him, we need creative people.” She directed the Council of State to send a letter requesting Eduardo’s presence in Havana.

This corresponded with a period in Cuba in which male homosexuals were being hounded and persecuted. Celia would have hated this. I went to the OHA office to see Nelsy Babiel, who was hired by Celia and is now the director of her materials in the
archives. She told me that Eduardo was one of several homosexuals Celia protected by creating jobs for them. As the atmosphere surrounding them became more dangerous, she kept a watchful eye over several men in the 1970s by asking them to stop by her house every day. “It was the only way she knew how to protect them,” Nelsy said.

“One day, it was January 18th, my birthday, I went to the archives and saw her at a distance, through a glass pane,” Eduardo told me. The archives is housed in a 1950s bank with a fair number of glass partitions. He happened to speak to Celia’s sister Acacia and said, “Today, I’ve had the loveliest birthday present, because I’ve just seen Celia from afar. A week later, I went back. Acacia called me over, and behind one of the columns was Celia. I met her face to face.”

I interviewed Mariela Castro, the director of the Cuban National Center for Sex Education. “Celia didn’t know how, but she found a means to protect homosexuals.” She went on to say that Celia did not have an institution to work with, and she wasn’t in a position to make legislation. All she could do was protect them. “Institutions were being created to develop the country, the party, the government; to defend ourselves, and to learn to survive in our sovereignty. At the time, nobody worried about the rights of homosexuals. . . . Nobody’s creative imagination would have led to this institution, not at the time.”

Eduardo continued: “One time I was at Once, and Fidel came in with Pepin Naranjo. Fidel put his hand out to get something and touched me. I flinched. I felt like a mouse under an elephant’s foot, and I told Celia: ‘I don’t know where Fidel ends and God begins.’ She answered, ‘For heaven’s sake, don’t tell him that.’”

In 1968, Eduardo began to work in one of Celia’s workshops and in 1970 began restoring furniture for Las Ruinas, an exclusive restaurant being built in Lenin Park. Celia made the architectural design of Las Ruinas very modern but used groups of antique chairs restored by Eduardo and other teams in her many workshops to decorate it; she also used antique pieces of stained glass.

LENIN PARK OPENED IN 1972
, a far cry from the old Spanish parks that were so much a part of Celia’s life in Manzanillo, but not unlike the rolling fields outside Pilón. She was neither working quickly
nor taking the easy way: she was behind the epic task of planting 80,000 mature trees, each with an extensive root system. And it was her idea to import birds from the not-too-distant province of Pinar del Rio, only to have most of them fly back home. She worked with many architects, but gave a start to a young architect, Juan Tosca, who helped her lay the foundations for a wonderful urban park where no buildings could be taller than the vegetation. She commissioned works of art from Portocarrero, and supplied his paints and rum while he worked on the project. On opening day, Celia made sure everybody who lived in Once was there as well as nieces and nephews. She introduced them to everything the park had to offer, sent the kids on hikes and trail rides. Eugenia fell off a horse.

The park reflects Celia’s good taste and practical nature, but just as much her eccentricities. Critics immediately point out that there are no paths. “People will make paths where they want paths,” she told her project manager, Lucy Villegas. Here, people walk wherever they want (although not always conveniently). Leaves are allowed to lie where they fall from the trees. When she discovered gardeners raking them up, she told them to let them fall and see the patterns they made on the ground. Celia disliked the topiaries in other Havana parks, because topiary took up too much time, and was unnatural. She would likely have labeled it unCuban.

Today, Lenin Park is a swath of gently rolling hills and open spaces, a refuge from the city center. The park lies on the southwestern edge of Havana, but along well-established roads linking the capital to the ancient tobacco fields that stretch from Havana Province to Pinar del Rio. Slightly to the west lies José Martí International Airport and its newest terminal, No. 3, which opened in 1998 and was designed by Mario Girona (his last project before his death) and Dolly Gómez. Lenin Park’s eastern boundaries touch on La Mantilla, home of Detective Lt. Mario Conde and his creator, the writer Leonardo Padura. Today Lenin Park has sixty or so restaurants, numerous food stands, art galleries, a narrow-gauge railroad, a rodeo, baseball diamonds, swimming pools, fields and wooded areas, a bust of Lenin in white marble, a garden that is a gift from Japan, an amusement park that is a fairly recent gift from China, and at least a million visitors a year.

40.
Life at Once

THE CHILDREN LOVED SPENDING HOLIDAY
time at Once, especially the week-long school holiday to commemorate the Bay of Pigs victory, Semana de Girón, which was celebrated every year. They didn’t go on vacation “like everybody else,” according to Tony. Celia would take them to work in the fields. “Volunteer work. We’d clean cane fields. The people who worked in her office did this, too. It was in the countryside outside Havana. We’d go in the morning and come back home.”

It was those stay-at-home, stay-in-Havana vacations that gave Celia time with the children. She taught them how to cook. She made sure they knew how to debone a chicken or a turkey, which they all learned how to do, and were surprised to hear that she’d learned the secrets at Macy’s, where she had taken cooking classes during her long stay in New York City in 1948. She taught them traditional Oriente recipes, like corn pudding made with the milk squeezed from the kernels and stirred constantly over a low flame. She made sure they all knew how to dance, and taught the girls how to use makeup. “We all had boyfriends and girlfriends,” Eugenia explained.

Tony elaborated on Celia’s approach to their social lives. “If anyone had a girlfriend or boyfriend, Celia would talk to us. She wanted to know who they were, where they lived, if they were revolutionaries, and what their parents did for a living. She asked us to find out this information.” When Eugenia met a boy on the Isle of Youth (formerly the Isle of Pines) on a school outing, she related, “I told Celia that I had a boyfriend, and she asked where he lived. I told her San Francisco de Paula.” Celia told Eugenia to bring him to Once. “Celia was lovely. We were very young. Twelve years old. We went steady for two years. He’d given me a ring and Celia gave me a gold ring to give to the boy.”