One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution (6 page)

BOOK: One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution
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SOON AFTER THIS
, Celia went to the mill and removed a set of nautical charts from the office. The mill was an easy walk from her house, and she was on friendly terms with most of the people who worked there. If they noticed her poking through the files, I get the impression that nobody thought it suspicious. At any rate, no one chose to mention it.

The mill office would have been in something of an uproar. The harvest started sometime in early December, with cane arriving at the mill even before the machinery was in working order. After that, the Cabo Cruz mill was running day and night, from mid- or late December through February. This was the start of the season, and when a handful of executives, plus one or two chemists, would arrive from Havana. The owner of the mill, Júlio Lobo, widely referred to in Cuba as the
Czar de Azúcar
(Sugar Czar), showed up at the beginning of the harvest as the mill’s machinery was put in place to negotiate the sale of last season’s sugar in order to make room in the warehouses for the new crop. This little mill, the Cape Cruz, always produced more than its quota of sugar and he could sell the surplus at pure profit.

Lobo’s executive staff circulated among his various mills throughout Cuba, and one of them, an economist named Ramiro Ortíz—described as second in command after the manager—was Celia’s boyfriend. He was a little older. They had a good relationship, and she would sometimes stay with his mother and brother when she visited Havana. Berta Llópiz, one of Celia’s closest friends, explains that Ortíz was a man she might have married (Berta called him “her last chance at a normal life”), but that Celia wasn’t in love with him, or not in love enough to put Ortíz through the double life she was starting. Yet he knew what she was up to, was supportive, and for that reason, Berta had urged her to get married. “I would tell Celia, it is because you
are in the M-26 that Ramiro Ortíz can help you,” which I took to mean “
protect
you.”

We don’t know whether the charts were stored in Ramiro’s office; they probably weren’t, but Celia knew the office staff and left with the charts she wanted. Maybe she gave a plausible reason; in any case, she took the charts straightforwardly and signed them out, leaving her signature in the file. The mill didn’t have everything she needed, so she went aboard a Portuguese ship anchored in the harbor to get more. The ship came regularly to pick up sugar, and she had been on it several times with her father. She found the charts she wanted in the ship’s collection. When the officers of the Portuguese ship discovered that some of their charts were missing, they filed a report with the Cuban Coast Guard.

The Servants of Mary took advantage of the extra harvest prosperity, and handing out toys on January 6, the Feast of Epiphany, was a tradition, so Celia was not the only one to officiate in such an event in Cuba—Mrs. Batista gave out toys in Havana. But it is safe to say that no one interpreted the custom in quite the way Celia did. She brought intensity, commitment, and a degree of detail to this project that no one had imagined. She initiated the toys project a few years after she moved to Pilón, at Christmastime in 1941 or 1942. In the beginning, her friends say, she gave children numbered tickets and told them to collect a gift at her house, but it became clear that small, poor rural children couldn’t come into town to pick up a present. Their parents were working virtually around the clock in the harvest (most for the first time in nine months) and were too busy, too exhausted, or too drunk to accompany their children to town. So she began taking a “census.” She drove to every plantation in her father’s old Ford convertible, would stop and take out her notebook, write down each child’s name, age, where he or she lived, and clothing sizes.

This census and those toys are keys to comprehending Celia’s part in the early stages of the Revolution. Every year she raised money with exceptional dedication to purchase toys that, people point out, were of the same quality she received as a child, and purchased from the same vendors. Many in Pilón loved her for this. By 1955, Celia, with her annually updated census (which by now consisted of several hundred children’s names, addresses, sexes, ages, and sizes), was buying toys for a second generation.

 

Celia’s charity, the Servants of Mary, raised money on New Year’s Eve. Traditionally, she’d go to Havana one or two days later to purchase toys to distribute on January 6, Epiphany. This photograph, showing her in Havana with a friend in 1941, may document such a trip. (
Courtesy of Oficina de Asuntos Históricos
)

 

This means that when she walked into the mill, as several people mentioned to me, the workers “would go crazy over her,” because they recalled receiving toys themselves, and were now relying on her to give a similar gift to their children. When she went to filch the charts, it would have been no different, the workers being thrilled to see her.

Until she could take the maps to Miret in Havana or consult with Frank in Santiago, she had to behave normally: participate in the church supper, dance, and raffle held each New Year’s Eve. To withdraw from these duties after so many years would have drawn attention.

Several weeks prior to the annual fiesta, Celia divided the Servants of Mary committee women into teams; each visited different stores and asked the owner to donate a bag of beans, rice, vegetables, or whatever they could give. Local families also participated; they would cook, serve the food, collect money, and as Elbia said, “supervise discipline.” The beer and rum companies
were donors, so everything they made that night would go to the Servants of Mary’s efforts. Men paid for dances, and, Elbia remembers, “Celia would tell us to eat a lot and dance a lot so that our partners would have to spend money.” Celia had tapped a new demographic: the people who came to the supper weren’t townspeople as much as farmers and ranchers from outside town. The event gave country people an excuse to celebrate New Year’s Eve with their friends rather than stay at home, isolated. They were landowners and had money, thus bought raffle tickets generously. A young cattle buyer with a good eye, Guillermo García, had given Celia a calf to be raffled off, and farmers were happy to purchase tickets with the dream of adding a fine piece of livestock to their herd.

The event was always a success, and for over a decade people had admired Celia for spearheading it. The New Year’s Eve party to ring in 1956 gave perfect cover to all the subversive things she was doing.

Traditionally, money now in hand, Celia would go to Havana or Santiago the day after the raffle to pay for her purchases, and it was then, I think, that she took the nautical charts to Miret in Havana. The bulk of the toys had been selected months in advance, so these last-minute trips were made to pay for prior orders, and most of the toys were purchased in Santiago. In Havana, she usually headed for the Hotel San Luis on Belascoain, on the block between Animas and Lagunas; it was a familiar place (her father liked its atmosphere and had taken his children there when they were young), affordable, and appropriate to her mission. The owner, Cruz Alonso, was a Spanish refugee who had created a hangout for Latin American revolutionaries and political activists living in exile.

This year, she probably returned to Pilón, then took the bus to Santiago, and after she paid for her purchases at two or three factories, arranged to have the toys shipped to Pilón on a boat that took cargo along the coast. Arriving a day or two after New Year’s Day, Celia would likely have stayed the night with her sister Silvia in the fancy Alta Vista neighborhood. When she got home to Pilón, the Servants of Mary wrapped the toys. Elbia recalls, “I remember being on the porch of her house where the gifts were separated and wrapped, each with the name and address of the
child. Many times we started this work at night and ended at dawn, tired and satisfied.”

Once back in Pilón, she set her sights completely on January 6, when the toys were distributed. Truck drivers who worked for the mill would load all the gift-wrapped packages and distribute them to the various settlements that dotted the landscape and edged the sugar plantations. That year, due to the union-organized strike that had involved the cane-cutters, many families had no income, so Celia had purchased wholesale hundreds of pairs of shoes to give out as well—and because her census was so up to date, she could match recipients to sizes. Her colleagues grumbled. Berta Llópiz says she protested when Celia announced that they were going to be giving out shoes to the cane-cutters’ children in addition to the toys. Celia simply replied that there was “no comparison” between the plantation children and the town children, “because the town ones have shoes. The others don’t. The others use
alpargatos
.” When Berta told me this, we laughed at the irony, since the rope-soled shoes were what Celia herself mostly wore.

Berta estimates that they gave out about a thousand gifts in January of 1956. She didn’t know it then, but Celia was making a special appeal to the striking cane-cutters. The trip to Santiago (to pay for and collect the toys she’d put aside) presented a perfect cover to talk with Frank and find out if Fidel had given the go-ahead to plan the landing that would kick off the revolution. Her boss, a teacher of fourth-graders, told her how she should go about it.

A GLIMPSE OF THE TOUGHNESS
in Celia—which common sense told me had to be there for her to have done what she did in the Revolutionary War—was revealed by Elbia Fernández, the younger second cousin. At times, Celia’s father was away overnight. When this happened, Celia often asked Elbia if she would stay with her. On one such night, the two cousins were talking in a bedroom at the back of the house, across the hall from the bathroom, which had a big window overlooking the patio. Suddenly, Elbia noticed a man looking in the bathroom window. She quietly let her cousin know. Celia, no change in her voice or calm demeanor, suggested that they go to the kitchen and get some coffee. As they passed the door that led to the patio, Celia said, “Open it. I am going to shoot him.” Elbia opened the door and Celia fired a pistol into the night. The peeping tom disappeared, but Celia wasn’t content. She turned to Elbia and said, “Let’s search the patio.” But the young woman refused, frightened, so Celia went out alone to search the dark and shadowy space. When she came back inside, Elbia told her that if she wanted someone for protection, she had picked the wrong person.

 

Pilón, 1952. Celia is surrounded by friends and is seated with José Larramendi in front of his house. Behind her, in the white dress, is her young second cousin, Elbia Fernandez, whom Celia affectionately called “The Teacher.” (
Courtesy of Oficina de Asuntos Históricos
)

 

I asked Elbia whether Celia had appeared to take aim, but she answered that she had been too frightened to notice. How much of this was bravado or a bluff? I got the impression that Celia was invigorated by the encounter; she certainly didn’t fall to pieces, and drank her late-night coffee with gusto, happy that she’d followed her instincts and sent a clear warning. Evidently she kept a small pistol under her pillow, or at least Elbia thinks she must have, since it was at the ready. This seems surprisingly dangerous, and therefore uncharacteristic of Celia, but it’s clear she did keep a weapon someplace close at hand.

Like Elbia, people around Celia were unaware of what might be going on in her mind. She was secretive to the extreme, and of course, that was part of what made her brilliant as a member of the underground.

3. J
ANUARY
1956
Frank País

 

ONE OF THE THINGS
you’re sure to notice on a hillside as you arrive in Santiago is the Frank País Teachers College. The Revolution—which is what the older generation calls the Cuban government—constructed this school almost immediately after victory in January 1959. And the word “victory” is rarely used today, nearly always substituted by something else: “the triumph over the regime of the tyranny,” referring to Batista’s years in power, or simply “the triumph.” In Santiago, the most prominent symbols of that triumph are the memory and the name of Frank País. He was too busy opposing the regime to get in much teaching while getting ready to rewrite the history of the nation.

BOOK: One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution
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