One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution (7 page)

The País house, now a museum, is the first place I went in Santiago de Cuba, the name given by the Spanish conquerors. Columbus landed on the eastern end of the island in 1492; a few years later Hernán Cortés built a house on a
balcón
, a ledge, on one of the steep hills above Santiago’s port. He conquered Mexico while his colleagues remained in Cuba to build homes and a church, creating a city. The oldest part of Santiago has been constructed on the foundations of these ancient buildings, and the present-day cathedral sits on a foundation tracing back to 1520, the year after Cortés sailed for Mexico and the year African slaves were first imported to the island.

Portrait of Celia’s boss, Frank País. There were two military components of the 26th of July Movement: combat activities, weapons training, and logistics (
acciones de guerra
) were under the direction of Fidel, but the underground (clandestino) unit was commanded by Frank País. (
Courtesy of Oficina de Asuntos Históricos
)

Frank’s parents’ house lies close to the oldest part of the city in a neighborhood developed in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. It is modest, pretty, and only a few blocks from the house where Maríana Grajales lived with her militant sons, António and Josué Maceo, commanders of Cuba’s rebel army in the Second War of Independence (1895–98). When my guide found out that I was writing about Celia Sánchez, she quickly adapted her tour of the house and led me to Frank’s room, where he and Celia carried on their discussions. His white linen jacket hangs in a glass case, as it might have hung the day of their first private meeting, placed over the back of his chair. The guide stretched her arms, lifted a ceiling panel, and pushed it back to show me where Frank hid papers, and moved to another room where he stored guns.

A halo hangs over Frank País. Outside Cuba, Che Guevara is the most-loved hero of the Cuban Revolution, but inside the country that place goes to Frank. At least that is the sentiment of the older generation, who often remark that if Frank were alive, he would be leading the government at Fidel’s or Raúl’s side. There were two military components of the 26th of July Movement:
acciones de guerra
(combat activities, weapons training, and logistics) carried out under the direction of Fidel; and the
clandestino
(underground) unit, commanded by Frank País. (Administration
was based in Havana and under the supervision of Armando Hart and Haydée Santamaria.) Two retired
comandantes
, Delio Gómez Ochoa and Dermidio Escalona, made a point of mentioning that the two-part military organization had been copied directly from the Second War of Independence, in which military strategies had been left up to the generals in the field, but clandestine activities were planned by Martí. In this regard, then, Frank País was Martí’s successor. On the day in early 1956 that he received Celia in Santiago he was twenty-one years old.

Frank had been born of old parents. When people describe Frank, they nearly always mention this. Rosario García, his mother, was about forty at his birth and her husband, Francisco País Pesquerira, much older. His father was a Baptist minister, and thus a man who delivered weekly sermons. I assume he did this in the usual way: using quotes of the church fathers well mixed with biblical texts to shape a message. Frank’s middle name, Isaac, is from Genesis, and it stands to reason his parents named him for the son of Abraham. Frank’s father died when he and his two brothers were still quite young, and Rosario raised them on a small church pension she supplemented by doing washing and ironing.

Frank entered Teachers College of Oriente Province (
Escuela Normal para Maestros de Oriente
) at the same time Batista took over Cuba. In high school, he had been a student leader, led demonstrations, organized protests, and after the 1952 coup put together an armed secret organization called Eastern Revolutionary Action. But as soon as Fidel and his men were out of prison, he transferred all his energy to Fidel. When he became Celia’s boss, he was in charge of all the subversive activities for the movement on a national level, from sabotage to uprisings, yet he still lived with his widowed mother and two brothers, Agustín and Josué, at 266 General Bandera. This is where Celia went in early January 1956 to receive orders. She entered the single-story house with white plaster walls, just like all the others in this old neighborhood above the port, where doors and windows open directly onto narrow streets, and Frank steered her to his room. Neither was a scruffy revolutionary, by any stretch of the imagination. She wore dresses, mostly, sunglasses, sandals; or maybe she had on high heels that day, and was carrying a pocketbook, and no doubt flashed her big smile, a spectacular
sonrisa
showing both rows of teeth. Frank had
an oval face, broadest at the cheeks, eyes set wide over a straight nose, white skin with a rosy hue where it was slightly toasted by the sun. He had brown hair, although in some photographs it is almost blond. Che Guevara commented that Frank was one of the few people who in person look like their photographs, and these show that he had a beautifully shaped mouth, wide, full, and sensuous (like the lips painted by Man Ray, floating in a blue sky above the little observatory). But the look in his eyes is what people remember. Che thought it cold, and others agree.

As I’ve mentioned, it doesn’t take long to pick up on the love and reverence Cubans, especially the old guard, have for Frank. To find out more, I conducted an interview with Carlos Iglesias, called “Nicaragua,” at the Council of State’s Office of Historical Affairs on Linea. Iglesias is one of the old revolutionaries who describe themselves as having been “there at the beginning,” small, wiry, and bald with a beautifully shaped head. He had prepared for the interview and began to speak immediately, before I had time to pose questions. “I have been thinking about Frank. To begin with, so that you can understand him, I thought of something to bring you,” and he handed me a piece of transparent plastic tubing with a very small aperture, an IV line from a nearby clinic. He watched my face and lack of comprehension. “It is soft, but something you couldn’t possibly break,” he explained, speaking quietly while he wrapped the soft plastic around his knuckles, then stretched it taut, all the while speaking just above a whisper. “He never cursed; he usually was smiling; when he wasn’t talking about war, his conversations were about music,
zarzuelas
, and women. . . . He was good-looking—not athletic. His shoulders were narrower than his hips. And he liked to dress well. And there were lots of girls after him. He was always dreaming of a great and sublime love. There was one girl he preferred, and he went steady with her. She was tall, blond. She looked something like you. Her name was America [Domitro]. She was from a Romanian family, but the family had lived in Santiago a long time. Their name originally was Domistrov. Her brother was Frank’s bodyguard.”

Nicaragua had been in school with Fidel and Raúl; he later met Frank at the Teachers College. “By this time, I had been fairly well educated at the Jesuit high school, so we would talk about things that most people didn’t understand at the time.” Before
long, Frank, then twenty, became the mentor to Nicaragua, who was twenty-four. “I had never put my hands on a gun. He threw a gun on my bed and said, ‘There, take it apart!’—and I was afraid to touch it. But Frank was a good teacher. . . . We were living in a very dangerous period and what he wanted was dangerous.”

ON THE DAY HE MET WITH CELIA
, Frank probably wore slacks and a well-pressed shirt with tails loose, Cuban style (there are some of these in the museum as well). He was 5’ 7”, taller than Celia by a couple of inches.

There, in his bedroom, he explained how she must go about planning Fidel’s return to Cuba. He told her to create a completely new network made up of persons of her own choosing, and to select individuals for her action cells. He suggested former Orthodox Party members, and people she was familiar with from other organizations, from every town along the coast. He advised against the old or fainthearted, because one of his plans for assisting Fidel’s landing called for capturing some of the army’s guard posts. These were manned by the
Guardia Rural
(which for the most part guarded the big landowners). And her people had to be militant enough to attack army garrisons and quickly knock them out, in order to impede or slow the Rural Guard’s arrival at the landing area. Frank explained that he would assist her by ordering 26th of July Movement sabotage units to create havoc. They would cut telephone and telegraph wires, making it difficult for the Rural Guard to notify army headquarters in Manzanillo and small garrisons elsewhere. Frank also told her that he would direct the entire clandestine apparatus of the movement under his command in the area—and this meant not only Pilón, along the southern coast, but all the coastal cities of Niquero, Media Luna, Campechuela, and Manzanillo, roughly a 50-mile radius in western Oriente Province—to help her out. Choosing the right people and developing a strategy for attacking the posts was her affair, with Manzanillo as her special base of operations.

Frank went on to the next point: he was also putting her in charge of transport. This meant getting Fidel’s men out of the region after they landed. She had to figure out how to get them away from the coast and into the mountains. The guerrillas would be bringing enough military supplies from Mexico to arm and
uniform her militants; and when Fidel and his men landed, there had to be two groups (Fidel’s guerrillas and Celia’s militants) ready and capable of attacking the nearest army post, capturing their weapons, and then rapidly move the guerrillas into the Sierra Maestra.

In clandestine work, you must make an unwritten contract with your boss, your handler, and Frank—from here on out—became the largest part of Celia’s universe. He set the rules; she had to abide by them. He would send her into danger and she would go there. But he would also be her protector. She (who was so independent) would be like a child with its mother, entering a state of dependence most of us could not tolerate. From that day forward, she would be restricted, even within the 26th of July Movement, in whom she could talk to about this project. For the moment any discussion would be limited to issues of where the landing was going to take place. Everything else, such as the creation of the new network of militants, was something she could only discuss—at least for the time being—with Frank. With no one to talk to near her base in Pilón, she was entering something a bit like a secret engagement with a long-distance fiancé, only the most limited telephone conversations allowed. Frank probably included a pep talk that day, since it was a daunting assignment he was handing her. Not that there was any doubt she could do it. She’d been preparing for the part, for years. Still, it required much more than anything she’d undertaken in the past. She didn’t know it then, but over eighty men would be arriving in a boat along her section of the coast.

FRANK’S PORTABLE RECORD PLAYER
is in the museum, and a bunch of albums. He may have put on a record for Celia, that was something he often did, or he may have played the piano. Music would have been a good camouflage to their conversation in a neighborhood where all windows were open, all houses were attached, and no one knew who was in the pay of the police. Music, as a mask, was equally a way of protecting others. Neighbors innocent of revolutionary intentions, maybe someone cleaning the floor of a house next door, or washing dishes, might overhear them; if questioned, that person could truthfully say, “I heard music.” Every account given by people who went to see
Frank mentions that he played the piano during their secretive conversations, and a couple of these visitors were disconcerted, not in a negative way, of course, and not by the discussions, which concerned guns, ammunition, and violence, but because he was so much more accomplished than they were. Further, playing piano seemed to help him think, analyze.

Celia would have spoken briefly to Frank’s mother, Rosario, had she been present in the house. Frank did what he did with his mother’s knowledge, her full blessing, and encouragement; Celia would have known this. The Lord told Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, his favorite child, and Abraham accepted this, although it was the worst thing imaginable. Such things are an act of faith. That was the surest way Rosario García could have accepted her son’s militant lifestyle.

Once outside Celia reentered Santiago’s busy streets, lit by shatteringly bright sun. She probably went to her sister’s house. If so, Frank would have sent his regards to Silvia, but only if he permitted Celia to confide that she had seen him.

4. F
EBRUARY
–J
UNE
1956
A Change of Strategy

WHEN SHE GOT HOME TO PILÓN
, Celia spent a period of time—perhaps as much as a month—thinking through her assignment. That in itself is interesting since she was such a woman of action. She studied the situation, mapped the area, thought her tasks through, and mulled over how best to assist Fidel and his soldiers. She always came back to the same thing: a large group of men was going to land in a place they did not know. Nor did the people in the area know them. Her analysis: she needed to create not one group but two: her militants plus a shadow group to recognize and help the rebel fighters. Who? She came to the conclusion that only the country people, farmers and ranchers who sparsely populated this coastal area, were dependable. She needed a group to protect the guerrillas, beyond the Orthodox Party members proposed by Frank, and decided that it should be composed of farmers willing to participate directly, even if just by letting Fidel’s soldiers camp on their property. She made a trip to Santiago to lay this out to Frank, arguing that the farmers were best suited to this aspect of the operation and could provide her with sound intelligence. Frank agreed.