One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution (9 page)

Crescencio Pérez was a local patriarch with family spread throughout the Sierra Maestra. Celia recruited him in 1956 to help the guerrillas when they returned to Cuba at the start of the Revolution. (
Courtesy of Oficina de Asuntos Históricos
)

AFTER GUILLERMO GARCÍA
, the next major figure Celia recruited was Crescencio Pérez, whom she had not previously known. It is likely that his name came up on weekend outings—at a ball game or picnic near some waterfall. People would have told her that she needed Crescencio Pérez not only because he was a local
don
, a patriarch, but because he hated the Rural Guard. To back it up, they told her tales of Pérez’s arrest and escape during Machado’s presidency. She listened closely to the region’s folklore.

Crescencio lived in Ojo de Agua de Jerez, a settlement of five or six houses located on the main road between Manzanillo and Pilón, a road she often traveled; but she lived on the coast and he in the upper foothills, in another world. Crescencio was the man for her, they explained, because the Rural Guard gave him a wide
berth. He had a great number of children spread throughout those hills, and over the years his family and neighbors, in formidable numbers, had protected him. He’d earned his reputation as a person to be respected. She wanted to know more about him and his family, and found out that Crescencio was a famous womanizer—a good many of his children were by women other than his wife. In his case, the story had a promising twist: he recognized the children as his own and had them baptized with his name. Here was a regional patriarch whose sexual prowess had earned him a certain dignity, since he not only openly recognized all his children but held the sway to do so. But not all his neighbors, especially those men whose wives he’d seduced, harbored benign feelings toward Crescencio. So, while he might be a good person to work for Celia’s cause, she was aware that she might be venturing onto thin ice here.

She made an appointment to meet him through Juan León, a relative of Crescencio’s. In the first quarter of 1956, he came to Pilón. The patriarch was sixty-one years old, with a square jaw, gray hair, blue eyes, with head reared back in his photographs, somewhat rooster-like because his head presided over such a solidly built, poker-straight body. He immediately promised to help her in every way possible. Álvarez Tabío thinks this happened so readily because Pérez liked rebellious causes, and Celia, by nature, was persuasive.

She must have been curious to meet this man; and, though she always dressed meticulously, she would have taken special care of what she wore that day, so as not to disappoint him. He may have felt the same about her; Juan León would have filled him in on her background: that she was the daughter of the doctor, of a man who had spoken out against Machado, and would have told him about her political background, her support of the Orthodox Party, of Eduardo Chibás and Emilio Ochoa. León might have described what he knew, or had heard, about the men in her life, her love affairs. Celia found out from Crescencio that Ignácio Pérez, his favorite son, was already eagerly conspiring with the union-organized cane-cutters in their strike against mill owners, and she could see that this worked to her advantage, that the old man was eager to be dealt in, handed a role. Several things jelled, and Crescencio needed little encouragement to act.

Guillermo García and Crescencio Pérez, in a completely natural way, began traveling in their own regions, saving Celia from exposing herself unnecessarily. This was helpful, since the Rural Guard watched everyone’s movements, especially those named on the government’s lists—Cubans say “marked”—as Celia was for her previous Orthodox Party activities. García, as he went about purchasing livestock, now rallied like-minded farmers near the coast. Pérez’s recruitment extended throughout his fiefdom: his children and their neighbors and relatives who lived in the central highlands from west to east in the Sierra Maestra range. The enlistment of these two men expanded Celia’s network to cover an immense territory; it soon had representatives in Belic, Ojo de Agua, Alegria de Pio, Rio Nuevo, Las Palmonas, Santa Maria, Guaimaral, Ceibabo, Convenencia, El Mamey, Palmarito, Sevilla, Las Cajas—all possible routes that Fidel’s men might take if they had to travel on foot from their landing point and into the mountains. Crescencio and Ignacio devoted themselves to Celia’s project, and by the middle of 1956, they had made useful contacts with people almost all the way east to Pico Turquino. Álvarez Tabío wrote that Crescencio and Ignacio passed through Purial de Vicana, El Cilantro, El Aje, La Caridad de Mota, La Habanita, El Lomon, Caracas, El Coco, El Jigue, and La Plata, laying the groundwork along a route the guerilla columns followed later. In other words, Crescencio and Ignacio Pérez had pledges from farmers and ranchers that paid off two years later, in early 1958, when the rebel army was being aggressively pursued by Batista’s army during the war.

Celia could not let her field commanders know about each other. For one thing, Crescencio had, at some point in the past, compromised a woman in Guillermo’s family, and in the 1930s had treated Guillermo’s father so badly that feelings against him remained strong in the García family, enough that the antipathy would have outweighed even the most ardent anti-Batista sentiments. She no doubt evaded questions and lied flat-out when she thought it was appropriate to ensure her network’s survival until her first two great missions were accomplished.

When Crescencio and his son Ignacio traveled from farm to farm, and house to house, they were recruiting clan members who were anti-Batista and anti-Rural Guard. People in this region had been exploited at every opportunity, for decades, and in an especially brutal manner, so it wasn’t all that hard to get them to come aboard—to say, in effect, “Sure, when these guys arrive, we’ll do our part.” Every generation had the desire to rid the place of government soldiers—dubbed
casquitos
or “little helmets”—who usually took the job to receive extra pay. If posted in the mountains, they received a per diem they never had to spend, living as they did by extortion, so it became the equivalent of bonus pay. Blatant expropriation of goods was the Guard’s standard behavior. Another factor worked in Crescencio’s favor: most of the Pérez clan had heard about Fidel and the Moncada when they agreed to join Crescencio’s cause, but it’s generally agreed that their decision was less a matter of supporting Fidel than of the pleasure of involvement: It was an opportunity for one more fight. In this instance, the fight was especially sweet because of the endorsement of their patriarch. Before long, Crescencio had secured the Pérez family’s collective pledge, and Celia’s network had real security in numbers.

In Guillermo García’s region near the coast, members of the Rural Guard regularly helped themselves to the ranchers’ cattle and horses. Logistically, the area was somewhat more important since it was closer to where the guerrillas might land: Boca del Toro, the cove called “mouth of the Toro River,” in Guillermo’s zone, was one of landing spots under consideration. The ranchers who agreed to go along with García surely took some time to think over the consequences: if they were caught, they would be jailed, and they didn’t have the safety in numbers that protected the Pérez family. If they were suspected of assisting the guerrillas, their buildings would likely be burned down. Each enlisted farmer and his wife made a decision to take a chance, based on others who were willing to do the same, and with a sense of community. It is my impression that García told them about an upcoming rebel invasion and mentioned the doctor’s daughter, which would have given them pause. If she was involved, she would be exposing her father, and if she was ready to take risks, they had better help her. When Guillermo showed up to ask if they had made a decision, they joined his team. By May, the job was done and Guillermo described all this to Frank and Celia at a meeting in her house.

BY THE MIDDLE OF 1956
, Celia had signed up another member of the Pérez family, Ramon Pérez Montane (called Mongo), Crescencio’s brother, who owned a house, store, coffee farm, and granary near Purial de Vicana in the Sierra Maestra. His place could be approached from Niquero by going directly east via several farm and seasonal roads to the region of the Vicana River. This put him about ten miles north of Pilón as the crow flies. From her viewpoint, Mongo was ideally situated. She liked his place because its location, just inside the Sierra Maestra, provided a natural protective barrier. Plus, it was a place of business and therefore a legitimate destination. Anyone stopped by the Rural Guards had a reason to be there and could say they were purchasing coffee from Mongo’s warehouse. Mongo’s coffee trees provided a place where Fidel’s men could camp out undetected. And finally, she trusted Mongo. Celia recommended his farm as the place for Fidel’s guerrillas to assemble after they’d landed, and designated it the “point of departure” for the mountains. Mongo’s farm was called
Cinco Palmas
, five palm trees. For the revolutionary forces, it would become a landmark.

Celia had a particular respect for country life. The Sánchez family owned three farms covering about 40,000 acres—in the foothills above Campechuela, known as San Miguel del Chino, named after a Chinese man who owned the first store in the region. This was mostly a cattle ranch, but also planted heavily in fruit orchards. Júlio Girona, her cousin, spent a summer there in the 1930s and described how all the Sánchezes convened on the weekends with their guests, around eighteen people of all ages. After-dark entertainment lit by kerosene lamps consisted of storytelling while the very young caught fireflies, and during harvest season, they watched cane fields set on fire (a method used to facilitate the harvest) in the valley. The house was two stories with a palm-thatched roof—two houses, actually, the front house had bedrooms and a second building, of the same height, was a kitchen and dining room. All the furniture, of pine, had been made on the farm by the cowhands—beds, tables, and dressers, chairs covered in cowhide. A tin tub filled by buckets of hot water (up until then, he’d only seen this in American westerns) was used for bathing in one’s room, but the younger generation always washed en masse in the river, though the sexes were separated by a clump
of apple trees—“with only the blossoms between us,” Girona notes. Mongo knew Celia’s appreciation for country furnishing and country places, and when she asked him to jeopardize his house, coffee plantation, pasture lands, and warehouses, he surely realized that she did so fully respecting his property, his livelihood, his way of life.

BY APRIL, CELIA WAS INVOLVED
in something that, even after numerous conversations with her sisters and study of the liturgical calendar, I cannot fully explain. Over two days (it could have been April 2 and 3, or April 3 and 4), the Archbishop of Santiago came to Pilón on an unprecedented Holy Week visit. He served Mass, officiated at marriages and first communions, events organized in advance by the Servants of Mary. It was more than unusual that during such a busy part of the year an archbishop would elect to go to a complete backwater. True, Pilón was within his archdiocese, but its church wasn’t even operating, and no regular Mass was held. Moreover, this trip bypassed large cities like Bayamo, Manzanillo, and Holguín that were clamoring for his attention. The question thus naturally arises what prompted him to come to Pilón.

What makes the situation even stranger is that during the week of the Archbishop’s visit, huge cracks began to appear in the armor of Batista’s regime. On Tuesday, April 3, some of Batista’s professional officers who had not taken part in his coup, and who therefore questioned his means of authority, mutinied. They called themselves “
Los Puros
” (the Pure Ones). Their uprising was squelched immediately. If the Archbishop knew about it in advance (and I have no evidence of this, but heard of other instances where secrets were passed via the confessional), he may have been happy to get as far away as possible from Santiago and its garrison, the second-largest military installation in the country.

Whatever his motives, the Archbishop was in Pilón at the moment
Los Puros
tried unsuccessfully to take over. A great deal of planning had gone into the mutiny, as it had into Celia’s two-day event: 115 of Pilón’s children received their First Communion and 58 couples got married. According to several of Celia’s friends, in particular Carmen Vásquez Ocaña, whose parents were married at one of these mass ceremonies, Celia simply provided the opportunity; she telephoned local people, gave the date and
place of the event, and asked whether they wanted their names on the list. Carmen, who was about fifteen when her parents got married, explained that due to the shortage of priests in the vicinity, very few couples were married. Priests came from Spain, and when they retired they went home and were not replaced. Celia adamantly thought that the Catholic Church wasn’t doing its job, and promoted these ceremonies because, as Carmen put it, people felt better about themselves if they could be married in the Church. Celia not only put people’s names on her list, she took care of the details, using her own money to purchase marriage licenses ($2 each, a significant investment for most rural couples). Ernestina had just had her baby and Celia was the cook. She wrote to Flávia’s daughters, Alicia and Elena: “I was out all day in the streets performing marriages and baptisms and in the afternoon preparing the children for First Communion and every five minutes I would come in and look at the pot on the stove.”