One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution (16 page)

HATUEY, THE ARMY OFFICER
who had arrested Celia, drove down to Pilón that afternoon to speak with Dr. Sánchez in person. Hatuey informed him of her arrest and escape. “But I can assure you, the second time she won’t escape,” he told the doctor. He explained that she had been spotted very early that morning, and the call had come in while he was at the army post in Manzanillo. He’d gone to arrest her but, as he tried to make clear to Celia’s father, he did not expect to find her so easily.

The hardened, brutal military policeman stood before the doctor, filled with remorse. His face was pockmarked, and one side was covered with a big scar; at times during his career he’d been evil incarnate, yet now he tried to apologize for what was happening. He claimed that he didn’t want to have any part of what was going to take place if they found her. He told Dr. Sánchez his reason for coming: he was grateful to the Sánchez family, referring to a time when Dr. Sánchez had cured his father of typhus. Hatuey implored: “Try to get her out of here because they are going to get her, and torture her. They have to make her talk. She knows a lot. They are going to make her talk.”

SOMETIME THAT AFTERNOON
, General Pedro Rodríguez Avila, commander of army operations in Oriente Province, issued a statement: forty members of the 26th of July Movement had been annihilated, among them their chief, Fidel Castro. Their bodies had been collected, he said, but some of the bodies had been “literally pulverized” and were therefore unrecognizable. By this
time the
Granma
had been confiscated by the government with the harbor maps that Celia had given to Fidel still on it.

IN THE LATE AFTERNOON
Celia heard a car approaching; she lifted her head from the ditch and, recognizing the driver, an automobile upholsterer named Grana, leaped out onto the road to stop him. She asked for a lift to Manzanillo. He looked at the scratches on her face, her clothes covered in dirt and grass stains, and asked, “Celia, how did you get like this?” She supplied him with a scarcely plausible explanation—that her car had broken down “somewhere nearby”—and appealed to his compassion: “Look at me. It’s been raining, look at the state I’m in. Just take me to Manzanillo.”

Once they were on the road, she said she had a friend “who’d gone to buy a car part” waiting for her on a bridge ahead. And in fact, serendipitously, they came upon Beto Pesant. Grana stopped the car and he got in. As Grana drove on, Celia and Beto questioned him about the military activity, visible everywhere. He told them that the army had called that morning for a general mobilization and that the military had taken over the airport. He had seen many planes take off that day, and didn’t know the reason because there hadn’t been any news bulletins. He added that everyplace in Manzanillo was being systematically searched by the police. Hearing this, Celia knew they’d be caught if they stayed in his car; they’d eventually be pulled over or come to a checkpoint. She told Grana to stop the car. She quickly contrived a new reason—her family wasn’t in Manzanillo, but waiting with a car at a farm nearby—and she and Beto got out. They hid in the underbrush at the side of the road until it was dark.

After nightfall, Beto took her to the house of a 26th of July Movement member who lived not too far from this stretch of the highway, where both husband and wife welcomed them. Celia was desperate for information, but the couple did not know much, although they knew through the grapevine that Frank’s uprising had taken place. Around midnight (as December 2 turned to December 3), after they were sure that all traffic had ceased on the highway, Celia and Beto got back on the road and started walking toward Manzanillo under cover of darkness.

IN CAMPECHUELA
, the police went to the house of the young bartender, Enrique de la Rosa, took him outside, and fired forty-two bullets into his body.

8. D
ECEMBER
3, 1956
Felipe Guerra Matos

AT DAYLIGHT
, on Monday, December 3, Celia and Beto Pesant reached the outskirts of Manzanillo. They hid in a cane field so that they could watch the airport, still under government control, and decided to stay out of sight for the rest of the day. Beto took her to the house of a sympathizer, on the edge of town. When they got there, they found the owner completely befuddled by grief. His father had died fifteen days earlier, and he’d barely eaten or gone out of his house since. They spent the rest of the day and night in this place.

The guerrillas—at least Fidel’s group—awoke hungry on December 3, having eaten only cane juice and a little bit of food, including some corn, the night before. They took the road to El Mijial. By this time, they had reached an inland corridor off the southern coast of Cuba where the elevation rises in terraces and begins to form the mountains farther east. The terrain is covered with trees, which gave the men cover, but the ground was nearly impossible to walk on, covered in sharp rocks that cut through their boots. They had no water until they came to a house owned by Zoilo Pérez Vega, called Varón, who was not home, but his wife and children greeted them and gave them water. The guerrillas introduced themselves and one of Varón’s sons, José Rafael Pérez,
spoke up to tell them what his father had heard on a neighbor’s radio. The Vega family killed some hens, made a nutritious soup with yucca, and offered them honey in the comb. The soldiers left with sweet potatoes and with Varón’s brother, Tato Vega, and son, José Rafael, as their guides, who offered to show them a shortcut east to Beattie Sugar Company lands and a blazed trail, or
trocha
, that would get them to the mountains.

By now, they were marching in three platoons: the vanguard led by José Smith, followed by Fidel’s platoon and Raúl’s rear guard. On the road, they had met a
carbón
(charcoal) cutter (Fidencio Labrada), and considered him to be a good omen: if he met other guerrillas, he could tell them where to go. They came to a little village called Agua Fina, where three
carbón
cutters lived, and once again the guerrillas were fed; this time it was chicken with black beans and rice, for which the
carbón
cutters were handsomely paid $5. They spent a relatively calm night on December 3.

AS CELIA AND BETO PESANT
were about to leave the next morning, Tuesday, December 4, they heard a milkman coming down the road and persuaded their host to go outside and buy a bottle of milk, which they shared. Then went on their way but right away ran into trouble. As they were going into town, a sentry recognized Pesant; they ran for cover and quickly separated so they’d have a better chance of getting away. Pesant told her how to find a dance hall in this part of town; he’d meet her there. They spent the rest of the day hiding out in the empty dance hall building, but when night came, the place filled up with prostitutes, and, at some point, they heard an argument followed by gunfire and were afraid the police would come and find them. They were desperate to leave because they were hiding in an office with only one way out, through a single door. Pesant thought the owner might have weapons hidden in the ceiling, so they spent the night searching frantically, and Celia would later describe the night, cryptically, as “very hectic.”

BY THE 4TH, FARMERS WERE BEGINNING
to hear stories: Batista’s forces were in the area. The guerrillas still had not reached the
trocha
, and soon after 8:00 a.m. Fidel’s group heard planes overhead, and their guide, José Rafael, had led them to
terrain where the volcanic rocks were so cutting—Cubans call them
dientes de perro
, dog’s teeth—that they made little headway. More
carbón
cutters came to their rescue (Jesus Luis Sánchez and his brother, Pedro Luis), providing food and water, and buying food for them in a bodega, as they kept marching eastward. The column spent the night of the 4th in a cane field, sucking on cane, which quenched their thirst and gave them a little energy. This was to be their undoing.

AROUND 5:00 A.M.
, on Wednesday, December 5, Celia and Beto left the dance hall. They had been in Barrio d’Oro, located on a bluff above the harbor, and now they carefully circled the hill moving toward the older part of the city. They separated, mindful that the sentry, who had seen them the day before, would have reported seeing them together. Completely out in the open and alone, Celia walked along the streets of Manzanillo and was greatly relieved to see one of the Larramendi brothers. He was stunned to see her, listened to her explanations (the same story: her car had broken down, she’d left it behind, could he take her home) and let her into his jeep, but started berating her for her political activities. “How can you do these things? You know what times are like. They are going to kill you.” She ordered him to “let me off right here” and got out of the jeep.

She made it to Cira Escalona’s house. Cira, one of her dearest friends, who had lived in Pilón but now lived in Manzanillo, called a young doctor, Lascos Vásquez, who gave Celia a tetanus shot as 26th of July Movement women arrived and began to remove
marabu
thorns with tweezers. She had a high fever and complained of severe headache, so her old friend, Dr. Rene Vallejo, came to Cira’s and surgically removed thirteen thorns from Celia’s skull. “Like Jesus Christ’s crown of thorns,” she’d say, later on.

WHEN CELIA’S FATHER HEARD
that she was in Cira’s house, he was overjoyed and wrote a long letter describing Hatuey’s visit on the afternoon of her escape. In this letter, he told her that she shouldn’t think of herself as different, or braver than anybody else, and he’d included his Colt 45. He advised her to use the pistol on herself rather than be tortured. This pistol (now housed in the Cuban Council of State’s Office of Historic Affairs) is sheathed
in silver and has the head of an Aztec warrior engraved on the stock. It fits into a holster made of thick, jet-black leather. A semiautomatic, the Colt was a very good gun and she was probably happy to have it, but closed her mind to her father’s warning and ignored his pathos.

AT THIS POINT, THE WHOLE AREA SOUTH
of Manzanillo—Campechuela, Media Luna, Niquero, and Pilón—was awash in speculation: was she dead or alive? Gossip flew from house to house, and town to town, linking the “doctor’s daughter” to Fidel Castro, and the moment she arrived in Manzanillo she was the main subject of conversation, a hero. “When the landing happened, everyone started to talk about Celia and how she helped the guerrillas,” explains Felipe Guerra Matos. He too had been inspired by the news of Fidel’s open revolt against Batista and wanted to do his part, and like a lot of other people, he wanted to have the privilege of joining the 26th of July Movement. To do that, you had to talk to Celia. She became the person to see in that part of the country. So he put in a request to meet her. Guerra Matos says that people didn’t use her name then, didn’t call her Celia Sánchez: “We referred to her as the ‘doctor’s daughter’ from Pilón. When we heard that she was in Manzanillo, everybody wanted to see her.” When Elsa Castro heard that Celia was alive, she went to Cira Escalona’s house to ask Celia to hand over the chocolate-brown skirt she’d been wearing. Celia was mystified, so Elsa explained: “This skirt is an important piece of Cuban history.” It ought to be in a museum someday, “like Panchita’s.” Clothes worn by the wife of Bartolome Maso, a leader during the Second War of Independence, were kept on display in a local museum. “Burn it,” Celia snapped. “You’ll never see me in medals.”

Elsa told me she still regretted not having ignored that injunction. She explained to me that Celia received many medals in her lifetime but never wore them. When she died, Fidel pinned these medals on a little cushion he placed by her coffin.

Even in the early days of the fight, Celia was suspicious of anything that smacked of a cult of personality.

ALTHOUGH SUFFERING SEVERE HEADACHES
from the infection and toxicity of the thorns, Celia immediately began recruiting. Just
days after her escape, she agreed to interview Felipe Guerra Matos. He introduced himself as the administrator of a rice mill, with many contacts among the rich farmers around Manzanillo, growers, mill owners, and rice producers. She responded by asking him to raise a thousand dollars. When Guerra mentioned the possibility that Fidel might have been killed, as the army reports were saying, he recalls, her voice dropped and she stated, quite coldly, that this was simply impossible. He watched the change come over her and thought he was going to be dismissed, until Celia explained why that information lacked validity. If they had killed Fidel, she reasoned, the army would have published a picture of his body in every paper, everywhere, “even pulverized.” Guerra Matos was moved by her strength, her insistence, and says that her conviction carried the whole movement during those moments when people turned to her for strength.

Guerra was overwhelmed by her fragility. “I didn’t have a proper description of Celia. I thought I would be meeting a big, strapping woman, but I met a thin, medium-tall woman instead, with a very refined manner. In bad shape. She had gone through a
marabuzal
. The first thing I said to her was, ‘Have you been in a cat fight?’”

9. D
ECEMBER
5–16, 1956
The Farmers’ Militia

THE GUERRILLAS WERE AMBUSHED
on the afternoon of December 5. Chewed cane stalk marked their trail. A hundred Rural Guards armed with machine guns and rifles trapped them at a place called Alegria de Pio, in a field, then set fire to the field to flush them out.

In the battle that ensued, as Cuban historians explain it, two were killed in combat; nineteen were captured and immediately executed; and nineteen escaped one way or another, making it out of the mountains to safety as best they could, but did not return to the life of a guerrilla. Twenty-one were taken prisoner. Another twenty-one survived to form the rebel army.