One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution (28 page)

On July 11, she writes: “I think I told you before about this. . . . Luis Sardina here in Manzanillo, his real name is Rafael, [is] a gangster; at present he is talking to Moran and
organizing a group. . . . We have to fear all these people because they are capable of anything.”

Two weeks had passed, and what had she done about Moran? “You can’t imagine the problems that come up daily,” she writes Fidel. “Moran is exhausting! He lives at the Moncada garrison, is always with the head of the SIM in Santiago; when he came here it was with someone else. He owns a jeep, two pistols and two machine guns, and it hasn’t been possible to eliminate him.” This letter to Fidel was written on the 16th. She treats Moran as a predicament, that is, a problem that comes up daily, but is defensive in case Fidel has forgotten that everybody in Manzanillo has been getting arrested (while he was interested in getting his rolls of film developed). She adds, with a certain amount of drama: “He left us here with 49 arrested and others in hiding. . . . He left me alone and out in the street.”

As to the assassination, the person Frank sent stayed two days. “The delegate came to exterminate ‘Gallego’ [Moran] and, I repeat, it was not possible.” I’m sure Fidel got this the first time. Then, in a separate paragraph, positioned on the page in a way that the words stand out clearly, she assures Fidel that “it is impossible for him to get the papers I have.” She briefed Frank, in a separate letter: “He [Moran] says he has nothing against the movement, only against me for not giving him his passport and address book,” meaning Moran spoke to her or passed messages to her. “In it, he has all the addresses of people in charge in the U.S. He says that he is getting a new passport and will be transferred to New York and before that is going to Mexico. He’s already left here for Santiago.”

I CAN ASSURE YOU THAT
most of the old revolutionaries I interviewed did not want to remember Moran, let alone talk about him. It took a long time to collect all the pieces to this story; I wanted to discover if the movement—to me this means “the men”—permitted women to carry out assassinations. I admit that I was wary of talking about assassination, but the veterans of the early movement were not. Still, when talking to the never particularly forthcoming members of the underground, I’d always ask about Moran; it was just one of the questions I asked. One day I hit the jackpot, and found out why Moran’s passport and address
book were “impossible for him to find.” Elsa Castro had them. In January 1959, she handed an envelope over to Celia. Only then did Elsa discover what she’d been safeguarding.

In guerrilla warfare, assassination is one of the duties attached to leadership, under certain circumstances. When Nicaragua took on the job of describing for me the steel-tempered aspects of Frank’s character, he started with, “I want to tell you a story.” He selected a situation in which he, Nicaragua, had been in charge of storing arms “in one of our cells,” meaning within the group he was responsible for, and two of its members sold some of the weapons. “Some young men in the cell, who were poor, were brought over by [another group that included] people with money.” Frank had just assumed a leadership role with the movement when this happened (on June 22, 1955). He went to see Nicaragua at the bank where he worked as a teller and stood in line at his window. When he got to the head of the line, he passed a deposit slip to Nicaragua with this written on it: “They stole your weapons and the measures we take have to be exemplary.”

After work that day, the leaders—“We didn’t leave this to other people”—traveling in several cars, had gone to the houses of the boys, searched, found the boys and “arrested them and set them free.” After a pause, Nicaragua continued, “It hurt us to do what we did,” and he skipped the details. I realized that he expected me to fill in what must have happened, so I said: “They were shot, right?” “It was a painful thing to do, but it had to be done,” he answered. It is basic, in a clandestine military movement, that members cannot sell weapons. That I understood. He waited as my mind edged forward to fill the gaps. I sought clarification: “Setting them free” meant letting them go, but only so they could get away from home, out of sight of their families, when they were assassinated? Nicaragua nodded. He explained that “the leaders” had left the bodies on a hill in the Loma Colorada section of Santiago (near the Hotel Versailles) as an example, so that other cell members and everybody in Santiago knew that the 26th Movement was tough and couldn’t be messed around with.

Celia was supposed to assassinate Moran. She didn’t, says she couldn’t—not even with the help of Frank’s “delegate”—because it was too dangerous. Instinct tells me that she would not do it, and didn’t have to. She knew full well that being Celia Sánchez
didn’t require bravado since she’d already played an important role in this revolution, and she didn’t have to assassinate someone just to please Frank and Fidel. They were all equals. She also knew that they had to accept it. She’d been through this before, when she rescued Moran and brought him to the underground clinic in Manzanillo. “It’s not about Moran,” she seems to be saying. The important thing is this: we, the 26th of July Movement, are not killers.

It is interesting to take note that, after telling Fidel that she could not eliminate Moran, she immediately changed the subject. In the next line she informs Fidel that Errol Flynn is premiering his movie in the Sierra Maestra town of Estrada Palma and Flynn sent someone to Manzanillo to make sure they were all invited. End of story—let’s not talk of assassinations.

It took me a long time to find out whether Frank had killed the policeman at Caney. Frank is so beloved, I realized, that this wasn’t a question for everybody. Finally, I slipped it in when interviewing Eloy Rodríguez. He paused, looked me in the eye, and nodded.

JUST HOW FRANK HAD BEEN ABLE
to assemble US$20,000 worth of weapons for his Second Front is a mystery, but a fairly strong clue lies in his letter to Fidel dated July 7, 1957. Discussing Lester Rodríguez, who has been trying to get out of Cuba, Frank writes: “You probably know that, at long last, after so much work, El Gordito [Fatso] Rodríguez left today for the United States. The very meritorious and valuable American embassy came to us and offered any kind of help in exchange for our ceasing to loot arms from their base [at Guantánamo]. We promised this in exchange for a two-year visa for El Gordito and for them to get him out of the country. Today they fulfilled their promise: the consul took him out personally, and the papers, letters, and maps he needed were taken out in the diplomatic pouch. Good service. In exchange, we won’t take any more weapons from the base (anyway, security there is now so tough, we couldn’t possibly get away with it), so we will only take ammunition (they didn’t mention that). The weapons, if all goes well for us, will be brought directly from the United States.”

18. J
ULY
12, 1957
The Manifesto

FRANK HAD BEEN REALIZING
one of his greatest political achievements during the two weeks he helped Celia with her problems in Manzanillo. He had charmed a couple of high-profile Cubans into going up to the Sierra to talk with Fidel: Raúl Chibás, Eduardo’s brother, and Felipe Pazos, former head of the National Bank of Cuba. Frank initiated this project after his brother’s death, and carried it to completion in less than two weeks.

“The idea you proposed is a good one,” he compliments Fidel, “precisely because the 26th of July Movement lacks respectability among the general populace.” People of Cuba might hate Batista, but were hesitant to endorse the 26th because it was too militant. Frank continued: “I think it necessary for you to have a General Staff with certain outstanding personalities to give it prestige and an even greater aura of danger for all the sectors of the nation who look upon you—romantically, perhaps?—with certain reservations.” Having talks with opposition leaders, Frank points out, would cause the general population to reconsider the rough-and-ready guerrilla leader in a new light, “when they see you surrounded by people of this kind.” Frank wanted a broader political base, uniting the two major parties, Authentic and Orthodox, behind the 26th of July Movement. “No one doubts that the regime will fall,” Frank states assuredly, but “what
concerns them is the quality of the engineers that the 26th can mobilize to construct the new edifice.”

Chibás and Pazos readily agreed to meet Fidel in the mountains; and Fidel asked Celia to take care of the logistics. As usual, she got these distinguished gentlemen visitors in and out of the mountains but with a distinctly feminine touch. She sent handwritten notes to their wives, once the men were in the Sierras, telling them not to worry.

Frank, by this time, had already established a wide social network in Santiago to support his M-26 underground. This, too, had been created during another precarious moment of his life (while lying low after the Battle of Santiago, waiting for the
Granma
to arrive). The Civic Resistance Movement was composed of Santiago professional business owners and their wives who’d been talked into raising money and giving shelter to his militant movement. Frank, this twenty-three-year-old schoolteacher, made them feel that they were supporting their country and being patriotic. Civic Resistance Movement had grown nationally, and now, as Frank threw himself into his new alliance-with-politicians project—almost as an antidote to his brother’s death—these politicians, within a week, had hammered out a public declaration, in which Fidel promises to hold elections and choose a nonpartisan provisional president within one year after defeating Batista. They signed the Manifesto of the Sierra Maestra on July 12, 1957.

JULY 12 MARKED THE BEGINNING
of a personal upheaval between Fidel and Celia. As soon as the Manifesto was signed, Fidel sent word to her that a messenger, carrying the Manifesto to Havana, would be coming by to say hello; on the following day, he added, another messenger would be coming through Manzanillo with another copy—in case the first one got lost. Celia was outraged. Fidel had so little confidence in his messenger that he was sending a backup? It wasn’t his job to make these arrangements. She and Frank selected everyone, including messengers, not Fidel.

Hidden away, in a cocoon of pine trees on his mountaintop, Fidel kept making capricious demands and ill-advised choices—or so it seemed. Every move he made could easily end up costing lives. All those people out there, operating in cities, were staying in houses located just minutes away from police stations, as was Celia herself. Fidel might be a giant among men, a genius, a charmer, but he was proving to be less than a great judge of character. He seemed to have a penchant instead for colorful personalities. Proof: the first messenger left Fidel’s camp and headed straight for Santiago, having taken it upon himself to deliver a letter for another soldier, to the man’s girlfriend. In Santiago, he let it be known that he was carrying a manifesto to Havana. “Everybody asked questions, he talked . . . !” Celia later wrote to Haydée. “Santiago found out about the manifesto before it got to Havana.” She complained to Frank that the whole messenger thing was insufferable, including the second messenger Fidel sent, even worse than the first.

She composed a letter to Fidel. “Dear Alejandro: This messenger arrived and continued on to Havana. I thought his mission so cute that I wrote David [Frank]. Later, M [second messenger] arrived. I was glad to see him. With him I am like one of those women in love with men who abuse them. They become indignant and afterward . . . they love the men more. He is such a liar and has such a loose tongue! But he is so useful!” She’s chagrined, choosing her line of attack. But what is she saying? I suspect that Frank cautioned her against confronting Fidel too directly, speaking too harshly, being overly critical. In any case, she ended up writing a coy letter—but her tone leaves clear her frustration. The second messenger, she complained, chatted to anyone who would listen to him in Havana, and turned up in Manzanillo again, on his return trip, informing Celia that lots of people would be coming to join the war because he’d told them who to contact when they got to Manzanillo. In fact, she told Fidel that one of his so-called recruits had already arrived there. Clearly, things were getting dangerously out of hand. She describes that messenger to Fidel: “He came on the boat with his boots on, telling all the passengers that he was sure he’d be taken prisoner on arrival because of what he was wearing. He stopped at the doctor’s house, then walked freely all over Manzanillo, endangering that family that is so useful to us.” (She may be referring to Dr. Rene Vallejo, Dr. Manuel “Pitti” Fajardo, or to Fajado’s mother, also an M.D. and active supporter of the 26th of July Movement.) “The doctor sent me a message to take this person out of the house at night, and we had to really search, since finding houses [to hide in] is critical here. We couldn’t even find one for me,” she adds accusingly.

She might as well have added: “Don’t you get it, Fidel? Don’t you have any idea what it’s like to be here, always in plain view?
Clandestinos
are always taking chances in order to support you and your men. We are living our lives a step away from arrest, always near the military garrisons. How can you pick such people as messengers and send them to us?” But she didn’t write this. Celia knew that unless she could educate Fidel, and do it quickly, they’d all sink into even deeper danger, if that were possible. She was confronting the fact that the movement had now increased in scope to the degree that such episodes were somewhat inevitable—and she and Frank would not have time to micromanage.

IN MID-JULY, CELIA CHANGED HER NAME
, adopting a new
nom de guerre
. It was a smart thing to do after all the arrests, since too many people knew her old appellation, Norma. Frank changed his
nom de guerre
around this time as well. “Even the dogs know me as Norma,” she complained, in a letter to Haydée Santamaria. Frank chose Cristían (as in Christian soldier, or Christian martyr), and Celia changed hers to Aly. She gave no explanation then, or after the Revolution, for its origin or meaning, and no one I’ve spoken to could say, for sure, including the historian Pedro Álvarez Tabio, why she chose this name. Álvarez Tabio commented that Aly—spelled that way—isn’t a Cuban or Spanish name. Yet, it’s hard not to notice the obvious: Aly is a little piece of Alejandro.