One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution (8 page)

The first farmer she contacted was Guillermo García, who had donated the calf for the New Year’s Eve raffle, and ranched on a section of the southern coast where the mountains rise straight
up from the sea. García’s was one of a string of ranches running through the Platano River Valley, perfect, in her opinion, because this location sat halfway between Pilón and Cabo Cruz, the western most point of the peninsula, whose lighthouse would be the first beacon the guerrillas would see when they approached Cuba. García was famous for knowing his region intimately, or, as Cubans described it, “from palm tree to palm tree.” His region included Boca del Toro, a place where the Toro River flowed into the Caribbean. In Celia’s opinion, this could be another good place on the coast for guerrillas to land, for the simple reason that it was away from other south coast garrisons.

Guillermo García and Celia had met around 1930, when they were children and he accompanied his father to deliver sides of beef to Dr. Sánchez’s house in Media Luna. Once Celia and her father moved to Pilón, ten years later, Guillermo helped her with the New Year’s Eve church suppers. Since he was a cattle buyer, it was customary for him to do business with all kinds of people and constantly travel through the countryside, visiting farmers and looking at their livestock. He was not only acquainted with farm people across the whole outer end of the peninsula, from Pilón to Niquero, but knew—or at least had a good idea of—what they thought about Batista’s government. Even before Batista’s coup, this region had known a particular history of oppression. Its farmers had been exploited by the state in various ways since the time of Machado’s government in the 1930s, by graft in various forms, but also by the Rural Guard.

As it turned out, Guillermo was more of a militant than Celia anticipated: he informed her that he was already taking part in a few resistance activities involving the December 2 strike by cane-cutters, and readily agreed to help her. In the end, she relied on him to gather his own network of people between his home in Bocadel Toro and Pilón. (According to Pedro Álvarez Tabío, Guillermo García solicited support and established a network of people in El Platano, La Manteca, Duran, Ojo de Toro, Las Puercas, and any other settlement he thought was necessary to line up sympathizers.) Even to wait for Fidel was treasonous in the government’s eyes, and active preparation only increased risk. Did Guillermo inform his recruits of this? It probably wasn’t necessary. This population had no love for the Rural Guard and had been
defying them, whenever possible, for decades. In the minds of the locals, anti-government activities rumbling beneath the surface were directed, first and foremost, at the
Guardia Rural
, because it represented a semipermanent, yet never-ending, occupation of their area.

CELIA TOOK TO DRIVING AROUND
in a jeep, purchased a boat (both financed by the Movement), and traveled all over the region while putting together the pieces of her revolutionary jigsaw puzzle, and recruiting new people. There are many stories of how she might have done this, and they only became understandable after Elbia Fernández explained to me how Celia had hidden (she called it “buried”) a method of recruitment in social events. Celia used her customary projects and her long-established activities as cover for carrying out Frank’s assignments. She had been a social organizer since her teenage years in Manzanillo and had never really changed. Since arriving on the south coast in 1940, she’d hosted social events—fishing trips, picnics, trail rides—now she loved deep-sea fishing, and frequently she and her friends would go out fishing at night. They’d load onto a boat, and voyage into the deep parts of the beautiful Caribbean, arriving home in the morning in time to go to work. Or, on a weekend, she’d get together a party to fish all day in one of her favorite coves; they would cook their catch over a fire built on the beach and come back at dusk. She would also organize trips with friends to go tromping in the mountains, and buy beeswax and honey from someone she’d heard about, or maybe they’d go on horseback to collect orchids for her garden.

In the summer of 1956, Celia did as she always had, and so did not attract unusual attention. She’d hire a truck, put benches on its open back, and invite her friends for an excursion. Celia brought a picnic basket, and the other women brought covered dishes. They’d drive to a remote spot—this year more often in the mountains rather than on the coast—and, as Elbia explains, if the place had a river or a waterfall, or any attraction, it provided an object for their outing. If not, then the group would improvise a baseball diamond in a field, and their game made an excellent cover for an entire afternoon. The residents of these little settlements wouldn’t be able to take their eyes off all the stylish,
town-bred men and women having such a good time in their cow pasture, and nobody noticed how, by the end of the day, Celia had spent several innings in conversation with one of their neighbors. Nor had the group of friends that accompanied her, because it was only later that Elbia and Elbia’s sister-in-law, Berta Llópiz, figured it out. “At the time, I couldn’t imagine that [these trips] served as decoys to her revolutionary activity,” Elbia commented. She pointed out that the residents who lived in these places they visited—“so far away from the ports”—rarely saw visitors and noticed if anyone from the village left for the day (so Celia couldn’t summon them), and would be extremely suspicious if just one or two outsiders arrived. Any small change in the natural course of events would have been discussed endlessly, so Celia’s way around the problem was quintessential Celia: go to a village, overwhelm the locals with numbers, bring along food; once there more or less keep to her role as hostess, busy talking to everyone and no one in particular. In that way, with everyone having a good time, she could just disappear.

She told these people, plainly, what she wanted. In some cases a “yes” may have come immediately. But most people don’t want to volunteer for anything, let alone anything dangerous. After all, this wasn’t about pledging a bushel of sweet potatoes at the end of the harvest season for the Servants of Mary supper—although that is the sort of conversation she probably was having with them, too. Agreement to become an activist comes in many cases after a cataclysmic event. That had certainly happened when the army, rather than take prisoners in the attack on the Moncada in 1953, killed most of the young men involved and the Catholic Church had intervened.

Yet not everybody in the mountains even knew about the Moncada, let alone had heard of Fidel Castro. So Celia approached them in another way: as herself. Convincing them would have taken time, and meant discussing pros and cons. She no doubt used every variety of persuasion, never taking no for an answer.

If Celia heard about a disaster, she would pay a visit. María Antonia Figueroa, the director of a school in Santiago who turned into a revolutionary and 26th of July member, told me that if Celia heard that a young woman had been raped by one of Batista’s soldiers—and Figueroa emphasized that “young woman” meant
someone’s daughter, sister, or wife—Celia would visit that woman and inquire if there was anything she could do to help. The mention of rape, in any discussion about pre-Revolution Cuba, always carries with it the implication of the army or Rural Guard, although, for all we know, these women could have been raped by a drunken relative. But rape was common, and carried with it a stigma, a feeling of helplessness and shame, and Celia, as the doctor’s daughter and also his nurse, could offer much welcome help. Moreover, victims and their families believed that she was discreet. Figueroa says that Celia would offer to take the woman to see Dr. Sánchez (although I think it seems very likely that she would do the examination herself). If a farmer’s wife or daughter or sister had been raped by the Guard, Celia’s offer of help was another way to build her small but growing army and advance her cause.

CELIA’S FIRST DIRECTIVE FROM FRANK
had been to put together a network of militants from towns along the coast. So one of her first activities was to set up a surveillance system, which she called “vigils,” to log the movement of the military garrisons. She recruited various people to accomplish this activity, drawing them as Frank had suggested from Orthodox Party faithful and 26th of July Movement members in the newly formed chapters in Pilón, Niquero, and Media Luna, where the garrisons were located. After a month or two Celia knew the names of the garrison personnel, their schedules, guard changes, patrol routes, the type of weapons they carried, the effectiveness of those weapons. Over time, her people became acquainted with every one of the enemy’s weaknesses, for example, whether a soldier on sentry duty routinely catnapped. This information helped her to plan a surprise attack as ordered by Frank. Over the first half of 1956, she carefully selected people she considered best qualified to carry out such attacks.

We need to bear in mind that Celia was setting up a regional, clandestine military operation: she was selecting her own army; picking people to train that army; and, in some cases, she would also be supplying it with uniforms and weapons. Although Frank assured her that Fidel would be bringing uniforms from Mexico, she also acquired them because she needed Cuban army uniforms for her assault teams, so they would look like a small company from
Batista’s army. Arriving in the back of a truck, rolling up to the garrison, to jump out and offer assistance, and to help those poor members of the army (out of their guns and ammunition). The garrison’s personnel would move to put in a call to headquarters in Manzanillo or Santiago, requesting reinforcement, but the electric, telephone, and telegraph wires would have been cut. So, when the attack came, it would be dark inside the garrisons, and the soldiers would have to defend themselves without the usual comfort of being able to find their arms and ammunition easily. Celia’s army would be there to offer assistance by stealing Batista’s soldiers’ guns and ammunition at gunpoint, and encourage them to hand everything over, without any fuss, because it was easier that way. Then back in the truck, and onto streets and along main roads, to be waved through by 26th of July sabotage units that would already have set up official-looking road blocks. This is how Celia planned for her troops to carry out their attack.

IN SELECTING HER FORCES
, Frank had asked for “proven militants” from various organizations Celia had worked with over the years. All her recruits lived along the coast. She needed to induct enough personnel to storm a guard post, yet use discretion in her choices, picking the younger and more independent over the older and more experienced. Young people were also closer to the age of army recruits, and it was hoped that young faces would all look alike to old soldiers, and therefore be indistinguishable. It is thought that Frank encouraged her to select her militants not only from a variety of groups, but put together individuals who did not know each other, since he tried to keep the members of his own action groups separate, unaware of each other, and their functions compartmentalized.

Later that summer, Celia’s recruits were given basic military training by the Movement. She directed some of this instruction herself, in the hills outside Pilón. She taught her troops to crawl along the ground and gave firing-range demonstrations. Why she elected to do this, when all those Movement men were available, is anybody’s guess, but in trying to understand Celia’s behavior we have the peeping-tom incident as a reference point. When that prowler looked in the bathroom window, she hadn’t called Cleever from his small house across the garden, or gone across the street to
summon Elbia’s father: she got her pistol, which she evidently kept loaded, and fired it at him. Celia consistently favored a hands-on approach. After all, she was a local, able to blend in; she probably also had to see for herself her troops’ offensive capabilities.

These military workshops took place outside the towns on property that was often “borrowed” to the surprise of the owners if they discovered it. It required chameleon-like behavior on her part, since Pilón was under the control of Sergeant Matos of the Rural Guard, who kept watch over every activity. For her, he was the enemy, but we can assume that as far as Matos was concerned she was pretty much someone he respected, a woman who ran a successful local charity, the doctor’s daughter whose maverick ways called for some accommodation on his part. Why? Because her father treated everybody equally, as doctors do: the
batistianos
, the paramilitaries, the 26th of Julyers, cane-cutters, mill executives, everybody in the town.

She was aware of Sergeant Matos’s respect. His style of vaguely tangible deference would have been good enough for most people, but not for her. Celia befriended his son. A newspaper article from that time shows a photo of Celia and Wilfredo Fernández, Elbia’s brother, a pole resting on their shoulders to hold up two huge fish. Celia had caught a 75-pound sierra (everybody in the boat had helped her haul it in). In a second photo, the entire fishing party of nine is assembled. Showing this clipping to me, Elbia pointed out herself, then Celia’s friend Carmen Vásquez, and, moving her finger across the yellowed paper, came to a young man in the back row: Sergeant Matos’s son. She explained that Celia had invited “Matito” to this particular fishing party so as to render all her fishing trips, in the eyes of his father, harmless. If the sergeant wondered what these people were up to out there on the water, his son could reassure him that they had gone out to catch fish.

Eventually, Celia had people everywhere: some studied all movement along the coast, including traffic on the highways, and reported directly to her; others drew up assault strategies. She lined up vehicles to accomplish Frank’s additional mandate: transporting the arriving guerrillas into the mountains. She considered her best bet the truckers who regularly drove cane to the mills in Niquero and Pilón. They’d be picking up the guerrillas near their place of landing. Who among the truckers, in the Pilón area at least, had not received a toy or transported toys for her on Kings Day and could say no to Celia and foist the new responsibility on others less reliable than themselves? She also recruited men who worked in the administrative offices of the sugar mills and regularly drove jeeps into the coastal cane plantations. They wouldn’t seem out of place if they were seen behind the wheel of one of the mill trucks. She obviously chose well. When Fidel and his men landed, there was a fairly large fleet of trucks waiting along the coast. None was detected by the government’s forces or agents.