One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution (23 page)

Frank arrived in the first week of March, driving a truck and wearing a khaki uniform. Hidden under a cargo of oranges was a load of weapons, uniforms, and backpacks. Eloy was greatly heartened by Frank’s appearance. “I had known Frank for a long time. I met him in 1953 or 1954. He used my group a lot. We were miners, and, as miners, we had access to dynamite, and we provisioned the 26th of July.” Eloy explained that Frank was always concerned about his well-being, that Frank worried about all his men, and mentioned that he had started working with the movement at the age of fifteen. So at the time he came to the
marabuzal
he would still have been under twenty.

Frank stayed a few days, working with his recruits and making further plans. The time had come for Celia to leave the underground and go into the mountains, along with Frank’s new recruits. Celia had always wanted to be a guerrilla and had been watching for an opportunity and this moment, when Frank was selecting recruits, presented itself as a natural, logical time for Frank to make the decision to send her. She and Frank were making good their commitment to replenish Fidel’s army, and with this complement he’d have 82, the same number of men he’d had at the landing of the
Granma
. Celia was to be the 83rd. It was an important move within the 26th of July Movement since she would be swapping roles, from
clandestina
to
guerrillera
. But not unprecedented; women had served in the guerrilla camps in Cuba’s wars of independence, about sixty years earlier. Aside from historic precedent, there were plenty of practical reasons Celia needed to get out of Manzanillo. She was in danger, more than ever since Matthews’s articles had appeared and angered the military, and by leaving town she’d get away from Lieutenant Caridad Fernández, recently appointed Manzanillo’s chief of police, specifically to capture her. Her prolonged presence in the underground was endangering others, most notably the entire Llópiz family, for Hector had enlisted his siblings Rene, Angel,
Angela, and Berta plus their spouses and children to protect Celia. As far as the Movement was concerned, this was a good time for closure: her job was completed, she’d brought Matthews up to the guerrilla camp, she’d set up her clandestine induction center and could leave it in someone’s hands—Guerra Matos, perhaps—although I get the impression that the
marabuzal
at this point was conceived as a single-use facility, to be decommissioned after the group left. Her departure meant Hector no longer had to move her every day; all those households could breathe a sigh of relief. Getting Celia out of Manzanillo would quell all their fears that some unreliable person, or wrong move, would uncover her whereabouts or inspire a betrayal. Closing down the
marabuzal
operation would get Rene off the hook, too.

But I suspect there was something else at stake here, maybe even tacit, in Celia and Frank’s thinking. Someone realized one of them would have to go into the mountains and sort those guys out. It was a long-term, highly specialized job, and couldn’t be left to a proxy (Crescencio, for instance). Since Frank could not leave Santiago, where he needed to be in order to run the underground, Celia had to do it. Celia understood the gravity of the situation. She had to serve Fidel, but also to influence and protect him. Finally, having been one of them, she understood the psychology of the underground. Fidel’s new army of guerrilla fighters was going to be made up of former members of the underground, who had been trained in covert operations but not in guerrilla warfare. Celia could shepherd these troops.

FRANK LEFT ON MARCH 9TH
, driving the truck alone back to Santiago. Just outside the city, the Rural Guard pulled him over. He was carrying false identification, according to Nicaragua, and a gun. Nicaragua’s account features the gun as a major character. It was an expensive little handgun, decorated in gold and silver, bearing the country’s seal in enamel. It had been stolen, Nicaragua claims, from a high-ranking officer in Batista’s army. Frank, found in possession of this distinctive weapon, was arrested and put in jail. Eloy’s account is simpler: Frank had been arrested several times before, as a student organizer, and “they were looking for him.”

Any hopes that Celia had of going into the mountains with the recruits were dashed when she learned of Frank’s arrest. Shortly after a courier got the news to Fidel, she received new orders from the commander in chief: take over all of Frank’s work and continue to supply him with an army. Celia would have to remain in Manzanillo, in the hazardous, frustrating role of the
clandestina
.

Part II
MANZANILLO

15. M
ARCH
, A
PRIL, AND
M
AY
1957
Clandestinos

DURING THE FOLLOWING MONTHS
, the heat was centered on Celia. The new and embarrassing revelations by the foreign press only caused Caridad’s police to step up their hunt for her in Manzanillo. One day, when Lilia Ramírez was looking out of the second-floor window at the telephone company, she saw a group of police leave headquarters. She quickly alerted Hector of a raid. Very likely, this was the day the police raided Angela Llópiz’s house, only to find that Celia wasn’t there. Ana Irma Escalona, who worked for and lived with Angela, describes the raid. 26th of July documents were hidden in the house, buried in the pockets of a couple of jackets hanging in a back-bedroom closet. Ana Irma was careful to say that Celia was never careless about leaving things around that might implicate the house owners, and that these particular documents were not important. Ana Irma had been ironing when the police arrived and left her ironing board momentarily to get the jackets. She placed them on a temporary clothesline she’d strung up, along with her freshly ironed clothes. The police searched everywhere, but didn’t think to check her ironing, and when they found nothing, “made a fuss.” They’d made a big show of finding a small statue (she thinks it was a bust of Mozart or Beethoven), but didn’t take it with them, “just kicked over some small tables” and left.

Celia continued to stay in the farmhouse off and on. With Frank in custody, she had to pay house calls and lean on her network of friends to provide supplies he’d formerly given her, such as armbands. This meant that the Llópizes got further into trouble since the armbands were made at Angela’s house for the new recruits. These armbands were carefully controlled items, being the guerrillas’ means of official identification, and sewing them was akin to a covert activity. The task was relegated to the back of the house where the red and black material was kept well hidden, as was the sewing machine that was used to stitch M-26-7 in white thread. (In Santiago, there was a much-lauded sewing machine capable of producing circular stitches, and those armbands are today highly collectible items. That machine, during the Revolution, was guarded as if it were the Queen’s diamonds.) Ana Irma casually mentioned that ammunition belts were also sewn at Angela’s house, and transported to the farm “in the usual manner.” When I asked what “usual” meant, she admitted that they were taken there “by a couple of young women,” who turned out to be herself and “somebody else.” Two slender young women had left Angela’s house wearing twenty bandoliers wrapped around their hips under “our wide skirts,” to step into Felipe Guerra Matos’s station wagon. (When I asked Guerra for details, he denied it ever happened.)

Wringing information from these former
clandestinos
is like getting water from a stone. Until this interview, Ana Irma says she has never mentioned having participated in anything to do with the
marabuzal
, and only recently have people from the underground begun to talk to one another, and to tell their stories. From others, I’d learned their silence has something to do with the pride, or what boils down to
clandestino
etiquette, which goes something like this: everybody took chances; you were given a job to do, were highly trusted, therefore, it is out of place to brag or speak too much about what you did personally. I wonder why
clandestino
protocol is so markedly different from that which applies to the rest of the rebels, about whom a whole industry of lore and aggrandizement came into existence?

Elsa Castro is more forthcoming about her work with Celia. Even she didn’t know about the
marabuzal
, although she knew, at the time, that Celia was outfitting a new group of soldiers selected
from former
clandestinos
. Celia had enlisted her help, and Elsa started buying hammocks, toothbrushes, combs, and knives from a cousin who owned a small bodega and “didn’t ask questions.” Rafael Sierra (the director of Manzanillo’s 26th of July) gave her shirts, blue jeans, and work pants from his family’s store. Elsa got blankets from another source, and would put all these things into backpacks, never assembling more than two at one time. Someone would pick them up—sometimes this was Hector, other times Felipe Guerra Matos—everything wrapped like any other product going out of her father’s stationery store. If anyone noticed, Elsa says she would have told them that she was making them up for the Boy Scouts.

CELIA HAD ACCOMPLISHED
her obligation to Frank and Fidel. At
La Rosalia
farm, a.k.a.
El Marabuzal
, two trucks rolled up the driveway on March 15, 1957, and 53
marabuzaleros
loaded into the back. The trucks lumbered onto the county road. Eloy Rodríguez described the specifics of this rarely described trip: “We went in a truck. We crossed rice fields, we took roads. We reached Cason, where we left the truck. We walked to Monte La O on foot. From Monte La O, we started up real mountains.” They were headed for Epifanio Diaz’s farm,
Los Chorros
, where Fidel had met Matthews. Che was waiting for them. He’d been instructed by Fidel to greet the new soldiers, bring them up the mountain slowly, while giving them some training en route. It took two weeks. At the end of the month, the new recruits met up with Fidel—or so goes the usual story. But it didn’t happen as smoothly as that. When they got to Epifanio’s farm, Che informed them that he was in charge, and Jorge Sotus had countered that “under Frank’s orders” he was leader, therefore the only person responsible for turning these men over to Fidel.

Finally, the new men, and their feuding platoon leaders, got to a small hill named Dereche de la Caridad where, Eloy says, they waited for Fidel. As soon as he showed up, Che told him what had happened, stating that Sotus had been insubordinate. Fidel listened to Che and decided to hold a trial, did so, but took no action against Jorge Sotus. Instead, Fidel made Sotus a platoon leader, and for Eloy, and the others, this seemed to be a very fair resolution. “I personally think that Sotus was right,” says Eloy,
author of a book about this historic event. He has been reviewing his memories, talking to others, and shaping his thoughts on the issue. “Frank was head. Fidel had asked for these troops, but Frank had organized, selected, and sent them. With all the respect we gave Frank, I personally feel that Sotus was right, and Che accepted this.”

While Fidel mulled over this conundrum, a state of shock, which Eloy openly describes, quickly set in among the new arrivals. Quite beyond the dispute, each of these men had been profoundly rattled by the situation they found themselves in. “Many of us,” says Eloy, “thought that the war was going to last eight or ten months. A year, maybe. When we got up there, Fidel told us that this war is beginning now, with our arrival, and may last five, ten, fifteen, twenty years. ‘The only thing I can guarantee, here, is that you aren’t going to be run down by a bus,’ is what Fidel told us. This was like a pail of ice water. It was so totally different from what we’d expected. We were shocked.”

Their expectations, by and large, had been shaped by Matthews’s
Time
s article describing life for the guerrilla in the Sierra Maestra—that, and the sense of fulfillment at having been chosen by Frank. As Eloy explains it, being picked by Frank meant a very great deal. Each man was proud that he had met criteria Frank had set, had been selected because he could resist the hardships of the Sierra, and felt honored to be among the first
clandestinos
to join Fidel’s army. Plus, it was a relief to leave the underground. “But we had to face a new life,” Eloy sums up. Still, so much had depended on what Matthews had written, no one realizing that Raúl had organized the few men Fidel had into small platoons, marched them in to report to Fidel, then marched them out to march in from another direction. After Eloy read what Matthews had written, that there were several columns, he “thought there were going to be hundreds of soldiers there. We found only about 17, and these men had long hair, beards, ripped uniforms, a sack for a backpack. It was a deplorable situation. This made us sad. Then, what Fidel said [about the bus] killed us. But it was momentary. We got there with a uniform, an armband, a beret, a backpack. We looked like an organized army. We saw them, however, and our hearts sank to our feet.”

CELIA, FILLED WITH PERSONAL ANGUISH
over Frank’s arrest, was unable to go to the mountains with the new recruits. With nowhere to go, she stayed on in Manzanillo, mostly at the farmhouse. There she received a second group of men Frank had picked before being arrested. She had to do everything alone, for now she was without his guidance, and probably felt like a boat that had lost its rudder. Just when she needed a partner, Felipe Guerra Matos was arrested one day, driving back from
Los Chorros
. Felipe’s lawyers, who represented all members of the influential rice-growers association, immediately got him out of jail. But nothing remained the same after that arrest. He was being closely watched by the police, so driving to confer with Celia at the farm, for example, was out of the question.