One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution (51 page)

FIDEL CONTINUED TO WORK
at least eighteen hours a day, then he’d meet friends and colleagues. In short, he didn’t get much sleep, was busy and happy, but he deeply missed being in the Sierra. Sometimes, when he felt like that, Celia would bring a fisherman from Pilón to tell Fidel jokes.

34. 1960–1961
The United Nations

CELIA IGNORED THE POSSIBILITIES
of personal danger and resolutely refused to have bodyguards. She drove her own car, and in that way she was like Frank. Later, this habit of going it alone took on a kind of symbolism. It is not unusual for Cubans to tell you that she was protected by the love of the people. Many believe that she was so well loved no one would touch her. Perhaps this even extended to a superstitious belief in her invulnerability, because in Cuba this is an aspect of Santeria that is strongly felt. The question is, did she count on such factors? I tend to think she just took off, was too busy to wait for anyone, by nature was too secretive and independent to share what she was up to. With a personal driver she would have to be forthcoming. Plus, she liked to do things her way. She never got much sleep. Close friends and her house staff would keep a tally, and if she went out after being awake more than 48 hours, they’d accompany her. Meaning, they’d just get into the car, apparently without her objecting too much.

Celia, however sophisticated, was a country woman and enjoyed doing things for herself. One woman I met at a senior citizens’ center told me that she glanced out her living room window one day to see Celia in the street, inspecting a flat tire on her car. Fascinated, she’d watched as Celia opened the trunk and hauled out the jack, got down on her knees and levered up one
side of the chassis. Celia was only a dozen blocks from Once and soon people recognized her and rushed to help. Although Celia was very cordial, she waved them off, saying, “I know how to change a tire.” And nobody was going to contradict her. Mind you, this same woman was an avid reader of
Country Life
, and the Spanish magazine
Hola!
, and sent for publications covering the life of Britain’s monarch, Elizabeth II. She’d telephone Miriam Manduley whenever these arrived, and they’d pore over the issue about a queen so close to their own age.

Around 1961, Celia ordered a small Italian jeep made of canvas and fiberglass and began driving it everywhere. She was getting things done and very happy with the inroads she was making, raring to go partly because she’d put on her artist’s hat, and was able to wear it and still take care of her government duties. Secure in her role, she started creating new hotels to enhance tourism. She had a drawing table moved into Once, began working on ideas, finding sites; this is the period when, I think, she set up workshops to produce ceramic tiles and stained glass. She talked her ideas over with Mario Girona and his American wife, architect Dolly Gómez.

Whereas the old tourist industry focused on travelers from New York and Miami, promoting Cuba as a playground for gambling and prostitution, the new tourist industry turned away from the United States; tourists came from England, France, Italy, Lebanon, Africa, Norway, Finland, Russia, Australia, Argentina, Canada, and Mexico. The new tourist wanted to experience the Revolution. So Celia (aided by Fidel’s carte blanche enthusiasm) generated hotel projects all over Cuba, choosing locations of natural beauty, where tourists could stay a month or two, and experience Fidel and Celia’s idea of utopia. If you wanted to fish, swim, or cut sugar-cane, they found a place for you to stay for a month or two. She recruited artists to collaborate in these projects.

Still overseeing the development of the Guama resort in the Zapata Swamp, Celia asked sculptor Rita Longa to create a group of bronze, lifelike figures to dot the landscape there. She alerted Maria Victoria Caignet and Gonzalo Cordova that they’d be furnishing the rooms and the dining areas as well as designing plates and silverware. Out of this grew another industry, small but important: for a brief period in the early ’60s, simple, cleanly
designed furniture from her workshops was exported and marketed in France, Spain, and Denmark under the brand Emprova. Gonzalo Cordova explained that Celia rejected tourism as an influencing force and favored instead the creation of a new form, because she wanted to create a new architecture both modern and essentially Cuban. She sent her design team all over the world to redecorate Cuba’s embassies with simple furniture, and to hang the walls with new paintings by Cuban artists.

One of the most positive aspects of these projects was that Celia started traveling around the country, getting out of Havana, conducting her own fact-finding tour on the state of the Revolution. She revisited old haunts: favorite fishing places, places where she’d loved to camp, beautiful locations to place hotels and to start up small industries in the eastern part of the island. She listened to people all over Cuba. She let them tell her how they were faring.

IN LATE SEPTEMBER 1960
, Celia left her projects to represent Cuba at the United Nations. A large Cuban delegation traveled to New York to attend the General Assembly. They arrived the afternoon of Sunday, September 18, 1960, at 4:32 p.m., two hours late and in the rain. Within 24 hours, they’d changed hotels, ending up in Harlem, at the Hotel Theresa on 125th Street, where she and Fidel had a suite on the 9th floor; it was nearly empty of furniture, say her cousins, artist Julio Girona and his sister, Inez. And since there was no other place to put famous visitors, Fidel sat with them on one bed.

The Theresa’s manager (Love B. Woods) struck a hard bargain: five suites of two rooms with a bath; thirty rooms without bath spread over the 7th, 8th, and 9th floors—half the original number of rooms for twice the cost of the hotel they’d moved from, the Shelburne. But the Cubans found warmth uptown in Harlem, and Love let them hang a Cuban flag outside his building. Things had been combative when they’d arrived at the Hotel Shelburne, on Lexington Avenue at 37th Street. They’d been greeted by about a thousand anti-Castro demonstrators held at bay by two hundred policemen. A fight broke out as soon as they arrived, and hand-lettered signs went up in windows through the neighborhood: “Fidel, Commie, Go Home!” Then the Shelburne’s manager (Dan Grad) decided to collect an extra $10,000 as a cash deposit
against possible damage. Fidel claimed they didn’t have that kind of money. The next day, at 7:00 p.m., he, Celia, and six others piled into a black Oldsmobile and rode eight blocks to the United Nations Secretariat on First Avenue. The rest of the delegation (77 others) had to scramble for transport, while the police, totally in the dark about what was going on, radioed for help as they saw Cubans streaming out of the hotel. Police cars, sirens screaming, arrived from all directions; they escorted the rest of the delegation to the U.N. while two hotel station wagons, loaded with luggage, shuttled between the Shelburne and the Cuban mission, which, at the time, was located nearby at 155 East 44th Street.

Fidel explained to Secretary General Dag Hammarskjold that they had been prepared to put up $5,000 for their twenty suites, but the hotel had held out for the full $10,000, and he’d interpreted this as an invitation to leave. The State Department, acting in the interests of security, had confined the delegation to Manhattan and Fidel pointed out that it was not Cuba’s fault that the U.N. was located in New York. Hammarskjold called William Zeckendorf, a New York real estate developer, who arranged for twenty suites plus 85 single rooms to be made available at the Hotel Commodore. This should have been a perfect solution, as the hotel was conveniently located on Lexington Avenue at 42nd Street, but Fidel was miffed and declined the offer. He said that Cubans should have “the right to choose the hotel we want.” They went to Harlem (and paid more money than either the Shelburne or the Commodore would have charged), arriving a little after midnight.

On the following morning, Celia’s three Girona cousins arrived with jugs of water from their apartment in Brooklyn. Then Celia went out to purchase a little refrigerator and a hotplate. She wanted to make sure that Fidel had safe food and drinking water. That morning, Malcolm X and African-American journalists came to Fidel’s suite, and Fidel told them of his brush with “incredible inhospitality” at the Shelburne. The Gironas say Fidel kept insisting that he would have preferred to camp out in Central Park.

Throughout Monday, there was an impressive array of visitors: Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, Egypt’s president Gamal Abdel Nasser, and India’s prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru. All visited the 9th-floor suite and sat on the bed with Fidel. According to the
New York Times
, Khrushchev “swept out of his headquarters
at the Soviet United Nations mission” (located on Park Avenue at 68th Street) and into a Cadillac Fleetwood. Reporters who had been camping out in front of the Soviet residence shouted, “Where are you going?” and the premier, leaning out the car’s window, replied, “We Communists don’t tell our secrets.” When Khrushchev arrived around noon at the Theresa, it was surrounded by “thousands of spectators and hundreds of policemen.” He spent twenty-two minutes in the suite on the 9th floor. Then, arm-inarm with Fidel, he walked to his Fleetwood at the curb. That same afternoon, Khrushchev made a point of walking very slowly from the rear of the General Assembly to the front where he gave Fidel the now famous bear hug.

Tuesday night, September 21, the Afro-Cuban comandante Juan Almeida flew in from Havana. He’d been with Fidel when he attacked the Moncada on the 26th of July, 1953, and as a fellow prisoner on the Isle of Pines, aboard the
Granma
in December 1956, in Column 1 “José Martí,” and a commander of the Third Front in Guantánamo during Batista’s summer offensive in 1958. Fidel invited NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) leaders to meet Almeida while he spoke with a supporter of Patrice Lumumba of the Congo. It was past midnight when police broke up the crowd of around three hundred people who had gathered in front of the Theresa. One carried a placard with a picture of Fidel and a hand-lettered message: “Man, like us cats dig Fidel the most. He know what’s hip and bugs the squares.”

On Wednesday the 22nd, President Dwight D. Eisenhower gave a lunch for the representatives of Latin American nations, but Cuba was not included. When Fidel was asked by reporters whether he cared to comment on being excluded, he looked embarrassed and said that it was better to say nothing. A few minutes later, he reconsidered this opportunity, and told reporters, “We are not sad. We are going to take it easy. We wish them a good appetite. I will be honored to lunch with the poor and humble people of Harlem. I belong to the poor, humble people.” Uptown, he and Almeida lunched in the Theresa’s dining room with a bellboy they’d serendipitously invited. They ate steak, drank beer, and took questions from the press. That night, the Cuban delegation was honored at a reception sponsored by the Fair Play for Cuba Committee. It, too, was held at the Theresa, and was thought
by many to have been the best party in town. The two hundred guests included Langston Hughes, Allen Ginsberg, and Henri Cartier-Bresson. The next day, the Hotel Shelburne’s management announced that it would return all the Cuban delegation’s money, without deducting charges incurred during their brief stay there.

On the evening of September 23, the Russians hosted a party. The Cubans arrived late. Khrushchev, misdirected by one of his staff who mistook a fire truck coming down Park Avenue with a red light flashing for the Cubans, went down to the street entrance at 6:55 p.m., expecting to welcome them. Reporters, camped outside, were curious to see Khrushchev killing time in the doorway. Television crews turned on their lights, cameras rolled while recording a piece of Cold War ad-lib diplomacy: Asked what he thought of Eisenhower’s speech, Khrushchev gave his opinion that it was “soft music without content.” And, to their question of how long he planned to stay in the United States, Khrushchev responded: “I feel like staying, so I’m not going,” then quipped, “I will stay here, but apparently I will not be granted citizenship.” The Cubans finally arrived, but only after they’d kept their new and powerful ally waiting for thirty-eight minutes.

Monday, the 26th, would be Fidel’s big day at the United Nations. He shocked the General Assembly by giving a speech that lasted for over four hours, spoke of U.S. aggression against Cuba, and warned the other underdeveloped nations to watch out for a similar fate. He observed that millionaire presidential nominee John F. Kennedy must have learned all he knew about guerrilla warfare from Hollywood films. He condemned the United Nations for assisting Joséph Mobutu’s rise to power in Congo, and called for the return of Patrice Lumumba whom he termed the “rightful premier.” Finally, Fidel defended socialism by saying, “If a person from outer space were to come to this Assembly, someone who had not even read the
Communist Manifesto
or had not read Karl Marx or the United Press, Associated Press cables or other publications of ‘a monopolistic character’ and was asked how the world were divided, how the world is distributed, and on a map of the world he were to see that the wealth of the world is divided among the monopolies of four or five countries, he would say that the world has been badly divided up. It has been exploited.” This is a sentiment he still voices regularly.

“Fidel is talking too much,” was Celia’s comment, according to Julio Girona, who sat with her. That pretty much sums it up. She didn’t particularly like the free-for-all atmosphere that had developed. Again, as in the Sierra, Fidel seemed to be following his own script. After ten days of pure drama, the Cuban delegation left on the 28th.

BACK IN HAVANA
, the new government was confronting resistance. Every day, on her way to work Celia saw long lines of people at the Central Bus Station; and when she asked what was going on was told that they were trying to get tickets. There were no travel restrictions, no official reason why people couldn’t travel to other parts of the island. She went about solving the issue in her own style: she contacted photographer Raúl Corrales and asked him to investigate the situation by taking pictures. He told her he would need a car and a driver.