Free One Day in December: Celia Sánchez and the Cuban Revolution by Nancy Stout

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.

     
    Crescencio Pérez was a local patriarch with family spread throughout the Sierra Maestra. Celia recruited him in 1956 to help the guerrillas when they returned to Cuba at the start of the Revolution. ( Courtesy of Oficina de Asuntos Históricos )
     
    AFTER GUILLERMO GARCÍA , the next major figure Celia recruited was Crescencio Pérez, whom she had not previously known. It is likely that his name came up on weekend outings—at a ball game or picnic near some waterfall. People would have told her that she needed Crescencio Pérez not only because he was a local don , a patriarch, but because he hated the Rural Guard. To back it up, they told her tales of Pérez’s arrest and escape during Machado’s presidency. She listened closely to the region’s folklore.
    Crescencio lived in Ojo de Agua de Jerez, a settlement of five or six houses located on the main road between Manzanillo and Pilón, a road she often traveled; but she lived on the coast and he in the upper foothills, in another world. Crescencio was the man for her, they explained, because the Rural Guard gave him a wideberth. He had a great number of children spread throughout those hills, and over the years his family and neighbors, in formidable numbers, had protected him. He’d earned his reputation as a person to be respected. She wanted to know more about him and his family, and found out that Crescencio was a famous womanizer—a good many of his children were by women other than his wife. In his case, the story had a promising twist: he recognized the children as his own and had them baptized with his name. Here was a regional patriarch whose sexual prowess had earned him a certain dignity, since he not only openly recognized all his children but held the sway to do so. But not all his neighbors, especially those men whose wives he’d seduced, harbored benign feelings toward Crescencio. So, while he might be a good person to work for Celia’s cause, she was aware that she might be venturing onto thin ice here.
    She made an appointment to meet him through Juan León, a relative of Crescencio’s. In the first