WHO
IS THIS WOMAN AND WHY IS SHE
ON THE COVER OF THE WOMAN SHE WAS?
The woman is Celia
Sánchez. The hand in the background
belongs to Fidel Castro. Had his image not been cropped out, our eyes
would
have slid past her unfamiliar face to Castro’s familiar one.
Journalists and
historians have done the same. For 50 years most have focussed on the
“guerrilla prince,” barely noticing the woman who actually ran the
Cuban
revolution and was central to its success.
The Woman She Was is not
about Celia
Sánchez. It’s about a doctor in modern Cuba
who was named for her, and who
in trying to untangle the complexities of her work life and love life
begins to
imagine that she is Sánchez. Or
rather, tries to not imagine that
she
is Celia Sánchez. As a pediatrician with no taste for the paranormal,
she views
her hallucinations as mental aberrations that might lead somewhere she
doesn’t want
to go. Because the story only gives glimpses of Sánchez as imagined by
the
protagonist, here are things that might interest you about this woman
we
non-Cubans know so little about.
Celia
Sánchez, a
native of eastern Cuba,
was working to undermine the dictatorship while Fidel, six years
younger, was still
in law school. Later, when he did attempt an armed uprising, he was
rapidly
apprehended. He might have spent the next 15 years in prison had
Sánchez not organized
island-wide protests demanding his release. Batista capitulated to
public
pressure. Fidel went free, moved to Mexico
to regroup, then returned for
another attempt at overthrowing Batista. Sánchez, who had communicated
with
Castro but never met him, was waiting with trucks to transport him and
his 81
men to safety. But they got lost, not making landfall till two days
later and in
the wrong place. Three days after that Batista’s soldiers caught them
and disaster
ensued.
Celia’s
friends
rescued the 16 survivors. Despite Fidel’s record of two disastrous
military
engagements, she convinced her co-conspirators that he should command
the rebel
army—fighters she and her people would have to recruit since most of
his had
been killed. She also took charge of strategy, organization, finances,
community
relations, and about everything else essential to a successful
guerrilla war.
Batista
knew her
importance to the insurgency and put a $75,000 bounty on her head. Che Guevara, commenting
in his diary on a false report that Sánchez had been captured, wrote,
“Celia
was our [the guerrillas] only known safe contact…her detention would
have meant
isolation for us.”
The CIA reported,
“Celia Sanchez is one of the most powerful figures in the 26th
of
July Movement. All functions not strictly
military are under her jurisdiction. All intelligence agents
report to her.”