Celia Sanchez's Saddest Days

As She Fueled The Revolution
Reposted on Tuesday 25th, 2021 from June-2015 Posting:

          This photo {Courtesy of AFP/Yamil Lage/Getty Images} shows Cuban girls in Havana this week enjoying their mobile devices. Cuba is opening 35 WI-FI stations in its bid to improve Internet accessibility on the island. In June of 2015 there remain off the island some well-to-do, powerful, self-serving and greedy people who benefit, at least vindictively, from hurting innocent Cubans such as the six girls depicted here. In the past six decades, in my opinion, the person who has done the most to benefit these girls is...Celia Sanchez. That's a conclusion I didn't reach lightly. Permit me to explain.

       September 17, 1958, should have been a happy day for Celia Sanchez because the guerrilla fighter-revolutionary leader most responsible for ending the Batista-Mafia dictatorship in Cuba had known since the decisive Battle of Jigue two months earlier that the Cuban Revolution would triumph. But that day Celia learned that two of her dearest friends -- Clodomira Acosta and Lidia Doce {right} -- had been captured and tortured to death by Batista's dreaded enforcer, Colonel Estevan Ventura Nova. Celia wept the rest of that day and throughout the night after losing her dear friends Clodomira and Lidia, two prominent losses in the bloody female-powered revolution.

        But to put one of Celia Sanchez's saddest days into a proper perspective, one must also comprehend her happiest days, such as the one above -- May 14, 1954. She and her father, Dr. Manuel Sanchez Silveira, had just hiked to one of their favorite spots, known as Mora Cove, high above the city of Pilon in eastern Cuba. Celia -- who was born on May 9, 1920, in the little Cuban town of Media Luna ("Half Moon") -- had just turned 34-years-old. Her father had asked her what he could do to make her birthday "happy." She replied: "I want for you and I, one more time, to spend a day hiking to Mora Cove." And so they did. They had hiked there and camped many times before. But Celia knew, based on her father's age and on her increasingly demanding role in the anti-Batista underground, that the May 14-1954 trek to Mora Cove would be their last one. The above photo at Mora Cove also represented the last full day Celia spent with her beloved father who had encouraged her dangerous anti-Batista activities as underground recruiter and guerrilla fighter.

       As the daughter of a rich doctor...Manuel owned three farms and had been head of the Cuban Medical Association...Celia lavished her time and money on eastern Cuba's peasant children. By 1953, shortly after the Batista-Mafia dictatorship had regained firm control of Cuba for a second time, Celia began to hear that rural peasant girls were being kidnapped and used to lure rich pedophiles to Mafia-run hotel-casinos. That revelation had induced Celia to join the anti-Batista urban underground, at least as a part-time tangential operative, in the nearby cities of Manzanilla, Holguin, Baracoa, Bayamo, and Santiago de Cuba.

      The kidnapping and rape-murder of a ten-year-old peasant girl named Maria Ochoa not only elevated Celia Sanchez into a full-time, do-or-die urban underground participant but also set her on the path to becoming the prime reason the U.S.-backed Batista-Mafia dictatorship was overthrown on the island of Cuba on January 1, 1959. In the year 2015 Americans generally understand the significance of January 1, 1959 when it comes to Cuban-U.S. history but few Americans comprehend the significance or nexus of Celia Sanchez {and little Maria Ochoa} to Cuban-U.S. history or to Cuban-U.S. topicality. Americans are simply not supposed to understand or comprehend such things. The Cuban narrative in the U. S. since 1959 has been tightly controlled by two generations of anti-Castro/anti-Celia exiles from the Batista-Mafia dictatorship. Vilifying Castro became a lucrative, power-grabbing cottage industry in the U. S., first in Miami and Union City -- two prime Mafia strongholds -- and later Washington after the exile extremists aligned solidly and eternally with the Bush political and economic dynasty in the 1980s. Vilifying Celia Sanchez, the child-loving doctor's daughter whose importance to the revolution exceeded Fidel's, was not possible. But pretending she didn't exist or was a non-factor in the Cuban Revolution or Revolutionary Cuba was easily accomplished in the U. S. where Americans got, and still get, their Cuban information from extremist exiles.

     Beginning in January of 1959, the leaders of the ousted Batista-Mafia regime in Cuba regrouped in South Florida and, from that day till this day, they have defined the history of the Cuban Revolution from their viewpoints and standpoints. The photo above shows key Batista Minister Rafael Diaz-Balart in 1958, with the holstered pistol, flanked by the infamous Masferrer brothers, Batista's brutal enforcers. All three in January of 1959 fled to Miami where two of Diaz-Balart's sons became members of the U. S. Congress and to this day remain powerful anti-Castro zealots allowed to dictate Cuban policy in the United States. 

      More than five decades have passed since the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. Thus, a second generation of viciously anti-Castro Cuban exiles -- such as these three current members of the U. S. Congress from Miami: Marco Rubio, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, and Mario Diaz-Balart -- now dictate most of America's Cuban policy as well as most of America's history and media coverage when it comes to Cuba.

         For example, Esteban Ventura Novo {above} was blamed by Celia Sanchez -- and supported by historical accounts -- for the gruesome torture-murders of her friends Clodomira Acosta and Lidia Doce in September of 1958. In the wee hours of January 1, 1959, Ventura was on the very same getaway airplane with Fulgencio Batista that fled to the Dominican Republic, which was ruled by the vicious U.S.-backed dictator Rafael Trujillo. Ventura within a few days had set up his new operation in the sanctuary of Miami. In the ensuing decades, at least five democratic governments in Latin America begged the U. S. to extradite Ventura so be could be put on trial but the good people high-up in the U. S. government, when it came to Cuban issues, were not strong enough to comply. Thus, Ventura lived a long, heralded, protected, and lucrative life in Miami before he had a heart attack and died on May 21, 2001. {You can research or google many sources to learn more about Esteban Ventura Nova, such as the Nov. 26-2004 edition of Bohemia Magazine that featured the man Celia Sanchez called "the typical Miami Batistiano killer." And you need to know who Ventura was to comprehend why September 17, 1954, was Celia Sanchez's saddest day}.

       The above photo was taken by Celia Sanchez in August of 1958, shortly after the rebel victory in the ten-day Battle of Jigue in July of 1948 over Batista's strongest army. That shocking rebel victory alerted Washington that the revolution in Cuba had, as a matter of fact, taken on a serious hue. The lady in the white blouse next to Fidel Castro in this photo is Lidia Doce, who was 48-years-old then but was one of Celia's bravest mountain messengers. The dark-haired lady next to Lidia is Griselda Sanchez, Celia's lookalike sister. After this last journey to bring Celia supplies and information, Lidia returned to her vital anti-Batista urban underground work. But she was soon captured, tortured for days, and then murdered.

   Twenty-two-year-old Clodomira Acosta {above} worked with Lidia Doce in the urban underground activity that was considered the most dangerous endeavors associated with the anti-Batista movement. On September 12, 1958, Lidia and Clodomira were in a Safe House coordinating details with four young urban underground men. But a police-army unit led by Colonel Esteban Ventura Novo, who was tipped off by a paid informer, surrounded the house and captured all six of the rebels. The four young men were beaten and then shot dead in front of the tied-up Lidia and Clodomira. The two women were kept alive so they could be tortured until, hopefully, they divulged the names of others involved in the underground.

      The mutilated bodies of the four assassinated young men were left on public display as a warning to others in the neighborhood not to assist the urban underground led by Celia Sanchez and Frank Pais. So photos of the bodies, such as that of young Fructuoso Rodriguez above, were published on billboards and in Batista-controlled newspapers and magazines. Herbert L. Mathews, the famed New York Times reporter, wrote, "U. S. tax dollars are paying for these atrocities, these photographs? I wonder if Americans care."

        But Ventura, not unexpectedly, had other plans for the two women -- Lidia and Clodomira. They were tortured for four days and nights in an effort to get them to divulge information about the urban underground and its ties to the rebel guerrillas that were then beginning to fight their way westward toward Havana. The torturers soon realized that Lidia and Clodomira, already near death, would die before they would give up one iota of information that would harm Celia Sanchez and the revolution. So Lidia and Clodomira were tied together and attached to a concrete slab by ropes and a chain. In that manner, they were dumped into the ocean and their bodies never recovered. But their work, confirmed by the urban underground, and their fate, confirmed by their captors, have established Lidia and Clodomira as two of the most memorialized martyrs of the Cuban Revolution. Cubans know their names; Americans should.

        By the way, when he was one of Batista's most infamous enforcers in Cuba during the 1950s AND when he lived out the rest of his life in Miami from 1959 till 2001, Estevan Ventura Nova {above} was known for always wearing expensive white suits. For example, his biography at www.latinaamericanstudies.org describes him as "the killer from Havana's Fifth Precinct" and "the white-suited hired assassin." Of course, in Havana and later in Miami Ventura had plenty of money to buy all the white suits he ever wanted.

       On July 30, 1957, 22-year-old schoolteacher Frank Pais -- vital to the anti-Batista underground -- was betrayed by a paid informer and captured at a safe house in Santiago-de-Cuba. One of Batista's brutal enforcers -- Colonel Jose Salas Canizares -- took Frank to a public street in Santiago-de-Cuba and brutally killed him. Notice the pistol near Frank's right hand. It had been placed there by Canizares. A few weeks earlier, Frank's 17-year-old brother Jesus had been brutally murdered just because he was Frank's brother. Children younger than Jesus were routinely murdered as warnings in Batista's Cuba.

         Incredibly brave female marches like this one fueled the nascent Cuban Revolution and eventually doomed Batista. These "Madres Cubanas, Cuban Mothers" carried placards denouncing the murders of their children. The lady in the white jacket in the center of this photo is the mother of William Soler. William and three of his classmates had been tortured, murdered, and their bodies left in an abandoned warehouse as a warning not to actively oppose the Batista brutality and thievery. William Soler's mother, Celia Sanchez, Haydee Santamaria, Vilma Espin, Tete Puebla, Marta Rojas, Lidia Doce, Clodimira Acosta and many other Cuban women didn't heed those warnings. Females, not macho men, keyed the Batista defeat.

             In Cuba today this is the William Soler Pediatric Hospital. If William Soler and his mother are not a part of the U.S.-Cuban history you have been told about for decades, then you have been lied to. 

         To this day in Cuba there are airports, hospitals, etc., named for Frank Pais and Celia Sanchez. And billboards like this one tie them together as the two greatest leaders of the urban underground, the force that eventually defeated the Batista-Mafia dictatorship. Frank Pais died at age 22 making it possible. When Frank was assassinated, there was an even larger Batista bounty on Celia Sanchez's head. If that bounty had ever been collected, the U.S.-backed Batista-Mafia dictatorship would never have been defeated.  

       For sure, Celia Sanchez's revolutionary fire was sparked by the fate of 10-year-old Maria Ochoa and then ignited further by the murders of 22-year-old Clodomira Acosta and 48-year-old Lidia Doce. It was that fire, that fervor, instilled within the delicate frame of the 99-pound doctor's daughter from the little Cuban town of Media Luna that booted the Batistianos, the Mafia, and the United States off the island of Cuba in 1959 and has kept them off for going on six decades. Celia was very shy and quite modest. She wouldn't mind at all that Americans don't know about her nor would she be surprised that the transplanted Batistianos, now through two generations, have chronicled the history of the Cuban Revolution in a fashion to suit their indulgence rather than the facts. So, the saddest days of Celia Sanchez's life were the days she learned the fates of 10-year-old Maria Ochoa, raped to death in a Mafia hotel, and the torture-murders of her dear friends Clodomira Acosta and Lidia Doce. Such tragedies turned the doctor's daughter into history's all-time greatest female revolutionary. Her imprint on Cuba and Latin American is huge.

         As a guerrilla fighter, as the leader of the urban underground along with the murdered young teacher Frank Pais, as the prime recruiter of rebels and supplies, and as the prime anti-Batista decision-maker, Celia Sanchez was the heart and soul of the Cuban Revolution. Fidel Castro, to this very day, is modest and honest enough to say, "No one rivaled Celia as the most important figure in the Revolution." Cuban historian Pedro Alvarez Tabio firmly states: "If Batista had managed to kill Celia Sanchez anytime between 1953 and 1957, there would have been no viable Cuban Revolution, and no revolution for Fidel and Che to join."

        Fidel Castro, after almost two years in a Batista prison and then another two off the island recruiting in the U. S. and Mexico, finally joined Celia Sanchez's revolution in the Sierra Maestra Mountains in December of 1956. In the above photo, that is Fidel inspecting the telescopic rifle that Celia had just given him. From that moment on, each day they fought together, gradually wearing down Batista's best armies.

       At night, side-by-side and often by candlelight, Celia and Fidel planned for the next day's guerrilla warfare against Batista's U.S.-armed soldiers. They were night-owls and indelible soulmates to the end. 

           After the smoke of many battles in 1957 and 1958 had drifted skyward, Celia led Fidel on a triumphant week-long trek from Santiago-de-Cuba to Havana in the first week of January, 1959. This photo was taken on Jan. 4-1959, halfway on that journey. It shows a tired Celia and a subdued Fidel. If Celia looks sad despite the startling triumph, she was. She had stayed in radio contact with the advance unit led by Camilo Cienfuegos and Che Guevara, hoping they could tell her that the leaders of the Batista-Mafia regime were still in Havana ready to defend their dictatorship. At this stop on January 4th, Celia had just been told by Camilo that, "They all ran, Celia. They had getaway boats, ships, airplanes standing by when we took Santa Clara. Then they fled...to Miami, the Dominican...anywhere but Cuba." A few months later Camilo told Bohemia Magazine of Celia's acute disappointment when he told her the Batista leaders had all fled. He said, "Celia damned the bastards for fleeing but when she calmed down she said, 'I knew they would do what cowards do, and that is to hook back up will all the money they have siphoned on this island.' Celia was hoping against hope they would stand and fight. She wanted the chance to make the killers pay. She knew their names. One night in the Sierra I heard her rattle off the twelve names she wanted to settle with." Indeed, history has recorded that the top 21 Batista leaders each had more than a million dollars in 1950s money stashed in numbered Swiss bank accounts, and it was presumed they each had stashed far more than that in Mafia-connected banks in Miami, Florida, and Union City, New Jersey. That is confirmed by many sources, including the best online chronological history of Cuba, which is Jerry A. Sierra's historyofcuba.com. Remnants of that siphoned loot, undoubtedly, have fueled tons of anti-Castro zealotry in the U. S. for two generations since 1959 and in 2015 it still fights President Barack Obama's plans to normalize relations with the island.

           The best singular source of information today regarding Celia Sanchez, Fidel Castro, and the Cuban Revolution is Marta Rojas. In the photo above that is Marta introducing Fidel Castro in December of 1959 for his very first televised speech to the nation. As a young and trusted journalist in Batista's Cuba, Marta had access to Fidel during his prison years -- 1953 till 1955. Unbeknownst to Batista, Marta worked for Celia Sanchez and the urban underground. She carried notes from Fidel, destined for Celia, out of the prison in her bra; in the same manner, notes from Celia reached Fidel in his cell. Later, in November of 1956 Fidel's contact with Celia from Mexico arranged the exact spot she and a force of rebels would be waiting for his arrival on the old yacht Granma with 81 other men. The over-loaded yacht was sinking before reaching the destination, resulting in an ambush that killed all but 17 of the men, but the survivors included the Castro brothers Fidel and Raul as well as Camilo Cienfuegos and Che Guevara. It was then that Fidel first laid eyes on Celia. As he nears his 89th birthday on August 13th, he still worships the ground she walked on. 

           Marta Rojas was born in 1928 in Santiago de Cuba. U. S. journalists desiring facts about Fidel Castro, Celia Sanchez, and the revolution ask Marta. Her vivid memories, often buttressed with photos and documents, include visits from Celia, such as late at night when Marta was working at the Granma newspaper or Bohemia magazine. Marta also emerged as one of Cuba's greatest authors and novelists.

         In Revolutionary Cuba, till she died of cancer at age 59 on January 11, 1980, Celia Sanchez was the prime decision-maker in Cuba, with the full concurrence of Fidel Castro. Not once did he ever overrule her, even if he disagreed with her decisions. It was Celia who set the parameters that have, against overwhelming odds, sustained revolutionary rule on the island for all these decades. In 1959, and twice in the 1960s, she established this mantra: "The Batistianos will never regain control of Cuba as long as I live or as long as Fidel lives." Considering the odds, no one believed her then. But they do now.

            Fidel Castro is unwell as he approaches his 89th birthday on August 13, 2015. But he is still alive and, thus, so is Celia Sanchez's proclamation. Till his last moments, his fondest revolutionary memories will revolve around Celia. To him, she will always be "The beautiful flower of the Cuban Revolution."

          Americans to this day are not supposed to comprehend the historical significance of Celia Sanchez. That would mitigate against the Cuban narrative in the U. S. that has been dictated by the remnants of the Batista dictatorship. But the best historians know her. More importantly, Cubans on the island know her, especially an old man named Fidel who was beside her day and night from 1957 till she died in 1980. 

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