Celia Who?
The Mausoleum of Celia Sánchez. Photograph by Clara Sanchiz When I travelled to Havana for the first time, in 1997, I visited a home whose entrance was adorned with two black and white photos. I recognized Che Guevara. But I had no idea who the woman in the second photograph could be.
“Who is Celia Sánchez?” I asked.
“Who is Celia Sánchez?” a friend recently asked when I told her about a biography I was reading.
“But who is Celia Sánchez?” President John F. Kennedy was said to have asked when her name surfaced in a CIA report.
Today, forty years after her state funeral drew thousands of Cuban mourners, Celia Sánchez remains the least-known personality in the Revolution’s pantheon.
Near the end of her new biography on the Cuban leader, Celia Sánchez Manduley: The Life and Legacy of a Cuban Revolutionary, Tiffany A. Sippial recounts an overheard conversation between two young tourists at the Museum of the Revolution in Havana. Standing in front of a set of Sánchez’s old military fatigues, one tourist asks the other, “Who is Celia Sánchez? I have never even heard of her.”
Who was Celia Sánchez and why isn’t she more well-known? The way she chose to live and describe her life suggests her anonymity was in part self-created. “My uninteresting life has consisted of silly things not worthy of writing down,” she wrote on March 1, 1958 in a personal diary that Sippial was allowed to see.
By that point, Celia’s “uninteresting life” had included coordinating Fidel Castro’s return from exile in 1956 and building the clandestine network that would support him and his rebel army in their attempts to overthrow Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. She’d stolen nautical charts, built alliances with the peasants, collected cash, and passed secret messages.
But years later, when her actions had propelled her to the top of Cuba’s leadership, she continued to shun public recognition. When a reporter started sniffing around for her “biography” in the early days of the revolution, Celia sent a letter to her sister Acacia warning her and the rest of the family to ignore him.
“Make sure that nobody gives him even one fact about me,” she wrote in the letter. “You know that I hate that and that I can’t tolerate it. I am so uncomfortable every time I see my name in print.”
After the Revolution, Celia continued to cultivate a modest persona while overseeing a staggering number of projects, including an official archive of the revolution, and the construction of Parque Lenin and the famous Coppelia ice cream park in Havana.
Sippial’s biography, based on hundreds of interviews, suggests that in the end, Celia’s reticence might have been her greatest achievement, the performance that made everything else she accomplished possible.
“Her presence within the world of Cuban politics gave little cause for alarm, as she did not frame her activities in ways that looked like power seeking to her comrades.”
If Celia did indeed cultivate discretion as a survival tactic, she found a society more than willing to go along with her vanishing act. An early organizer, and the first woman into Havana in January 1959. But cropped her out of their photo.
