One Day in December: Celia Sanchez and the Cuban Revolution

By Nancy Stout.
Biography of the woman who took a central role in the revolutionary struggle. Her journey from an doctor’s daughter in rural Cuba through opposition to the brutal dictatorship and into activity in Fidel’s rebel movement and beyond. See Review.

Monthly Review Press, 2013. ISBN-13: 978-1-58367-317-1 hardback

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One of the legends of the Cuban Revolution finally has a fitting biography in the shape of Nancy Stout’s immensely readable account of the life of Celia Sánchez.
Ten years of painstaking research – including interviews with Sánchez’s family, friends and comrades, as well as access to the Cuban national archives – make this biography authoritative while not preventing it from reading like a gripping novel.
Sánchez’s personal story is bound up with all the drama, tragedy and extraordinary success that continue to make the Cuban Revolution such an inspiration.
The wider history of the growth of the revolutionary struggle against the Batista dictatorship, the guerrilla movement in the Sierra Maestra, the triumphant march into Havana and the transformation of Cuba that followed takes on a freshness even for those familiar with it when seen through the focus on this remarkable woman.
Her journey from an independent-minded doctor’s daughter in rural Cuba through opposition to the brutal dictatorship and into activity in Fidel’s rebel movement is a great personal testament.
It’s often a cliché that historic female socialists and revolutionaries are presented as “gentle”, human counterpoints to their “ruthless”, driven, male equivalents. This book easily avoids that travesty.
It conveys Sánchez’s central role as organiser, fighter and leader in the revolution. The account of her organisation of the Sierra Maestra camp and of a network of underground communications leaves no doubt about her central role.
Her position as Fidel’s confidante emerges as a natural outcome of her activity as a revolutionary in her own right. That bond and her role went on to be a major feature of political life in Cuba in the years after the revolution.
At the same time Stout does indeed provide rich personal detail and colour which begins to explain why Sánchez remains so loved by the Cuban people. She combined ferocious attention to organisational detail with a soaring vision for the transformation of her country, which she had started to develop in her teens. She pioneered the construction of parks and urban spaces, for example, and founded the world famous Cohiba cigar brand.
Some of the international journalists who Sánchez organised to visit the rebel army in the mountains in the 1950s remarked on the supposed incongruity of an armed woman in fatigues, issuing orders while exuding cultured elegance.
That apparent paradox dissolves in the pages of this excellent biography as a portrait emerges of a woman who was liberated in so many respects and whose personal example continues to be felt in the liberation of her homeland.

Kevin Ovenden for Cubasi Winter 13/14