Book review

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/intejcubastud.6.2.0222
• Pages: 222472-224
• Published date: 01 December 2014
• Date: 01 December 2014
• Author: Steve Ludlam

I J  C S 6.2 W 2014

BOOK REVIEWS

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

(New York: Monthly Review Press, 2013) hb 472pp. ISBN: 9781583673171

Reviewed by Steve Ludlam

The death in March 2014, aged 92, of Melba Hernández Rodriguez del Rey,

‘Heroine of Moncada’, was a reminder of the outstanding role played by women

f‌ighters throughout the Cuban Revolution. Of other leading women, recent

publications by Aleida March (March 2012), and about Vilma Espín (Rodríguez

2013), have been joined by Nancy Stout’s brilliant biography of Celia Sánchez.

All three, clandestine revolutionary leaders of the urban 26 July movement, were

ordered into the mountains when their personal security, and their knowledge

of the movement, became too exposed to the pursuit of Batista’s torturers. Each

became crucial organisers of the guerrillas’ supplies and communications. Each

became executive off‌icers, and personal partners, to comandantes of the rebel

army, respectively, Che Guevara, Raúl Castro, and in Celia’s case Fidel Castro.

And each played leading roles in the new revolutionary government and mass

organisations. Of these three, it can be argued that the greatest revolutionary

role, but the role least understood, especially outside Cuba, was played by Celia

Sánchez. Stout’s biography adds signif‌icantly to our knowledge of Celia and of

the revolution and does so with outstanding sensitivity and insight.

Celia was entrusted with preparing for the arrival of Fidel’s 1956 expedition

(on the Granma). The delay in its arrival put her regional network at great

risk as they abandoned normal work and waited to receive the revolutionary

forces. Given the debacle of Granma’s late arrival and running aground, and

the disastrous f‌irst encounter with Batista’s forces, Stout notes that Fidel and

Raúl acknowledge that it was Celia’s ‘farmers’ militia’, organised outside of the

regular 26 July movement, that rescued the remaining f‌ighters and got them

safely into the mountains. At the crucial moment, it was Celia’s clandestine

authority and leadership (she had formed her f‌irst group independently in 1954)

that ensured that the revolution was not defeated at the outset. She was by then

already wanted ‘dead or alive’ and only narrowly escaped torture and death

by a daring dash for freedom when under arrest, a story captured by Stout in

breathless detail. She then took direct command of training new forces to send to

Fidel to restore his battered expedition to its original strength. Once she moved

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