Celia Esther de los Desamparados Sánchez Manduley

Cuban revolutionary. Member of the National Leadership of the Revolutionary Movement of July 26 (MR 26-7). Secretary of the Presidency and Council of Ministers of the Republic of Cuba.

Celia Sánchez Manduley was born in the town of Media Luna, Manzanillo, in the former province of Oriente. She was the daughter of Manuel Sánchez Silveira, a physician by profession, and Acacia Manduley Alsina.

She began her primary education at the age of seven in a small private school in Media Luna. At the same time, she took piano lessons for four years. She also had great enthusiasm, notable skill, and good taste for drawing, painting, and manual arts in general.

In 1930 she entered the preparatory school "José María Heredia" in Manzanillo, affiliated with the Institute of Secondary Education of Santiago de Cuba. She began her high school studies —instruction that she did not complete— in the 1937-1938 school year, when the Institute of Secondary Education of Manzanillo opened.

She was a supporter of Eduardo Chibás Ribas, leader of the Cuban People's Party (Ortodoxos). She met this leader in Havana, and he later visited the Sánchez Manduley family in Pilón, in the former province of Oriente, during the development of his political campaign in 1948.

Celia Sánchez opposed Fulgencio Batista's coup d'état, which occurred on March 10, 1952. On the centennial of José Martí's birth on May 19, 1953, together with a group of scholars of the Apostle's ideology who frequented the Fragua Martiana and members of the Cuban Speleological Society, which her father presided over in the former province of Oriente, she climbed Pico Real del Turquino —the highest mountain in Cuba, in the Sierra Maestra, where she placed a bust of the Apostle of Cuba's Independence created by sculptor Jilma Madera.

When the attack on the Moncada Barracks in Santiago de Cuba and the Carlos Manuel de Céspedes Barracks in Bayamo occurred on July 26, 1953, she showed solidarity with the young people who participated in the action, immediately traveling from Pilón to Santiago to contact Fidel Castro and his companions. In the days following the action, she visited two wounded individuals who were in the La Colonia Española hospital in the same city.

Later she sent food and medicine from Pilón to the Moncada fighters imprisoned on the Isle of Pines (now the Isle of Youth). She participated in distributing the self-defense argument delivered by Fidel Castro before the court that tried him for the events of July 26, which has been called "History Will Absolve Me."

In 1955, she was one of the founders of the Revolutionary Movement of July 26 (MR 26-7) in the southern territory of the former province of Oriente; she organized and consolidated the movement in Manzanillo, Campeche, Media Luna, Niquero, Pilón, and other places. In contact with Frank País, who was her chief during that period, she prepared and organized conditions for the possible landing of Fidel and the other expeditionaries of the yacht Granma on the southern coast of Oriente, in the zone spanning from Cabo Cruz to Marea del Portillo.

She efficiently fulfilled the instructions to create a support base in the planned zone for the expedition's landing. She prepared groups of combatants in the area, directed their integration, the gathering of weapons, and the appointment of the main leaders. She anticipated the interruption of communications, carried out the inspection of barracks and frigates, and even managed to obtain direct and detailed information about the Navy in the eastern province. During these activities she used the pseudonyms Aly and Norma.

Faced with uncertainty about whether the arrival of the fighters had taken place in another area, she decided to preserve the organization and arranged for those being persecuted to be assured clandestine shelters.

After the landing of the expeditionaries on December 2, 1956, she began preparing the supply of weapons, provisions, and medicine to Fidel Castro's group. Together with Frank País, she organized and directed the incorporation of the first reinforcements to the Sierra Maestra —an armed detachment of sixty men from Santiago de Cuba and other areas of the former province of Oriente— and ensured the arrival in rebel territory of foreign journalists and members of the Movement of July 26.

Thus, she became the principal contact between the rebel groups commanded by Fidel Castro and the clandestine movement operating in the rest of the country, especially in Oriente.

On May 19, 1957, she joined the Rebel Army. She was the first woman to join the group of fighters led by Fidel Castro. She participated in the battle of El Uvero in the Sierra Maestra on May 28, 1957. She traveled numerous times to urban areas on risky missions assigned by the supreme leader of the Revolution.

She developed different activities in the General Headquarters of the Rebel Army. She remained by Fidel Castro's side throughout the war and participated in meetings where important agreements of the National Leadership of the MR 26-7 were reached, being present at the most important decisions made during the armed struggle.

In Column 1 of the Rebel Army, she promoted the creation of infrastructure that culminated in May 1958 with the establishment of General Headquarters in La Plata, also in the Sierra Maestra. There she was responsible for organizing and coordinating the rear guard in the guerrilla territory to ensure its subsistence. She participated in the Battle of Pino del Agua, which occurred on February 16 and 17, 1958; in the organizational work of the first peasant assembly, which took place in Vegas de Jibacoa on May 25, 1958; and in the Battle of Guisa on November 20, 1958.

She entered Santiago de Cuba on January 1, 1959, as part of the Caravan of Freedom, which arrived in Havana on January 8. Called in those early days to occupy a prominent public position in the first Revolutionary Government, she preferred to continue at Fidel's side as his personal assistant. On March 24, 1962, she was appointed Secretary of the Presidency and Council of Ministers.

She worked in the preparations for the Literacy Campaign, in its development and conclusion on December 22, 1961, when Cuba was declared a territory free of illiteracy at José Martí Revolution Square. Celia was an important pillar in the organization, execution, and consolidation of the Revolution's educational plans. After the promulgation of the Constitution of the Republic in 1976 and the reorganization of state structures, she became Secretary of the Council of State of the Republic of Cuba.

In October 1965, when the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba (PCC) was established, she was granted membership status, which was ratified at the I Congress of the PCC, held in 1975. When the process of creating the bodies of Popular Power began in 1976, she was elected deputy to the National Assembly.

Since she showed particular interest in the development of cultural and recreational facilities and in pioneer and youth activities, many works of the Revolution received her personal attention. Thus, she was the promoter of the construction of Lenin Park and the plans for the development of popular tourism.

Passionate about History, she zealously preserved —with the objective of conserving them for posterity— all documents, materials, and writings of Fidel Castro, which she organized in a Historical Archive containing valuable documents of the Revolution. Thanks to that work, more than 70,000 original documents of the Cuban revolutionary struggle are now kept in the Office of Historical Affairs of the Council of State.

She was a member of the National Secretariat of the Federation of Cuban Women.

Celia Sánchez Manduley died in Havana on January 11, 1980.