Celia S�nchez Manduley: The Life and Legacy of a Cuban Revolutionary

By Tiffany A. Sippial

For Professors: Free E-Exam Copies

• Language: English
• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Release date: Oct 29, 2019
• ISBN: 9781469654089

Tiffany A. Sippial

Tiffany A. Sippial is associate professor of history at Auburn University.

Book preview

Celia Sánchez Manduley

ENVISIONING CUBA

Louis A. Pérez Jr., editor

Envisioning Cuba publishes outstanding, innovative works in Cuban studies, drawn from diverse subjects and disciplines in the humanities and social sciences, from the colonial period through the post–Cold War era. Featuring innovative scholarship engaged with theoretical approaches and interpretive frameworks informed by social, cultural, and intellectual perspectives, the series highlights the exploration of historical and cultural circumstances and conditions related to the development of Cuban self-definition and national identity.

Celia Sánchez Manduley

The Life and Legacy of a Cuban Revolutionary

Tiffany A. Sippial

The University of North Carolina Press   CHAPEL HILL

This book was published with the assistance of the Greensboro Women’s Fund of the University of North Carolina Press.

Founding Contributors: Linda Arnold Carlisle, Sally Schindel Cone, Anne Faircloth, Bonnie McElveen Hunter, Linda Bullard Jennings, Janice J. Kerley (in honor of Margaret Supplee Smith), Nancy Rouzer May, and Betty Hughes Nichols.

© 2020 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Set in Merope Basic by Westchester Publishing Services

Manufactured in the United States of America

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sippial, Tiffany A., author.

Title: Celia Sánchez Manduley : the life and legacy of a Cuban revolutionary / Tiffany A. Sippial.

Other titles: Envisioning Cuba.

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press,

[2020]

| Series: Envisioning Cuba | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2019014009 | ISBN 9781469654072 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469654607 (pbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469654089 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Sánchez Manduley, Celia, 1920–1980. | Women revolutionaries—Cuba—Biography. | Revolutionaries—Cuba—Biography. | Castro, Fidel, 1926–2016—Friends and associates. | Cuba—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC F1788.22.S26 S57 2020 | DDC 972.9106092

[

B

]—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019014009

Cover illustration: Melanie Cervantes, La Paloma (2017). Used by permission of the artist.

For my parents, Wade and Gail Thomas,

who always believed I had a story to tell.

For my son, Rhys,

who holds my heart.

For my husband, Trey,

who champions all my dreams.

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations in the Text

Chronology

CHAPTER ONE

Searching for Celia

Biography and the Politics of Remembrance

CHAPTER TWO

Most Native Wildflower

Tales of a Revolutionary Youth

CHAPTER THREE

Compañera of Ideals

Forging a Revolutionary Identity

CHAPTER FOUR

First Female Guerrilla

Life on the Front Lines of Revolution

CHAPTER FIVE

Like the Invisible Salt

The Making of a Revolutionary Stateswoman

CHAPTER SIX

Who Is Celia Sánchez?

Image, Politics, and Sexuality in the U.S. Media

CHAPTER SEVEN

Toward the Gates of Eternity

Death of a Revolutionary Heroine

CHAPTER EIGHT

Myth, Mother, Mujer

Afterlife of a Revolutionary

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Figures

1. Monument in Lenin Park, Havana, 2018 15

2. "Celia, Siempre Celia [Celia, Forever Celia]" billboard, Media Luna, 2018 21

3. Portrait, 1948 59

4. Counting money in the Sierra Maestra, 1958 95

5. Climbing Turquino Peak, 1965 125

6. Leaving the Shelburne Hotel en route to Harlem, New York, 1960 127

7. Fatigues and Lipstick, 1960 148

8. Collectible card in the Albúm de la Revolución, 1959 155

9. Crypt in Revolutionary Armed Forces Mausoleum in Colón Cemetery, Havana, 2018 161

10. National Assembly of Popular Power in Manzanillo, 1976 180

Preface

In April 2018 I received the email that transformed this book. After twenty-two years of filing requests, I was invited to enter an archival world few scholars have ever entered. I am now one of the few U.S. scholars granted access to the highest security archive of the Cuban revolutionary government, the Oficina de Asuntos Históricos del Consejo de Estado (Office of Historical Affairs of the Council of State, OAHCE) in Havana. A hallowed vault of Cuban revolutionary history, the archive houses the papers of Cuba’s top revolutionary officials, including Fidel and Raúl Castro and Che Guevara. The archive directorship offered me almost unprecedented access to thousands of pages of personal correspondence, wartime communiqués, diary entries, and official government memos penned by Cuba’s most revered female revolutionary heroine—Celia Sánchez Manduley (1920–80).

Sánchez shares within these documents her raw, intimate assessment of life on the front lines of history in the making. Her documents prove the decisive role she played in planning and executing the Cuban Revolution from the mid-1950s until her death in 1980. They also reveal the woman behind the mythology. In her signature block print, Sánchez articulated her hopes and dreams, and even her personal doubts and fears, in ways that reshaped my understanding of her experiences and identity. Exquisite details, like Sánchez’s habit of closing her correspondence with the words Revolutionarily Yours, granted texture and dimension to Cuba’s mythologized heroine.

Positioned within twenty-two years of archival and oral history research conducted in the United States and Cuba, the OAHCE documents revealed to me the choices and struggles of a highly private woman who nonetheless stepped willingly onto the precarious stage of international politics, shifting gender roles, and public scrutiny at a time of tremendous national upheaval. While no archive can encapsulate the full complexity of a life, nuances of her personality, beliefs, and experience emerged within her writings. I glimpsed the revolution through Sánchez’s own eyes in ways that few ever have. What follows is a critical portrait of a woman who became, over the course of an exceptional life, a revolutionary icon.

Acknowledgments

The list of people who deserve my gratitude for supporting me with this book is long. First on the list of people to thank is Sonia Riquelme, who introduced me to the name Celia Sánchez Manduley in 1995. When she invited me to Cuba to assist her with her research on Afro-Cuban poets, Sonia insisted that I pursue my own research project. I learned so much about the research process from her that summer and only wish she were still alive to read this book. At Southwestern University, I must thank Eric Selbin, who has been a constant supporter of this project for more than twenty years, and of me for even longer. His Latin American politics class changed the course of my life, and his friendship and mentorship continue to mean the world to me.

With support from the Latin American and Iberian Institute at the University of New Mexico, I decided to extend my undergraduate work on Sánchez into an M.A. thesis. My thesis committee—Judy Bieber, Linda Hall, and Elizabeth Hutchison—pushed the work in fruitful new directions. I am also indebted to Jane Slaughter, whose graduate seminar on gender, war, and memory introduced me to a whole new field that shaped in important ways how I thought about Sánchez’s legacy. Another of my UNM mentors, Melissa Bokovoy, offered instructive feedback on a section of this work at the American Historical Association meeting in 2016.

At Auburn University, where I have been on the faculty since 2007, I must thank my amazing colleagues for their friendship and support in all things. Special thanks to Dave Lucsko, Donna Bohanan, Ken Noe, Joe Kicklighter, Jim Hansen, Cate Giustino, Kathryn Braund, Charles Israel, Alan Meyer, Jennifer Brooks, David Carter, Matthew Malczycki, Christopher Ferguson, Abby Swingen (now at Texas Tech), and Ralph Kingston. To my amazing Honors College team, I have loved every minute of this new adventure together and look forward to all the great things to come. Many thanks also to Andrew Gillespie and the Office of International Programs at Auburn University, who helped finance my final two trips to Cuba to complete the research for this book through an Internationalization Grant. I feel so privileged to work with such supportive and inspiring colleagues.

I am also grateful for the support extended to me by the staff at a number of U.S. archives. The University of Florida’s Center for Latin American Studies awarded me a Library Research Grant in 2016, and my experience with the entire library and special collections staff was stellar from beginning to end. My research in the University of Miami’s Cuban Heritage Collection was equally enriching, and the helpful staff there both tracked down the sources I requested and brought others to my attention. I have made countless trips to the University of Texas at Austin’s Benson Latin American Library, and each was as helpful as the last. I also appreciate the assistance I received (on both of my books) from library and archival staff at Yale University.

In Cuba, so many wonderful people have supported my research over more than two decades. I am deeply indebted to the staff at the Celia Sánchez Manduley Memorial Stairway (Manzanillo), Federation of Cuban Women (Havana), José Martí National Library (Havana), History Institute (Havana), Celia Sánchez Childhood Home Museum (Media Luna), Celia Sánchez Home Museum (Pilón), Municipal History Museum (Media Luna), Municipal History Museum (Manzanillo), Celia Sánchez Monument in Lenin Park (Havana), and the Colón Cemetery (Havana). To the staff at the Office of Historical Affairs (OAHCE) in Havana, there are no words to express what my time with you all meant to me and to this project. My most heartfelt thanks to Eugenio Suárez Pérez, Jorge Luís Aneiros Alonso, Iliana Salas Lemus, Ileana Guzmán Cruz, Adelaida Béquer Céspedes, and Aida Luisa Moreno Fonseca.

I am also beyond grateful to the many people—some of whom are no longer living—who offered their insights about Sánchez through interviews, conversations, email correspondence, and long-distance phone calls. In particular, I would like to thank Raquel Andino, Adelaida Bécquer Céspedes, Bárbara Cañadilla, Nirma Cartón, Elizabeth Elliottt, Bonnie Fambrono, Alina Fernández, Arnaldo Gómez Satti, Mirtha Hernández, Nexsy Llana, David Martínez, Aida Luisa Moreno Fonseca, Delio Orozco González, Nilda Porot, Margaret Randall, Sergio Rego Pita, Lourdes Sang, and the incomparable Nydia Sarabia. I am profoundly thankful to Efraim Conte for all the many phone, text, dinner, and email chats in which he answered my questions about his family with the most exquisite care and detail. His friendship is one of the greatest gifts this project brought to my life. To other Cuban friends who I consider my family, I send so much gratitude for offering their homes, their friendship, and their insights about Sánchez and about life: Luís René, Mercy, and Luís Carlos in Havana; Pedro, Tamara, and Tamarita in Media Luna; and Yolanda Díaz Martínez and Bárbara Danzie Martínez at the National Archives. Los quiero mucho.

I am grateful as always to the amazing editorial staff at the University of North Carolina Press. Elaine Maisner and Lou Pérez were as wonderfully supportive and encouraging on this second book project as they were on the first, and I am beyond honored to join again the authors of the Envisioning Cuba series. Thank you also to the anonymous readers whose key insights and advice improved this book greatly.

Last but not least, I offer my gratitude to my family. They have lived with this project for so many years and supported me at every step. I dedicate this book primarily to my parents, as nobody championed it more loyally and enthusiastically. My siblings, Jared Thomas and Lauren Menn, might be pressed to remember a time when I was not working, in some capacity, on this project. I am so blessed to have siblings who are also my friends. My wonderful husband loves and supports me and my work without hesitation, even when it pulls me away from home for extended periods of time. I am proud to be his wife and to be the mother of our precious son, Rhys, and stepmother to three wonderful young men. Life is beautiful.

Abbreviations in the Text

ANR

Revolutionary National Action

CIA

Central Intelligence Agency

DRE

Revolutionary Student Directorate

FAR

Revolutionary Armed Forces

FBI

Federal Bureau of Investigations

FCMM

Martí Women’s Civic Front

FEU

Federation of University Students

FMC

Federation of Cuban Women

FOIA

Freedom of Information Act

INRA

National Institute of Agrarian Reform

M-26-7

26th of July Movement

OAHCE

Office of Historical Affairs of the Council of State

SIR

Military Intelligence Service

SISS

Senate Internal Security Subcommittee

Chronology

Celia Sánchez Manduley

CHAPTER ONE

Searching for Celia

Biography and the Politics of Remembrance

The people know how this symbol was created, but in this moment, we are participating in the duty of remembering.

—ARMANDO HART DÁVALOS, El ejemplo de Celia

Memory as a whole … is bigger than the sum of its parts.

—ALON CONFINO, Collective Memory and Cultural History

Searching for Celia

I first heard the name Celia Sánchez Manduley (1920–80) in August 1995 from a professor who had recently traveled to Cuba. As I had spent much of that summer living in Oaxaca, Mexico, investigating the role of women within the recently formed Zapatista Army of National Liberation, my professor thought that Sánchez’s story might interest me. What I discovered upon further investigation into Sánchez’s life was baffling. She had played a critical role in the Cuban Revolution, but references to her in scholarly accounts of those events were brief and often confined to footnotes.

I learned that the revolutionary leadership recognizes Sánchez as the first woman to fire a weapon in battle, an achievement that earned her the title of first female guerrilla of the Sierra Maestra. It also credits her with organizing the first platoon of female combatants, known as the Mariana Grajales Brigade.¹ Following the triumph of the revolution in 1959, Sánchez was appointed secretary to the president and Council of Ministers (1962) and then secretary of the Council of State (1976). In her capacity as a government official, she created several large public institutions and tourist centers, including the Office of Historical Affairs, the Palace of the Revolution, and Havana’s 1,900-acre Lenin Park. She also traveled widely—to the United States, Africa, and Vietnam—as an international ambassador for the revolution. Her image appears on two Cuban postage stamps, a commemorative one-peso coin, and in the watermark of the twenty-peso note.

In light of these achievements, I found it remarkable that many published works about the revolution never even mention her. How could this be? How could a woman openly spoken of as the maximum representative of the Cuban revolutionary woman not have at least one biography written about her life?² In contrast, the Library of Congress online catalog listed forty-one published biographies of Fidel Castro (1926–2016) and sixty-five biographies of Ernesto Che Guevara (1928–67). I was intrigued.

My first research trip to Havana’s José Martí National Library, during the summer of 1996, revealed a card catalog with only a handful of references to Sánchez, and several enthusiastic, but honest, librarians who told me that I would be hard-pressed to find much published biographical information about her. Not only was I having difficulty finding materials written about Sánchez, but I was also having difficulty getting people to move beyond the basic biography sketched above. It seemed that wherever I went people offered the same observations about Sánchez’s contributions to Cuban history.

I was both frustrated and fascinated by the fact that my interviewees often responded in an almost formulaic way during our interview sessions. One young interviewee responded very honestly to my assessment on this front, stating, "Yes, everyone thinks of her as a hero, but if you ask someone, ‘Tell me something about her,’ they could probably only tell you about her public works projects after the triumph of the revolution. She is rarely mentioned in school. Mostly the way you learn about her is through government-produced sources … you know, ‘La flor más autóctona de la Revolución Cubana’ [the most native wildflower of the Cuban Revolution]. The government has preserved and communicates her story that way."³

In some ways, the standardization of Sánchez’s biography serves a didactic purpose. Centered on a manageable subset of her experiences and accomplishments, it is easy to teach and learn, which promotes its circulation. For some critics of the revolutionary government, however, standardization promotes truncation. The female revolutionary experience is reduced to a handful of talking points, while the male leaders are meticulously eulogized. Ilja Luciak finds that some Cuban feminists even feel that Sánchez’s presence in the watermark of the Cuban currency, which can only be seen if one holds the note against the light, symbolizes the invisibility of women’s contributions to the revolution.⁴ They argue that despite grandiose plans to transform gender relations and the position of women in Cuban society, the revolutionary government can boast only moderate accomplishments on that front. Pointing to the limited number of female rebels who assumed leadership roles after 1959, they claim that the promised revolution within the Revolution never occurred.⁵

Many of my interviewees identified Sánchez herself as the primary architect of the relative silence surrounding her life. Sánchez shunned cameras, interviews, and the press.⁶ Her deep sense of personal humility, rooted in a family legacy of service, provides a common explanation for her allergic reaction to publicity. Sánchez’s long-term colleague, Aida Luisa Moreno Fonseca, a woman who has worked at the Office of Historical Affairs for four decades, refers to Sánchez as a compañera of ideals.⁷ Waldo González López explained in a January 1984 memorial article published in Muchacha magazine that Sánchez operated with the silence characteristic of authentically great people.⁸ Several of my interviewees over the years also linked Sánchez’s leadership style to the teachings of famed Cuban independence leader José Martí—namely, his belief that all the glory in the world fits inside one grain of corn.⁹ Any silence or mystery surrounding Sánchez’s life was, they argued, of her own purposeful design.

I began to question this representation of Sánchez, however, the first time I saw her on film. Before that moment, I had marveled on several occasions that I had never heard Sánchez speak. I assumed that I never would, as in all her years of public service she almost never delivered public speeches or granted interviews. One family member even chuckled when I asked him a question along those lines, noting simply: She received dignitaries daily, but she was a terrible public speaker.¹⁰ What was so surprising about the first time I saw her on film, therefore, was not only what she was saying, but also how she was speaking. In the clip, Sánchez recounts her legendary evasion of government troops under the command of U.S.-backed dictator General Fulgencio Batista (1901–73) by dressing as a pregnant woman. I saw nothing in this footage of the camera-shy woman so often described to me. Wearing the bohemian-style dress and large earrings that were typical of her later life, she stood directly in front of the camera. A cigarette dangled from her right hand, and she appeared to be wearing false eyelashes. She spoke eloquently and confidently in the notorious rapid-fire Cuban style, looking directly at the interviewer except in the brief moments when she allowed her gaze to take in the movement of people around her. She was engaged but also aware of her surroundings. Completely at ease and comfortable telling a story about her own participation in the early mobilization efforts of the 26th of July Movement (M-26-7)—the vanguard political party led by Castro that would overthrow Cuba’s national government in 1959—Sánchez smiled wryly when amused by a particular memory. She used the pronoun I often, but seemed neither boastful nor self-deprecating.

When the film clip ended, I began to wonder about the need to reevaluate Sánchez’s legacy. What might imaginings of Sánchez as the self-effacing player behind the scenes obscure in our understanding of her life and of the Cuban Revolution more broadly? I was reminded of a moment during my interview with scholar and activist Margaret Randall in which she sagely noted that the official story is often wrong.¹¹ The narrative of purposeful self-denial and sacrifice that dominates imaginings of Sánchez’s career has left little room for alternative readings. The words of my colleague Paula Backscheider also came to my mind as I pondered this issue. Backscheider notes that Women who understand and are able to maintain a conformist image while striving for their individual successes often do well. She encourages us to consider the performative self, and the roles that are available, natural, accepted, attempted, and forced upon a person.¹²

How much of the Sánchez that we can access via photographs, poetry, and commemorative acts is really a reflection of her performative self? To what extent might she have purposefully refashioned herself in order to play the role she wanted to play and have the life she wanted to live? Might a more attention-seeking woman not have risen as high in the ranks of the revolutionary government, as she would appear more competitor than comrade? Furthermore, how much of what we think we know about Sánchez is really just the projection of an image crafted by others?

It became critical for me to find people who had actually had a personal or professional relationship with Sánchez. This quest led me to conduct interviews with women like Nydia Sarabia, Nirma Cartón, and Lourdes Sang. Due to their interactions with Sánchez, all three women were well aware of the difficult task ahead of me. They concurred that Sánchez was one of the most important women in Cuban history, but they also agreed that she was one of the most private. They generously offered their own invaluable insights about Sánchez’s life and legacy and encouraged me to seek access to the principal archive of the Cuban Revolution.

The Office of Historical Affairs of the Council of State occupies a former bank at the intersection of Línea and Twelfth Street in Havana and is Cuba’s highest-security archive. It houses the memos and communiqués that Sánchez painstakingly recopied during her time in the Sierra Maestra Mountains and stored in a satchel now on display at her childhood home in Media Luna. The archive also contains books, photographs, newspaper clippings, and maps detailing the earliest years of the Cuban Revolution. These records are considered national treasures. A rotating set of uniformed guards stands at the door throughout the day to verify each visitor’s credentials. Consequently, only a small handful of U.S. scholars have ever accessed that archive. As Randall noted during our interview: Cubans are very protective of their heroes and heroines.¹³ Attempts to access the Office of Historical Affairs proved disappointing on that and several subsequent trips. I could never have guessed that I would wait twenty-two years to receive authorization to access the archive.

By early 2018, I had almost given up hope of being able to examine Sánchez’s papers. One evening, however, I sat down and wrote a final request to the archive director. Much more personal than previous requests, the letter described my research journey and my hopes for the book. I sent the email without any expectation of a response, especially in light of deteriorating U.S.-Cuban relations as a result of rumored sonic attacks on U.S. diplomatic staff in Havana. Within forty-eight hours I received an invitation to the archive, and I had purchased a plane ticket within forty-nine.

My unprecedented access to that repository allowed me to complete the first critical biography of one of the most influential female political leaders in twentieth-century Cuban history, if not Latin American history more broadly. Twenty-two years of field, archival, and oral history research pull Sánchez out from the shadow of the bearded male heroes whose life stories continue to dominate our understanding of the Cuban Revolution. While most assessments of Sánchez’s life produced within Cuba or off the island—including works by Álvarez Tabío, Stout, and Haney—take at face value the legacy of heroic self-abnegation that frames her state-sanctioned biography, this study offers a more analytical treatment of her life story.¹⁴ Employing a combination of feminist biography and cultural history methodologies, I interrogate the meanings assigned to Sánchez’s experiences within official discourse, popular memory, and sites of memorialization. I also examine Sánchez’s purposeful and strategic framing of her own public image within Cuba’s new brand of revolutionary womanhood. She was more than an object of mythologization; she actively crafted her own legacy. Balancing the careful work of recovery and interpretation, this is a study of the making—and remaking—of Cuba’s revolutionary New Woman through the life story of one of its most revered national heroes.

Writing Celia

This project has challenged my understanding of biography as a genre of historical writing. As I moved more deeply into the work, the variables with which I would need to grapple seemed to compound upon themselves. How does a U.S. female scholar write the biography of a woman who also happened to be Cuban, who also happened to occupy a high-ranking government office, and who was also notoriously private? As I struggled to account for these aspects of both Sánchez’s identity and my own, I discovered a new intellectual cohort whose work offers a critical methodology for considering a project of this nature—feminist biographers.¹⁵ To be clear, placing my work within the field of feminist biography does not mean that I define Sánchez as a feminist. Sánchez placed her faith in the transformational possibilities of the revolution, not feminism. I claim this book as feminist biography not merely because its primary subject is a woman, but because it reveals the historically and culturally contingent process by which Sánchez became the embodiment of Cuba’s New Woman.

Feminist biographers reimagine traditional approaches to biography as a coherent, bounded narrative unfolding through linear time. They value cultural forms of evidence (such as memorabilia), recognize the subjectivity of biography as a tool for understanding historical experience, and acknowledge the complexities, contradictions, and tensions in stories told about a person’s life. As a feminist biographer, I am disinclined to smooth out the rough edges that appear where public commemorative acts or private, personal reflections from friends and family solder together incongruous pieces of Sánchez’s life. That roughness is, in fact, a key area of my interest in this project. My motivation is not only to recover as many facts about Sánchez’s life as are accessible, but also to explore how representations of her life developed over time. I acknowledge, however, that the subject of any biography remains, in many ways, a cipher. There are elements of Sánchez’s lived reality that we may never fully understand.

Recognizing the potential effect my own presence had on the production of my knowledge about Sánchez is important to this work. Like other feminist biographers, I recognize the subjectivity of biography as a form of historical inquiry. Rather than attempt to disappear within a slick narrative, I acknowledge my own presence within this story and the ways my positionality may have impacted various phases of the project, from accessing sources to interpreting meanings. As Susan Crane states, Historical research is a lived experience that the self-reflexive historian consciously integrates into collective memory. Historical representation is inadequate to this lived experience only so long as the author remains absent and the textual or site-artifact serves only the function of commemoration.¹⁶

I also recognize the ways in which Sánchez actively shaped her own story. I balance concerns with fixing in time and space the significant events and accomplishments of her life against frank evaluations of how gender constraints shaped those public achievements. Freed from the limits of traditional biography, I can ask complex questions. What is at stake in Sánchez’s own self-fashioning—her performative self—with regard to the (at least perceived) strategies she engaged in to enhance her political effectiveness, manage her public and private life, and construct herself as a public figure within a set of available gender roles? These kinds of questions alter and expand the framework within which we understand biographical truth and encourage us to read stories about Sánchez’s life against a broader discourse of acceptable revolutionary womanhood.

As a scholar of Cuba, I also acknowledge the complex politics that shaped the parameters of the possible with my work. Strained U.S.-Cuban diplomatic relations became a central character in my research even before I set foot on the island. The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests I filed with the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) were both rejected (we can neither confirm nor deny the existence or nonexistence of records). The U.S. Treasury Department denied the