Men shot by a firing squad in the Cuban province of Santa Clara, 1959
I was 18 months old when Fidel Castro and his pseudo-military followers rode into Havana on tanks on New Year’s Day 1959. My knowledge of those first days comes from family lore and the first-hand accounts I’ve read or seen. My first memories of the regime are from the Bay of Pigs and the Missile Crisis, not from the heady days after Batista was toppled.
By pseudo-military I mean those olive-drab men and women who didn’t belong to the Cuban National Army, but liked the rebel look. Argentine physician Ernesto “Che” Guevara took to the rakish elan of a beret and scruffy beard. Others wore Rosaries around their necks as decorations instead of holding them in their hands to pray.
My mother’s side of the family had several Cuban National Army soldiers, including my grandfather, several great-uncles and a cousin. The spit-and-polish of my grandfather’s khaki officer’s uniform looked nothing like the rumpled olive clothing of the Castro acolytes. My maternal relatives also included police officers, since the military and law enforcement were a way out for poor boys back then, too.
I have found accounts approved by Castro’s censors that mention my grandfather in connection with arrests of their supporters prior to 1959. He was well known within the ranks and in the area surrounding the military installation he commanded. I’ve met strangers within the exiled community who knew of him. He was an honorable man, as they’ve told me.
I never knew my maternal grandfather because he was shot by a firing squad within weeks of that New Year’s Day that began with such hope for many and ended in tragedy for many others, too. I had heard the family stories of his being placed in a cage suitable for animals and then taken out and shot without his family’s knowledge.
The sadness and the anger over his loss colored much of my childhood, but there was more to come. My mother’s first cousin, another military officer, would meet the same fate later that year in September. My uncle would return with the exiles who took part in the failure of the Bay of Pigs. He spent months in one of the harshest prisons in this hemisphere, the 18th century colonial prison called El Principe. Once a week, my mother would visit him posing as a single woman so that she wouldn’t endanger my father’s side of the family.
I thought of my grandfather and cousin this week because I found a Web site listing their names as casualties of the Castro regime. It contained their names and the dates of their deaths. Looking further, I found another page with photos of some of the ad hoc firing squads of those first days in 1959. (There’s video here.) It’s no surprise that I grew up to become a staunch opponent of the death penalty.
There’s much more I could write about how state-sponsored death touched my family, but not now. I do what I can to speak out against the death penalty here and now instead of only looking back.
Still, 2009 is the 50th anniversary of that horrible year of 1959 when there was euphoria over change promised by a scruffy band of rebels who began by decimating the army and police and then quickly moved to taking over the media, the schools, the churches and commerce until nothing remained out of their reach. Many who had been supporters felt betrayed and lied to when the real aim of the atheistic, Marxist-Leninist regime became clear. By then, it was too late.
Many of the political prisoners who died in Castro’s gulag were originally gung-ho followers who later tried to change the course of his regime, but couldn’t. They became the plantados, the “rooted ones” who didn’t want to be considered common criminals and who had much more in common with the Irish “blanket men” and Hitler’s red-triangle political camp inmates than with common thieves and murderers. Huber Matos and Eloy Gutierrez Menoyo are two former Castro associates who felt betrayed and were then given long sentences in prison for speaking out.
A courageous physician named Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet is languishing in jail now because he won’t be silenced. He is on Amnesty International’s list of political prisoners, as are thousands in Castro’s vast prison system.
My parents’ generation — those who lived though 1959 and its aftermath — bleed each time some dolt crows about Che Guevara’s mythical status or how “charismatic” Castro is. My Mom and Dad saw their murders close-up and the pain they feel would be the same a Holocaust survivor would feel if he or she were subjected to paens about Hitler’s heroism. The blood shed within their family would rightfully boil. Forgiveness takes more spiritual courage than revenge.
This February 2 marked 50 years since my grandfather’s killing by a firing squad. My mother and her siblings were in their early 20s, but my grandfather also had a new family of little boys who lost their father and had to grow up in the shadow of death. Another little boy was left fatherless when my mother’s cousin was killed by a firing squad later that year in September. My generation grew up with holes in our family history.
I was a young adult when I heard a stranger tell me the full story of how my grandfather was sentenced to death. My mother had filled me in on how his wife had asked him to consider supporting the new regime that January and how he had refused, but a former Cuban army soldier I met in Providence, Rhode Island, decades later had been a witness.
This former soldier was a co-worker in a manufacturing plant where I was a teen working an after-school job to buy my first car. We chatted and asked about each other’s family. He told he had been a soldier and I mentioned that my grandfather had been an officer. He asked me his name and, when I told him, the man turned pale. My grandfather had been his commanding officer, he said.
In rural areas with no police force, the army served as law enforcement, said the soldier. As commander of the military post, my grandfather was the law in the area. The soldier told me that my grandfather had gone home to his wife and little boys one evening and left others in charge. One of his men had arrested a rowdy and thrown him in a cell. The prisoner asked for medical help, but he didn’t receive it. He died because he was a hemophiliac who bled to death from his injuries.
Since my grandfather had failed to support the new regime, he was a fair target for a charge of murder arising from the hemophiliac’s death. The soldiers who had placed the man in the cell were also arrested and charged. My grandfather’s former driver, a low-ranking officer who threw his lot in with Castro, was placed in command of the installation.
After a kangaroo trial typical of the early days of the regime, he was given a short prison term. Late one night, the penalty was arbitrarily changed to death and he was taken out and shot without the family’s knowledge.
A few years later, his oldest son — my uncle — joined Brigade 2506, the group of exiled Cuban men who were trained by the CIA to invade and who were then abandoned there. My uncle was captured and marched to prison by the gloating Communist regime claiming a victory that was hollow because it was won over men who never had a chance.
A former soldier in my grandfather’s command who had remembered him as an honorable man recognized my uncle and told him not to identify himself. He would be instantly shot with the others they were lining up for the firing squad, he said. My uncle hid under a false name similar to his own; a prison beard helped hide his features.
An author who has written a book about the Bay of Pigs debacle and the prisoner exchange that followed told me that my uncle was the only person identified under two different names: He had a phony name on the Cuban list of the captured and his real name on the American list.
He was later in the group ransomed by the Cuban government for money, medicines and food. I was a child in Havana when a flood of peanut butter appeared in our government-rationed food stores. Apparently the product was so unknown a staple in Cuba that the Marxists in the government didn’t want it and had passed it to the people. There aren’t too many times that I see a jar of Skippy on a supermarket shelf without remembering those days.
Fifty years after my grandfather’s death and all the events that followed, the Cuban Marxists are still in power. They will claim that they triumphed over the United States and leftists all over the world will fawn over the Castro brothers. I would disagree with them.
It’s true that we left our home and that our families were split. It’s true that those who were well off lost their interests or their businesses. (My family was working class, so we didn’t have property or commerce to lose.) It’s true that we lost family members to firing squads and jails. It’s true that we Christians had to see our priests and ministers expelled and our beliefs spat upon.
Still, we’ve survived in exile. There are huge Cuban-American communities in several cities in Florida, New York and New Jersey. I have family members from Spain to California who made it out. (I also have some who are still in Cuba; one remains a regime supporter.) We kept our language and renewed our faith from our homes in a new land. Refugees who arrived in Miami recreated former homeland businesses, churches and schools that are thriving here. Remember that the next time you have a mojito made with Bacardi Rum.
Better yet, have a mojito while you examine the falsehoods that supporters of the Revolution continue to spread — those old canards about free health care and free schooling and all. Those are issues to consider another time, but let’s just say that government-run health care isn’t a big enough draw to prevent young people from boarding homemade rafts to get out of Cuba.
On New Year’s Eve, the old folks would sometimes toast to having the next New Year’s in a free Cuba. My generation and those after may want to see their homeland again, but we are part of the United States, too, and this is home. I don’t think my teenagers would ever consider Cuba home 50 years after my parents’ generation lost it.
In 2009, I’ll be taking spiritual inventory of what has happened since that New Year’s Day in 1959. Today is as good a day to start as any.
