In the year of 2018, this particular week included a date -- August 13th -- that was reverently celebrated across the island of Cuba. Had he lived a bit longer in his 90s, Fidel Castro would have turned 92 on August 13th, 2018. The Cuban government honored the date with a few ceremonies but it was the everyday Cuban people who spontaneously on their own made the recognition special. That reaction was especially prevalent among young-adult Cubans, like the ones above holding Yo Soy Fidel memorials. "Yo Soy Fidel" translates to "I Am Fidel." Of the 11.2 million Cubans on the island in August of 2018, as many as 9 million -- young and old -- treasure...even worship...the memory of Fidel Castro.
Beginning with the Eisenhower presidency in the 1950s, right-wing thugs have dictated CUBAN POLICIES that have continually shamed the U. S. democracy while also CREATING AND ENHANCING THE CASTRO LEGEND. In 1952 the right-wing thugs in the otherwise decent Eisenhower administration sicced the Mafia on Cuba to facilitate the robbery of the island that the U.S. wrested from Spain in the 1898 Spanish-American War, which was fought entirely in Cuba. After the FIDEL CASTRO-led Cuban Revolution in January of 1959 chased the Batista-Mafia thugs to their new capital -- Little Havana in Miami -- those same right-wing thugs in the Eisenhower presidency -- Richard Nixon, the Dulles brothers, General Lyman Lemnitzer, etc -- began plotting to recapture Cuba. Those plans, including the Bay of Pigs attack, were inherited in 1960 by America's new President, John Kennedy, who deigned to carry them out.
Thus, from the time he entered office on Jan. 20-1960 till he was assassinated on Nov. 22-1963, the young and promising President Kennedy was absorbed with eliminating Fidel Castro to appease Eisenhower's right-wing thugs and the Batista-Mafia leaders that Castro had chased to nearby Florida. And therefore Kennedy and America had inherited a "BRILLIANT DISASTER" because Fidel Castro, incredibly, turned out to be hard even for the world superpower to defeat or to kill.
{P.S.: These are historic and topical facts that sufficiently propagandized Americans are programmed to consider ridiculous. Another historic fact is this: Back in April of 1961 the CIA, orchestrating the Bay of Pigs attack that was designed to recapture Cuba, ASSURED President Kennedy that once Fidel Castro heard the bombs dropping on Camp Colombia on the edge of Havana, Castro would bolt for his getaway airplane and, ANYWAY, the Cuban people would TURN AGAINST CASTRO when they learned the attack was underway. But facts show Castro raced to the front-lines at the Bay of Pigs to lead the defense of his Revolution [unlike Batista and the Mafia, Fidel never had getaway planes and ships}. AND NO CUBANS turned against him during the attack. Later, also an easily Googled fact, the duped Kennedy in the Oval Office later loudly bellowed: "IF I COULD I WOULD BLOW THE CIA TO SMITHEREENS!!"
The Bay of Pigs attack in April of 1961, which was supposed to kill both Fidel Castro and his Revolution, instead forever sealed the Castro legend and has incredibly prolonged his Revolution for over six decades -- AND COUNTING. As Celia Sanchez, the Revolution's greatest heroine, so correctly and famously stated: "The utter cowardice and stupidity of our greedy enemies, not us rebels ourselves, was most responsible for the triumph and sustainability of the Revolution." Also, just for the record, the great Celia Sanchez in Revolutionary Cuba laid down this mantra: "The Batistianos will never regain control of Cuba as long as I live and as long as Fidel lives." She died of cancer at age 59 in 1959 and Fidel died at age 90 in 2016. So, her amazing mantra still lives all these many decades later.
Incredibly, from the 1950s till August of 2018 -- for the most part -- the Cuban narrative in the United States has been dictated by three generations of Counter Revolutionaries on U. S. soil -- you know, the ones Celia Sanchez hailed as the Revolution's beatable "greedy, stupid cowards." The notation in the graphic above that "President Kennedy refused to provide air support" is inaccurate. U. S. planes bombed Cuba's three military airfields into oblivion at the start of the invasion, plus other strategic targets. Also, a U. S. bomber flew circles over Havana hoping ground sources would alert them to Fidel Castro's location. It turned out Fidel was, as usual, in Celia Sanchez's 7th Street apartment when the bombs started falling on Camp Colombia. Only after it became clear that the attack was failing badly on the ground, in the air, and on the sea did Kennedy call back the U. S. planes. Cuban pilots, in fact, had destroyed U. S. supply ships {flying 8 planes the CIA didn't know Celia had removed from the airfields and hidden prior to the attack}. Brutal U.S.-backed dictators in Nicaragua {Somosa} and the Dominican Republican {Trujillo} had assisted the U. S. and the CIA before, during, and after the Bay of Pigs attack. Without delving into conspiracy theories, every historian is aware that Kennedy's ceasing the U. S. air attack resulted in the young U. S. president being eternally and immediately targeted by the perpetrators, participants, and supporters of the attack. Yet, to America's continuing shame, President Trump and the Counter Revolutionaries in Little Havana-Miami still lavishly celebrate the attack. And yet, three pusillanimous generations of Americans have accepted such things and been forced to lavishly support them with their tax dollars because of Little Havana's political influence and financial support for politicians like Trump, the Bush dynasty, key right-wing congressional hacks, etc.
Two-term U. S. President Barack Obama turned out to be the only U. S. president since the 1950s with the guts, the intelligence, and the patriotism to seriously challenge the right-wing thugs dictating America's Cuban policies. But on Jan. 20-2017 Obama, a Democrat, was replaced by Republican President Donald Trump.
And as expected, President Trump quickly went to Little Havana in Miami and, speaking before the Bay of Pigs 2506 Assault Banner, turned America's Cuban policies back over to the salivating Counter Revolutionary extremists. Is this the prime fault of Batistianos, Mafiosi, and the right-wing thugs in the last six Republican adminstrations? No. the prime fault lies with the American {including Cuban-American} citizens who have so cowardly permitted this insult to the U. S. democracy since way back in 1952.
As Celia Sanchez so aptly stated, it was greedy, stupid American cowards who created the Cuban Revolution and the legend of Fidel Castro. After all these decades, the U. S. democracy has yet to create a generation of citizens that has the guts, intelligence, and patriotism to correct Cuban policies that President Obama and the entire world, by a 191-to-0 vote in the United Nations, condemned in loud unanimity in 2016 as the American voters were stupidly electing Trump although the alternative, the equally unpopular Mrs. Clinton, allowed that to happen to America's two-party, money-crazed democracy.
The case can surely be made that the doctor's daughter, Celia Sanchez, was overall the most important player in the Cuban Revolution -- as a guerrilla fighter {above}, the top recruiter of rebels and supplies, a military leader, and the only person Fidel Castro would let over-rule him, which she often did as all historians, including America's top Castro biographer Georgie Anne Geyer, well knew.
Now 83-years-old, Georgie Anne Geyer was a noted nationally syndicated conservative columnist in hundreds of newspapers for decades. Conservative or not and American or not, Mr. Geyer wrote the all-time best biography of Fidel Castro.
In her classic, seminal Castro biography, Georgie Anne Geyer correctly pointed out that Celia Sanchez could and did "over-rule Fidel" whenever and wherever she chose. That, of course, was with Fidel's concurrence but it never wavered.
The all-time greatest expert related to Fidel Castro, Celia Sanchez, and the Cuban Revolution is the still-living Marta Rojas. In 2004 the Counter Revolutionary George W. Bush administration granted me LEGAL permission to visit Cuba to research revolutionary legend Celia Sanchez. Marta graciously helped me with that research and my biography of Celia Sanchez published in 2005. Marta worked closely with Celia and Fidel all their adult lives, including when Marta was a highly regarded young journalist in Batista's Cuba. Like Georgie Anne Geyer and other experts, Marta knew that Celia was the prime decision-maker, with Fidel's blessing, both during the Revolutionary War and in Revolutionary Cuba. And Marta, via email from Cuba to Wyoming in 2005, told me this extraordinary but definitive fact: "Since Celia Sanchez died of cancer in 1980, Fidel has ruled Cuba only as he precisely perceives she would want him to rule it."
By the way, the London-based BBC says the photo above is "the first known photo of Fidel Castro and Celia Sanchez together." She was letting him inspect a Belgium telescopic rifle that was among the many weapons she had clandestinely purchased from her main Latin American suppliers. Most of the considerable money that Celia Sanchez secured resulted when she sent her allies to Miami and New York to meet anti-Batista Cubans and Americans.
The photo above shows Marta Rojas with Fidel Castro soon after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution. Study his countenance as he shines his admiring gaze upon her face. She first met him when she was a journalist in Batista's Cuba but allowed to interview him while he was imprisoned on the Isle of Pines from July-1953 till May-1955. Batista permitted this only because the U. S. insisted that the Cuban people, who adored Fidel, NEEDED TO KNOW THAT HE was still alive and not murdered like other rebel prisoners. Marta would take his written notes to Celia Sanchez out of his cell in her bra and get them in the underground pipeline so they would reach Celia in the foothills of the Sierra Maestra Mountains where Celia's viable Revolution was alive. So, Marta provided the Fidel-Celia nexus long before they ever laid eyes on each other, which happened in December of 1957 when Fidel finally joined Celia's Revolutionary War.
The photo above shows Marta Rojas introducing Fidel Castro in December of 1959 for his very first television address as the new leader of Cuba. Millions of lies have been told about the Cuban Revolution by Counter Revolutionaries in the United States since 1959. But from 1953 till this day in August of 2018, renowned journalist-author Marta Rojas has been the greatest expert on Fidel Castro, Celia Sanchez, and the Cuban Revolution. MOREOVER, Marta does not lie. So let me repeat those definitive words Marta told me in that very helpful 2005 email: "Since Celia Sanchez died of cancer in 1980, Fidel has ruled Cuba as he precisely perceives Celia would want him to rule it." Americans since 1959 are programmed to believe every word the Counter Revolutionaries say about Fidel Castro, Celia Sanchez, and the Cuban Revolution...including well-documented lies. But the words of experts like biographer Georgie Anne Geyer and the incomparable Marta Rojas have been documented as the gospel truth...for what it's worth in the propagandized world of U.S.-Cuban relations. The photo above, meanwhile, provides a rather good clue as to how close Fidel was to Marta...and vice-versa.
The highly regarded Cuban historian Pedro Alvarez Tabio once documented the many young Cuban rebels that were murdered by Batista's goons as the Revolution began to take shape -- such as martyred student leader Jose Echeverria, the martyred teacher and rebel recruiter Frank Pais, Frank's 17-year-old brother Jesus Pais, etc., etc., etc. Then the great historian Tabio wrote: "If Batista had managed to kill Celia Sanchez anytime between 1953 and 1957, there would have been no viable Cuban Revolution, and no revolution for Fidel and Che to join." I've researched Celia Sanchez since the 1980s and I believe the words of Cuba's two greatest experts on that subject -- Marta Rojas and Pedro Alvarez Tabio. I have yet to see an accurate word about Celia Sanchez from the Counter Revolutionaries who insist on dictating the Cuban narratives in the United States of America.
So, it's logically debatable whether the petite Celia Sanchez stood taller than Fidel Castro as the Cuban Revolution's most important figure. But Fidel himself gave the nod to Celia...and ONLY Celia...ahead of himself and all others.
The photo above was Celia Sanchez's all-time favorite image of Fidel Castro. This photo, Celia thought, best personified the rebel who got out of a Batista prison in 1955 and helped her already-viable rebel army win the Cuban Revolution on January 1, 1959. As it so happens in August of 2018, Celia Sanchez's favorite image of Fidel Castro is also the favorite of millions of Cubans today.
Entrance to Havana Harbor.
Havana and the sea.
Havana fishermen at dusk.
Havana musicians are ubiquitous.
Havana artists are ubiquitous too.
An Havana tourist.
More Havana tourists.
Restful, shady outside Havana tables.
Havana native poses for Vladimir.
Rosy Amaro Perez.
