Gems of the Archive Archives

UF-IFAS and University of Havana faculty in the field

University of Florida, Institute of Food and Agricultural Science (UF/IFAS) faculty and University of Havana collaborators visit a potato farm in Havana Province (1995). The gentleman in sunglasses in the center of the photo is UF/IFAS Professor Dr. Jose Alvarez, who envisioned the possibility of active, nonpolitical, collaboration between U.S. and Cuban scientists and who was instrumental in bringing the University of Florida/University of Havana collaboration on agricultural issues to fruition.

UF-IFAS researcher Dr. Fred Royce conducting field research in Cuba

UF/IFAS Dr. Frederick Royce (right) when he was conducting graduate field research in Cuba in 1996. Also in the photo is Dr. Brian Pollitt (Univ of Glasgow, left) and cooperative vice-president Victor Franco (center) at sugarcane production cooperative (CPA) “Revolución de Etiopía,” Ciego de Avila Province, Cuba. Dr. Royce’s thesis “Cooperative agricultural operations management on […]

Cuba citrus juice processing plant

University of Florida/IFAS and University of Havana faculty prepare to tour the Cuban citrus processing facility in Jagüey Grande, Matanzas Province, Cuba, along with facility staff and administrators (2000). Photograph by Fred Royce. Guest curators Fred Royce and William Messina.

UF-IFAS faculty meeting members of Cuban agricultural production cooperative

University of Florida/IFAS faculty attend a meeting of members of the Cuban citrus agricultural production cooperative “30 de Noviembre”, Artemisa Province (2002). Photograph by Fred Royce. Guest curators Fred Royce and William Messina.

Florida citrus industry representatives tour Cuban citrus grove

Florida citrus industry representatives and UF/IFAS faculty members visit citrus groves of Citricos Ceiba farm near Caimito, Artemisa Province, Cuba, 2003. By the early 1990s, following the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the loss of Cuba’s preferential trade arrangements, the citrus groves of the Citricos Ceiba state farm had fallen into neglect. Agricultural inputs […]

New incentive-based management system in Cuban citrus

The new incentive-based management system used throughout Cuba’s Citricos Ceiba agricultural production cooperatives is based on a “finca” of around 15 hectares of citrus. The maintenance of the trees in each finca is overseen by a particular cooperative member, whose income is tied to the finca’s production. Photograph by Fred Royce. Guest curators Fred Royce […]

UF-IFAS faculty tour Cuban citrus grove

UF/IFAS Extension citrus scientist Dr. Steve Futch and UF/IFAS agricultural economist Dr. Tom Spreen (left) were part of a UF delegation that visited the Cuban citrus cooperatives 9 de Abril and 30 de Noviembre in April 2003. Notice the apparent health of these citrus trees before the arrival in Cuba of citrus Huanglongbing (HLB, or […]

UF-IFAS faculty and students meet with citrus farm workers

University of Florida/IFAS faculty and UF students, along with the University of Havana researchers, are hosted at a Cuban citrus farm and meet with farm administrators and workers (2006). This was at the high point of production for Cuba’s citrus industry, when Cuba was the third largest grapefruit producer in the world, behind the United […]

UF-IFAS faculty at vegetable farm in central Cuba

Distinguished Professor Daniel Cantliffe (left foreground, UF/IFAS Department of Horticultural Science) and other UF/IFAS and University of Havana faculty in the field with administrators and workers at a vegetable farm in central Cuba (2008). Photograph by Fred Royce. Guest curators Fred Royce and William Messina.

Joint UF-University of Havana ‘Our Shared Environment’ workshop in Havana

Dr. Jorge Angulo, Director of the University of Havana’s Center for Marine Research (Centro de Investigaciones Marinas, CIM-UH) presents a seminar in Havana to University of Florida/IFAS faculty during the UF-UH joint workshop “Our Shared Natural Environment” (2012). Photograph by Fred Royce. Guest curators Fred Royce and William Messina.

Cuban research scientists tour citrus packing house in Florida

Director of Cuba’s Plant Health Research Institute (Instituto de Investigaciones de Sanidad Vegetal, INISAV) Dr. Berta Lina Muiño, and fellow INISAV scientists tour the IMG citrus packing house in Vero Beach, Florida in 2015. The collaborative research project between INISAV and the UF/IFAS School of Forest Resources and Conservation (now the UF/IFAS School of Forest, […]

Cuban research scientists at Seald Sweet International

University of Florida/IFAS faculty and scientists from Cuba’s Plant Health Research Institute (Instituto de Investigaciones de Sanidad Vegetal, INISAV) meet with representatives from Seald Sweet International to discuss issues and challenges related to safe harvesting, transportation, and distribution of fresh fruits and vegetables (2015). Photograph by Fred Royce. Guest curators Fred Royce and William Messina.

Cuban sugarcane scientists talk with growers at sugarcane farm

Director of Cuba’s National Sugar Cane Research Institute (Instituto de Investigaciones de la caña de azúcar, INICA) Dr. Ignacio Santana, and distinguished Cuban sugarcane breeder Dr. Guillermo Galvez (right) and UF/IFAS faculty meet with Florida sugarcane farmers on a sugarcane farm in Palm Beach County, Florida (2015). Photograph by Fred Royce. Guest curators Fred Royce […]

Florida agricultural industry delegation at Vivero Alamar outside of Havana

Isis Salcines, one of the leaders of the Organopónico Vivero Alamar, discusses their farming operation with representatives from Florida agricultural and natural resource industries and UF/IFAS faculty during the 2015 University of Florida/IFAS Wedgworth Leadership Alumni delegation trip to tour Cuban agriculture. Organopónico Vivero Alamar outside of Havana is one of Cuba’s largest and most […]

University of Havana faculty tour Publix dairy processing plant Lakeland, Florida

University of Havana faculty collaborators and UF/IFAS agricultural economist Bill Messina visiting Publix dairy processing plant, Lakeland, Florida (2016). Photograph by Fred Royce. Guest curators Fred Royce and William Messina.

UF-IFAS faculty and Florida agricultural industry meet with members of Cuban farm cooperative

Florida agricultural industry representatives, Florida Farm Bureau staff, and University of Florida/IFAS faculty meet with members of the Cuban farm cooperative 9 de Abril, Caimito, Artemisa Province, Cuba (2016). Photograph by Fred Royce. Guest curators Fred Royce and William Messina.

UF-IFAS Professor Pedro Sanchez examines soil profile in Cuba

UF/IFAS Research Professor of Tropical Soils Dr. Pedro Sanchez examines a soil profile at a private farm, “Finca El Mulato,” near San José de las Lajas, Mayabeque Province, Cuba, 2016. Photograph by Fred Royce. Guest curators Fred Royce and William Messina.

Professors Haman and Palm at Organopónico outside Havana

UF/IFAS faculty members Dr. Dorota Haman and Dr. Cheryl Palm meet with the administrator of the urban farm “Organopónico 25 y 146”, Havana, Cuba (2016). Photograph by Fred Royce. Guest curators Fred Royce and William Messina.

Cuba Phytosanitary Institutions report

“Cuba’s Phytosanitary Institutions” report prepared in 2018 by UF/IFAS faculty as part of a multi-year, joint research project with Cuba’s Plant Health Research Institute (Instituto de Investigaciones de Sanidad Vegetal, INISAV). This project was funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, the first funding provided by USDA for field research in Cuba in nearly 50 […]

Cuca’s Cuban Christmas

In December 1949, my great-grandmother “Cuca” threw a Christmas Eve party that featured one of the ultimate symbols of fashion and modernity at the time: a dazzling aluminum Christmas tree imported from the United States. Known as a generous and joyful host, Cuca (who rarely consented to any photographic documentation of her “aging process” after the age of 15), displayed that Christmas tree on an “advent altar”, flanked by a handmade image of the Holy Family in the manger on one side and of the Magi still en route to Bethlehem on the other.

Chichi’s Christmas

Like the photograph that my maternal grandpa “Chichi” took of his three kids and his in-laws on Christmas Eve in December 1949, this image documents more than he probably intended about the social, economic, and cultural history of Cuba. At the center stands his ninety-plus-year-old mother, Teresa Rosado Rodríguez, known as “Mama Teresa,” holding the youngest member of the family, and his own mother, Carmen (in striped dress), the oldest of Mama Teresa’s 22 children.

Cuba’s Slave-Driven Economy & Map as Propaganda

Probably made in the late 1840s, this detailed map of Cuba features evidence of its “modern picturesque” advancement through historically sanitized scenes of commercial sugar and tobacco production that was— despite appearances to the contrary—made possible by hundreds of thousands of enslaved African and Cuban-born slaves.

400-Year-Old Map of Matanzas Bay

Printed in Holland in 1628, this map shows a “birds-eye-view” of the port of the Bay of Matanzas made by cartographers who likely never visited either Cuba or the province of Matanzas themselves. Hence, they erroneously depicted the Bay of Matanzas (whose name commemorates the Spanish massacre of native people on the site) as a volcanic mountainous landscape.

Ñica and My Family’s Story

When my dad fled Cuba for Spain in 1964, he left behind parents whom he never saw again: Agustín Guerra, an orphaned peasant who beat the odds to become a small tobacco farmer, and Aurora Almirall, a graduate of one of Cuba’s rigorous escuelas normalistas and a rural teacher who founded a one-room school in 1926.

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Ñica and the Reality of Race in Cuba

In 1959, the most illiterate province in Cuba was not the most associated with foreign investors’ economic control or massive sugar plantations: it was Pinar del Rio, tobacco production’s legendary ground zero, where the belief that slavery and anti-Black racism has played little or no role in the region’s economic and social development continues to […]

Bodega Dreams

Only the second son of eleven children to survive to adulthood (of twenty-two) born to María Teresa Rosado, my maternal grandfather Heriberto Rodríguez Rosado—better known in the family as “Chichi”—started selling mangoes on the streets of Cienfuegos with a goat named Alicia at the age of nine. That’s when Candido González, the Spanish-born owner of […]

A Cuban Family Celebrates the End of War

Marking the start of the Christmas holiday season of 1945, shortly after the end of World War II, this family photo speaks to a time in Cuba when electoral democracy had just ended the first of General Fulgencio Batista’s two regimes (1934-1944). Anything, for many Cubans, must have seemed possible. Those gathered include my ringleted, […]

Escuelas Básicas de Instrucción Revolucionaria

Launched for a three-year run in 1962, “Basic Schools of Revolutionary Instruction” were designed to teach the principles of Marxist-Leninism to legions of Cuban workers who were enthusiastic supporters of Fidel Castro’s Revolution but knew next to nothing about Communism—including how or even why the government was supposed to own and plan the national economy. Hoping to boost productivity among all workers, officials relied on the EIBRs to develop cuadros (awkwardly translated from the Soviet word “cadre”).

Cantando a Camilo [Singing to Camilo]

Flanked by fellow instructors at an Escuela Básica de Instrucción Revolucionaria, Roberto García Añel, a young twenty-something who worked in the accounting division of his factory, led worker-students in revolutionary songs at this class session, held sometime in 1964. On the wall hangs a mass-produced portrait of the popular revolutionary Comandante Camilo Cienfuegos, whose plane […]

Revolutionaries first, Marxists last?

It is impossible to know whether young loyalists like EBIR teacher Roberto García Añel would have chosen a Marxist path for Cuba if Fidel Castro had given them a choice. What is clear is that García Añel made a commitment to what he understood was “the Revolution” as a very young man, and he worked […]

Stamps: The Revolution’s Stained Glass

Stamp collecting reached a zenith of popularity in Cuba and the United States about the same time: 1950s and 1960s. As Cuba’s revolutionary state adopted communism, government organizations charged with ideologically educating citizens heavily promoted the hobby as a methodical, non-lucrative and meditative way to broaden one’s consciousness.

Camilo and continuity

The popularity of the handsome (and almost always smiling) Comandante Camilo Cienfuegos rivaled that of Fidel Castro until late October 1959 when the airplane meant to fly him back from Camagüey to Havana mysteriously disappeared over open water. Only a few hours earlier, he had reluctantly arrested fellow Comandante Huber Matos for resigning his post […]

Your spies are our heroes

A dizzying array of commemorations covers this page of stamps in Abreu Hernández’s album. While top designs honor flora, fauna, art, cinema, and the Moscow Summer Olympics of 1980 (boycotted by much of the Western world), other stamps depict guerilla leader Ernesto “Che” Guevara, as well as Tania Bunke, his lover and East German spy, […]

African solidarity…and the enslaved

A close-up of stamps reveals Cuba’s intense claims to solidarity with the world’s anti-colonial liberation movements in Africa and Vietnam and the Soviet Union’s victory over fascism in World War II. Yet contradictions persisted. One stamp honors Amilcar Cabral, a Marxist intellectual who launched independence in the Portuguese colony of “Guinea” (now Guinea Bissau) and […]

Fidel’s Bulls & Cows

In the mid-1960s through the early 1970s, Fidel Castro created (and personally managed) a national crossbreeding and insemination program that most scholarly observers credit with the destruction of Cuba’s vast herds of beef and dairy cattle. Confiscated from their owners—both wealthy, middle-income, and poor alike between 1960-1962—Cuba’s cattle died or failed to produce enough milk […]

Cubanizing Abe Lincoln

“You can fool all of the people some of the time and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all of the people all of the time.” This famous quote, attributed to US President Lincoln, occupied an unlikely place in 1960s Cuba: unanimity—the opposite of pluralism, let alone democracy–had been […]

Prehistoric Humans & the Birth of Ho Chi Minh

Issued at the same time (1970), these stamps depicting the evolution of humans and the “eightieth anniversary” of the birth of Vietnam’s liberator diverge radically in their illustrators’ style. Yet they are deeply didactic and precise in the lessons they convey. Eduardo “Guayo” Hernández Collection, Smathers Libraries, University of Florida

The Ten Million Ton Harvest of 1970

Called by Fidel Castro to be the largest sugar harvest in Cuban history and carried out by a nationwide force of nearly half a million unpaid (“volunteer”) workers, the Ten Million Ton Harvest of 1970 brought Cuba’s economic development to a grinding halt. Although they produced eight million tons—a historic record, the human cost workers […]

The Soviet Orbit

Thanks to the Soviet Union, Cuba enjoyed a short-lived “space program” that launched pilot Arnaldo Tamayo into space alongside Soviet cosmonaut Yury Romanenko in September 1980. Eduardo “Guayo” Hernández Collection, Smathers Libraries, University of Florida

Special Period Stamps

With the disappearance of Soviet aid and the Soviet Union itself by 1993, Cuba’s mail service ground to a virtual halt. Yet stamps continued to be produced even though the island’s mail carriers were in short supply. These years, known by Fidel Castro’s moniker as “The special period in a time of peace,” coincided historically […]

“Learn to Eat in Cuban”

Aprender a comer en cubano was literally the name of a daily, national public radio program sponsored in the 1940s by the first elected government of the Auténtico Party. Its leaders claimed to represent the “authentic” program of Cuba’s 1895 War for Independence. The least fulfilled goal of this war and the Republic it founded was the establishment of a prosperous small farmers’ economy.

“Revolutionarily Yours”

The Cuban government printed postcards like this one as well as special stationery for Cuban volunteer teachers who participated in the 1961 Literacy Campaign. As former maestro voluntario Ernesto Chávez explained to his students, citizens were supposed to sign off their letters and notes, much as adherents of the state still do, “revolucionariamente” [revolutionarily yours] […]

Ideological Training Songs for Voluntary Teachers

This list of songs come from a teacher-training manual that Ernesto Chávez carried like a socialist Bible when he served for four years as a maestro voluntario [volunteer teacher] in the mountains of El Escambray and Oriente province (1960-1964).

Mementos of a Euphoric Youth

Some of the strongest memories we conserve are embedded in the fragile tokens of a striking experience we once felt deeply but can no longer fully describe. Ernesto Chávez conserved these ribbons for decades. Raggedy from pinning it to the front of his teacher’s olive-green uniform nearly every day in 1960, one ribbon reads Patria o Muerte [Fatherland or Death], Fidel Castro’s historic revision of the 1959 Revolution’s original mantra of Patria y Libertad [Fatherland and Freedom].

ID Card of the Committee for the Defense of the Revolution

This card, commonly called a carnet in Cuba, belonged to the mother of Ernesto Chávez. She joined her local Comité de Defensa de la Revolución [CDR] soon after PSP strategists founded a block-to-block network of these organizations nationwide in the fall of 1960. At the time, the creation of CDRs—whose members’ task was to snoop […]

ID Card of the Federation of Cuban Women (FMC)

Since the 1960s, many scholars have noted how Cuba’s virtually all-male leadership burdened women with the most work “for the Revolution” yet they enjoyed little power over policies not immediately relevant to their gender. Women were expected to fulfill domestic chores, stand in line for rations, work outside the home, volunteer for no pay and, […]

Cuba’s FMC: A Cost-Benefit Analysis

Directed for decades by Vilma Espín, the FMC was the “mass organization” in which all women were supposed to participate. The term itself connotes Cuba’s adoption of norms from the Communist bloc.

Ernesto Chávez and Lillian Guerra in 2016

The University of Florida remains grateful to Ernesto Chávez for the donation of his personal archive, papers, books, and memories of life in early revolutionary Cuba for researchers and future generations. A memoirist and scholar of peasant and Canary Islanders’ folk traditions, Ernesto Chávez lives in Cuba. A guide to its contents can be found […]

BBC Archive: Robin Day in Castro’s Cuba

For this edition, we invite you to see a gem from the BBC Archive, which transports us back to the struggles, questions, and drama of Cuba’s early years of revolution.

Cover Image: Revolutionaries listen to Fidel Castro’s weekly televised show, March 1960. Andrew St. George Collection, University of Florida.

Guayo’s Collection: El Bogotazo

On April 9, 1948, the assassination of Liberal Party presidential candidate and congressman Jorge Eliécer Gaitán provoked an incendiary riot in downtown Bogotá. Military and police repression combined with violent protests left over three thousand dead. Working as a photojournalist who had planned to cover an inter-American diplomatic congress, Eduardo “Guayo” Hernández witnessed and fearlessly documented these tragic events.

Self-Portrait of an Enslaved Woman

Unusual for its large size (5”x7”) and the rarity of its subject, this tin type was made in Trinidad de Cuba in the early 1870s. I acquired it from a man I caught selling national antiquities to tourists. When I stopped the sale by explaining to his buyers why such an image should be treasured by Cubans rather than purchased like a tourist trinket for display in France, he quickly demanded that I put my money where my mouth was.

Turn-of-the-Century Geisha Fad

I grew up with this 1898 portrait of Mercedes Sotolongo Suárez del Villar, my then fifteen-year-old great-grandmother-to-be, better known as “Cuca.” Like virtually anyone who saw it, I was struck by the oddity of her dress: why was she wearing the clothing of a Japanese geisha? Only later, as a doctoral student working in archives, […]

Cuban Kindergarten

This photograph shows four devoted Kindergarten teachers with their charges on an excursion to a park in Cienfuegos in 1941. The teachers include my great aunt Olga Sotolongo (second and tallest adult from left) and her cousin Silvia “Chacha” Suárez del Villar (first adult on the right). Like many women of the middle classes who […]

First Tape-Recorded Interview of Fidel Castro in Sierra Maestra, April 1957

Herbert Matthews’ February 1957 blockbuster report in the New York Times of the survival of Fidel Castro and 18 members of an 82-man invasion force inspired young journalist Andrew St. George to go to the Sierra Maestra himself. With Coronet magazine’s funding and CBS’s heavy recording equipment, St. George made contact with clandestine activists of […]

Is that Fidel Castro?

Only at the insistence of the camp medic, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, did Fidel Castro finally concede a taped interview to St. George. He quickly convinced Fidel Castro of the value of addressing the English-speaking world directly. Castro subsequently wrote “Why We Fight”, the only single-authored manifesto of his entire time in the Sierra Maestra (December […]

St. George’s Gift of a Camera to Che Guevara

Halfway through St. George’s first trip to the Sierra Maestra, Che explained he had once made a living as a street photographer in Mexico after fleeing Guatemala and a job in the agrarian reform division after a CIA coup toppled Guatemala’s elected government. St. George then gifted Che Guevara with one of his three cameras and some film. Che expressed sheer delight with the gift. He also took several well-crafted pictures of St. George in the Sierra that he later used to prove his own presence there. On his second trip in the fall of 1957, St. George also began to bring back rolls shot by Che of daily life in the Sierra, the surrender of enemy soldiers, and the army officers who switched sides from Batista to Fidel during the war. St. George also provided the 26th of July Movement’s propaganda wing with many pictures of his own.

St. George and Anti-Batista Activists at the United Nations

In 1958, a large group of 26th of July Movement activists protested the presence of a Cuban delegation appointed by dictator Fulgencio Batista at a voting session of the United Nations in New York. I first found a photo of the whole group at the University of Florida and published it in Heroes, Martyrs, and […]

Caught in Color: 1st January 1959

Although Kodak produced its first color film in the early 1940s, most photographers only reluctantly used it, in part because mid-twentieth-century readers were accustomed to magazines with articles whose texts did not “compete” with accompanying photos unless they were explicitly designed as “picture stories.” Many editors never fully trusted St. George because they were predisposed to favor native English speakers to write their articles. St. George nonetheless produced full-color covers for Life magazine’s first January 1959 coverage of the 26th of July Movement’s takeover of the state. Images like these represent rare, never-before-published shots in the color of New Year’s Day, 1959. Here, Fidel Castro meets with longtime underground activist and fellow lawyer Armando Hart, backed by anti-communist and former Orthodox Party member Luis Orlando “Pupo” Rodríguez, Fidel’s personal bodyguard, holding a semi-automatic weapon. A second portrait shows Fidel and soldiers riding on a jeep at the crack of dawn, just before jumping into an eight-day “caravan of triumph” from Santiago to Havana.

Exhausted Soldiers and a Short-Term Anti-Communist President

One of the characteristics of St. George’s photography is that it often resisted the mythification of revolutionary reality. Here, his lens reveals dusty, exhausted Rebel Army soldiers marching through a town in Oriente province on New Year’s Day, 1959. St. George also regularly photographed Judge Manuel Urrutia, hand-picked by Fidel Castro to be President of the Republic, in the first weeks of 1959 when few other reporters seemed interested. His trust in Urrutia lasted and deepened, especially when Urrutia’s efforts to echo Fidel Castro’s own disavowal of Communism got him in trouble. In June 1959, Urrutia’s assertion on national television that the government was “anti-communist” elicited rebuke from Fidel Castro who attacked him in turn as morally weak and incapable of rule. St. George subsequently hand-delivered Urrutia’s letter of resignation to Fidel. Urrutía’s marginalization contributed to Fidel’s power and ultimately, his ability to rely on Communists, not the members of his own 26th of July movement, to rule unconditionally.

The Word in Action

In the first three years after the 1959 Cuban Revolution, no other photographer was as good at capturing the drama, charisma and sheer physical exertion typical of any of Fidel Castro’s hours-long speeches. In these frames, St. George relied on rapid-dire photographic methods to document Fidel in action. They evince a cinematographic quality.

Rubirosa, the Original “Latin Lover” and Fidel Castro, January 1959

Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo’s favored son-in-law, Porfirio Rubirosa, somehow managed to turn up at a Presidential Palace reception held for Fidel Castro, who had just completed his 8-day caravan-of-triumph from Santiago to Havana. Because Andrew St. George had written an exposé on Trujillo’s 1956 kidnapping and assassination of Jesús Galíndez, a Basque writer and legal […]

Che Guevara on National Radio

St. George took these pictures in either late 1959 or early 1960 as Ernesto “Che” Guevara addressed a live radio audience at the national headquarters of Cuba’s largest labor union, the Confederación de Trabajadores Cubanos [CTC]. By then, the CTC had refused to accept any Communist Party participation in their leadership on multiple occasions, in […]

José Ignacio Rivero, last director of Diaro de la Marina

A pro-business newspaper whose 128 years of publication in Cuba gave it a certain cache, Diario de la Marina lost its freedom from government interference in its content and publication in May 1960. Then, Diario de la Marina and other papers, including its ideological rival Prensa Libre, were intervened, and shuttered by Communist Party-organized militias. […]

Fidel Castro and Armando Hart Toast Anastas Mikoyan

Perhaps naïvely, most Cubans believed the revolutionary government’s story that the Soviet Vice Premier Anastas Mikoyan had come to Cuba in February 1960 in order to promote an exhibit of Soviet Culture in Havana. His real motives were to assist Fidel Castro in deepening Cuba’s ties to the Soviet bloc, particularly in areas of trade, […]

Government Rally outside of Santiago, Oriente in 1960

Unlike the previous year when Cuba’s nationalist (but still pro-capitalist) policies generated an economic boom and mass support for the state, the radicalizing policies of the summer of 1960 produced palpable tensions and outright opposition to Fidel Castro’s version of revolution. Held on July 26, 1960, this rally to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of Fidel’s failed Assault on the Moncada Barracks took on an oddly forced tone. Held outside the city of Santiago in a remote field in eastern Cuba, the rally entailed mobilizing hundreds of thousands of people to the site, including an unprecedented number of invited foreign Leftists from Latin America and the United States. Compared to its predecessor in July 1959, which relied on civic volunteers to coordinate the visit of 500,000 formerly landless peasants to Havana and their stays in private homes, the 1960 rally lacked the euphoria and spontaneity of citizen-led organization.

The Myth of the Revolution Shakes New York

For ten days in September 1960, Fidel Castro led a large delegation of top Cuban leaders to New York City where he was slated to address the General Assembly of the United Nations. Coming on the heels of an unexpected, blanket nationalization of all foreign-owned businesses that August, the trip catalyzed a frenzy of support. […]

Communists and Opera Fans, April 1959

Here Vilma Espín, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, Che’s wife Aleida March, Raúl Castro, Alfredo Guevara and Guillermo Cabrera Infante are seen attending a performance of the famed soprano Elizabeth Schwartzkopf during Fidel Castro’s good will tour of the northeastern United States in April 1959. Ironically, Schwarzkopf had been a member of the Nazi Party who had […]

The CIA’s Answer to Fidel’s Revolution

In early 1961, St. George photographed these young Cuban exiles who had recently been recruited for “Brigade 2506”, an armed force of about 1,500 men whom the CIA trained and financed to invade Cuba and ultimately, they hoped, to topple the government. As part of the plan, the CIA secretly developed what was supposed to be a transitional, pro-United States government under the name Movimiento de Recuperación Revolucionaria [MRR], led by Manuel Artime. Today both the CIA’s plot and its abysmal failure as a military operation are better known by the location of the invaders’ landing site at the “Bay of Pigs”. As these images bely, MRR members ranged dramatically in age and experience. St. George interviewed some of them at a hotel that served as a “barracks” in South Miami.

Life and Death in Anti-Castro Miami

Over the decade of the 1960s, St. George was repeatedly baffled by how little attention the national media paid to the open warfare that thousands of Miami Cubans—with and (later) without CIA funding—were conducting against Communist-ruled Cuba. This funeral procession likely took place in 1960 when the body of a Cuban man, charged with working […]

Exile commando force at secret training facility

One of many photographs St. George made of the same event, the image appears innocuous: its subjects—almost all male except for the young woman at its center—seem to be holding a social gathering. Yet the group was engaged in high-intensity training and political discussions at a secret facility somewhere in South Florida. Meticulously, St. George […]

Rolando Masferrer’s Private Army Trains in Miami

By the late 1960s, St. George had lost all hope that any armed exile group might succeed in toppling Cuba’s communist regime, particularly because he knew that such groups’ reliance on the United States, and often CIA funding, undermined their credibility—especially in Cuba. To his shock, one of the giants of the terror network on which Cuba’s former dictator Fulgencio Batista had relied began operating openly in Miami in 1965. Headed by ex-Senator, Spanish Republican exile, and Batista loyalist Rolando Masferrer, the militia took the same name it had once had in Cuba: Los Tigres. Famous for the atrocities they committed against civilians on behalf of Batista, Miami’s Tigres were mostly U.S. citizens. Their middle age and lackluster physical condition made them no less dangerous.

“Government by Television”

In this contact sheet, St. George catches Fidel Castro’s theatrical style of speaking on Ante la Prensa, a Cuban version of the United States’ popular Meet the Press. One difference obvious to any viewer, however, was that invited speakers on the American show offered comparatively short and courteous responses to on-stage reporters, whereas Fidel Castro’s answers often lasted two to three hours (on what was formerly a 45-minute telecast). On these shows, Fidel regularly justified radical policy moves, denounced any critics, and demanded the resignation of officials he considered too democratic or independently minded—including many members of his own cabinet who had given their lives to the fight against Batista. In 1959, journalist Herbert Matthews called Fidel’s constant presence on TV and radio “government by television”.

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The Puzzle of Ernesto “Che” Guevara Solved

An earlier edition of Gems of the Archive featured this puzzle, manufactured and purchased by Andrew St. George in Cuba. Here we see the same puzzle in the context that explains why St. George found it so interesting. Surrounded by books that normalized hero worship in the pivotal year of 1960, it was one of […]

Guardian and Donor of His Father’s Legacy

Along with thousands of images of Cuba and Latin America, the Andrew St. George Collection also includes many intimate portraits of the photojournalist’s family from the early years of the Revolution when, together, they witnessed Cuba’s tumultuous transformation. No words can express the gratitude that all of us who study and love Cuba feel toward the donors of the Andrew St. George Collection. His sons and their families have entrusted priceless treasures of knowledge to the University of Florida. Thank you.

TOYS THAT TEACH WHITE SUPREMACY

Known in the US South as “topsy turvy” dolls because of their two-in-one design, dolls like these from Cuba differ fundamentally from ones I have seen at local Florida antique stores.

CUBA’S 1961 CURRENCY CRISIS

When I was a little girl growing up in Kansas, I often asked my mother to explain why she had left Cuba. Rather than speak in adult abstractions that flatly cited black-and-white reasons such as “communism,” my mother often referenced specific experiences she had before she left Cuba in 1964. They revealed the Castro regime’s […]

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CATHOLIC COMMUNISM?

After the Cuban state formally dropped its promotion of atheism in favor of official secularity in 1991, the Papacy successfully negotiated the right of the Catholic Church to edit and publish theological newsletters like this one, Vida Cristiana [Christian Life]. One goal was to recover the discursive public space that had long defined personal values […]

“The Wounded Island” (1980)

A mixed media watercolor monoprint, Isla Herida is the unique creation of Florencio Lennox Campello, born in Santiago de Cuba in 1956, as part of a printing assignment while the renowned artist was still a young student at the University of Washington School of Art.

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The Puzzle of Che Guevara (1960)

Manufactured by a privately owned business in Cuba in 1960, this puzzle-portrait of Comandante Ernesto “Che” Guevara speaks to the market for hero-making propaganda and revolutionary memorabilia that citizens’ trust in the Revolution then represented.

“Terpsichore” by Manuel López Oliva (1997)

One of the nine muses in the religion of the ancient Greeks, Terpsichore is primarily known as the patron of dance.

“Free and Equal”: Really?

For much of its first three decades in power, the Cuban government spent an astonishing amount of money, time, and effort courting the white American and Western European “Left”, particularly through its Soviet-modelled Instituto Cubano de Amistad con los Pueblos [Cuban Institute of Friendship with the People, ICAP], originally founded in the early 1940s by Stalinist leaders of the Partido Socialista Popular, a label Cuban Communists adopted until 1965.

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Cuban Patriot Day, 1958

Since the 1920s, Cubans have celebrated as a national holiday the birthday of José Martí, the nationalist writer and principal civilian leader of Cuba’s 1895 War for Independence from Spain.

What a passport can say

In 1963, my father, Tomás H. Guerra, decided to leave Cuba for exile after the government passed communist reforms that eliminated his peasant family’s right to grow and sell crops independently of the state.

The Liberty Editions of 1959

Before Fidel Castro’s government took over the press in the early summer of 1960, Bohemia magazine had a vast circulation among subscribers across the island and large swaths of Latin America.

Quinceañera Glamour Shots of the 1970s

In 1968, Fidel Castro unexpectedly announced the confiscation of all remaining small businesses on the island without compensation to their owners.

Witnessing Cuba in the 1970s

Probably written in 1978 when the Carter administration negotiated with the Castro regime to allow visits by Cuban exiles and US citizens for the first time, this fascinating report paints a portrait not unlike that of Cuba today.

Sugar magnate (privately) endorses US-Cuba relations

Dated 1974, this letter from Cuban sugar baron Alfonso Fanjul to his cousin and fellow magnate George Braga reveals the tight connection between US foreign policy toward Cuba and the power of the United States’ wealthiest elite.

“This is your house, Fidel” (1959):

Throughout 1959, the revolutionary government headed by Fidel Castro and a cabinet of top revolutionaries who had fought the urban war against Batista was enormously popular.

Revolutionary Drinking Glass (1959):

This glass is a product of the massive tide of euphoria that engulfed popular culture and consciousness when Fidel Castro’s caravan triumphantly entered Havana on January 8, 1959, a week after the dictator Batista had fled.

Machado: Crímenes y horrores de un regimen by Sergio Carbó (1933):

Owner and director of the newspaper Prensa Libre, journalist Sergio Carbó completed this book, the first record of the atrocities perpetrated by President Gerardo Machado’s government against citizens, in late August 1933. It was published only two weeks after the dictator, his family and many military and police officials fled Cuba for sanctuary in Miami.

Medal for building “tunnels of love” or war? Fidel’s autocracy in the 1980s

In the wake of the Soviet Union’s collapse, many of the most far-fetched examples of Fidel Castro’s “policy-making-by-whim” became both the stuff of legend and taboo.

Cuban Cigarette Cards of Erotica

Most of us know that bubble gum companies once included collectible baseball cards in their packages in order to encourage sales. But did you know that Cuban cigarette manufacturers did something similar over a century ago?

Fidel Castro in Moscow’s Red Square, 1963

Taken by Alberto Díaz, better known as “Korda”, and bearing the stamp of his studio, this photograph shows a 36-year-old Fidel Castro addressing adoring crowds in Moscow on his April 1963 tour of the Soviet Union. Although conspicuously absent from the stage that day,