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 to protest the elevation of secret communists to important positions in the Rebel Army. Matos went on to serve twenty years in prison while “Camilo” became a malleable myth and martyr for the state. Dated 1968-1970, stamps made him an icon of Cuba’s allegedly uninterrupted century of revolution and the progenitor of the Camilitos, cadets at one of Cuba’s elite communist military academies. Eduardo “Guayo” Hernández Collection, Smathers Libraries, University of Florida
