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. Manufactured by a locally owned five-and-dime store called La Época, the glass highlights exactly who Cubans understood the primary heroes of the war against Batista and Cuba’s ostensibly new age were. Alongside long-term leaders like Fidel Castro and the Argentine recruit to Fidel Castro’s guerilla, Ernesto “Che” Guevara, and Camilo Cienfuegos, then the head of the Rebel Army, is one forgotten face. It belongs to Manuel Urrutia, a national hero. As a judge in Oriente province in 1957, Urrutia had refused to prosecute a group of captured activists charged with subverting the Batista regime on the grounds that the latter was unconstitutional and that the rebels were acting within their rights to save Cuba. Subsequently, Fidel selected Urrutia as the revolutionary government’s first President in 1958, but when Urrutia defined the government as “anti-communist” on national television in June 1959, Fidel demonized him continuously until Urrutia, realizing Fidel was secretly relying on Communists to consolidate his own plan to rule, fled the country in fear of his life. Gift of Nancy Macaulay, collection of Lillian Guerra.
