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. Because its editors had taken every opportunity to contest the Batista dictatorship in the 1950s and documented an enormous amount of “news” that censors would not publish, Bohemia’s first three editions of 1959, printed at the height of public support for the Revolution, each sold more than one million copies. The “Liberty Editions” also provided extraordinarily detailed information about events and the struggles of revolutionary activists to fight the dictatorship that was previously unknown to much of the Cuban public. So seriously did many Cubans take these revelations that many, like Hector Sotolongo, had their copies of the magazine professionally bound. Hector titled his volume, “History of the Cuban Revolution, 1952-1959.”Personal collection of Lillian Guerra.
