Marta Rojas turned 81 in May of 2009. As a Cuban revolutionary, journalist, and author, her life has been without parallel. As a young reporter in Batista’s Cuba in 1953 Marta covered the Moncada trials that resulted in a 15-year prison sentence for Fidel Castro. As a trusted journalist, Marta had access to the imprisoned Fidel; as a dedicated revolutionary, she smuggled notes in her bra from his cell and used the urban underground to get them to Celia Sanchez, the rebel leader in the mountainous Sierra region of eastern Cuba. In similar fashion she smuggled return notes from Celia to Fidel.

After the triumph of the Cuban Revolution, the above photo shows Marta Rojas introducing Fidel Castro for his very first television address to the nation on December 17, 1959. From 1953 into 2009 -- as an intimate of Celia Sanchez and Fidel Castro, and as an internationally renown journalist, author, and historian -- Marta Rojas has more knowledge of Celia Sanchez, Fidel Castro, the Cuban Revolution and Revolutionary Cuba than any person alive, bar none. She is a sweet, gracious lady and I am deeply indebted to her for providing me unique insight into the life and times of the incomparable revolutionary Celia Sanchez.

Marta was not only the bravest journalist in Batista’s Cuba and the leading journalist in Revolutionary Cuba, she was also the bravest journalist in her world-wide coverage of the Vietnam War from the frontlines. Her five novels include Tania: The Unforgettable Guerrilla, which was published in the US by Random House in the 1970s. As the conduit for smuggled notes to and from Fidel Castro’s prison cell, Marta created the lifelong synergy between Fidel Castro and Celia Sanchez that kept his revolutionary fire ablaze at a point when the embers seemed forever doused. When I visited Cuba in 2004 to research my first biography of Celia Sanchez (published in 2005 by Algora of NYC), my top priority was input from Marta Rojas. Marta, for both my Celia Sanchez biographies, has not only answered my questions but she has also sent me precious e-mail attachments of hand-written notes by and to Celia Sanchez during the period (1959 to 1980) when Celia “made all the decisions for Cuba, the big ones and small ones,” according to notable Cuban insider Roberto Salas. While all researchers visiting Cuba are aware of Marta Rojas, I don’t believe she has cooperated as fully with any of them as she has with me regarding Celia Sanchez. Marta’s input coupled with my full access to seventeen Celia Sanchez-to-Nora Peters letters (written from 1953 till just before Celia’s death from cancer in 1980), I believe, provide me with insight that no other Western author has. After being mesmerized by those letters in the 1980s, I have studied Celia Sanchez and the Cuban Revolution each day for two decades. The two most fascinating things about the Cuban Revolution, in my opinion, are: (1) The dominant role performed by the doctor’s daughter Celia Sanchez, and (2) the massive effect the little island of Cuba has had for so long on international affairs, especially those of the United States. This biography of Celia Sanchez is from the prism of a conservative, democracy-loving U. S. Republican who happens to be neither a leftist nor a liberal. Each of the 25 chapters of this biography begins with a documented quotation by or about Celia Sanchez. In 2005 Marta Rojas, the one person who would know, told me: “Since Celia died of cancer in 1980 Fidel has ruled Cuba only as he precisely believes she would want him to rule it.”

My favorite photographs of Marta Rojas and Celia Sanchez are depicted on the next page. The top photo shows Marta as a three-year-old in the streets of Santiago de Cuba using an umbrella to shade herself from the tropical sun. The bottom photo shows a happy Celia during a rare moment of relaxation in Revolutionary Cuba.

The Legend of La Paloma

The True Story of Cuba’s Celia Sanchez

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Author: Rich Haney

This photo shows Celia Sanchez, on the left, with her friend Vilma Espin during a lull in the fighting in the Sierra Maestra during the Cuban Revolution. Typically, Celia is the studious one and Vilma is the frivolous one. They are the two most famous heroines of the Cuban Revolution, legendary as guerrilla fighters and as revolutionary leaders and planners. Their power in Revolutionary Cuba equaled and often surpassed that of Fidel and Raul Castro. Fidel idolized Celia; Raul married Vilma. (Photo courtesy: The Cuban Historical Society)

This quotation is taken from a letter Cuba’s greatest revolutionary heroine, Celia Sánchez, wrote to her American friend Nora Peters in February of 1973, fourteen years after the triumph of the Cuban Revolution and at a point when Celia, with the full support of Fidel Castro, was the top decision-maker on the island of Cuba. From an historic perspective, the above sentence is quite arcane – ensconced as if in a protective cocoon in the middle of a long letter (nine pages) from one dear friend to another – and yet, I believe, any understanding of the vast ramifications of the Cuban Revolution must begin with that sentence.

The “she” Celia spoke of was a ten-year-old Cuban peasant girl named María Ochoa. The “was” concerned the fact that María had been legally kidnapped in early 1953 in rural eastern Cuba and then legally raped to death in a Mafia-controlled Havana casino on the western end of the island by a rich New Orleans pedophile lured to the island to gamble in the lecherous U.S. – backed and Mafia – backed Fulgencio Batista dictatorship. Celia Sánchez at the time was the 32-year-old, 99-pound daughter of a rich and well known physician, Dr. Manuel Sánchez, in the little southeastern Cuban town of Media Luna. Dr. Sánchez owned three farms and was the former head of the Cuban Medical Association. His beloved daughter, Celia, was a peasant-loving dissident appalled by the wholesale robbery and massive atrocities being inflicted on the island by the Batista, Mafia and U.S. capitalist goons, but she had never entertained thoughts of becoming a revolutionary guerrilla fighter against a brutal dictator massively supported by the strongest criminal organization in the world, the Mafia, and by the strongest nation in the world, the United States of America. But all that restrained reticence was tossed aside because of what happened to little María Ochoa, the peasant girl that Celia had helped birth and then, for the next decade, came to adore because she was verily enthralled by the little girl’s “sweetness” and “beauty.”

Weeks of dire anxiety coated Celia’s mind following the kidnapping although there were suspicions because it was well known that little peasant girls were routinely kidnapped to be used as sex objects, especially in the island’s two biggest cesspools – Havana to the West and Santiago de Cuba to the East. The dissident underground movement finally got word back to Celia regarding María’s fate. Felipe Mateo, a teenage University of Havana student working undercover as a janitor, discovered María’s used-up, tortured body in the basement of a Mafia-controlled Havana hotel/casino.

At 3:00 A.M., knowing the remains would be disposed of after daybreak, Celia and Felipe stole María Ochoa’s body from that basement and buried it in the countryside. It was at that gravesite that Celia Sánchez made a tearful but sacred promise to the little girl: “I will make them pay for what they did to you and what they are doing to Cuba.” Felipe Mateo was witness to those words.

In precisely that manner and for precisely that reason, Celia Sánchez, the petite doctor’s daughter, declared war on Batista, the Mafia, and the United States of America. The odds were at least a billion-to-one that her declaration was meaningless because never had a U.S. – backed dictatorship been threatened, and Batista was additionally supported by the omnipotent and ruthless Mafia. Antonio Guiteras, a powerful peasant-loving and democracy-loving politician on the island, had resisted Batista on behalf of the peasants. Antonio Guiteras was murdered at Matanzas Bay on May 8, 1935, because he was considered a threat to U.S. – backed dictator Fulgencio Batista. The young upstart Fidel Castro in 1953 was sentenced to fifteen years in a Batista prison after Castro’s brave little band was shot to pieces trying to capture Batista’s Moncada garrison on the edge of Santiago de Cuba.

Celia Sánchez was well aware of how easily Batista had crushed Guiteras, Castro and all other opponents. She was still undeterred and forever guided by the sacred promise she had made at the grave of little María Ochoa. Incredibly, the doctor’s daughter would evolve into the greatest threat to the powerful Batista dictatorship, and she would indelibly stamp the fate of little María Ochoa as the biggest mistake Batista, the Mafia and the United States ever made on the island of Cuba. Along the way, amidst the drifting smoke of many battles and then measured by the tenacious longevity of the Cuban Revolution, Celia Sánchez would enshrine herself as “the greatest” revolutionary leader and the “most outstanding” frontline guerrilla fighter of the Cuban Revolution, simple but poignant facts pointed out to this day by a billboard that fronts the shrine that once was her native home in the Cuban town of Media Luna.

“She was the sweetest and most beautiful thing in sweet, beautiful Cuba.”

The above quotation was credited to Haydée Santamaría in Bohemia Magazine in February of 1973. Haydée, next to Celia, will always reign as the second most famous heroine of the Cuban Revolution.

Along with the Castro brothers, Fidel and Raül, Haydée was the major planner and participant in the famed rebel attack on Batista’s powerful Moncada army garrison on the outskirts of Santiago de Cuba on July 26, 1953. The little band was shot to pieces, all of them killed or quickly captured and imprisoned. Very quickly, sixty-one of the prisoners were gruesomely tortured to death. That was also the intended fate of the three imprisoned leaders – Fidel, Raül, and Haydée. Just one thing kept them alive and that was the fact that the brazen attack against the hated Batista dictatorship had made the three leaders instant heroes among the majority peasants. Women peasants monitored the prison and made sure that the media, including the New York Times, did likewise. In that milieu, Batista decided he couldn’t murder the top rebel attackers but instead was forced to bring them to trial, the trial that resulted in Fidel’s fifteen-year prison sentence.

Meanwhile, Haydée was unmercifully tortured in her prison cell in an effort to get her to reveal all she knew about the rebel underground. She refused to divulge even one iota of information, well knowing that just mentioning the name of an anti-Batista dissident would result in the murder of that individual. The Batista goons then tried another tactic with Haydée. They tied her to a chair and forced her to watch as first her fiancée, Victor Torres, and then her brother, Abel Santamaría, were tortured to death in front of her eyes, and then their warm testicles and eyeballs were rubbed over her face and chest. Still, Haydée Santamaría refused to provide her tormentors with any information about the rebel underground.

But the history of the Cuban Revolution chronicles the fact that Haydée got out of Batista’s prison in 1955 with death squads dogging her trails.

She made her way to the Sierra Maestra Mountains on the eastern end of the island to join Celia Sánchez’s guerrilla revolution. In short order, the massively motivated Haydée became a legendary guerrilla fighter, a deadly frontline operative against any force Batista sent to the Sierra.

The best biography of Haydée Santamaría is entitled “Rebel Lives” published by Ocean Press of Australia and edited by Betsy Maclean of New York City. The cover of the book features a picture of the heavily armed Haydée and Celia marching in the dense jungles of the Sierra during the height of the fighting, with the close-up black-and-white photo vividly depicting the vast determination coating the faces of the two incomparable female guerrilla warriors. Another photo of Haydée shows her on horseback in the Sierra, with a heavy ammunition belt slung over her left shoulder and chest.

After the triumph of the Cuban Revolution on January 1, 1959, Haydée emerged, after some early shuffling, as one of the seven most powerful leaders in the new Cuba – three women (Celia, Haydée and Vilma Espín) and four men (Fidel Castro, Che Guevara, Camilo Cienfuegos, and Raül Castro). Celia, always idolized by Fidel and his constant companion from December of 1956 in the Sierra till her death from cancer in January of 1980, was the most powerful person and the top decision-maker on the island from 1959 till 1980. Vilma Espín, a fearless guerrilla rebel in the Sierra, married Raül Castro in 1959 and also became the ultra-powerful head of the Cuban Federation of Women in 1960; so Vilma, till her death in 2007, was a superb and unchallenged power in Revolutionary Cuba. But unlike Celia and Vilma, Haydée preferred the arts to politics. In Revolutionary Cuba, Haydée founded Casa de las Americas, a renowned literary institution that soon became a beloved refuge for talented but besieged artists and intellectuals across all of Latin America. Haydée concentrated on nurturing her beloved Casa de las Americas, including a branch in Paris, but she remained close to her three greatest revolutionary compatriots – Celia, Fidel and Che Guevara. When Che was executed by the CIA-directed Bolivian army in 1967, Haydée was devastated. But Celia’s death from cancer in 1980 was the one thing that Haydée could not endure. She committed suicide with a gunshot to the head in her bathroom. Betsy Maclean’s biography of Haydée confirms that the suicide was directly because of the death of Celia Sánchez, whom Haydée worshipped. Celia Hart, Haydée’s daughter who was named after Celia Sánchez, became a prolific Latin American writer and lecturer. Celia Hart also confirmed that her legendary mother’s suicide was because of her sorrow over the death of Celia Sánchez. “My mother,” Celia Hart wrote, “was a fearless guerrilla fighter and she survived the deaths of her fiancée, her brother and her dear friend Che. But I knew, as Celia Sánchez lay dying from cancer, my mother would not survive her passing. As a girl, I felt the same way…for the longest time.”

(Note: Celia Hart and her brother Abel, the beloved children of revolutionary icons Haydee Santamaria and Armando Hart, both died in a car crash on the edge of Havana during the fall of 2008 as hurricanes Ike and Gustav were causing unparalleled damage on the hurricane-prone island. Celia Hart had been named for Celia Sanchez and Abel Hart had been named for Haydee‘s brother Abel who was tortured to death in a Batista prison).

Surpassed only by her idol Celia Sánchez, Haydée Santamaría will always reign as the second most important heroine of the Cuban Revolution. To this day, the literary edifice that she founded and nurtured, Casa de las Americas, remains very important to the writing, musical and fine arts culture of Latin America. On March 10, 2007, Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Nobel Laureate and Latin America’s most famed author, was in Havana to present the Haydée Santamaría Medal to Cuban singer Pablo Milanes, the internationally acclaimed folk singer who wrote the seminal Latin American love song “Yolanda.”

Milanes was quoted by the Associated Press on March 10, 2007, as saying: “I am especially moved to have this medal named after my mentor, the late Haydée Santamaría. She fought so hard for what she believed in up in Cuba’s Sierra Mountains, and she fought so hard for Latin artists like me. God bless the time she spent on this earth. I hope she is proud of me.”

The above quotation was given to me by General Teté Puebla when I visited Cuba in 2004, via a legal license from the U. S. government, to research the footprints Celia Sánchez left behind on the gorgeous island she called “mi Cubita bella” (“my beautiful little Cuba”).

Teté Puebla, next to Celia Sánchez and Haydée Santamaría, is the third most famous female guerrilla fighter in the Cuban Revolution and, together with Celia, Haydée, and Vilma Espín, among the top four Cuban heroines. Today Teté is a very powerful general in the Cuban army. At the age of fifteen in the Sierra Teté had already carved out a niche as a fearless warrior and leader.

The best biography of Teté Puebla was published by Pathfinder Press and edited by Mary-Alice Walker in 2003. It is entitled “Marianas in Combat: Teté Puebla and the Mariana Grajales Women’s Platoon in the Cuban Revolutionary War, 1956-1958.” The cover of the book features a picture of Teté in her modern general’s uniform as well as a black-and-white photo of Teté with some of the other women and girls that formed the all-female Mariana Grajales guerrilla unit, which Teté fearlessly and brilliantly led from the frontlines as a guerrilla legend at the tender ages of fifteen and sixteen. (Mariana Grajales was a black Cuban woman famed for fighting the Spanish in an earlier revolution).

When the beautiful, teenage Teté Puebla, a black Cuban, joined the Celia Sánchez-led revolution in the Sierra, her motivation was already deeply embedded in her heart and her soul. Her motivation, like that of thousands of peasant girls and women who became pivotal warriors in the revolutionary fight against Batista, is often overlooked or disregarded by protectors of the Mafia’s image, Batista’s image, and America’s image relating the origins of the Cuban Revolution.

Here is how General Teté Puebla described her motivation, and it parallels the motivations of countless other Cuban girls and women like her: “In my village, Batista’s Masferrer Tigers would tie innocent victims up and put them in a sack, pour gasoline on them, and set them on fire. Girls in my village, including a relative, were gang raped by 50 or more of Batista’s soldiers. The brutality from the nearby Manzanillo barracks was intended to quell any anti-Batista dissent from the peasants. I was a 14-year-old peasant girl when I saw that happening. It didn’t quell me. I had to fight back. The only fight that was going anywhere was Celia’s fight in the Sierra. When I got there, there were other girls inspired like me, just as good at fighting as me. That’s how the all-girl Mariana Grajales Platoon formed. Fidel, who joined Celia in December of 1956 and was at her side day and night after that, actually named the platoon ‘Mariana Grajales.’”

In 2004 General Puebla added, “Both Fidel and Celia were great admirers of

the rebel fighter Mariana Grajales for the fight she and her sons waged against the Spanish long ago. That name inspired us all the more. Celia was proud and awed by the frontline fighting of the Mariana Grajales Platoon in the Sierra, and I have always been proud our greatest leader was proud of me.”

For her personal heroics as a guerrilla fighter and for her leadership of the Mariana Grajales Platoon in the Sierra, Teté Puebla will forever be enshrined as one of the four greatest heroines of the Cuban Revolution. To this day General Teté Puebla starkly remembers what the Batista goons did to innocent young peasants in and around her hometown of Yara in eastern Cuba. Till those sad days in 1980 when they died, Celia Sánchez and Haydée Santamaría never forgot what happened to little girls like Mariá Ochoa and young men like Victor Torres and Abel Santamaría. In 2006 and 2007 U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice repeated the Batistiano refrain that has assaulted Teté Puebla’s heart and soul since 1959: “The goal of the U.S. government is to return democracy to Cuba.” RETURN DEMOCRACY TO CUBA to Teté Puebla means a return of the Florida-based Batistianos! And that’s why today Teté Puebla is a general in the Cuban army. For the Batistianos, who are very good at hiding behind the skirts of the U.S. military and the U.S. treasury, to return to Cuba, they would still have to kill Teté Puebla. They couldn’t do that in the Sierra when she was a teenager in the 1950s or at the Bay of Pigs when she was barely out of her teens in 1961. Even today, if the U. S. sent soldiers to Cuba to fight on behalf of the Batistianos, Teté Puebla would meet them on the frontlines. That’s what she told me on my visit to Cuba in 2004. And that’s because the 14-year-old Teté saw the Batistianos burn her friends to death in gasoline-soaked sacks and locked sheds, something Condoleezza Rice forgot and conveniently never mentioned. Teté hasn’t forgotten. When she mentioned it to me, a big tear traced down her cheek onto her uniform. That big tear indicated to me why the Cuban Revolution, against all odds, is still alive on the island of Cuba.

The atrocities of the Batista dictatorship against innocent peasants transformed the 14-year-old Teté Puebla into the famed teenaged guerrilla fighter. In the euphoria that signaled the triumph of the Cuban Revolution on the last day of December, 1958 – when the rebels captured Santa Clara before storming toward Havana – Teté was hoping the leaders of the Batista terror would stand and fight in the capital city. However, the fall of Santa Clara was enough to send the Batista and Mafia leaders fleeing towards their getaway boats and airplanes. Around 3:00 A.M. on the morning of January 1, 1959, six cash-stuffed airplanes left Camp Columbia on the edge of Havana destined for safer havens, mostly southern Florida; the plane carrying Mafia kingpin Meyer Lansky landed first in the Dominican Republic, where the vicious U.S. – friendly dictator Rafael Trujillo was in his 30^th year of his murderous rule. Lansky, safe in the U.S., would not die till in his seventies of natural causes, never having spent a day in prison although he illegally amassed one of America’s largest fortunes, much of it derived from the rape and robbery of Cuba.

Like Mafia kingpins Meyer Lansky and Santo Trafficante, the other leaders of the Batista dictatorship in Cuba – including Batista himself, Rafael Diaz-Balart, Rolando Masferrer, etc. – would enjoy and expand their astounding wealth thanks to the continued support of the U.S. government and to the new dictatorship they quickly established on U.S. soil – namely southern Florida and Union City, New Jersey, the two Mafia havens that had spawned many of the thugs who teamed with Batista and the U.S. government in ravaging Cuba right up until January 1, 1959.

No, Teté Puebla has never forgotten what transformed her from a studious 14-year-old peasant girl into the legendary guerrilla fighter. Thus, Teté was not in a celebratory mood the first week of January, 1959, with the triumph of the revolution. Instead, the famed teenage leader of the all-female guerrilla unit in the Sierra spent the first three weeks of January-1959 leading a rebel unit fervently searching for Batista leaders who had so viciously tormented helpless peasants. Her unit rounded up about seventy-five Batistianos that she turned over to Camilo Cienfuegos and Che Guevara, the first two revolutionary commanders to reach Havana. But she was saddened that the three Batista leaders she most wanted to get her hands on – Rolando Masferrer, Rodolfo Masferrer, and Rafael Diaz-Balart – had escaped the island to nearby, much safer havens.

Rafael Diaz-Balart, whom Teté considered the prime Batista collaborator of the Masferrer brothers, was actually in Paris, France, during the first week of January, 1959. But by the middle of January, he had joined his fellow escapees in Florida. Rafael had a fortune estimated by historians to be worth hundreds of millions of dollars. He maintained mansions in Spain and Florida, flying back and forth in his jets. Both Rafael Diaz-Balart and Jorge Mas Canosa became billionaires thanks to money accumulated in Batista’s Cuba and then especially thanks to the money they accumulated in southern Florida, which from 1959 to the present day has been a Batistiano dictatorship far wealthier than Batista’s in Cuba.

Of course, all Internet biographies of the Batistiano billionaires and millionaires in Florida that they “arrived from Cuba penniless.”

With their financial power, Rafael Diaz-Balart and Jorge Mas Canosa easily controlled the political power in Florida and the Cuban agenda in Washington, especially beginning with the Reagan administration when Canosa formed the powerful and unchallenged Cuban American National Foundation, which essentially has been the Cuban government in exile since the 1980s.

Rafael Diaz-Balart and Jorge Mas Canosa both died of old age in Florida without realizing their dreams of retaking Cuba. But to this day, the second generations of the Diaz-Balart and Canosa families still control both Florida and the U.S. Cuban policy. The primary dictators of America’s Cuban policy are now three members of the U.S. Congress from southern Florida – Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Rafael’s two sons, Lincoln and Mario Diaz-Balart. Along the way, the Diaz-Balarts and Ros-Lehtinen, when it comes to Cuba, inherited absolute dictatorship of their own U.S. political dynasty – the Bush dynasty that has featured George H. W. Bush, Jeb Bush, and George W. Bush.

In 2008, the last full year of the two-term George W. Bush presidency, Ros-Lehtinen and the Diaz-Balart brothers were huge backers of John McCain’s Republican presidential bid, believing he would be an extension of the Bush dynasty. During any Republican administration, Ros-Lehtinen and the Diaz-Balarts would continue to totally dictate America’s Cuban policy, a policy that has humiliated the United States for over half a century. During the Obama presidency, the plan of Ros-Lehtinen and the Diaz-Balarts is for Jeb Bush, after his two terms as Florida’s governor, to get a U. S. Senate seat and then run against Obama in the presidential sweepstakes of 2012. If successful in 2012 or 2016, Jeb Bush would provide the Miami Cuban hardliners a third Bush presidency that would take 100% of their orders pertaining to Cuba even if 100% of all other Americans and 100% of all other people around the world disagreed with those orders. Democracy and majority opinion has never fazed the Bush political dynasty when it comes to dictation from Miami regarding Cuba, and Jeb Bush is a looming threat to extend that travesty despite his older brother having exited the White House amidst extreme unpopularity at home and abroad.

The Diaz-Balart brothers and Ros-Lehtinen, with their immense financial power and their control of Florida’s political structure, are well aware that even a Democratic administration will bend to their will regarding Cuba. Florida has 27 electoral votes, 10 percent of the 270 needed to win the presidency. New Jersey, also aligned with the Florida Batistianos, has 15 electoral votes. Incredible wealth, along with the control of 42 electoral votes, etc., will most likely keep the Diaz-Balart brothers and Ros-Lehtinen in control of the U.S. Cuban policy even in post-Castro Cuba and post-Bush America. Cuban exiles like the Diaz-Balarts and Ros-Lehtinen have attained astounding wealth and political power in the U. S. based on perpetrating the anti-Cuban fight for exactly fifty years as of January 1, 1959. If that fight ended, so would the lush gratuities; therefore it will not end anytime soon.

Not only did Rafael Diaz-Balart choose to escape Cuba and avoid Teté Puebla’s fervent desire to get her hands on him but Rolando Masferrer and Rodolfo Masferrer also chose to run rather than stand and fight in Havana against guerrillas like the teenage Teté. Rolando Masferrer, the leader of the infamous Masferrer Tigers in Batista’s Cuba, escaped to Florida in a boat that contained, according to historic accounts, $10 million of his cash. That tiny amount of loot was all he could quickly get in his getaway boat. But remember, back in the 1950s numerous Latin American magazines and newspapers had already documented that “the top twenty officials in the Batista dictatorship” each had accounts exceeding $1 million in Swiss banks while most of the loot being taken in Cuba was being sent to banks in the Mafia havens of Miami, Florida, and Union City, New Jersey. So it can be assumed that, in addition to the $10 million in 1950s money that Rolando Masferrer had on his getaway boat, many more millions awaited him in U. S. banks.

All the biographical accounts of the Masferrer Tigers recount their unspeakable crimes in Batista’s Cuba, crimes such as the ones that impacted young Teté Puebla. And like the other Batista leaders, Rolando Masferrer transferred those crimes to U.S. soil, with the same freedom and even more financial support than he enjoyed in Cuba. Soon after landing in Florida, Masferrer was instrumental in creating paramilitary units that repeatedly struck back viciously at Cuba and Cuban exiles in Florida who did not agree totally with him.

The Cuban Revolution represents many firsts for the United States, such as marking the first U.S. – backed dictatorship to be overthrown and then, even more everlastingly significant, becoming the first U.S. – backed dictatorship to then set up shop on U.S. soil, creating a more powerful dictatorship than Batista had in Cuba.

The eviction of the Batista dictatorship in Cuba and its resurrection in Florida reshaped the U.S. democracy, highlighting America’s support of ruthless Third World dictators, its partnerships with the Mafia, and its ties to and protection of terrorists. It also thrust little Cuba onto the international stage. That stage enlarged considerably in April, 1961, when Revolutionary Cuba again startled the world by defeating the offensive Bay of Pigs attack, which stands as the second phase of the unending U.S. and Batistiano efforts to recapture Cuba. The first phase, begun even before the 1961 Bay of Pigs attack, was the famed Operation Mongoose farce that was formed to assassinate Cuba’s leaders and unleash terrorist attacks on the island’s coastlines as well as its international interests.

The third phase, in place from 1962 to the present day, was and is the economic blockade of the island that has been designed to severely punish and deprive the Cuban peasants for the purpose of encouraging them to internally overthrow the Cuban Revolution. Like the military and terrorist attacks, and like the countless assassination attempts, the blockade has failed to restore the Batisitianos to power in Cuba although it is the longest, strongest and cruelest economic blockade ever imposed by a powerful nation against a tiny one.

From its infancy in the 1950s to the present day, the Cuban Revolution has been a female-oriented phenomenon, the “greatest phenomenon of our time” according to historians such as Robin Blackburn and Jane Franklin. The most important female revolutionaries – Celia Sánchez, Haydée Santamária, Vilma Espín, Teté Puebla, Melba Hernández, Marta Rojas, Alicia Alonso, etc. – have one thing in common: They all have or will live out their lives as fervent supporters of the revolution. And that fact largely accounts for the revolution’s longevity. Two of the famed female guerrilla fighters – Celia and Vilma – had political power equal to the Castro brothers, Fidel and Raul, from 1959 till their tragic deaths from cancer – Celia’s in 1980 and Vilma’s in 2007. Historians or pundits who disagree with that assessment also ignore two pertinent quotations from two prime Cuban insiders – Roberto Salas and Marta Rojas. Salas, the famed Cuban journalist, stated in his notable book (A Pictorial History of the Cuban Revolution), “Celia made all the decisions for Cuba, the big ones and the small ones. When she died of cancer in 1980, we all knew no one could ever replace her.” Rojas stated in 2005, “Since Celia died of cancer in 1980, Fidel has ruled Cuba only as he precisely believes Celia would want him to rule it.” Vilma’s political power in Cuba beginning in 1959 was almost equal to Celia’s. From 1959 till her death in 2007 Vilma was married to Raul Castro and also the vigorous leader of the powerful Cuban Federation of Women. In 2008 Mariela Castro, the 45-year-old daughter of Raul and Vilma, is among hundreds of Cuban women with immense power in Cuba. Josefina Vega, another current Cuban woman with enormous power, is a diehard Celia Sanchez disciple.

Teté Puebla, the 1950s teenage guerrilla fighter and now a general in the Cuban army, remains as determined as ever to keep the Batistianos in Florida and off the island of Cuba. To this day, Teté regrets the fact that her prime nemesis, Rolando Masferrer, escaped to Florida where he formed Masferrer Tiger-like paramilitary units to attack Revolutionary Cuba. “He was like all the other Batista leaders -- a killer-thief and a killer-coward,” Teté says with conviction.

Rolando Masferrer was born on July 12, 1918, in Holguin, Cuba. He was a staunch Communist and a leader of the Cuban Communist Party that twice was reinstated by Batista. Masferrer was also a lawyer, congressman, and newspaper publisher in Batista’s Cuba.

One of the paramilitary units formed by Masferrer in Florida, known as the “30^th of November” organization, concentrated on assassinating Cuban leaders.

Masferrer’s efforts in Florida were repeatedly assisted by CIA leaders such as Richard Bissell. On September 26, 1960, Masferrer sent four boats to Cuba but only one landed safely, and three Americans on that boat – Allan D. Thompson, Anthony Zerba and Robert O. Fuller – were killed. In December of 1960 the Miami Herald, in updating Masferrer’s well-known paramilitary groups, reported that Masferrer was using a ranch owned by multi-millionaire Howard Hughes to polish the “killing skills” of his Florida soldiers. In 1961 Masferrer had a personal meeting with President John Kennedy to discuss various anti-Castro tactics. In the early 1960s Masferrer plotted a plan and accumulated a force designed to capture Haiti for the purpose of using that nearby country as a staging point to attack Cuba.

In Florida, Masferrer competed with two even more powerful and richer Cuban exiles – Jorge Mas Canosa and Rafael Diaz-Balart -- as leaders of the primary anti-Castro factions in Florida. The three men had visions of being the new leader of Cuba when, as expected, the ever-friendly U.S. government helped them recapture the lush island. This led to internecine warfare. Masferrer lost. On October 31, 1975, Rolando Masferrer was murdered by a powerful bomb that ignited when he turned the ignition in the car parked beside his Miami home. That left Mas Canosa and Diaz-Balart as the leaders of the Cuban government-in-exile.

Miami and other cities and towns in southern Florida were unprepared and unable to cope with the violence that resulted from the relocation of the Batista dictatorship to U.S. soil. For example, here is the way the top writer for the Miami Herald, Edna Buchanan, began her front-page article on April 18, 1976: “During Easter Week, 1974, Cuban exile leader Jose de la Torriente is shot dead. During Easter Week, 1976, Cuban exile Ramon Donestevez is shot. During the two years between those shootings bullets cut down Cuba-coexistance advocate Luciano Nieves, 43, in a hospital parking lot; a dynamite bomb killed anti-Castro revolutionary Rolando Masferrer, 58; Bay of Pigs leader Higinio Diaz, 51, and exile activist Jose Antonio Mulet, 55, survived bullet wounds in separate shootings. There are no arrests…”

There were “no arrests” because the local police forces were out-gunned and out-manned and, if they investigated at all, they often bumped head-on into the U.S. government, which not only tolerated but supported much of the mayhem.

This official report by the Metro Dade County Organized Crime Bureau on June 18, 1979, detailed these facts: “Cuban exile terrorists have blown up ships in the Miami Harbor; they have placed bombs on Russian ships in Puerto Rico and New Jersey; they have blown up a Cuban aircraft in the air killing all 73 souls on board; they have placed a bomb on an airliner in Miami; they planted a bomb in a car owned by a former Cuban Senator and later the editor of a newspaper in Miami, killing him instantly; they have blown off both legs of the News Director of the largest radio station in Florida. In March of this year (1979) they placed a bomb in a suitcase which detonated as it was being placed aboard a TWA 747 bound from New York to Los Angeles. The passengers were already aboard the jet when the explosion occurred, injuring 4 baggage handlers. In one 24-hour period in December, 1975, a Cuban exile terrorist placed 8 bombs in the Miami area. Cuban exile terrorists blew up the car in which Chilean Ambassador to the U.S., Orlando Letelier, was driving. The bombing near the White House in Washington also killed Letelier’s female American aide Ronni Moffit…”

The infamous murder of Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffit in Washington supposedly occurred for these two reasons: (1) Chile’s government, a democracy, was friendly with Revolutionary Cuba until a CIA coup put murderous dictator Pinochet in charge of Chile; and (2) the Cuban exiles in Florida felt that they were unchallenged because of the continued support of the U.S. government. The last page of the official document – dated June 18, 1979 – posted by the Metro Dade County Organized Crime Bureau details a few of the many terrorist acts attributed to anti-Castro zealot Orlando Bosch in the 1960s and 1970s. It states that Bosch was actually arrested by the FBI in October, 1968, for “the placing of a bomb on a vessel of foreign registry, the Lancastrian Prince. Fingerprints were found on newspapers inside the bomb. Bosch and 2 other members of his group were charged with firing the 57mm recoilless rifle at the Polish ship Polanica. Bosch received a 10 year sentence in 1968 but was paroled on December 15, 1972. He began planning terrorist activities immediately upon his release. In June, 1974, he publicly admitted having sent package bombs to Cuban Embassies in Lima, Peru; Madrid, Spain; Ottawa, Canada; and Buenos Aires, Argentina. Bosch traveled to various countries in Latin America --Chile, Costa Rica, and Venezuela. A bomb was placed on a Cubana Airlines airplane in October, 1976, on a flight from Caracas to Havana. All 73 passengers and crewmen were killed. Bosch and others were arrested for this crime…”

Much of the bloodiest terrorism attributed to the two most notable Cuban exiles – Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles – occurred during the 1970s when George H. W. Bush was CIA Director – including the bombing of the child-laden Cuban airplane on October 6, 1976. Bosch would later be pardoned by President George H. W. Bush and to this day (2009) Bosch and Posada are free in Miami, thanks to their incredible ties to the Bush political dynasty and thanks to the successful efforts of three current southern Florida members of the U.S. Congress – Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Lincoln Diaz-Balart, and Mario Diaz-Balart. Every Latin American and Caribbean nation today is incensed over Bosch and Posada.

The Ros-Lehtinen/Diaz-Balart connection to the most violent Cuban exile terrorists was scathingly detailed in a very notable Miami Herald article by leading columnist Jim DeFede; DeFede stated that he asked Ros-Lehtinen to comment on his article, and she refused. Yet, Ros-Lehtinen and the Diaz-Balart brothers, entrenched in the U. S. Congress, eagerly get on cable television news to expound on “terrorist” Cuba, well knowing they will never have to answer to things such as the DeFede article that accused them of being major supporters of the five most notorious Cuban exile terrorists, including Bosch and Posada.

Meanwhile, today the antithesis to the Cuban-born U. S. congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen is General Teté Puebla, the legendary teenage guerrilla fighter from the 1950s. General Teté Puebla remains a prime reason Rolando Masferrer, Rafael Diaz-Balart, Jorge Mas Canosa, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, etc., became exceedingly rich and powerful either in Batista’s Cuba or in Batistiano Florida, or both, but not in Revolutionary Cuba.

Teté Puebla said in 2004, “My fondest hope has always been that Celia would be proud of me.”

Beyond doubt, Celia Sánchez was very proud of Teté Puebla in the Sierra and she would be very proud of General Teté Puebla today.

“I agree with Fidel. The Cuban Revolution was Celia Sánchez’s revolution. And Revolutionary Cuba is Celia Sánchez’s Cuba. She inspired all of us to do what we did and become what we are.”

(General Teté Puebla, 2004).

This photo shows Fidel Castro in 2004 pinning another medal onto the chest of General Tete Puebla, the legendary teenage guerrilla fighter in the Cuban Revolution. The lady looking on is Vilma Espin (Mrs. Raul Castro). Vilma died of cancer in 2007, about three years after this photo was taken.(Photo courtesy Cuban Historical Society)

Photo courtesy: Cuban Historical Society

Photo courtesy: Cuban Historical Society

As with the photo depicting Celia Sanchez with Vilma Espin in the Sierra, this photo of Celia and Fidel Castro at one of their hideaways in Revolutionary Cuba reveal the fact that, during almost all her waking moments, she was engrossed with honing up on data relevant to Cuba. This was appropriate considering the fact that during the Sierra fighting Celia was the final decision-maker and then the same was true in Revolutionary Cuba. In his book A Revolution in Pictures Roberto Salas, the official photographer of Revolutionary Cuba and an intimate of both Celia and Fidel, wrote: “Celia made all the decisions for Cuba, the big ones and the small ones.” She was not distracted by the fun-loving Vilma in the Sierra nor by the leisurely Fidel in Revolutionary Cuba. Renowned Cuban journalist Marta Rojas said: “In the Sierra she didn’t expect to survive very long and in Revolutionary Cuba she didn’t expect to live very long. So, she never wasted a single hour of her time. She worked, she studied, and she acted…or devised Fidel and others to act.”

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The photo on the left shows Celia Sanchez in the lobby of a New York City hotel in April of 1959, just over three months after she had taken off her guerrilla uniform following her dynamic role in ousting the U. S. - backed Batista dictatorship in Cuba. This historic photo was taken by Andrew St. George and the copyright is owned by Yale University. The photo on the right is a modern image of 45-year-old Josefina Vidal, Cuba’s Minister of North American Affairs.

Celia Sanchez was the leader of the first generation of Cuban women that played crucial roles in the defeat of Batista; Josefina Vidal is the leader of the second generation of Cuban women defending the revolutionary government against the ongoing and omnipotent efforts of a second generation of Cuban exiles in Florida to regain control of the nearby island. Celia spent twelve days in the U. S. in April of 1959 (at Fidel Castro’s side, as always) hoping that the Eisenhower administration would agree to normal relations with Cuba. Double-crossed by Vice-President Nixon and a coterie of other right-wingers who expected to recapture Cuba within a few weeks, Celia’s mission to the U. S. failed. When she returned to Cuba, Celia laid down the proclamation that has resonated for more than a half century: “The Batistianos will never regain control of Cuba as long as I live or as long as Fidel lives.” Fifty-plus years later, Josefina Vidal, a Celia Sanchez disciple, is fully in charge of “protecting” that proclamation. In January of 2009 Vidal said: “In Cuba’s long history dating back to 1492, only in the past fifty years have Cubans on the island -- not cruel dictators controlled by foreign powers such as Spain and the United States -- ruled this island. Jose Marti and others died fighting for Cuban sovereignty and, beginning with Celia and Fidel a half century ago, the majority of us Cubans on the island are willing to die for sovereignty. That’s where we were in January of 1959 and that’s where we are in January of 2009. Sovereignty, for good or for bad, should rule this island, not foreign governments and not cruel and greedy exiles on foreign soil. If the majority of Cubans on the island didn‘t feel this way, the U. S. government and the Miami Mafia would have regained control of this little but pugnacious island many decades ago.”