TBO.com - TBO is Tampa Bay Online

After 50 Years, Cuban Expats Recall Broken Promise Of Castro

Tribune photo by JIM REED

Orlando Rodriguez was living in Cuba when Fidel Castro overthrew the Batista government. His father told him to leave the country for his own safety.

ADVERTISEMENT

By JOSÉ PATIÑO GIRONA

The Tampa Tribune

Published: December 26, 2008

On Jan. 1, 1959, many Cubans on the island nation celebrated the overthrow of President Fulgencio Batista and the promise of Fidel Castro's movement.

Fading black and white images show Castro and his revolutionaries in military fatigues and beards — including Ernesto "Che" Guevara, Camilo Cienfuegos and Castro's brother, Raul — as they traveled to Havana from the eastern countryside in military trucks and cars.

They arrived in the capital city Jan. 8 to a heroes' welcome, with people crowding the streets to cheer the revolution and get a glimpse of the new national leaders.

The celebration extended beyond Cuba. Hundreds gathered outside the Cuban Club in Tampa's Ybor City to celebrate as well.

But the euphoria didn't last. The dream and hope that Castro would deliver a democracy didn't materialize, and the movement embraced communism. The Castro revolution divided the country and brought exoduses, which cemented the separation among its former citizens, the nation they treasured and the families who remained behind.

The dawn of 2009 marks 50 years since Castro's revolution led to a new way of life on the island. Expatriate Cubans living in Tampa recall the passion of the movement a half-century ago and speak of the betrayal they still feel.

Isabel And Elio Muller

Isabel Muller remembers standing outside her family home in Cardenas as the vehicles carrying Fidel Castro and his revolutionary fighters passed by.

They were headed to a nearby cemetery to recognize a martyr, then continue their victory caravan to Havana. Muller headed to the cemetery.

"When I saw him [Castro] with the beard, and that emotion, for me that was the best thing that could be happening," said Muller, 82, of Tampa. "I dressed in black and red. I dressed my children in black pants and red shirts, which was the revolutionary movement's colors. I didn't realize it was communism. I saw it from a different point of view — of salvation, of liberty."

The Mullers led a middle-class life in Cuba. She was a kindergarten teacher. Her husband, Elio, had studied accounting and was a businessman, and at one time was a city councilman in Cardenas.

They had seen atrocities committed by Fulgencio Batista's dictatorship. They knew about teams of Batista soldiers and policemen who hanged dissidents.

"I saw two of them," said Elio Muller, 85. "Not that people told me the story. I saw them. Right between Varadero and Cardenas I saw one of them. Batista had the power. The army was the one that really ruled over there."

Those experiences motivated them to support Castro's revolution.

Isabel Muller had read about Castro and was moved by his cause. She helped make armbands that the revolutionary fighters used to identify themselves, and she listened to Castro deliver passionate and moving radio addresses in the middle of the night.

"I had the feeling that he was going to resolve our country's situation," Isabel Muller said. "I read his story. His principles were religious and his principles related to the values I followed, and [they] spoke of liberty."

Once Castro took over, things changed.

First, Castro asked women to donate their jewelry to raise money to restore the country, Isabel Muller said. He then put his soldiers in municipal positions and later placed known communists in those posts, she said.

Her husband was wary, but at first she wasn't convinced the movement was communist.

"I had to convince her that that was communism," Elio Muller said. "She said no. She told me one time, 'We can get out any time.' I said, 'This is an island and you don't get out of here that easy.'"

Isabel and Elio Muller and their three children got out of Cuba in 1961.

Today, she retains a feeling of betrayal.

"It was treason to my emotions," Isabel Muller said. "My position is of sadness, and it's as if I have lost hope that I will die and I won't see my country free."

Adalberto Tosca

When Castro's revolution was ascending, Cubans at all economic levels supported the cause — aristocrats, business leaders, clergy and workers, Adalberto Tosca said.

Tosca remembers the bank administrator at the Royal Bank of Canada in his hometown of Pinar del Rio held bonds for people who were raising money for Castro's revolution, known as the 26th of July Movement.

"It was a beautiful revolution," Tosca said. "A true bourgeois revolution."

Tosca was a law student at the University of Havana when he met Castro in the 1950s. He described Castro as well-known and intelligent, with a drive for leadership.

Tosca later was moved by the revolution's philosophy.

"We thought it was going to produce a real change in Cuba," Tosca said. "In Cuba, although there were injustices, one could live well. We needed to eliminate the administrative corruption, and we thought the revolutionary government would accomplish that."

In the middle of the night Jan. 1, 1959, Tosca received a call that Batista, the president, had fled the country. The euphoria on the streets was like an explosion, he said.

"The entire population, at least 98 percent of the public opinion, was in favor of the new regime," said Tosca, 79.

"The population overflowed [the streets] thinking that it was a new stage that we always had wanted to fight for in Cuba."

Tosca, a lawyer and officer of the court in Pinar del Rio, said he was considered a likely candidate for a joint mayoral post in his hometown after Batista was ousted. But it didn't materialize.

Months later, however, Tosca began to question the movement when he saw bodies of six people who had been executed. They were in a rustic box with blood still flowing, he said.

"It was very impressionable that there wasn't sensitivity," Tosca said. "Even at the moment of death, I believe, you have to respect even though one considers that they were your enemy.

"I noticed early on where we were headed when the people were still blind because Fidel is an extraordinary charismatic leader," said Tosca, who left Cuba in 1968 with his wife, two daughters and mother-in-law. He settled in Tampa in 1973.

Tosca said he made a mistake in following Castro's cause.

"But I'm not remorseful for what I did because what we had I don't think was the best for Cuba," Tosca said. "Ideally, I identified with what I thought was the best for the country, and at that moment it was. We were victims of a deception from an extraordinarily intelligent man."

U.S. Army Retired Col. Orlando Rodriguez

Most people saw Castro's triumph as a victory for the country.

That wasn't the case for Orlando Rodriguez and his family. His father, Pedro Rodriguez Abascal, was a lawyer who held an administrative post in Cuba's supreme court. His mother, Luisa Alvarez de Rodriguez, was a director of census and statistics for the country's ministry of education, and an uncle, Santiago Alvarez, was a senator.

Rodriguez and his family were at his uncle's house celebrating the New Year when they received word that the president, Batista, had gone into exile. It caught everyone in the room by surprise; people didn't know what to think.

"It turned from a family reunion with happiness to sadness and uncertainty because we didn't know what was going to happen," Rodriguez said.

"As the day passed, it was an overflow of the population in the streets with flags and happiness, believing they were going to receive the messiah who later was going to crucify all," he said.

Rodriguez and his family had observed the movement and had an idea what would happen if it succeeded.

Rodriguez's father told him he needed to leave the country for his safety. Family members believed it wasn't necessary for all of them to leave because the movement wouldn't last.

"He told me, 'You must leave for the good of the entire family. If something happens to you, we'll die of despair,'" Rodriguez recalled.

At age 23, Rodriguez left for Mexico in February 1959. He left behind his wife and son, his mother and father, and his sister.

He returned to Cuba two years later as a member of Brigade 2506, which was staffed by Cubans and supported and funded by the U.S. government as part of the Bay of Pigs invasion. He was arrested after the failed coup.

He served two years in a Cuban prison before his release to the United States after the governments reached an agreement. His father died in Cuba in 1961 while Rodriguez was in prison.

The remainder of his family had come to the United States while Rodriguez was incarcerated. After his release, Rodriguez rose to the rank of colonel with the U.S. Army, retiring in 1990.

"Instead of achieving, like the socialism that he espoused, a higher standard of living for the poor, he lowered the level for all," said Rodriguez, 73.

"Instead of improving, he destroyed. He destroyed the family. When he disintegrated the family, then came the separations, people were executed, others imprisoned, others exiled.

"Not only did he destroy the family," Rodriguez said, "he destroyed the nation."

Reporter José Patiño Girona can be reached at (813) 259-7659 or jpatino@tampatrib.com.

Loading Comments...

Email Print

ADVERTISEMENT