2023-05-13 15:56:39
From Radio Rebelde, in the Sierra Maestra, Fidel Castro denounced in May 1958 the assassination days before in Havana of the young Ecuadorian journalist Carlos Bastidas Argüello at the hands of the police of the Batista tyranny.
Every year, now 65 years ago, the crime of the reporter who had arrived in the Sierra Maestra in mid-March is remembered, the last one against a journalist in retaliation for practicing his profession in Cuba.
After the failure of the strike on April 9, the revolutionary forces prepared to face the offensive of 10,000 soldiers of the dictatorship supported by armored equipment, aviation, land and naval artillery.
The rebel leader ordered the transfer of the radio plant, which, together with the hospital and the Command, would mark the positions to defend until the last bullet.
Under these circumstances, it was decided that Carlos Bastidas, already an enthusiastic collaborator of the station, would return to the capital and send his work about what he saw and lived in the liberated territories.
Who did they kill? At the age of 14, Carlos did an interview with Velazco Ibarra, president of Ecuador, which he inserted in a student magazine. His subsequent adventures took him to the US, where he interviewed another President, to Hungary after the Soviet intervention, to Colombia after the flight of the dictator Rojas Pinilla, and to Venezuela still under the tyranny of Pérez Jiménez.
He intended to travel to Santo Domingo, hoping to broadcast the overthrow of Trujillo, but was prohibited from entering. It was then that he turned his gaze to our country where he arrived with his notebook and camera to discover the truth, share it and face the risks..
His sympathy for the struggles for social justice increased as he investigated and contrasted the realities of our nations, in which neocolonial structures predominated, run by local oligarchies and foreign economic power. The ideas expressed in his work and his personal activism were putting him in the crosshairs of the enemies of any change of popular sign.
That was the reporter who once in the Sierra Maestra addressed the peasants, lived with the combatants, spoke on Radio Rebelde and interviewed Fidel Castro.
An atmosphere of repression and murder awaited him in Havana, a very dangerous city for the newcomer from the Sierra Maestra. In the capital, he visits the diplomatic headquarters of his country and the Bohemia Magazine, among other places. Declassified CIA documents reveal that the United States Embassy had information about him and his passage through the Sierra Maestra, which facilitated his location and subsequent assassination.
As we know, at Bar Cachet, in Prado, between Neptuno and Virtudes, Bastidas was shot in the head by Corporal Orlando Marrero Suárez, alias Ojos Gachos, a thug from the dictatorship’s investigative police. This criminal was entrusted with special missions such as killing the respected Cuban lawyer and politician Pelayo Cuervo Navarro.
On one occasion, reading the “Diary of a Combatant, from the Sierra Maestra to Santa Clara”, of Commander Che Guevara, what he wrote on May 22, 1958 about Radio Rebelde caught my attention: “In these last days, we took the plant under our direction and a great improvement is noted. Fidel personally reads a work on the murder of the Ecuadorian journalist Carlos Bastidas”.
The Historical Affairs Office of the Council of State, which guarded the documents related to Radio Rebelde’s programming, sent us a photocopy of the original typed with handwritten corrections in which the unmistakable handwriting of the Commander in Chief was appreciated.
I transcribe the text of the valuable document below:
A few days ago a piece of news arrived that plunged us all into deep sorrow:
The murder of the Ecuadorian journalist Carlos Bastidas by the repressive forces of the Batista dictatorship in the capital of the Republic. The official version was that the journalist Bastidas was shot down by a police officer when he was drunk running after a woman.
The usual: on top of the murder, the vile slander. As much as the murder outrages the infamous accusation. The family of Carlos Bastidas, his colleagues by profession, his friends, his compatriots from Ecuador, those who knew him at school as a brilliant and intelligent student must have suffered, in addition to the terrible impact of his tragic death, the impotent pain of listening in the very lips of their victimizers the scoundrel version that a criminal, a vicious person, a sadist was being murdered.
It was difficult to conceive of a cultured and educated journalist running like a madman through the streets of the capital after an unhappy woman who demanded help. The version was too suspicious, especially if one takes into account that Carlos Bastidas had just left the Sierra Maestra where he came to do a report. What happened to Carlos Bastidas was not at all strange if one considers that a few weeks ago another reporter who left the Sierra, the Spanish journalist Enrique Meneses, a correspondent for the French magazine Paris-Match, was arrested in Havana, tortured and forced to to shamefully retract the information he had written about the rebels in the Sierra Maestra and the July 26 Movement for Bohemia magazine, Paris-Match, the United Press and other organs and news agencies.
Enrique Meneses saved his life because he gave in, because he submitted to signing the statements presented to him by the police because, in a nutshell, to save his life he went as far as denouncing all the clandestine contacts of the July 26 Movement who had been helping him for several months into his journalistic mission. Many valued colleagues were persecuted for the denunciation that the police made of Enrique Meneses.
It is painful that Enrique Meneses as a man did not have the courage to resist, but it is even more terrible and outrageous that a journalist in the fulfillment of his mission can be subjected to such barbaric procedures, forced to retract and become an informer, to save the life still in exchange for destroying his career forever.
Carlos Bastidas was more rebellious, no one would have been able to make him retract or denounce the contacts that had helped him to come to the Sierra Maestra. His aversion to dictatorships was such that in the days of his visit to our camp that coincided with the strike he requested and was granted to speak from our rebel station to the people of Cuba, using his magnificent skills as an orator and prose writer to our cause. , going out into the air from plant no. 2 with the symbolic name of Atahualpa Recio.
Atahualpa Recio who spoke to our listeners many times from here, who from here expressed his concern as a combative journalist who could not sit idly by in the middle of the conflict, who from here demonstrated the solidarity of the race and the blood of unredeemed America with the just cause of our people, has fallen. Those who know the proverbial gratitude of the Cubans, towards the men who in all our liberating epics have come from distant lands to give their blood and their lives for our country, will understand our pain.
Carlos Bastidas was assassinated by the henchmen of the Batista tyranny. The indomitable journalist was murdered, the revolutionary was murdered, the brother of Latin America was murdered who did not deserve for the tyrant the respect that the men of the north inspire him. Batista knows who he hits and who he kills. That would not have happened if he were an American journalist: that is understood by everyone. But not only some are worthy of respect, journalists from Latin America also deserve respect; The Spanish journalist, the French journalist, the journalist and the citizen from any part of the world also deserve respect. If crime is repugnant in all its forms, it is even more so when it is cowardly fed against the weakest and most defenseless.”
The entire America, the newspapers and journalists of the entire continent must strongly condemn the treacherous murder of the young Ecuadorian Carlos Bastidas, torn from his profession and life at the age of 22. They should not settle for one more protest, we must act, we must denounce the events that are taking place in Cuba before international organizations, we must break relations with the disgraceful regime that in this way violates human rights, we must demand the cessation of the shipments of arms that are no longer used only to assassinate the children of this land but also the citizens of any country in the Americas.
Not only is the most rigid censorship established against the press, not only is the dissemination of all news for the country and abroad prevented, but journalists who try to bring to the world the truth of what is happening in Cuba.
From here, today, we can do nothing to punish the criminals, but we solemnly promise the journalists of the entire Continent and the people of Ecuador that the guilty will surely pay for the crime and we transmit to that noble people, beaten so many times and who have had to fight for their freedom, our condolences and our indignation as brothers for the slap given to that nation, which is a slap to all of America.”
Thus concluded the complaint read by the Commander in Chief himself on Radio Rebelde.
What happened to the murderer? He escaped popular justice like many other criminals who received shelter in the United States.
Jean-Guy Allard, a Canadian journalist based in Cuba, now deceased, who was a specialist in tracking criminals, managed to locate the telephone number of the house where the murderer lived quietly in Miami, but they were elusive there and the colleague postponed the investigation to continue his investigations into the blood trail of Luis Posada Carriles, which ended in a book about the 40 years of terror of the former Batista policeman and CIA agent, who also received protection from the US Government.
Cuba today is a territory free of attacks, murders and disappearances of journalists, which respects the physical and moral integrity of press workers, both those who work in the Cuban media and foreign correspondents accredited in Havana.
A country where there is no family in which, by exercising our noble profession, is missing a father or a mother, a son or a daughter, a brother or a sister. My colleagues will not carry a banner that demands justice for a murdered comrade or demands an end to impunity for such actions; if they exhibited something, perhaps it would be a small symbol on their clothes, attached to their hearts, with Carlos’s face, as a thank you to a colleague who came to give us encouragement in difficult times and an expression of pride in practicing journalism in a free country where journalism is respected truth as the supreme attribute of the word.
Outstanding image: The only known photo of the meeting in the Sierra Maestra, in 1958, of Fidel Castro and the Ecuadorian journalist Carlos Bastidas Argüello, who was assassinated in May of that same year in Havana by henchmen of the Batista dictatorship.
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