Dokumen - Pub Cuba in The Caribbean Cold War Exiles Revolutionaries and Tyrants 1952 1959 1st Ed 9783030463625 9783030463632

ST ANTONY’S SERIES
Cuba in the Caribbean

Cold War
Exiles, Revolutionaries
and Tyrants, 1952–1959
Nicolás Prados Ortiz de Solórzano
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Nicolás Prados Ortiz de Solórzano
Cuba in the Caribbean

Cold War
Exiles, Revolutionaries and Tyrants, 1952–1959
Nicolás Prados Ortiz de Solórzano
Oxford, UK
ISSN 2633-5964 ISSN 2633-5972 (electronic)

St Antony’s Series
ISBN 978-3-030-46362-5 ISBN 978-3-030-46363-2 (eBook)
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Acknowledgments
This book stems from two years of research at the University of Oxford.
I want to thank my supervisor Eduardo Posada-Carbó for all his help,
guidance and support; to the faculty, librarians and staff at the Latin
American Centre that made me feel at home; to the Latin American
Centre itself for the travel grant that allowed me to visit Cuba in the
summer of 2018 and write this book; and to all my classmates and
friends during the past years, especially to Daniel Barker Flores for his
feedback and revisions.
I also want to thank Dr. Aaron Coy Moulton for all his enthusiastic
support and encouragement, and Dr. Juan Pablo Fusi for his kind com-
ments and advice on an early draft. I want to thank everyone who helped
me during my fieldwork in La Habana. I am indebted to Belkis Quesada
from the Instituto de Historia de Cuba, who opened the doors of the
archive to us; Rosana at the Instituto de Historia; Martha and Alain for
hosting us; and Claudia, Alain and Sebastián for their generosity.
I want to thank all my friends and family; especially Leandro and
Blanca, my sister Lucía and my parents Isabela and Luis, who would help
me with my homework when I would confess late on a Sunday that it
was due for the next morning. I hope this book shows that all their
efforts were worth it. This book would not have been possible without
the help, hard work and unconditional support from Mariana Quaresma,
who worked in the Cuban archives with me and has been a constant
source of encouragement in the past years.
vii
Contents
1 Introduction: The Caribbean Legion Revived 1

The Rise of Caribbean Transnational Networks 6
Historiography and Sources 9
Structure 15
2 A Caribbean Cold War, 1947–1955 17

Origins of the Caribbean Legion 19
Democracy Is Overthrown in Cuba 27
Cuba’s Political Landscape 32
La Transnacional de La Mano Dura 34
Conclusion 40
3 The Internationalization of the Cuban Revolution,

1955–1956 43
The M26/7 in Exile: Tapping into the Caribbean Legion 46
The Complicated Batista–Trujillo Relationship 56
Conclusion 63
4 The Caribbean Legion Supplying the Sierra Maestra,

1957–1958 67
Costa Rican Support for the Guerrilla 70
Venezuela Joins the Rebels 77
Conclusion 86
ix
x CONTENTS
5 Conclusion: The Demise of the Caribbean Legion,

1959–1961 89
Bibliography 101
Index 109
About the Author
Nicolás Prados Ortiz de Solórzano (Madrid, 1992) is a doctoral

candidate reading History at the University of Oxford. He is currently
researching the relationship between democracy and transnational, rev-
olutionary networks operating in Latin America and the Caribbean from
the mid-1940s to the early 1960s.
xi
Acronyms
AD Acción Democrática
APRA Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana
DR Directorio Revolucionario
M26/7 Movimiento 26 de Julio
OA Organización Auténtica
OAS Organization of American States
ORIT Organización Regional Interamericana de Trabajadores
PLN Partido de Liberación Nacional
PRD Partido Revolucionario Dominicano
PRI Partido Revolucionario Institucional
PSP Partido Socialista Popular
xiii
CHAPTER 1
Introduction:
The Caribbean Legion Revived
Abstract   This chapter introduces the concept of transnational

revolutionary networks, and lays out the argument of this book: Cuban
revolutionaries in the 1950s tapped into a previously existing revolu-
tionary network dubbed by the press “the Caribbean Legion”. With
the help of this network, the Cuban conflict became entangled in a
larger, region-wide cold war between dictatorial regimes and democratic
republics. Prados explains the transnational methodological approach,
before making the case for its relevance to the specific region of the
Circum-Caribbean and its history and geography. This is followed by an
analysis of the existing historiography concerning the Caribbean Legion,
the Cuban Revolution, the Cold War in Latin America and the exiles in
the region. The chapter closes with a summary of the book’s structure.
Keywords  Transnational history · Networks · Exile · Cold war ·

Cuban revolution
In the early months of 1959, journalists from all over the world rushed
to the tropical island of Cuba to report on the unfolding revolution. On
1 January, dictator Fulgencio Batista had fled Cuba and a small group
of rag-tag rebels under the inspiring command of a young, bearded law-
yer called Fidel Castro, had taken over the government. Writing from
Havana, veteran New York Times correspondent, Ruby Hart Phillips,
© The Author(s) 2020 1

N. Prados Ortiz de Solórzano,
Cuba in the Caribbean Cold War, St Antony’s Series,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46363-2_1
2 N. PRADOS ORTIZ DE SOLÓRZANO
warned that revolution was on the loose in the Caribbean. Under the
headline “A Revolt in Haiti Urged from Cuba”, Hart pointed at some-
thing that only someone with her over 20 years of experience in the
Caribbean could be aware of:
Caribbean Legion Revived.

Familiar faces of the Caribbean Legion, sometimes called the ‘phantom
army’ of the Caribbean, have appeared in Havana. The legion came into
being in 1947 when the Cuban Cayo Confites Expedition was getting
ready to attack Generalissimo Rafael Trujillo in the Dominican Republic.1
The return of this mysterious legion seemed significant, since Fidel

Castro himself had participated in that 1947 Cayo Confites expedition
when he was a student. Hart kept reporting on this “phantom army”
throughout the spring of 1959, which she described as “an o rganization
of exiles and adventurers” focused on deposing every dictatorship in
the Caribbean.2 Her colleague Herbert Matthews reported that June:
“(…) revolutionaries in Cuba called for the overthrow of Generalissimo
Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, François Duvalier in Haiti and the
Somoza brothers in Nicaragua. Exiles were welcomed in Cuba, got arms
and went into training”.3
What was the Caribbean Legion, this “organization of exiles and
adventurers”, why had it reappeared in Cuba and what connection did it
have to the recent revolution?
The “Caribbean Legion” was the name the press had given to a loose,
transnational, revolutionary network of politicians, adventurers, idealists,
exiles and mercenaries, joint by the common aim of deposing the dic-
tatorships of the Caribbean. Since the 1940s, it coordinated exiles from
different Caribbean countries under the auspice of democratic govern-
ments to launch invasions against the dictatorial regimes of the region.
During the Cuban Revolution,4 Cuban fighters such as Fidel Castro and
his Movimiento 26 de Julio (M26/7) turned towards this network of
1 ‘A Revolt in Haiti Urged from Cuba’, New York Times, 1 March 1959.
2 ‘Cuba is Cautious on Aid to Risings’, ibid., 18 March 1959. ‘Nicaragua Rebels Arrested
in Cuba’, ibid., 20 April 1959.
3 ‘Trujillo Now Centre of Caribbean Unrest’, ibid., 28 June 1959.
4 Understood as the fight against Fulgencio Batista, 1952–1958.

1 INTRODUCTION: THE CARIBBEAN LEGION REVIVED 3
experienced revolutionaries for help. Over the course of the insurrection,

the rebels received the backing of members along the Caribbean Legion
network, which included influential figures of Latin American politics,
such as Venezuelan Rómulo Betancourt, Costa Rican José Figueres,
Cuban Carlos Prío, Guatemalan Jacobo Árbenz or Dominican Juan
Bosch. The aid received by the Cuban revolutionaries from this network
was vital for their success. As we shall see, patrons from the Caribbean
Legion furnished the rebels with crucial military, financial and diplomatic
aid, entangling the Cuban revolutionaries in a larger regional struggle
between democratic regimes and military dictatorships. As a participant
in this “regional cold war”, Castro and his M26/7 movement received a
legitimizing boost from those democratic leaders aligned with the Legion
against dictatorship. Once in power, the M26/7 would be asked to recip-
rocate the aid they had received, and support Nicaraguan, Dominican
or Iberian anti-dictatorial guerrillas. However, the revolutionary regime
would move in an unexpected direction for their wartime democratic
partners like Figueres or Betancourt. This transnational involvement in
the Cuban conflict shaped the revolutionary regime of 1959, brought
long-lasting consequences to the larger geopolitical dynamics of the
region, and even to the Cold War at large.
This book has four broad aims: first, to expand the neglected
historiography of the Caribbean Legion by defining this “phantom

army” as a network, anchoring it in tangible terms, and by unearthing
the movements of its participants during the 1950s. This disproves pre-
vious interpretations in the literature that argue that the Legion disap-
peared in 1950. Second, to provide an additional narrative of the Cuban
Revolution, focused on its place within its contemporary international
context. This book will not trace the motives of the Revolution to the
nineteenth century nor to its relations with the United States, and it will
not view it as an exceptional event unparalleled in the region: instead,
we will see how the Cuban Revolution was a successful revolution in the
midst of several failed attempts in the surrounding countries, all linked
by a common, transnational, revolutionary network. Third, to contribute
to recent historiographical trends that propose to study the Caribbean
during the 1950s as part of a regional “cold war” between two ideolog-
ically opposed blocs: democratic governments against dictatorial strong-
men. This re-interpretation seeks to add nuance to Cold War histories
which might underestimate the regional divides that failed to neatly align
with Soviet–Western power struggles. Finally, the fourth aim of this book
is to make a contribution to histories of exiles in Latin America, high-

lighting their influential role in shaping the politics not just of their own
countries, but of a transnational conscience that transcended national
boundaries.
Transnationality is a theme that lies at the heart of this book. The
Cuban Revolution will be approached through the lens of transnational
history, focusing particularly on those “ideas, things, people, and prac-
tices which have crossed national boundaries”.5 The purpose of transna-
tional history is to move beyond the nation state as the unit of analysis
in history. As Jeremy Adelman argued, “until very recently, the practice
of modern history centred on, and was dominated by, the nation state.
Most history was the history of the nation”.6 Nation builders often drew
from the past in order to create a common identity, arguably relegat-
ing history to the position of “handmaiden to the nation state”.7 This
nationalist use of the discipline was particularly salient in Latin America,
where racially, culturally and ethnically diverse populations were unified
through historical narratives into allegiance to the state.8 In this process
of dividing history into a set of national histories, we might have over-
looked the connections that bound different, seemingly unrelated events
and how they mutually shaped each other. The focus of this book will be
placed in these connections.
The transnational approach is necessary in order to understand the
revolutionary network of the region during the 1950s for a series of rea-
sons. The Circum-Caribbean as a region has been since the 1500 s a site
of transnational contact, with porous or often absent borders, easily nav-
igated through physical proximity, fluid migration patterns, and bound
mainly by the Spanish language. Furthermore, the region and Latin
America at large have long participated in a common “public sphere”
5 Ann Curthoys and Marylin Lake, “Introduction”, in Connected Worlds: History
in Transnational Perspective, eds. Curthoys and Lake (Canberra: Australian National

University Press, 2005), 17.
6 Jeremy Adelman, ‘What Is Global History Now?’ Aeon magazine, available at https://
aeon.co/essays/is-global-history-still-possible-or-has-it-had-its-moment. Accessed April

20, 2019.
7 Curthoys & Lake, “Introduction”, 17.
8 Max Paul Friedman and Padraic Kenney, “History in Politics”, in Partisan Histories:
The Past in Contemporary Global Politics, eds. Friedman and Kenney (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005), 4.
where cultural and linguistic affinities have circulated dynamically mainly

through the works of political exiles, migrants and artists.9 Evidently the
focus on exiles also calls for a transnational approach, since they naturally
transcend national borders. For all these reasons which will be developed
further in the next section, the transnational lens is necessary to analyse
events which go beyond the national mould.
In writing a transnational history of the Cuban Revolution, we will
discover valuable insights that would have gone missing in a book
focused on what occurred solely within the Cuban island. The findings
of this book will prove relevant to those interested in gaining a better
understanding of revolutionary movements and insurgencies at large.
By comprehending the network from which Cuban revolutionaries
(and more particularly, Fidel Castro and his movement) emerged,
we will gain a better understanding of the Castro-headed revolution-
ary government and the hectic years that followed the triumph of the
barbudos. After all, as Paul Staniland explains, “pre-existing networks
provide the underpinnings for new insurgent groups”.10 In this book we
will see how Fidel Castro’s movement tapped into a previously existing
revolutionary network to oust Batista. This network provided the means
for the Cuban revolutionaries to wage war, but also influenced, and at
times constrained, their politics. A transnational support network pro-
vided material, logistic, financial, and propagandistic benefits, as well
as international legitimacy, on which the Cuban revolutionaries heav-
ily relied during the war against Batista and in its immediate aftermath.
It also however, created a political debt that had to be repaid. As this
book will show, the foreign relations of revolutionary movements, an
often overlooked topic, will help explain, in the words of Skocpol, “as
much about the structure and orientation of social-revolutionary regimes
(…) as analysis of their class basis or propositions about the inherent
logic of modernization and the violence and disruptiveness of various
revolutions”.11
9 Íñigo García-Bryce, Haya de la Torre and the Pursuit of Power in Twentieth-Century
Peru and Latin America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2018), 17.
10 Paul Staniland, Networks of Rebellion: Explaining Insurgent Cohesion and Collapse
(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), 17.

11 Quoted in Odd Arne Westad, ‘Rethinking Revolutions: The Cold War in the Third
World’, Journal of Peace Research, 49:4 (1992), 455.

The Rise of Caribbean Transnational Networks

In the 1950s, the Caribbean basin was swarming with exiles. Dictators in
countries like Cuba, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic or Nicaragua
were banishing their political rivals into exile. These “forced political
migrants”, came from different strata of society, and ranged from poli-
ticians to student activists, intellectuals, workers, professionals and art-
ists.12 Among the more prominent politicians spending years in exile
during this period, we find influential former and future presidents like
Fidel Castro, Rómulo Betancourt, Juan Bosch, Jacobo Árbenz and
Carlos Prío. Politicians such as these were joined in exile by a cohort
of other “revolutionary wanderers and exiles”, as Barry Carr defined
them.13 Country of origin varied, and spanned from Cubans and Puerto
Ricans to Guatemalan, Spanish or Venezuelan. Many of these revolution-
ary exiles came from the armed forces, or had military experience from
the Spanish Civil War or local guerrilla attempts in their home countries.
Together they formed a “militant travelling culture” that adopted a pro-
foundly anti-dictatorial character during the late 1940s and 1950s, and
became bound by a revolutionary network.14
However, this is not a story of individuals. As historian E. H. Carr
noted, “all effective movements have a few leaders and a multitude of
followers; but this does not mean that the multitude is not essential to
their success. Numbers count in history”.15 Indeed, these exiles found
their strength in numbers. They received a considerable degree of sup-
port from the local population. In the cases of Cuba or Nicaragua, for
example, many of the anti-dictatorial activities were supported by local
labour and student organizations. In places like Honduras, Costa Rica
or Venezuela, the proponents of anti-dictatorial action were backed at
the polls by a majority of voters. These ideas circulating in the transna-
tional revolutionary networks were seconded by a significant proportion
of the population in the region. Therefore, despite the number of first
12 Luis Roniger, ‘Political Exile and Democracy’, in Exile & the Politics of Exclusion in the
Americas, eds. Luis Roniger, James N. Green and Pablo Yankelevich (Eastbourne: Sussex
Academic Press, 2012), 330.
13 Barry Carr, ‘Across Seas and Borders: Charting the Webs of Radical Internationalism
in the Circum-Caribbean’, in ibid., 218.

14 Ibid., 217.
15 E. H. Carr, What Is History? (London: Penguin Classics, 2018, first published 1961), 46.
names that will appear in this book, this is not a recollection of individual
adventures.
The setting is key to understanding the Legion. This book will
refer to the “Circum-Caribbean” as the region including the insu-
lar Caribbean, the northern coast of South America, Central America
and the Mexican Gulf.16 This region already enjoyed a rich tradition
of transnational networks which shaped the Legion into existence.
Since the nineteenth century, the Circum-Caribbean had been a “pio-
neer site of transnational capital” dealing in primary commodities for
export, exploited by transnational companies such as the United Fruit.
The Second Industrial Revolution drastically transformed the Caribbean,
with innovations in transport and communication accelerating capital
and labour flows. These movements “shaped the political-economic and
cultural forms that would eventually transpire in transnational resistance
and exile networking”.17 Prosperity and financial opportunity during a
time of crisis in Europe also attracted large numbers of Spanish immi-
grants in the early decades of the twentieth century. As Samuel Farber
notes, a significant amount of leaders in the Cuban Revolution against
Batista were first generation Cubans, the children of Spanish migrants.18
The experience of the Spanish Civil War heavily politicized these future
revolutionaries.
Furthermore, the United States’ interventions in the region during
the opening decades of the twentieth century helped build movements
of national liberation, as well as shape ideologies which emphasized
common elements of hispanidad, indigenismo and mixed ancestry.
These ideas, perhaps best embodied in the writings of Uruguayan writer
José Enrique Rodó in Ariel, gave the Caribbean and Latin America at
wide a shared sense of identity in opposition to the United States and
Anglo-Saxon culture.19 Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío encapsulated
16 Ileana Sanz, ‘Early Groundings for a Circum-Caribbean Integrationist Thought’,

Caribbean Quarterly, 55:1 (2017), 1.
17 B. Carr, ‘Across Seas and Borders’, in Exile & the Politics of Exclusion, eds. Roniger,
Green and Yankelevich, 222–223.

18 Among these were the Castro brothers, Camilo Cienfuegos, Frank País, Abel and
Haydee Santamaría and almost a quarter of the generals of the future Revolutionary Armed
Forces. Samuel Farber, Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered (Chapel Hill, NC:
University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 51–52.
19 García-Bryce, Haya de la Torre, 20.
this feeling in his 1905 poem “A Roosevelt”, where he wrote against

incipient US imperialism: “Eres los Estados Unidos, / eres el futuro
invasor / de la América ingenua que tiene sangre indígena, / que aún
reza a Jesucristo y aún habla en español”.20
One of the ideological products of this setting was the doctrine of
Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre, a Peruvian politician who lived in exile in
Mexico during the 1920s and travelled extensively across Latin America
in the 1930s. Banished from his native Peru, Haya created a political ide-
ology called Aprismo, named after the initials of the party he founded
in exile: APRA, Alianza Popular Revolucionaria Americana. APRA was
a radically different party to its contemporaries: it was the first trans-
national party to emerge in the Americas. Its purpose was to unite the
Latin American nations in a common front against US imperialism,
which would allow them to redistribute the wealth of natural resources
and achieve greater levels of development and social justice. Aprismo was
simultaneously nationalist and internationalist: it combined a nation-
alistic defence of land resources with a transnational, Pan-American
vision of uniting Latin America in the mould of Bolívar and previous
thinkers. It supported non-Communist revolution, deeply influenced
by Marxist analysis. This ideology gained widespread following in the
Circum-Caribbean during the late 1920s and 1930s, with many parties
of the region subscribing to Aprista doctrine. These parties would later
on constitute key nodes of the Caribbean Legion network.21
A major cornerstone underpinning the intellectual make-up of the
transnational revolutionaries of the 1940s and 1950s was the experience
of the Mexican Revolution. Many influential figures of the time, such as
the aforementioned Haya and his contemporaries, were deeply impressed
by it, and sought to export its model to the rest of Latin America. As a
result, revolution and revolutionary tactics grew to enjoy wide prestige
in the region, reinforced by the success of Sandino’s guerrilla campaign
in Nicaragua against the United States (1927–1933).22 Several leading
parties of the region established in the first half of the twentieth century
included the “Revolutionary” label in their name, such as the Mexican
Partido Nacional Revolutionario, the Cuban Partido Revolucionario
20 Rubén Darío, A Roosevelt, available at https://poemario.org/roosevelt/. Accessed
April 20, 2019.

21 For more on Aprismo see García-Bryce, Haya de la Torre.

Cubano—Auténtico, the Venezuelan Agrupación Revolucionaria de

Izquierda, the Dominican Partido Revolucionario Dominicano or the
aforementioned APRA.
Finally, another key experience that shaped the mindset of partici-
pants in the Caribbean Legion was the Second World War. As Ameringer
notes, the war “converted antitotalitarianism”, firmly espoused by the
revolutionary exiles populating the region, “into an international cause”
which “led to the adoption of an interventionist foreign policy for the
eradication of dictatorships”.23 This notion of anti-dictatorial interven-
tion would become a crucial tenet of the Caribbean Legion network.
The Second World War “was releasing the forces of social revolu-
tion throughout the world”, according to Puerto Rican politician Luis
Muñoz Marín, and the victory of the Allies severely undermined the
image of Latin American dictators. In 1945, democratic governments
of Latin America were drawing-up international laws to eradicate dicta-
torships: Guatemala proposed withholding recognition of governments
established by coup d’état, and the Uruguayan foreign minister proposed
to allow international intervention against authoritarian regimes. Both
proposals however were unsuccessful.24
Revolutionary exiles were undaunted by these setbacks. By 1947,
Dominican exiles with the backing of the Cuban, Guatemalan and
Venezuelan governments were preparing an invasion of the Dominican
Republic. The assembled army gave itself the name “Ejército de
Liberación de América”; the press however, would eventually refer to
them as “the Caribbean Legion”.
Historiography and Sources
The Caribbean Legion has remained an elusive subject in the historiog-
raphy. Its study has confronted several problems, mainly the fact that it
was a transnational, clandestine network which left a scant paper trail,
and whatever traces it left are disseminated among archives across the
Caribbean basin, from Miami to Caracas and from San José to Santo
23 Charles Ameringer, The Democratic Left in Exile: The Antidictatorial Struggle in the
Caribbean, 1945–1959 (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1974), 30–31.
24 Ibid., 52–53.
Domingo.25 Historian Charles Ameringer wrote, to the best of my

knowledge, the only monograph on the Legion. The Caribbean Legion:
Patriots, Politicians, and Soldiers of Fortune, 1946–1950, published
in 1996, recomposed the activities of the Legion in the second half of
the 1940s from US sources.26 Historian Piero Gleijeses additionally
shed light on the Legion in his 1991 article Juan José Arévalo and the
Caribbean Legion, focusing on the participation of Arévalo’s government
as a patron of the network between 1944 and 1949.27 Both of these
works date the Legion’s disappearance to 1950.
The first analyses to go beyond the 1940s are found in the work of
Aaron Moulton, who is working extensively on the Legion and transna-
tional activism in the Caribbean during the post-World War II years. In
his articles from 2014 and 2015, Moulton analyses the Legion through a
transnational lens, placing its activities in the context of an international
solidarity movement among the region that transcended the limits of
the nation-state.28 This book picks up this line of enquiry to locate the
Caribbean Legion network in the context of the Cuban Revolution: to
trace the participation of those exiles who came to be in contact through
the Legion and participated in the fight against dictator Fulgencio
Batista between 1952 and 1958. In doing so, Caribbean Legion litera-
ture will be put in contact with wider studies of the Cuban Revolution
and vice versa.
Cuban historiography has been a fertile terrain for historians for
decades. However the difficult access to Cuban sources and the polit-

icization of its topics has driven the field into a paradoxical situa-
tion: as scholars Michael Bustamante and Jennifer Lambe describe it,
25 This issue is highlighted in Tanya Harmer and Alberto Martín Álvarez, ‘Introduction:
Writing the History of Revolutionary Transnationalism and Militant Networks in the

Americas’, Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe, 28:2 (2017), 8.
26 Charles Ameringer, The Caribbean Legion: Patriots, Politicians and Soldiers of Fortune,
1946–1950 (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1995).

27 Piero Gleijeses, ‘Juan José Arévalo and the Caribbean Legion’, Journal of Latin
American Studies, 21:1 (1989), 135–145.

28 Moulton, ‘Building their own Cold War’, 135–154; ‘Militant Roots: The Anti-Fascist
Left in the Caribbean Basin, 1945–1954’, Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y

el Caribe, 28:2 (2017), 14–29.
Cuban historiography has become “simultaneously overpopulated and

underdeveloped”.29
Cuban history has been hindered partly by mythology: as historian
Louis A. Pérez points out, the revolutionary government of Fidel Castro
appropriated Cuban history, tying the origin of their Revolution to the
nineteenth-century struggles for independence, thus claiming “histor-
ical authenticity” to their movement. This “official” line of analysis of
Cuban History sees the fight against Batista and the successive decades
of revolutionary rule as the culmination of a long process that began in
1868, in an example of what Max Paul Friedman dubbed “partisan histo-
ries”.30 This book will not look back into the nineteenth century to find
the motives of the anti-Batista struggle, but instead to the events taking
place simultaneously in the neighbouring Caribbean nations.
The study of Cuban history has unfortunately been hindered by a
second obstacle in the field: the difficult access to Cuban sources and
the consequent over-reliance on US archives. There is a temptation by
scholars and Cuban officials alike to reduce the Cuban Revolution to
its conflict with the United States: from the birth of the United States
to our present days.31 The availability of North American sources ver-
sus the “hiding of information” in Cuba has but fuelled this US-centric
take on Cuban history.32 However, new exciting work is being published
in the field that is reliant on Cuban archives and reduces the depend-
ency on its Northern neighbour. Recent books by Julia Sweig, Heberto
Norman Acosta, Steve Cushion, Elíades Acosta and Jonathan Brown all
draw from different Cuban archives to provide valuable and previously
unknown insights into the Revolution.33
29 Michael J. Bustamante and Jennifer L. Lambe, “Cuba’s Revolution from Within: The
Politics of Historical Paradigms”, in The Revolution from Within: Cuba, 1959–1980, eds.
Michael J. Bustamante and Jennifer L. Lambe (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019), 4.
30 Ibid.; Partisan Histories, eds. Friedman and Kenney.
31 Joseph, ‘Border Crossings’, 6; Bustamante and Lambe, “Cuba’s Revolution from
Within”, 13.
32 Fernando Martínez Heredia, ‘¿Cómo Investigar la Revolución Cubana? Cinco prob-
lemas para la investigación (I)’, La Tizza, 27 March 2018, available at https://medium.

com/la-tiza/c%C3%B3mo-investigar-la-revoluci%C3%B3n-cubana-i-2d5a9c18ce7a.
Accessed April 20, 2019.
33 Julia Sweig, Inside The Cuban Revolution: Fidel Castro and the Urban Underground
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Heberto Norman Acosta, La Palabra
Empeñada (Havana: Oficina de Publicaciones del Consejo de Estado, 2005); Steve
This recent trend in Cuban historiography is reflecting a wider move-

ment within Cold War histories, one in which scholarship is becoming
more decentred and looking beyond “the machinations of the con-
tending superpowers”.34 This book is part of a new strand of Cold War
historiography which locates the region’s Cold War in a wider histori-
cal context. As historian Gilbert Joseph notes, in the early twenty-first
century, the analysis of foreign relations in Latin America during the
Cold War remained fixed in the frame of a bipolar superpower conflict.
Again, scholar Mark Gilderhus complained that Latin American litera-
ture remained “narrowly focused and dependent upon the records of the
United States”.35
However, there is a shift occurring during the past few years. Many
historians are taking a transnational approach to histories of the region as
a way of “removing the Cold War lens” which reduced Latin American
actors to pawns in the wider US–Soviet struggles.36 One of the main
ways of achieving this is by “restoring Latin America to the equation
in terms of both agency and archives”.37 There is work being done in
this aspect by the aforementioned Moulton, Tanya Harmer, Robert
Karl, Kirsten Weld or Barry Carr to name a few.38 This new Cold War
Cushion, A Hidden History of the Cuban Revolution: How the Working Class Shaped the
Guerrillas’ Victory (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2016); Eliades Acosta Matos, La
Telaraña Cubana de Trujillo (Santo Domingo: Archivo General de la Nación, 2012);
Jonathan C. Brown, Cuba’s Revolutionary World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2017).
34 Joseph, ‘Border Crossings’, 8.
35 Ibid.,6.
36 Robert A. Karl, ‘Reading the Cuban Revolution from Bogotá, 1957–1962’, Cold War
History, 16:4 (2016), 339.

37 Max Paul Friedman, ‘Retiring the Puppets, Bringing Latin America Back in: Recent
Scholarship on United States-Latin American Relations’, Diplomatic History, 27:5 (2003),

636.
38 Moulton, ‘Building Their Own Cold War’ and ‘Militant Roots’; Tanya Harmer,
Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2011); Karl, ‘Reading the Cuban Revolution’; Kirsten Weld, ‘The Spanish
Civil War and the Construction of a Reactionary Historical Consciousness in Augusto
Pinochet’s Chile’, Hispanic American Historical Review, 98:1 (2018), 77–115; Barry
Carr, ‘Pioneering Transnational Solidarity in the Americas: The Movement in Support of
Augusto C. Sandino, 1927–1934’, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research, 20:2
(2014), 141–152.
historiography places its emphasis on the transnational character of its

participants, the multi-archival source of its evidence and the primacy
of regional struggles for local actors, which were not always in line with
wider US–Soviet Cold War concerns.
The overarching aim of this recent literature is to emphasize a spe-
cific point: “the Cold War in Latin America” is not the same as “the
Latin American Cold War”.39 During the decades following World War
II, Latin America was divided among its own regional lines, enmeshed
in regional conflicts which did not necessarily align with US–Soviet
divides. As it will be detailed in this book, during the late 1940s and
1950s, the Caribbean basin was immersed in a “Cold War of its own”.40
Two blocs had been formed after the war, one favouring democracy ver-
sus another bent on maintaining authoritarian rule. This “ferocious dia-
lectic” between reformist and sometimes revolutionary projects, against
the reactionary responses it provoked, shaped the decades following
the World War II.41 It wouldn’t be until 1961, when the United States
attempted an invasion of Cuba which triggered a subsequent adherence
from Castro’s government to Marxism–Leninism, that this regional con-
flict would be subsumed into the wider, global Cold War.
The main subject in this book are exiles, coordinating transnation-
ally through a network created for the purpose of revolutionary activity.
Unfortunately, despite its ubiquity throughout history, the phenomenon
of exile in Latin America has been under-researched until recent years.42
Luis Roniger, James N. Green and Pablo Yankelevich have recently
edited a survey of exile and politics in the Americas; and Mario Sznajder
and Roniger also wrote a socio-political analysis of exile in Latin America
during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.43
The analytical framework created by these scholars serves to explain
the situation of the Caribbean during the late 1940s and 1950s. As

40 Moulton, ‘Building Their Own Cold War’.
42 Luis Roniger and Pablo Yankelevich, ‘Exilio y política en América Latina: nuevos estu-
dios y avances teóricos’, Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe, 20:1

(2009), 8.
43 Roniger, Green and Yankelevich, Exile & the Politics of Exclusion; Mario Sznajder and
Luis Roniger, The Politics of Exile in Latin America (New York: Cambridge University
Press, 2009).
Sznajder and Roniger argue, exile during the nineteenth century

was fairly restricted to elites banished by political rivals. From exile, a
three-tiered interplay was created, between the exile’s adoptive coun-

try and the exile’s home country. Dynamics worked along this triangle,
with some of the most frequent cases involving the adoptive country
hosting the exile to further an antagonism towards the exile’s nation,
for example.44 However, by the beginning of the twentieth century,
exile underwent a process of “massification”, with a growing number of
political refugees from the middle and working classes. Increased num-
bers allowed for more effective efforts to capture international attention,
in an increasingly evolved international arena p ost-World War II, with a
growing number of international organisms. The transnational arena was
added to the previous triangular interplay to create what Sznajder and
Roniger call “four-tiered exile”.45
One of the earliest examples of this four-tiered exile at play, in which
exiles coordinated transnationally through support networks and alli-
ances, was the Caribbean during the late 1940s and 1950s. During
these years, “political dynamics were characterized by recurrent shifts
between democracy and dictatorship, redefining lines of alignment and
generating streams of political exiles”.46 This book will add to the histo-
riography from which socio-political analysts such as Sznajder, Roniger
or Yankelevich can draw from.
The sources for this book are drawn from the aforementioned sec-
ondary literature and from a wide array of archival material, in line with
transnational analyses. In Cuba, I examined the Archivo del Instituto
de Historia Cubana. This archive holds the records of the Servicio de
Inteligencia Militar: the reports on threats to Batista’s regime, both
inside and outside Cuba. Additionally, I visited Cuba’s foreign ministry
archive, the MINREX, where diplomatic correspondence from Batista’s
ambassadors to the Caribbean is stored. This book will rely heavily on
these Cuban sources, given the limited secondary literature available on
the Caribbean Legion.
In Europe I visited the UK’s National Archives in London; in Spain
I consulted the archive of the Francisco Franco Foundation, containing
44 Ibid., 73–76.
45 Ibid., 152–155.
46 Ibid., 158.
diplomatic reports from Franco’s diplomats in the Caribbean, and the

archive of the Federación Universitaria Española, which contains records
from the Spanish Republican government in exile. Finally, I have con-
sulted some records from US agencies and departments. Diplomatic
records from the Foreign Relations of the United States series availa-
ble online, as well as diplomatic cables from the Havana embassy avail-
able at latinamericanstudies.org. Additionally, FBI and CIA files from
their archive websites and the John F. Kennedy Assassination Collection
records, which were made public and digitally available in 2017, were
used.
The overall aim is to reconstruct the secretive activities of the Legion
from a broad, multinational perspective.
Structure
This book will be divided in three chapters. The first will provide a new
definition of the Caribbean Legion as a transnational network. It will
briefly trace its origin and history up to 1952, as well as provide a sketch
of its form. It will then show how after Batista’s coup d’état in Cuba,
the ousted Auténtico government turned to the Legion for help. We will
then briefly survey the political landscape in Cuba during the first years
of Batista’s dictatorship, before moving on to show how the Legion’s
counterpart, the Transnacional de la Mano Dura mobilized during the
early 1950s to repress the wave of democracy threatening to spread
through the region.
Chapter 2 will deal with the emergence of Fidel Castro and his
Movimiento 26 de Julio in the anti-Batista fight. It will analyse how the
M26/7 in exile got in contact with Auténtico exiles and through the
latter, with the Caribbean Legion. Examples will be provided of how
the M26/7 sealed alliances with prominent members of the Legion.
Additionally, this chapter will trace the changing relationship between
Batista and Rafael Trujillo, dictator of the Dominican Republic and per-
haps the main patron of the Transnacional. It will show evidence of an
unlikely and pragmatic collaboration between Trujillo and anti-dictatorial
Cuban exiles such as Castro himself.
Finally, Chapter 3 will cover the last two years of the anti-Batista
struggle, 1957–1958. The first half of this chapter will explain how the
Costa Rican government of Caribbean Legion patron, José Figueres,
provided military and financial supplies to Fidel Castro’s guerrilla.
Additionally it will show how this support was enmeshed in larger

attempted revolutions taking place simultaneously in Nicaragua. The
second half will look into the events unfolding in Venezuela during
1958, when the dictatorial regime of Marcos Pérez Jiménez was ousted
and democracy returned to the country. During this year, prominent
Legionnaire Rómulo Betancourt became one of the main backers of
Castro.
The conclusion will bring the findings of the book together, while
offering an account of the influence of the Caribbean Legion in the first
months of revolutionary rule in Cuba and explaining the eventual disso-
lution of the Legion.
CHAPTER 2
A Caribbean Cold War, 1947–1955
Abstract  This chapter provides a much-needed examination of the

Caribbean Legion: a loose, transnational network of revolutionaries that
operated in the Circum-Caribbean during the late 1940s and 1950s, and
has received scant attention in the historiography. Focusing on this net-
work, this chapter draws attention to how shortly after the military coup
against Cuba’s democratic government, resistance to the dictatorship
became structured through the channels of the Caribbean Legion. Prados
establishes the links between the incipient Cuban Revolution and a wider,
regional anti-dictatorial struggle supported by transnational networks
of exiles and revolutionaries. This chapter shows how in the 1950s, the
Caribbean had descended into a regional cold war between two opposed
blocs: democratic governments against military dictatorships.
Keywords  Revolutionary networks · Caribbean · Exiles · Dictatorship ·

Cold war · Democracy
On 10 March 1952, Fulgencio Batista overthrew the democratic gov-

ernment of Cuba. Ousted was president Carlos Prío from the Auténtico
party, a weary president almost at the end of his term, battered by cor-
ruption scandals. During his four years in power, Prío had openly sided
with the Caribbean Legion and with the democratic governments of
the region, offering military and diplomatic support to Guatemala,

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46363-2_2
Costa Rica and Venezuela. Batista was promising to return Cuba to the
orderly rule of a strongman, ceasing any foreign adventures and sup-
port for rebellious exiles. In the week that followed the coup, Batista’s
government was first recognized by dictatorial regimes: the Dominican
Republic, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Haiti, Spain and Honduras.1 Meanwhile
Guatemala played a crucial role as a safe haven for conspiratorial activ-
ity during the first years of Batista’s rule (1952–1958). Linked by the
Caribbean Legion network, Guatemalan president Jacobo Árbenz was
willing to support the deposed Prío and his cohort in their aspiration to
overthrow the Cuban dictatorship.
This chapter will first offer a brief account of the Caribbean Legion up
until 1952, establishing the nexus between the different Caribbean poli-
ticians who were joined by their anti-dictatorial aims. It will also explain
who the main agents of this network were: the men and women who
travelled back and forth between the different capitals securing weapons,
diplomatic support and acting as couriers for high-profile politicians try-
ing to preserve a veneer of neutrality.
This will be followed by an examination of the initial attempts made
by deposed president Carlos Prío to retake control of Cuba. From his
exile in Miami, Prío designed several schemes to oust Batista. This meant
seeking the support of the allied governments of Guatemala and Costa
Rica, allied through the contacts forged in the Caribbean Legion net-
work. Additionally, we will delve into Cuba’s political landscape during
the early years of Batista’s dictatorship to understand the different politi-
cal groups and alliances that shaped the anti-dictatorial struggle.
Meanwhile, the Caribbean dictators—Nicaragua’s Anastasio Somoza,
Santo Domingo’s Rafael Trujillo, Venezuela’s Marcos Pérez Jiménez and
Cuba’s Fulgencio Batista—were not going to sit idly by as the enemies
of their regimes plotted their downfalls. The last part of this first chapter
turns its attention to the Transnacional de la Mano Dura, the network of
counter-revolutionary operations led by the Caribbean dictators to retal-
iate against conspirators. They gained a major victory in the deposition
of Guatemala’s democratic government in 1954, followed by a defeat, a
failed attempt to oust the Costa Rican government in 1955.
The overall aim of this chapter is to explain what the Caribbean
Legion was, how it operated and how it participated in the early years
1 ‘Countries that have recognised the BATISTA regime’, 1 April 1952, US Havana
Embassy to State Department, available at www.latinamericanstudies.org.

2 A CARIBBEAN COLD WAR, 1947–1955 19
of the fight against Batista, from 1952 to 1955. During these years the
role of the Guatemalan government in aiding the exiles was key, thus
the 1954 coup against it represented a shattering blow to the Legion.
However, on 26 July 1953, two events became crucial for the dem-
ocratic exiles: In Cuba, Fidel Castro’s attack on the Moncada barracks
revitalized the struggle against Batista, just as a succession of aborted
attacks were tempering opposition to the strongman; and in Costa Rica,
the election of notorious Caribbean Legion supporter, José Figueres,
gave the Legion an additional patron.
Origins of the Caribbean Legion

At the outbreak of World War II, most Circum-Caribbean countries were
ruled by dictatorship. From Cuba to Santo Domingo, Guatemala to
Venezuela, except for Costa Rica and Colombia, all countries lived under
the boot of dictatorship. Modernization processes during the begin-
ning of the century had seen the creation of middle and working classes,
pushing for economic and political reforms that would bring about a
fairer distribution of resources. However, the turmoil succeeding the
Great Depression saw many autocrats rise to power in order to guarantee
the stability of the economies.2 Many of these dictators counted on the
backing of the United States.3
When the United States joined World War II, Cuba, Guatemala,
Honduras, Nicaragua, Venezuela and the Dominican Republic followed
suit. The anti-dictatorial, anti-fascist rhetoric pushed by the Allies even-
tually backfired on the dictators of the Caribbean, who saw their popu-
lations turn against them as the defeat of the Axis drew closer. In Cuba,
former sergeant Batista governed the country constitutionally since
1940, following six years of autocratic rule through puppet presidents.
In 1944 he lost the presidential election and for the first time in a dec-
ade, Cuba was not ruled by Batista. That same year, a military-civilian
junta overthrew the dictator of Guatemala and elections were called.
The following year, something similar happened in Venezuela: another
military-civilian junta staged a coup and called elections. As Huntington
Caribbean, 1945–1959 (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1974), 19.
3 Lillian Guerra, Heroes, Martyrs & Political Messiahs in Revolutionary Cuba, 1946–1958
(London: Yale University Press, 2018), 49.

and Ameringer observed, a small democratic opening was sweeping the

region.4
The parties undertaking these revolts, as defined by Alan Angell, were
nationalist-populist, heirs of the doctrine of Peruvian politician Haya de
la Torre.5 Haya had developed a particular ideology in the 1920s called
Aprismo (after the initials of his party, Alianza Popular Revolucionaria
Americana, APRA) which incorporated elements of Marxism but adapted
them to the history and culture of Latin America.6 The appeal of Aprista
parties, unlike the Communists, was not restricted to the working class
and advocated for a multi-class society. The emphasis was not on ide-
ological dogma but on a certain tactical ambiguity, designed to incor-
porate the broadest base possible, especially the middle classes. These
parties were anti-capitalist but simultaneously anti-Communist, and
internationalist: they shared a continental conscience in opposition to
foreign imperialism. They competed with the Communists for the alle-
giance of labour and relations with the orthodox Left varied from out-
right enmity to close collaboration.7
In Cuba, Haya helped found Havana’s university in the early 1930s.
Students there, at the time opposing the dictatorships of Gerardo
Machado (1928–1933) and Fulgencio Batista (1934–1940), founded
the Partido Revolucionario Cubano—Auténtico (known as the
Auténticos) in 1934, drawing heavily from Haya’s ideas. So much so
that the Cuban branch of APRA merged with the Auténticos in 1937.8
Similarly, Venezuelan university students fighting the dictatorship of Juan
Vicente Gómez (1908–1935) founded the Acción Democrática (AD)
party, using Marxism to arrive at “Venezuelan” solutions.9 Its founder,
4 Ameringer, The Caribbean Legion: Patriots, Politicians and Soldiers of Fortune,
1946–1950 (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1995), 1–5; Samuel P.
Huntington, The Third Wave: Democratization in the Late Twentieth Century (London:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1993), 18–19.
5 Alan Angell, “The Left in Latin America Since c. 1920”, in The Cambridge History of
Latin America, vol. 6: 1930 to the Present, Part 2: Politics and Society, ed. Leslie Bethell
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 165.
6 Ameringer, Democratic Left, 20–21.
7 Angell, ‘The Left in Latin America’, 171. See also, Íñigo García-Bryce, Haya de la Torre
and the Pursuit of Power in Twentieth-Century Peru and Latin America (Chapel Hill, NC:
9 Ameringer, Caribbean Legion, 2–5.

Rómulo Betancourt, had met Haya during his exile and was influenced
by his ideas.10 In the Dominican Republic, the Partido Revolucionario
Dominicano (PRD) was founded in exile in 1939 along similar lines
and in Guatemala, elected president Arévalo followed a similar ideolog-
ical path, advocating for a “spiritual socialism” that was ideologically
elusive.11
As Sznajder and Roniger defined them, these parties were all “crea-
tures of exile”.12 Given the improvements in communications and travel,
plus the increasing focus on international cooperation following World
War II and their shared ideological base, it is unsurprising to find that
these parties were closely knit by alliances, helping each other out in the
face of regional dictatorships.13 This help mainly consisted in providing
asylum to those exiled by dictators. In 1945, dictatorship remained in
Nicaragua, Honduras, and in the Dominican Republic.
If the range of cooperation was spilling beyond countries’ borders, so
was repression. Given the increasingly transnational character of oppo-
sition to dictatorship, repression took the same nature, with dictato-
rial governments ordering the assassinations of rivals in foreign soil.14
Cuba, Venezuela and Guatemala hosted the exiles of the Nicaraguan,
Honduran and Dominican dictatorships, supporting their agenda in a
Caribbean, anti-dictatorial crusade. In the light of this, Trujillo decided
to play the same game and invited to the Dominican Republic those
military officers ousted by the democratic governments of Cuba and
Venezuela. As Luis Roniger notes, providing asylum to exiles was not
an activity limited to democracies. Several strongmen of the region pro-
vided asylum to “forced political migrants” in hopes to boost their inter-
national image, or use the exiles against a rival government.15 In 1946,
Trujillo sponsored these officers in two attacks: a group of Venezuelan
officers tried to stage an unsuccessful revolution in the Táchira region,
10 García-Bryce, Haya de la Torre, 16–17.

11 Mario Sznajder and Luis Roniger, The Politics of Exile in Latin America (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2009) 174; Ameringer, Caribbean Legion, 4.
12 Sznajder and Roniger, Politics of Exile, 156.
13 Ameringer, Democratic Left, 17; Sznajder and Roniger, Politics of Exile, 153.
14 Ibid., 154.
15 Roniger, ‘Political Exile and Democracy’, in Exile & the Politics of Exclusion in the
Americas, eds. Roniger, Green and Yankelevich (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press,
2012), 335–336.
and following this fiasco, the Cuban plot by disgruntled officers to stage
a coup in Havana’s military headquarters, was discarded.16
The Caribbean had descended into a regional “cold war” of sorts,
with two opposed blocs: democracy versus dictatorship. The physical
proximity between the countries and the widespread use of banish-
ment as a tool for the exclusion of rivals meant that the Caribbean was
swarming with political refugees, courted by a host of governments who
could use them for their international agendas. The aims of the exiles
aligned with the political considerations of their host countries against
the expelling homeland. This triangular interplay, characteristic of the
nineteenth-century Latin American exile, was defined as “3-tier exile” by
Sznajder and Roniger. However by 1945, this structure incorporated a
new angle, the transnational domain. In this 4-tiered exile, the triangular
interplay was now structured by transnational support networks, which
afforded exiles a greater capacity to act against their home countries.17
In the late 1940s Caribbean, this transnational network of support for
the democratic exiles was called the Caribbean Legion.
The Caribbean Legion has several cited origins. According to British
intelligence, it began in 1944 in Colombia, when former Liberal pres-
ident Eduardo Santos met with Nicaraguan and Dominican exiles
and agreed to harbour and finance them, as a way of countering
extreme-right political parties in Colombia which were receiving sup-
port from Trujillo and Somoza.18 Ameringer, meanwhile, points to
1946 Cuba, when Juan Bosch, the Dominican leader of the exiled PRD
party sought the support of the Cuban and Venezuelan governments
against Trujillo.19 In both cases, the Legion came into existence through
the funding of democratic leaders to Dominican exiles seeking to oust
Trujillo.
As a network, the Caribbean Legion had no formal structure or hier-
archy to speak of, and that makes it hard to pinpoint its exact origin.
The exile world was a deeply factional and personalistic realm. Banished
politicians demanded allegiance from their followers and organized in
clientelistic networks which expected reward upon the success of their
16 Ameringer, Caribbean Legion, 8.

17 Sznajder and Roniger, Politics of Exile, 73–76, 152–161.
18 Leslie Boas, ‘The Caribbean Legion’, 2 March 1957, National Archives, London (NA
from hereon), file FO371/119802.

19 Ameringer, Caribbean Legion, 10.
patron.20 Personal considerations such as friendship or enmity played a

decisive role.21 The Caribbean Legion network was thus organized as a
wide network of personal contacts between like-minded politicians with
the same ambitious goal in mind: to depose the dictatorships of the
region. Since the network was revolutionary, secrecy was imperative and
everything possible was done to keep plans hidden. The preservation of
communications for future historians was not a pressing concern.22 To
begin to grasp the extent of the network, we must briefly dabble in social
network analysis, which focuses on connections between individuals
and the regularity and patterns of their interactions.23 We can begin to
uncover the Caribbean Legion by tracing the movements and contacts of
anti-dictatorial exiles.
The Legion network consisted of a nucleus of patrons who provided
the funds for operations. These patrons were presidents in power, with
access to the vast logistical, military and financial resources of a head of
state, or exiled millionaires, willing to donate considerable sums. These
patrons included Carlos Prío, president of Cuba (1948–1952); Rómulo
Betancourt, head of the Venezuelan democratic junta (1945–1948);
Juan José Arévalo, president of Guatemala (1944–1950), and his politi-
cal heir, Jacobo Árbenz, president from 1950 to 1954. Additionally, Juan
Rodríguez, a wealthy Dominican cattle rancher and retired general went
into exile with much of his fortune and agreed to devote it to the liber-
ation of the Dominican Republic in the late 1940s. These patrons were
joined by personal acquaintance, common ideological roots and a shared
regional objective: the removal of dictatorship in the Caribbean.
To achieve this, they relied upon a wide array of agents. Spies, mer-
cenaries, exiled military officers, smugglers or politicians, were hired by
the patrons to provide certain resources such as surplus weaponry, mil-
itary training, manpower; or to perform the task of couriers and dip-
lomats. Communication was both ways however, and sometimes these
20 Sznajder and Roniger, Politics of Exile, 75.

21 Ibid.,188.
22 Tanya Harmer and Alberto Martín Álvarez, ‘Introduction: Writing the History
of Revolutionary Transnationalism and Militant Networks in the Americas’, Estudios

Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe, 28:2 (2017), 8.
23 Brian Reed, ‘A Social Network Approach to Understanding an Insurgency’,
Parameters, 37:2 (2007), 19–30; Tanja A. Börzel, ‘Organizing Babylon—On the Different
Conceptions of Policy Networks’, Public Administration, 76:2 (1998), 253–273.
agents could lobby the patrons for support for a specific action they had
planned. More often than not, exiles were employed as agents. They
weren’t directly linked to the supportive government, allowing the lat-
ter to deny any relationship if they got caught, and were obviously
extra-motivated to fulfil the task at hand. Furthermore, life in exile was
financially strenuous, and many struggled to make ends meet. Exiles
needed to earn a livelihood and working as an agent in the Caribbean
Legion was a suitable fit.24 This also meant however that political ref-
ugees were susceptible to bribes by rivals and thus betrayal and dou-
ble-crossing were not uncommon.25
Many Spanish Republican veterans of the Civil War, such as Alberto
Bayo, a figure that will feature prominently in this book, became entan-
gled in the Caribbean Legion. They had combat experience and valua-
ble skills: they knew how to run training camps, feed an army, design
strategy or identify the adequate planes to be purchased for a specific
operation. Another type of agent, very common in the Cuban case,
were figures associated with the criminal underground. Hired gunmen
belonging to action groups were used as liaisons in Caribbean Legion
activities. These agents owed their loyalty personally to the politicians
that paid them. Some of these gangsters were politically motivated, but
more often than not they also sold their services to the highest bidder.
These elements blurred the line between political subversion and organ-
ized crime: sometimes marijuana or people smugglers were “enlisted”
by a patron to smuggle weapons to an ally. These criminals had the
expertise and means to move illicit contraband around the Caribbean
undetected.
The Caribbean Legion network had no permanent feature but a core
group of exiled officers with no country to return to. This flexible char-
acter meant that the Legion could seemingly disappear without a trace
after an operation and quickly regroup for the next one months later;
there was no standing army to speak of. The name “Caribbean Legion”
was given to this group of officers by the press. Initially, in the Cayo
24 Ameringer, Democratic Left, 18.

25 A first-hand account of these problems is given by exile Alberto Bayo. Bayo to
Marcelino Iñurreta, 11 June 1950, Archivo de la Fundación Universitaria Española,
Madrid, Spain (FUE from hereon), colección Gobierno de la II República en el Exilio
(CGRE from hereon), file MEX 85-3.
Confites expedition, the revolutionaries adopted the name “Ejército

de Liberación de América”. In the Costa Rican Civil War however, a
correspondent from Time magazine dubbed the exile army supporting
Figueres as a “Caribbean Legion”. The name became widespread and it
was informally adopted by the group of exiled officers. In this book, I
will use the name to refer to the revolutionary network which traces its
origins to the expeditions of the 1940s. The name is used abundantly
in the primary sources, with Batista’s secret services referring multiple
times to the “Legión del Caribe” throughout the 1950s as a credible and
dangerous threat to their regime. From these materials, there appears to
be no doubt that such an entity existed and was plotting against Batista.
The dictator himself mentioned the Caribbean Legion several times in
his biographical account Cuba Betrayed.26
The network coordinated its first military action in 1947, a seaborne
invasion of the Dominican Republic by an army of around 1200 mostly
Cuban and Dominican volunteers. The expeditionary army managed to
gather an impressive arsenal (including airplanes and warships) thanks to
coordination between the Cuban, Venezuelan and Guatemalan govern-
ments, bankrolled primarily by Dominican millionaire Juan Rodríguez.
This action, known as Cayo Confites, was a failure, due to infighting
between different factions and international pressure. However, it was
successful in introducing a new generation of Cuban university stu-
dents to the anti-dictatorial fight. As Lillian Guerra notes, “Cayo Confites
proved how easily Cubans could respond to a seemingly ingrained call to
defend Caribbean freedom and shared national sovereignty even to the
point of arms when the opportunity came knocking”.27 Among this new
generation recruited for the expedition was a young Fidel Castro and
many from his university cohort that would go on to fight in the Cuban
Revolution a decade later.28
In 1948, the network assembled again to support an exiled Costa
Rican politician called José Figueres. Figueres successfully lobbied the
patrons for support to launch an attack against the Costa Rican gov-
ernment, which was turning increasingly authoritarian. Like his peers,
26 FulgencioBatista, Cuba Betrayed (New York: Vantage Press, 1962).

27 Guerra,Heroes, Martyrs & Political Messiahs, 49.
Figueres was at the helm of the Partido de Liberación Nacional (PLN),

another Aprista-populist outfit.29 The Caribbean Legion provided mate-
rial support and the logistics to transport it, as well as the experience of
a group of exiled military officers, mainly Nicaraguans, Dominicans and
Hondurans. With this help, Figueres proclaimed victory after a short
Civil War in the spring of 1948. He went on to rule a provisional junta
and call for presidential elections.
Following this success, a second attack was made against the
Dominican Republic in 1949, which received the name of Luperón. This
time the Caribbean Legion network could not count with the support of
Venezuela, after the AD party had been overthrown by a military coup
in 1948. Guatemala and Cuba bore the brunt of the operations and an
international army of Cubans, Dominicans, Nicaraguans, Mexicans,
Guatemalans, Hondurans and Spaniards was assembled to attack Santo
Domingo. The plan was a three-pronged attack, by sea, land and air.
However, due to technical issues, bad weather and bad luck, the aerial
invasion, which was supposed to kick-start the attack, failed. Only one
plane made it to its destination and the Dominican army shot or arrested
all expeditionaries.30
After this failure and as the 1950s dawned, the Caribbean Legion
remained undaunted. Its chief of staff, a Dominican called Miguel Ángel
Ramírez, proudly declared to the Cuban press that their mission was far
from over.31 The Caribbean Legion had become a tool of considerable
weight in the region. The AD, PLN and Auténtico parties enjoyed access
to a network of experienced mercenaries, weapon smugglers and agents
with a background in successfully organizing operations. As the case of
Figueres had proven, any aspiring revolutionary in the Caribbean that
managed to access the network’s pool of resources stood a good chance
of achieving their goals. Ideologically akin projects that managed to
secure the blessing of any of the core patrons of the network could count
with a web of support and supplies that had been built throughout the
years.
29 Angell,‘Left in Latin America’, 179–180.

31 ‘La Legión del Caribe, Baluarte Democrático de América’, Bohemia, 14 August 1949.
Democracy Is Overthrown in Cuba

In 1952, Cuba was preparing for presidential elections. The incumbent
Auténtico party looked like it was going to be defeated by their rivals
and off-shoot, the Ortodoxo party. Two terms of Auténtico govern-
ment fraught with corruption scandals had shifted the advantage to the
Ortodoxos, a political party that “did not differ ideologically from the
Auténticos”, as Bonachea and Valdés remarked. Instead, the Ortodoxos
claimed to be the true heirs of the revolutionary spirit that surged Cuba
in the short interval between Machado’s dictatorship and Batista’s.32 The
Ortodoxos blamed the Auténticos for enriching themselves and neglect-
ing their responsibilities towards the revolutionary change that had been
promised since the 1930s.33
Running far behind was a familiar character in Cuban politics: Batista.
The former sergeant had led a coup in 1934 against the short-lived rev-
olutionary government that rose after Machado’s downfall. During the
1930s, Batista had ruled behind puppet presidents and in 1940, he had
agreed to create a constitution with the participation of all opposition
parties, including the Communist Partido Socialista Popular (PSP). In
1940, he was democratically elected president in a 4-year term until his
loss to the Auténticos in 1944. It seemed like Batista’s time in Cuban
politics had faded as he retired to his estate in Florida. However he
returned in 1948, elected to Congress and geared up in 1952 to com-
pete for the presidential election. His chances were slim. Therefore, in
early 1952, a group of disgruntled military officers plotted a coup with
Batista, who knew he would not win the elections. Many of his support-
ers and cronies feared displacement “by the new parasitical social class
spawned under Auténtico rule”.34
On 10 March, military officers headed by Batista declared total
control of the army’s headquarters in Havana. Carlos Prío was caught
off-guard and despite calls at Havana University to resist the coup, no
weapons ever reached the students and soon, Prío was seeking asylum in
32 Rolando Bonachea and Nelson Valdés, Revolutionary Struggle: The Selected Works of
Fidel Castro, Volume 1: 1947–1958 (London: MIT Press, 1972), 28–29.

33 Samuel Farber, Origins of the Cuban Revolution Reconsidered (Chapel Hill, NC:

34 Guerra, Heroes, Martyrs and Messiahs, 78; Bonachea and Valdés, Revolutionary
Struggle, 33.
the Mexican embassy. Batista placed himself at the head of the new gov-
ernment and delayed the elections until 1953.35
Prío and the politicians of the Auténtico party were no newcomers
to the world of exile and conspiracy. After eight years in power with a
proactive international policy cemented in the values of the Caribbean
Legion, Auténtico politicians were well-connected in the region.36 They
had an ally in Guatemalan president Árbenz and in Costa Rican presi-
dential candidate, José Figueres. Prío had provided vital military sup-
port to the Guatemalan government in 1949 when it had to suppress
a military revolt. Similarly, when Costa Rica was invaded by Nicaragua
in late 1948, Prío ensured that several planes with military cargo were
dispatched to help Figueres’ junta resist the assault.37 In the early weeks
of Batista’s dictatorship, Guatemala and Costa Rica became the safe
havens from which Auténtico exiles could plot. Additionally, these two
governments were in need of some regional backing: Guatemala was
facing increasing pressure from their own landed elite and their allies
in the Dominican, Nicaraguan and Venezuelan dictatorships, as well as
in some US companies. Costa Rica on the other hand, was on a hos-
tile stand-off with its neighbour Nicaragua, where the Somoza dynasty
fiercely disapproved of José Figueres coming to power. The Somoza’s
were also backed by some elements of the Tico elite, and the Dominican
and Venezuelan dictatorships. Removing Batista and reinstating their
Auténtico allies would strengthen the Guatemalan and Costa Rican
positions.
The Árbenz government became a close supporter of the Cuban
exiles. Weeks after the coup, Cuban agents from the Caribbean Legion
were given asylum and work in Guatemala. Eufemio Fernández, Prío’s
head of the secret police and a veteran leader of the Legion, was reported
in Guatemala City, in charge of a “small intelligence unit reporting to
Árbenz through his private secretary”. Fernández had been a military
35 Lars Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic: The United States and the Cuban
Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 49. See also
Guerra, Heroes, Martyrs and Messiahs, 74–85, for perhaps the most in-depth account of
how the 10 March coup unfolded.
36 Charles Ameringer, The Cuban Democratic Experience: The Auténtico Years, 1944–1952
(Miami, FL: University Press of Florida, 2000), 90–105.

37 Alberto Bayo, Tempestad en el Caribe (Mexico, 1950), 134–135; Salvador Pallarés to
Luis Nicolau D’Olwer, 27 August 1949, FEU, CGRE, SE/1-10.

leader in the Cayo Confites and Luperón expeditions, and was living with
other Cuban exiles linked to the Legion.38 His role in Guatemala was to
secure weapons and materiel to organize an invasion of Cuba. To that
end, Fernández travelled frequently between Guatemala and Mexico,
allegedly on a tab of half a million US dollars given to him by Prío for
“revolutionary purposes”.39
Former education minister and Prío’s right-hand man, Aureliano
Sánchez Arango, was also using his Guatemalan contacts to further the
anti-Batista cause. Sánchez Arango had been involved in the Caribbean
Legion and was now putting to use all his contacts in the region to oust
the Cuban dictator.40 Over the years he had befriended his Guatemalan
counterpart, Raúl Osegueda, who had been recently appointed foreign
minister under Árbenz. Already in the summer of 1952, it was reported
that “Sánchez Arango flies in his personal plane to Guatemala to con-
sult with Osegueda and has been accompanied by president Prío”.41
Osegueda had pledged his support to the Cuban exiles to take down
Batista’s illegitimate government, raising the suspicions of the US air
attaché to Guatemala who reported “apparently increasing activity on the
part of Cuban exiles in Guatemala and Mexico to bring about a planned
revolt against Batista”.42
The Cuban exiles belonging to the Auténtico party had mobilized
all the support they could muster against Batista. This support mainly
came from Caribbean Legion veterans: exiles and freedom fighters roam-
ing across the few democracies of the region, attracted to Prío’s for-
tune and promise of work.43 A plan was being devised for the summer
38 Rudolf Schoenfeld, ‘Cuban Ex-Police Chief Eufemio Fernández in Guatemala’, US
Embassy in Havana, 14 May 1952, available at www.latinamericanstudies.org.

39 Carlos Cantillo to Ministro de Estado, 5 August 1957, available at www.latinameri-
canstudies.org; Schoenfeld, ‘Arrival in Guatemala of Eufemio Fernández’, 26 May 1953,

available at www.latinamericanstudies.org.
40 CIA, ‘Cuban Counterrevolutionary Handbook’, 10 October 1962, available at
https://cuban-exile.com/doc_376-400/doc0378.html. Accessed April 20, 2019.

41 FBI Director to Havana Legation, 17 July 1952, John F. Kennedy Assassination
Records (hereafter JFKAR), 124-10224-10230.

42 Earl T. Crain, ‘Alleged Plans for Revolt Activities Against Batista Regime’, US Havana
Embassy, 13 February 1953, available at www.latinamericanstudies.org.

43 Unlike subsequent insurgent movements in the region, during the early 1950s,
Communists of the region were pursuing non-revolutionary tactics and condemned all
forms of “adventurism”.
of 1953, just a year into Batista’s rule, to launch an expedition against

Cuba reminiscent of the Legion’s operations back in the 1940s. For the
preparations, Cuban exiles met and secured the alliance of other exiles.
The patrons of the expedition would be Prío providing the funds, and
the Árbenz government providing Guatemala as a springboard. Sánchez
Arango travelled to Guatemala in the spring of 1953 accompanied
by two Dominican leaders of the Legion, Enrique ‘Cotú’ Henríquez
and Miguel Ángel Ramírez. Both were veterans of Cayo Confites and
Luperón, and Ramírez had also fought in the Costa Rican Civil War.
Through Osegueda, they lobbied to meet Árbenz personally.44 Some
months earlier, Prío had also met with these two Dominican exiles in
Mexico City, where he had pledged three million dollars for the rebel-
lion.45 Thus, since the very beginning, the fight against Batista had a
markedly international character. Almost immediately after the coup, a
transnational network of anti-dictatorial solidarity was called in for sup-
port: the Cuban Revolution began to be shaped by a wider set of polit-
ical decisions and calculations that transcended the immediate Cuban
context. The Cubans were enlisting veteran Dominican freedom fighters
to launch an attack with the assistance of the Guatemalan government.
The first plan was a cross-party affair. A prestigious university pro-
fessor close to the Ortodoxos was planning a coup in Havana’s military
headquarters. Supporting his scheme, professor Rafael García Bárcena
counted with around 3000 student volunteers. García Bárcena was
invited to the meeting in Mexico City with the Dominican exiles, where
Ramírez, chief of staff of the Legion, promised to provide weapons from
the Legion’s arsenal if they were allowed to participate.46 The plan col-
lapsed however when García Bárcena was arrested.
Despite this setback, the Auténticos moved on to a second plan: a
full-fledged invasion of Cuba designed by Caribbean Legion veterans,
launched from Guatemala. As the summer approached, the Cuban press
was filled with rumours of pending invasions. Newspapers repeatedly
warned of “the complicity of Mexican, Guatemalan and Costa Rican
authorities” in a possible triple-pronged attack of Cuba, and Visión
44 Crain, ‘Weeka 20’, US Embassy in Havana, 15 May 1953.

45 Ibid., ‘Alleged Plans’.
46 Ibid.
magazine reported that Guatemala was going to be used as a base.47

With tensions running high, in July 1953, the plan devised by the
Caribbean Legion was leaked to the press. Appearing under the head-
line “The Invasion of Country XXVI: Cuba”, the prestigious weekly
magazine Bohemia revealed the contents of the scheme, presented by the
Cuban Colonel that had intercepted them. In total, the file comprised
around 160 pages, but Cuban intelligence only shared a handful with the
press, detailing estimates of the amount of ships, warplanes or weapons
needed to undertake the revolution.48 US intelligence was already aware
of this plan through their air attaché in Guatemala, and corroborated
that the plan was real. Throughout the report, the Caribbean Legion fea-
tured prominently as the military organizer.49 Revolutionary exiles and
the transnational network that bound them together could be seen at the
heart of the anti-Batista struggle.
Tensions between the Cuban and Guatemalan governments were at
an all-time high. During that summer, the Cuban air force strafed two
cargo ships, thinking they were Guatemalan vessels headed for insur-
rection in Cuba. Three unlucky sailors were injured.50 To reduce ten-
sions, a meeting was arranged between former Guatemalan president
Arévalo and Batista. The Cuban ambassador to the United States dis-
closed to this country’s State Department some details of the meeting:
“[The Cuban ambassador] said that Guatemala is the only country in
Central America which permits activities to continue within its borders
unfriendly to the Cuban government, and in this connection he spoke
particularly of Prío and his followers and of the Caribbean Legion”.
According to the ambassador, the meeting was a success, and as a
result Eufemio Fernández had been discreetly fired from his job in the
Guatemalan government and asked to leave the country.51 Luckily for
47 Schoenfeld, ‘Foreign Minister Denies Guatemalan Participation in Cuban Plots’, US
Havana Embassy, 22 June 1953, available at www.latinamericanstudies.org.

48 ‘La Invasión del País XXVI: Cuba’, Bohemia, 5 July 1953.
49 Crain, ‘Bohemia Interview with Colonel Tabernilla on “The ‘Invasion of Country
XXVI’: Cuba”’, US Havana Embassy, 7 July 1953, available at www.latinamericanstudies.

org.
50 Ibid., ‘Weeka 31’, 31 July 1953.
51 Memorandum of conversation between Aurelio Concheso, Cuban ambassador and
Charles Burrows, Office of Middle American Affairs, 22 July 1953, available at www.lat-
inamericanstudies.org.
the Cuban exiles, their Costa Rican ally José Figueres won his country’s
presidential elections in July 1953 and welcomed Cuba’s political
refugees.52
Cuba’s Political Landscape

Batista’s coup had landed a severe blow to Cuba’s main parties, the
Auténticos and the Ortodoxos, both already fraught with personalism
and factionalism. The Auténticos splintered broadly into two factions
as a result of the coup d’état. One faction led by Carlos Prío and his
followers advocated revolution against the dictator’s regime. This fac-
tion moved into exile and recruited the help of the Caribbean Legion as
described above. However, another faction refused to engage in insur-
rection. This faction, led by former president Ramón Grau San Martín
(1944–1948), advocated participation in elections under Batista. Batista
had announced an election for 1953 and some Auténtico politicians took
him up on his word. Grau wanted to reclaim leadership of the Auténtico
party and thought he would be able to achieve this by participating in
the elections.53 Batista, however, delayed the election date to June 1954,
feeding the suspicions of those who believed he would never allow a fair
contest.54
Similarly, the Ortodoxo party became fractured by the challenge
posed by Batista. Along the same lines, a faction was created advocat-
ing revolution while another favoured a negotiated solution and partic-
ipation in the upcoming elections.55 Raúl Castro described the party at
the time like “an army where their leaders had run away”.56 Within the
Ortodoxo Youth, a group of students was becoming increasingly deter-
mined to overthrow Batista through violence rather than participate in
52 Havana Embassy to State Department 26 January 1954, available at www.latinamer-
icanstudies.org; Carlos Hall, ‘Weeka 33’, Havana Embassy, 18 August 1954, available at
www.latinamericanstudies.org.
53 Charles Ameringer, ‘The Auténtico Party and the Political Opposition in Cuba 1952–
1957’, The Hispanic American Historical Review, 65:2 (1985), 332.

54 Bonachea and Valdés, Revolutionary Struggle, 44–45.
55 Ibid., 34–35.
56 Carlos Franqui, Diario de la Revolución Cubana (Barcelona: Ediciones R. Torres,
1976), 66.
the elections.57 One of these students was Fidel Castro, who had been
in the Auténtico Youth until he joined the Ortodoxos at the moment of
their foundation.58
The Ortodoxo Youth were breaking apart from their leadership,
both with those willing to compromise with the dictatorship, and with
those “playing revolutionary”.59 During 1952, an independent stu-
dent movement began to coalesce around the figures of Fidel Castro
and Abel Santamaría, with many of the members coming from the
Ortodoxo ranks.60 These young revolutionaries, yet without a name
for their organization, were offered to participate in García Bárcena’s
coup, described earlier in this chapter. Participation was voted down by
the group in a meeting, but nevertheless, García Bárcena commanded a
great deal of respect among the students. After the discovery of the plot
and his arrest, many of his followers joined Castro’s movement.61
If this group of students wanted to undertake a revolution, they
needed weapons. For this, Castro ordered his followers to seek an alli-
ance with Prío’s faction of revolutionary Auténticos.62 As the press
covered the many invasion attempts from abroad, it was clear that the
exiled Auténticos counted on an impressive arsenal and smuggling net-
work. Castro’s fervent defence of revolutionary tactics only had a match
in auténtico Aureliano Sánchez Arango, who was the loudest proponent
of insurrection among his party; much more than Prío who seemed to
harbour doubts on the best route back to the presidency.63 Regardless
of the similarity of their end-goal, these contacts did not make much
progress and after some fruitless months, in January 1953, Castro
announced to his group that they should take matters into their own
hands, independently from any other faction.64 The Castro-Auténtico
collaboration would only come about some years later.
57 Guerra, Heroes, Martyrs and Political Messiahs, 106–107.

58 Bonachea and Valdés, Revolutionary Struggle, 28.
59 Franqui, Diario, 68.
60 Guerra, Heroes, Martyrs and Political Messiahs, 123.
61 Franqui, Diario, 58–60.
62 Ibid., 67.
63 Bonachea and Valdés, Revolutionary Struggle, 45; A primary source also points to
Prío’s indecisiveness and Arango’s fervour: FBI Director to Havana Legation, 17 July
1952, JFKAR, 124-10224-10230.
64 Franqui, Diario, 67.
Castro and his group devised an attack against the Moncada barracks
in the city of Santiago, and an outpost in Bayamo, on the eastern side
of the island. The movement included over a hundred recruits and on
26 July 1953, struck the first blow to Batista’s regime. The attack was
repelled by the army and many of the student combatants were appre-
hended, tortured and executed. A small band under Castro’s command
tried to flee to the nearby mountains of Sierra Maestra, but eventu-
ally surrendered to authorities. As Cuban historian Antonio de la Cova
wrote, Batista’s fierce repression after the Moncada attacks “allowed
Castro to turn a military disaster into a political victory”.65 Castro and
his group, now baptized the Movimiento 26 de Julio (M26/7), were
propelled into national prominence. The survivors of the attack were
imprisoned and sentenced to a fifteen-year term.66
The same day of the Moncada attack, Figueres was elected president
of Costa Rica. As 1953 drew to a close, the outlook for 1954 was look-
ing bleak for the Cuban revolutionaries. The failure at Moncada and
the inability of the Auténticos to execute their plans meant that many
politicians from the opposition were siding with those willing to par-
ticipate in the 1954 elections. As Guerra noted, “at the dawn of 1954,
Cubans perceived themselves on the cusp of a return to constitutional
order”.67 Revolutionary activity went quiet as Castro and the survivors of
his movement despaired in prison, and the Auténticos in exile were only
welcome in Costa Rica. To make matters worse for the would-be revo-
lutionaries, the Transnacional de la Mano Dura was working to bring
about the removal of both Figueres and Árbenz, key supporters of the
transnational revolutionary alliance. A blow against these friendly gov-
ernments would have a severe impact on the revolutionaries linked by
the Caribbean Legion network.
La Transnacional de La Mano Dura

As Figueres took power in Costa Rica in 1953, neighbouring dictator of
Nicaragua, Anastasio Somoza, was already planning his removal. Somoza
was allied with Trujillo to contain the democratic surges in the region, so
65 Citedin Guerra, Heroes, Martyrs and Political Messiahs, 123.

66 Bonachea and Valdés, Revolutionary Struggle, 50–53, 62.
67 Guerra, Heroes, Martyrs and Political Messiahs, 140.
they exchanged intelligence reports on the Caribbean Legion and kept a

close eye on rebellious exiles threatening their regimes.68
This section will focus on the case study of a specific individual, a
US mercenary called Edward Browder, to illustrate the composition
and nature of the Transnacional. Browder, active in the Caribbean
area between 1947 and the 1960s, managed to become involved in an
exceptional number of plots directed by the Dominican, Nicaraguan
and Venezuelan dictatorships against the democratic governments of
the region. Through the story of Browder, we will obtain a clear view
of how far these dictatorships collaborated and acted in coordination
to sabotage, repress and depose enemy governments, thus reinforc-
ing the notion of a regional “cold war”. Furthermore, if we are look-
ing at a revolutionary movement, it is necessary that we examine its
counter-revolutionary counterpart. As John M. Gates remarked, “the

study of revolution cannot be separated from the study of counterrev-
olution, recognizing that the forces opposed to a revolution represent
an important aspect of the revolutionary dynamic and form a significant
part of its history”.69
Edward Browder lived in Miami in 1945, after he had finished his
service in World War II. Enjoying a reputation as a “shady promoter
and a blowhard who was all conversation and no money”, he became
involved in a plot with a group of Venezuelans, funded by the
Dominican dictatorship in 1947.70 In 1945 the Venezuelan dictator-
ship was deposed and Rómulo Betancourt and his AD party rose to
power. Former members of military government were banished and they
received support from Trujillo, who paid Browder to obtain US weap-
ons for an expedition against Venezuela. Like the Caribbean Legion, its
counter-revolutionary opposite employed similarly transnational meth-
ods: the Dominican government was paying a US mercenary to support
Venezuelan exiles in a proxy war against regional rivals. To cut costs,
Browder stole US$20,000 worth of machine guns from an army base
in Georgia. In August 1947, the ring was arrested and Browder was
68 Aaron Moulton, ‘Building Their Own Cold War in Their Own Backyard: The
Transnational, International Conflicts in the Greater Caribbean Basin, 1944–1954’, Cold

War History, 15:2 (2015), 145–147.
69 John M. Gates, ‘Towards a History of Revolution’, Comparative Studies in Society and
History, 28:3 (1986), 536.

70 Ibid.
convicted for conspiring. This didn’t deter him. In January 1948, while
out on bond, he became involved in another conspiracy.71
That month, Browder arranged the transport of two US planes to
Nicaragua. The plan was to fly to Nicaragua, load the planes with shells,
bomb Caracas and then return to the United States.72 Simultaneously,
a group of around 50 Venezuelans were flown from the Dominican
Republic to Nicaragua to form the expedition that was meant to invade
after the bombing.73 However Betancourt denounced the plot interna-
tionally before it took place and Browder was arrested again and con-
victed to 3 years of imprisonment.74
These two episodes show the extent to which the Nicaraguan and
Dominican dictatorships had established a network of support for
exiles willing to depose their enemies. Just as the Caribbean Legion
saw wealthy presidents backing rebellious exiles, the Transnacional fol-
lowed a very similar approach. Trujillo and Somoza were coordinating
their support for Venezuelan exiles to launch large-scale military opera-
tions. Both dictatorships funded, armed and organized those banished by
enemy governments. As mentioned earlier, asylum was not given exclu-
sively by democracies, but by dictatorships too.
During the time Browder was imprisoned, the Transnacional scored
some important victories. In November 1948, the AD government was
overthrown by the military and the banished officers who had been sup-
ported by the Nicaraguan and Dominican dictatorships returned to posi-
tions of power. They would now repay the favours they had received.75
In 1952 the Cuban democratic government was overthrown by another
military officer, Batista. Historian Acosta Matos hinted at collusion
between the Cuban officers who staged the coup and Trujillo’s govern-
ment, based on declarations made by Dominican officials some years
71 ‘Three Booked in Theft of US Machine Guns’, The New York Times, 24 April 1947;
‘2 Maryland Men Charged in Plot to Arm Venezuelans’, The Washington Post, 2 October
1947; ‘Navy Guns Purchased to Halt Dominican Revolt, Court Told’, ibid., 25 November
1947; ‘2 Convicted for Theft of Machineguns’, ibid., 3 December 1947; ‘FBI Accuses Six
of Plotting to Bomb Venezuelan Capital’, ibid., 8 February 1948.
72 ‘FBI Accuses Six of Plotting to Bomb Venezuelan Capital’, The Washington Post, 8
February 1948.
73 Moulton, ‘Building Their Own Cold War’, 146.
74 ‘7 Sentenced in Venezuela Bombing Plot’, The Washington Post, 22 August 1948.
75 Moulton, ‘Building Their Own Cold War’, 148–149.

later.76 Not surprisingly, Trujillo’s government was the first to recognize

Batista’s regime and the Dominican dictator was ecstatic about forming
a partnership with his Cuban neighbour.77 Relations between Batista and
Trujillo however, became more complicated than initially expected, as we
will learn in Chapter 2.
In 1952, Browder was released and it wasn’t long before he was look-
ing for work again. In that year, he was contacted by an agent of Prío
to buy a cargo of weapons. Browder obtained the weapons from Italy
but when he delivered them, he was paid half the amount in counter-
feit US currency.78 Quite possibly because of this fiasco, in March 1953,
Browder sent a letter to Batista offering him to disclose the location of a
cache of weapons belonging to Prío in exchange for US$25,000.79 This
seemed to be a habitual practice in Browder, to work for one side but try
to profit simultaneously from the rival.80
During 1953, Browder became involved in a plot against Figueres, led
by Nicaraguan exile and former ally of Figueres, Rosendo Argüello Jr.
Argüello had helped Figueres during the Costa Rican Civil War of 1948
and upon success, he was granted command over the guerrillas destined
to liberate Nicaragua. However, his mismanagement of the training
camps was such that he earned the enmity of many influential Caribbean
Legion commanders.81 In late 1948, Figueres asked the Legion to
leave and Argüello’s mission was a failure criticized by most. Argüello
denounced Figueres as a traitor.82 In 1953 he was planning Figueres’
downfall and for that, he hired Browder.
In an example of transnational networking, in November 1953
Browder turned to other exiles from the Transnacional looking for help
against Figueres. He found an ally in a group of Guatemalan military
officers looking to depose Árbenz, headed by Colonel Castillo Armas.
76 Elíades Acosta Matos, La Telaraña Cubana de Trujillo: Tomo II (Santo Domingo:
Archivo General de la Nación, 2012), 573, footnote 1.

77 Ibid., 521–522.
78 Rolf Larson to FBI Director, 25 June 1954, JFKAR, 124-10208-10425.
79 CIA Mexico City to Director, 28 May 1954, JFKAR, 104-10164-10077.
80 Larson to FBI Director, 25 June 1954, JFKAR, 124-10208-10425; FBI to Director,
30 June 1954, JFKAR, 124-10208-10427.

81 Ameringer, The Democratic Left, 82–83.
82 Argüello Jr. wrote a pamphlet titled Quiénes y Cómo Nos Traicionaron (Who Betrayed
Us and How) in 1955 against Figueres.

The Guatemalans had influential backers: the Dominican, Nicaraguan

and Venezuelan dictatorships, plus the United States government.83 The
deal between Browder and the officers was that the US mercenary would
agree to provide eight planes, $850,000 worth of weaponry and partic-
ipate in the uprising, in exchange for reciprocal help to depose Figueres
and generous payment for his services. Additionally, Browder had to
supervise the shipment of the weapons from Tangiers, Morocco, to a
port in Honduras where the exile army was gathering.84
Preparations for the plot took Browder on trips to Guatemala and
Nicaragua during the spring of 1954. His role in the coup was given to
him personally by Anastasio Somoza’s son “Tachito”, revealing the deep
complicity of actors from the Transnacional in the causes of their allies.85
However Browder suffered a setback just days before the attack on
Guatemala was due to start: he was arrested by Mexican police. Browder
was interrogated in his cell by Mexican and US officials on his activities
but managed knock-out one of the guards and escaped. He immediately
fled to Guatemala where he participated in the uprising as a pilot.86
Being involved in the fighting on the side of Castillo Armas didn’t
stop Browder from trying to make a profit off the enemy. A truce was
arranged in late June, when Árbenz agreed to leave the presidency and
negotiations began for a settlement. During these hectic days, Browder
wrote a letter to the Guatemalan ambassador in Mexico, loyal to Árbenz,
offering his services as a provider of airplanes. As proof of his efficiency,
he pointed out that he had been the person who had armed Castillo
Armas! Ultimately, Árbenz’s government fell before any reply could
reach Browder.87
After successfully deposing Árbenz, Browder and the Transnacional
immediately turned, as promised, towards their next objective: Figueres
83 Moulton, ‘Building Their Own Cold War’, 149–151; On the involvement of the
Transnacional in Árbenz’s downfall, see Moulton, ‘Counterrevolutionary Friends:

Caribbean Basin Dictators and Guatemalan Exiles Against the Guatemalan Revolution,
1945–50’, The Americas, 76:1 (2019), 107–135.
84 CIA Mexico City to Director, 28 October 1954, JFKAR, 104-10164-10075.
85 ‘Tachito’ was the nickname of Anastasio Somoza Debayle. Larson to FBI Director, 25
June 1954, JFKAR, 124-10208-10425.

86 Ibid.; US Mexico Legation to FBI Director, 26 November 1954, JFKAR,
124-10208-10434.
87 CIA Mexico City to Director, 28 October 1954, JFKAR, 104-10164-10075.
in Costa Rica. Browder wrote letters to the dictators of Cuba, Venezuela

and Nicaragua requesting further aid for the movement against
Figueres.88 The antagonism of the Transnacional towards Figueres had
been further fuelled by a recent assassination attempt against Somoza,
designed from Costa Rica. The action had been planned since late 1953
and was carried out on 3 April 1954. The plot featured help from all
along the Caribbean Legion network: Prío provided funds through
his agents Eufemio Fernández and Cotú Henríquez (a veteran of
Cayo Confites and Luperón, as well as Prío’s brother-in-law); Figueres
offered the staging ground for the smuggling of weapons and assassins
into Nicaragua; and Legion veteran, Honduran Jorge Ribas Montes,
was second-in-command of the operation. Juan Bosch and Rómulo
Betancourt were also involved. The assassins however were surprised by
the Nicaraguan National Guard and were either executed or imprisoned.
Only one man survived the operation, a Nicaraguan former officer called
Manuel Gómez Flores, a colonel in the Caribbean Legion during the
Costa Rican Civil War and the Luperón expedition.89
By the fall of 1954, Browder was running short of money. He
returned to Mexico to raise more funds and try to earn some for himself,
offering Time-Life Magazine a report on the anti-Figueres’ expedition.
Its editor, Henry Luce, personally sent a telegram to Browder to arrange
sending a photographer to cover the future attack. Before anything could
be agreed, Browder was arrested once more by Mexican immigration.90
Once more, this arrest stopped Browder from participating in the
action: in January 1955, a column of Costa Rican exiles loyal to Rafael
Calderón Guardia, the president Figueres had deposed in the Civil
War, and armed by the Nicaraguan, Dominican and Venezuelan dicta-
torships, crossed into Costa Rica. This time however, the United States
government did not side with the Transnacional. US disapproval of the
Guatemalan government had intersected with the interests of the dicta-
tors, but the downfall of Figueres was not in the interest of the State
Department. Therefore, the US government condemned the invasion
88 Ibid.
89 Ameringer, Democratic Left, 206–208.

90 Larson to FBI Director, 19 January 1955, JFKAR, 124-10208-10438.
and provided 5 fighter planes to the Costa Rican government for the
symbolic price of $1 per plane. Within days, the invasion was repelled.91
Despite the Costa Rican fiasco, the success of the Transnacional in
Guatemala delivered a devastating blow to the Caribbean Legion net-
work, with many of its most reputed leaders facing arrest in the hands of
the new military dictatorship. Furthermore, an important ally and patron
had been lost. Árbenz and his government now joined the group of
exiles wandering the streets of Mexico, Miami or San José. The failure to
assassinate Somoza in April 1954 and the consequent decimation of the
Nicaraguan underground added to the misery of the Legion. As 1954
came to a close, the democratic exiles were in desperate need of fresh
ideas and new recruits.
In Cuba, Batista’s promised elections arrived in November and he
ran unopposed: it was the sham the radical sectors of both opposition
parties had predicted. This gave common ground to the revolutionaries
of Auténtico and Ortodoxo persuasion and thus, in December 1954, in
Mexico City, Eufemio Fernández, Sánchez Arango and other revolution-
aries linked to the Auténtico party began meeting with those few veter-
ans of the Moncada attacks that had managed to escape the ordeal. The
idea was to form an alliance between the Auténticos and the Moncadistas
to fight Batista.92
Conclusion
As we have seen in this chapter, Batista’s coup and the resistance that
followed took place in an international context of unrest. As the his-
tory of the Caribbean Legion shows, the region was in considerable tur-
moil since the end of World War II, with democratic surges provoking
streams of exiles from dictatorial countries. The region had descended
into a “Cold War of [its] own”, with a 4-tiered interplay between exiles,
their host countries and the expelling dictatorships, structured by a trans-
national network of support. Exiles represented those democratizing
impulses in the Circum-Caribbean, frustrated by repression.
91 Moulton,
‘Building Their Own Cold War’, 151.
92 ‘Actividades
Subversivas’, 23 December 1954, Archivo del Instituto de Historia de
Cuba, Havana, Cuba (AHIC hereon), Colección Marina de Guerra (CMG from hereon),
28/1.3/1.3/1-48.
In Cuba, Batista’s regime immediately drove any rebellious oppo-

sition into exile, reinforcing the transnational dynamic in place: as the
Auténticos fled the island, the Caribbean Legion saw a sudden upsurge
in vitality, with a new patron funding operations. The personal connec-
tions made through this network were immediately called into action,
spurring influential members of the Guatemalan and Costa Rican gov-
ernments to support subversive activities in Cuba. Opposition to Batista
was taking place not just in the national domain, but also in the trans-
national, as exiles from several different nations joined the cause. This
international dimension shows that the transnational network repre-
sented something more than the will of a handful of individuals: it was
a region-wide wave of discontent against dictatorships everywhere, in
Cuba and beyond. The anti-Batista revolutionary movement drew
from the previously established insurgent network in the region: the
Caribbean Legion.
In reaction, the dictatorial governments of the Circum-Caribbean
worked together to supress these rebellious activities. Cross-border
cooperation between the different security agencies became common as
plots were devised to assassinate exiles, thwart plans and even overthrow
unfriendly governments. While the East–West Cold War flared in Europe
and Asia, the Caribbean was living a divide of its own.
CHAPTER 3
The Internationalization of the Cuban

Revolution, 1955–1956
Abstract  This chapter re-examines a crucial period of the Cuban

Revolution: the year that Fidel Castro and the leadership of his move-
ment spent in exile in Mexico. During this time, Prados shows how
Castro, a newcomer to the world of revolution and guerrilla-fighting,
tapped into the pre-existing Caribbean Legion network. With the aid
from this experienced web of freedom fighters, smugglers, politicians
and exiles, Castro managed to successfully build up his organiza-
tion from exile and invade Cuba. This chapter also draws attention to
the counter-revolutionary dynamics of the region, detailing how the
relationship between Batista and Rafael Trujillo soured, leading to the
unexpected support from the latter to Cuban rebels.
Keywords  Fidel Castro · Exile · Caribbean Legion ·

Cuban Revolution · Revolutionary network · Rafael Trujillo
In 1955, Mexico City was buzzing with exiles from all over Latin
America. In cafés and cantinas, groups of Cubans discussed the
politics of their country, while Venezuelans lamented the military

coup that had reinstated dictatorship in 1948, close to recently arrived
Guatemalans loyal to Jacobo Árbenz’s government. This often con-
trasted with the more veteran Nicaraguan and Dominican exiles, whose
countries had been under dictatorship for almost three decades, or

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46363-2_3
the Spanish Republicans who had fled General Franco’s regime in the
late 1930s.1 Additionally, in the opening years of the decade, two new
groups of exiles arrived to Mexico from their Northern neighbour: US
Communists and leftists (many of them Hollywood screenwriters, har-
assed by McCarthy’s witch-hunt) and Puerto Rican nationalists belong-
ing to Pedro Albizu Campos’ Partido Nacionalista de Puerto Rico,
facing prosecution after a failed uprising in 1950. Since the nineteenth
century, Mexico had established an open policy towards exiles, consist-
ently providing safe haven to political refugees.2 In 1955, Mexico City
had thus become a breeding ground for a Caribbean revolution.
In July of that year, Fidel Castro took a plane from Cuba to Mexico,
joining his brother and a whole generation of exiles in the Mexican capi-
tal. Castro had been released from prison earlier in May, after the prom-
ulgation of a general amnesty. He had immediately returned to political
agitation in Havana, accusing Batista’s regime of multiple abuses, until
a prominent oppositionist loyal to the Auténticos, Felipe Agostini, was
murdered in cold blood by police. The murder of Agostini, a veteran
revolutionary that, like Castro, had participated in the Caribbean Legion
operation of Cayo Confites, sent a clear message to all oppositionists on
the island. Castro therefore decided that his revolution would be better
prepared in exile.
In the year and a half that ensued (from July 1955 to November
1956), the M26/7 emerged as a veritable force to challenge Batista.
More importantly to this book, during this time the M26/7 became
entangled in a larger revolutionary network, encompassing more than
just opposition to Batista. In order to strengthen their organization,
Castro and his inner group networked with other exiles, specially from
Guatemala, Nicaragua and Puerto Rico. He also successfully lobbied the
Costa Rican government for support and thus tapped into the Caribbean
Legion network. The M26/7 managed to access the Legion thanks
to the brokerage of revolutionary Auténtico politicians and became
involved in something larger than Cuban politics: the internationaliza-
tion of the Cuban Revolution had begun.
Cambridge University Press, 2009), 156; Sznajder and Roniger, ‘Political Exile in Latin
America’, in Exile & The Politics of Exclusion in the Americas, eds. Luis Roniger, James N.
Green, and Pablo Yanklevich (Eastbourne: Sussex University Press, 2012), 13.
2 Ibid., 28.
3 THE INTERNATIONALIZATION OF THE CUBAN … 45
While Castro was in Mexico, on the other side of the Caribbean a

twisted dynamic blurred the already intricate web of personal allegiances
and strategic pacts criss-crossing the region. An international dispute over
the US sugar quota between Cuba and the Dominican Republic pitted
two dictators against each other: Rafael Trujillo and Fulgencio Batista.
Trujillo devised a convoluted plan against Batista: he would provide train-
ing and weapons to Cuban exiles linked to the Auténticos with the hopes
that in the ensuing chaos, Cuban generals friendly to the Dominican
dictator would replace Batista. The exiles were to be used as a dispos-
able pawn in Trujillo’s larger scheme and the Auténtico exiles wilfully
accepted, thinking they could outsmart Trujillo and retain control over
any regime change. The ensuing international “chess game” saw the birth
of an unlikely alliance: Prío and many of his Auténtico lieutenants, many
of them Caribbean Legion veterans, entered a partnership with their main
nemesis, Trujillo. This collaboration turned into a triangle when Castro’s
M26/7 in turn entered an uneasy alliance with the Auténticos, and thus
became a beneficiary of Trujillo’s aid. The anti-Batista fight had become
a truly transnational affair, where foreign involvement was not exclusively
the domain of US agencies, but also from neighbouring governments
such as the Dominican Republic or Costa Rica.
In what follows, this chapter will first examine Fidel Castro’s exile in
Mexico, while charting the networking and collaborations between the
M26/7 and other exiled movements, under the auspice of the Auténtico
party. One of the aims of this chapter is to add to recent scholarly
work, such as that by Sweig, which details ways in which “ competing”
revolutionary organizations collaborated and reached pragmatic

understandings to take advantage of their respective strengths.3 The

other aim is to show how the resulting alliance put the M26/7 in con-
tact with a wider Latin American phenomenon, the Caribbean Legion’s
anti-dictatorial struggle, and enmeshed the Cuban Revolution into a
broader regional confrontation. Through the revolutionary network, the
Cuban Revolution became interdependent and reliant on other revolu-
tionary movements, such as the Nicaraguan, Dominican or Guatemalan.
This will provide a new picture of Fidel Castro’s Mexican exile as a fun-
damental stage for the development of the M26/7. As we will see, net-
working with fellow exiles was vital for this movement. This reinforces
3 Julia Sweig, Inside the Cuban Revolution: Fidel Castro and the Urban Underground
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 15–16, 18–20.

one of the main arguments of this book: Cuban revolutionaries and the
M26/7 in particular tapped into a pre-existing revolutionary network to
wage war against Batista.
The second part of this chapter will analyse the position of Batista
within the Transnacional de la Mano Dura and his troubled relation-
ship with Trujillo. Batista was torn between seeking the legitimacy of
democracy through an electoral victory, while refusing to submit himself
to the possibility of losing power. This drove him to reject and embrace
Trujillo, depending on his own domestic problems. More importantly,
the dispute over sugar quotas and cracks within the Cuban military
establishment further aggravated relations between both tyrants. Trujillo
was courting Cuban top generals who wanted Batista to drop the dem-
ocratic pretence, and Batista increasingly faced the possibility of a coup
from within the armed forces. Ultimately, the launch of a guerrilla war in
the Sierra Maestra by Castro’s rebels brought the Trujillo-Batista enmity
to an end, as both dictators joined efforts to repress their rivals.
The purpose of this apparent diversion from the Caribbean Legion is
twofold. On the one hand, this explanation is needed to understand the
paradoxical and counter-intuitive alliance between Auténtico exiles linked
to the Caribbean Legion and Rafael Trujillo, as well as the equally com-
plex participation of the M26/7 in this pact. On the other hand, this
section will serve to expand on the idea of a Caribbean Cold War, show-
ing the joint repression of exiles exercised by the security branches of
the Cuban and Dominican dictatorships. As mentioned in Chapter 1, a
thorough examination of a revolutionary movement cannot be detached
from its counter-revolutionary opposite.
The M26/7 in Exile: Tapping

into the Caribbean Legion
Upon his arrival in Mexico City in July 1955, Fidel Castro sent a letter
to a colleague from the M26/7 stating the priorities of the movement
in exile: “we outlined a working plan which covers from getting Cuban
news at a short notice, to the way of contacting influential personalities
in this country whose friendship can be of use”.4 Networking was at the
4 Cited in Heberto Norman Acosta, La Palabra Empeñada (Havana: Oficina de
Publicaciones del Consejo de Estado, 2005), vol. 1, 157.

top of Castro’s priorities if he wanted to build a capable organization

for waging war against Batista. After the failed Moncada attack, a stint
in prison, and exile, Castro might have had “will and enthusiasm”, but
his M26/7, according to US embassy analysts, lacked “the means for
successful revolution”.5 By November 1956, however, the M26/7 had
managed to purchase a yacht for an expedition, arm and equip a contin-
gent of 82 recruits and provide training, shelter and food to over 100
movement members that had flocked to Mexico for instruction.
Navigating the complex world of exiled politics in Mexico City was
not easy for a newcomer. Shortly after arriving, Castro was furious when
he learnt that one of the leaders of the Ortodoxo revolutionary faction
in exile, his own party, had sold a shipment of weapons to followers of
Árbenz, planning a revolution in Guatemala. The sale had been bro-
kered by Auténtico revolutionary Eufemio Fernández.6 If Castro wanted
to participate in this network of weapon-smuggling and logistical sup-
port, he needed an introduction from an insider. Luckily for him, the
Auténtico party was going through a crisis. As explained in the previous
chapter, the Auténticos were divided into two factions, one advocating
revolution headed by Prío and his right-hand men, former education
minister Aureliano Sánchez Arango and former head of secret police
Eufemio Fernández; and the n on-revolutionary faction willing to reach a
political understanding with Batista, headed by former president Ramón
Grau San Martín. In July 1955 it was being rumoured that Prío was will-
ing to abandon his revolutionary stance and return to Cuba for peaceful
negotiations with Batista. Members of the Auténtico revolutionary fac-
tion saw Prío’s move as treason. One former navy officer from this fac-
tion “violently expressed that if Prío was returning to Cuba to do politics
of any kind, he would join the Ortodoxo revolutionary faction”.7
Castro was quick to pick up on this schism and, in line with his net-
working objective, decided to incorporate as many Auténticos as pos-
sible into his movement. The Auténtico revolutionary faction, best
represented in the organization named Triple A headed by Sánchez
Arango, held a valuable asset: a list of contacts that spanned almost all
5 Havana Embassy, ‘Weeka 5’, 31 January 1956, available at latinamericanstudies.org.

6 Nicolás Cartaya, 29 July 1955, Archivo del Instituto de Historia de Cuba,
Havana, Cuba (AHIC hereon), Colección Marina de Guerra (CMG from hereon),
28/1.31.5/1-186.
7 Ibid. This officer ended up joining Castro’s expedition.
revolutionaries in the Caribbean basin. Men like Sánchez Arango or

Eufemio Fernández were key figures in the Caribbean Legion network
and thus enjoyed a prominent position within what Tad Szulc called
“the Latin American revolutionary grapevine”.8 An alliance between the
M26/7 and the Triple A would give Castro’s group access to a pool of
resources beyond their means.
The Triple A’s smuggling network involved a web of personal alle-
giances and friendships that spanned several nationalities and countries.
Batista’s spies in Mexico managed to unearth one particular smuggling
route that painted a picture of deep transnational cooperation: weap-
ons were purchased in Mexico City through a company owned by two
prominent Mexican generals from the ruling Partido Revolucionario
Institucional (PRI). The weapons were then taken by train to Campeche
in the Yucatán peninsula, where a local smuggler transported them to
the hacienda of a Mexican businessman friends with Prío. In turn, this
hacendado moved the cargo to the port of Chetumal, where the network
counted on three small airplanes and two schooners: one with a Costa
Rican licence and the other with a Haitian one. Both schooners were
owned by two Nicaraguan brothers, and the planes were piloted by a
Nicaraguan and a Mexican. Aiding in the operation was a Guatemalan
woman nicknamed “La Tigresa” (the tigress) married to a former
Arbenzista mayor, and operated from an Indian village in the south of
Belize. Working with her from Livingstone, Guatemala, was a former mil-
itary officer.9 Instead of heading straight to Cuba and thus alerting the
suspicions of both Mexican and Cuban authorities, the smugglers took
a diversion to Belize and Guatemala before heading north to the island
of Hispaniola and then finally, into Cuba. As illustrated by this account,
such route to Cuba involved agents of five different nationalities, work-
ing across four countries. Similarly, arrests along other smuggling routes
shed light on the international revolution being carried out. On one
occasion, a seizure prompted by a denunciation from the Cuban secret
service to Mexican authorities resulted in the arrest of 12 Cubans, 4
Venezuelans and a Nicaraguan citizen carrying weapons aboard a ship.10
8 Tad Szulc, Fidel: A Critical Portrait (New York: William Morrow, 1986), 326.
9 Juan Estevez Maymir, 21 September 1956, AHIC, colección Ejército (CE from
hereon), 24/3.80/1.1/1-228.
10 Ibid., 7 December 1956, 24/3.20/1.1/1-223.
The young M26/7 in exile could only dream of building a network as

intricate as the one the Triple A enjoyed.
Castro immediately got to work to lure these disaffected revolution-
ary Auténticos onto his side. In a letter to a fellow movement leader,
Castro instructed him “to work with the utmost skill” now that the “sin-
cerely revolutionary Auténtico group will no doubt rebel against” Prío’s
decision to return to Cuba.11 In August 1955, Prío returned to Cuba
and publicly renounced revolution as a means of securing power. “The
moment is ours!” Castro responded as he wrote to the M26/7 national
directorate: “You will have to be skilful and intelligent in recruiting with-
out exceptions any unhappy elements with weapons”.12 Through the
course of 1955, he met with leaders from the Triple A. In August, he
visited Horacio Ornes (a Dominican leader of the Caribbean Legion who
had participated in Cayo Confites, Costa Rica and Luperón), and asked
him for an introduction to Eufemio Fernández, with whom he wanted
to reach an understanding.13 In September, Paco Cairol and Cándido
de la Torre, agents of Sánchez Arango travelled to Mexico to meet
Castro.14 A few weeks later, Justo Carrillo, another prominent member
of the Triple A, met with Castro in the scenic ruins of Chichen Itzá.15
An agreement was reached between both groups: the M26/7 had just
gained access to the Caribbean Legion network.16
Through this cooperation with the revolutionary Auténticos, Fidel
Castro met Salvador Cancio Peña, a Cuban cartoonist and satirist that
had been living in exile since Batista’s coup. Cancio Peña had produced
several anti-Batista pamphlets from exile and was being funded by both
Prío and Ortodoxo revolutionaries. He worked from Miami until he was
discovered stashing 15 rifles in his home and fled to Mexico in 1955.17
There, he befriended Castro and introduced him to a friend who could
be useful to Castro’s cause: retired general and prominent Caribbean
11 Acosta, La Palabra Empeñada, vol. 1, 166.

12 Ibid., 199.
13 Horacio Ornes to Eufemio Fernández, 29 August 1955, digital scan sent to me by Dr.
Aaron Moulton.
14 Acosta, La Palabra Empeñada, vol. 1, 241; vol. 2, 46.
15 Ibid., vol. 1, 233, 275.
16 CIA, ‘Cuban Counterrevolutionary Handbook’, 10 October 1962.
17 ‘Antecedentes Extractados de Salvador Cancio Peña’, 21 January 1958, AHIC, CE,
24/3.20/8.1/1-134.
Legionnaire Alberto Bayo.18 Bayo was a Spanish career officer, having

fought in Morocco during the 1920s, and later in the Spanish Civil War
on the side of the Republican forces. In 1939 he fled Spain and arrived
in the Caribbean as an exile, where by 1948 he was entangled with the
Caribbean Legion as an instructor for anti-Somoza guerrillas in Costa
Rica. He additionally participated in the 1949 Luperón affair and had
since worked multiple jobs, barely making a living while keeping contact
with several exiles from different nationalities in the hopes of finding a
new revolutionary project.19 After a conversation with Castro, Bayo was
recruited as the military instructor of the group.
In exile, the M26/7 leadership actively networked with exiles from
multiple nationalities to further their cause. Melba Hernández, a leader
of the M26/7, described in a letter to her mother how they had been
recently meeting and mixing with other exiles, such as the Venezuelan for-
mer president Rómulo Gallegos.20 In Mexico City’s Ateneo Español (an
organization of the Spanish Republican exiles) Castro gave speeches to
gatherings of exiles from all over the Spanish-speaking world. Reminiscing
on the event, Puerto Rican politician Juan Juarbe Juarbe recalled that
the audience was composed of Guatemalan, Salvadorian, Peruvian,
Venezuelan, Puerto Rican and Dominican exiles. “They all see the 26th
of July as their date too”, Castro summed in a letter.21 In the Autumn
of 1955, Castro embarked on a fundraising tour of the United States.
This tour catered particularly to the Cuban émigrés, but also counted
on the help of other exiles: the Tampa, Florida, branch of the M26/7,
“second in stature in the United States” according to the FBI, was organ-
ized thanks to Bayo’s recommendation letter sent to prominent Spanish
Republican exiles living in Florida. According to an FBI informant, the
Tampa branch had become so successful due to “the large Cuban and
inter-related Spanish–Latin colony” and to the pressure exerted upon

it “by the powerful Spanish Commies of Tampa—the old timers of the
Spanish Civil War”: Alberto Bayo’s comrades in arms.22 Similarly, Castro’s
18 Alberto Bayo, Mi Aporte a la Revolución Cubana (Havana: Imprenta Ejército Rebelde,
1960), 20.
19 See Bayo, Tempestad en el Caribe (Mexico, 1950).
20 Acosta, La Palabra Empeñada, vol. 1, 300.
21 Ibid., 182.
22 ‘July 26 Movement, Tampa, Florida’, 5 December 1960, FBI online-archive, available at
https://vault.fbi.gov/fidel-castro/fidel-castro-Part-05-of-05/view. Accessed April 20, 2019.

first speech in New York was organized and hosted by the Dominican
exile community, who ceded the Casa Dominicana in Broadway for
the event.23 Besides touring the United States, during 1955 and 1956,
Castro established partnerships between the M26/7 and three key groups
entwined by the Caribbean Legion network: the Guatemalan exiles loyal
to Árbenz, Nicaraguan anti-Somoza exiles and the Costa Rican govern-
ment under Caribbean Legion patron José Figueres.
Other key figures soon joined this network. In the final months of
1953, Ernesto Guevara was travelling across the Americas after finish-
ing his studies in his native Argentina. By December, Guevara was in
San José, Costa Rica, where Figueres had attained power a few months
earlier.24 Here Guevara met for the first time members of the Caribbean
Legion: he dined several times with Juan Bosch and Rómulo Betancourt
whom he knew through a friendship with Bosch’s son. Years later, Bosch
wrote on the impact that this young Argentinian doctor had had on him,
and the multiple meetings they had while Guevara passed through the
country.25 By January 1954, Guevara arrived to Guatemala and he was
impressed by the efforts of Árbenz and Arévalo’s governments to reform
the country while confronting US business interests and their own mili-
tary and terrateniente establishments.
Living in Guatemala City, Guevara met his future wife Hilda Gadea,
a Peruvian exiled activist from Haya de la Torre’s APRA party. Through
Gadea, he became embedded in the exile community of Guatemala,
befriending Ñico López, a Cuban veteran of the Moncada attack; Elena
Leiva de Holst, a Honduran exile who headed the Alianza de Mujeres
organization and had visited the Soviet Union; and Edelberto Torres, a
prestigious Nicaraguan writer teaching at a local university as well as his
son Edelberto Torres Jr.26 The senior Edelberto had played an active role
23 Acosta,La Palabra Empeñada, vol. 1, 303.

24 Jon Lee Anderson, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (New York: Grove Press,
2010), 318–321.
25 ‘Mis Recuerdos de Che Guevara por Juan Bosch’, El Día, 9 October 2017, available
at https://eldia.com.do/mis-recuerdos-de-che-guevara-articulo-escrito-por-juan-bosch/.
Accessed April 20, 2019.
Caribbean, 1945–1959 (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1974), 163; Acosta,
Palabra Empeñada, vol. 1, 14.
in the Caribbean Legion in the past years: he had introduced Figueres

to Juan José Arévalo back in 1948 and had actively conspired against
Somoza from Costa Rica. The junior Edelberto was roughly Ernesto
Guevara’s age and was already an established leader of Guatemalan
Communist Youth.27 The uprising against Árbenz in June 1954 left
Guevara “understandably bitter”, and it wasn’t until September that he
was able to leave the country and move to Mexico.28
Guevara met Castro in Mexico over the summer of 1955 and quickly
joined the movement, strengthening the ties of the M26/7 to the
Guatemalan exile community in Mexico City. Many of Árbenz’s follow-
ers had been granted asylum in the capital and were planning on retak-
ing control of their homeland. Both the Cubans and Guatemalans joined
forces several times: as mentioned above, the Guatemalan exiles bought
a cargo of weapons from Ortodoxo revolutionaries through Eufemio
Fernández, who had worked closely for the Árbenz government. This
partnership between the Guatemalans and the different Cuban factions
aroused suspicions among the members of the Transnacional de la
Mano Dura. In July 1955 deposed Costa Rican president and Somoza-
ally, Rafael Calderón Guardia, was warning Cuban intelligence that
Guatemalan exiles where gathering in the Yucatán peninsula, looking
to jointly launch an expedition against Cuba.29 Indeed, former Árbenz
officials were very close to the Cuban exiles. In a report from Batista’s
intelligence service, the military attaché in Mexico City reported that the
former Guatemalan ambassador to Cuba, Colonel García Montenegro
was in close contact with Castro and his group: “he meets with these
elements on account of his own conspiracy against Guatemala”.30
Additionally, García Montenegro served as a courier for important trans-
actions along the Caribbean Legion: in November 1956 the colonel trav-
elled to Cuba to pick up money coming from Puerto Rico. The sender
of this money was former Venezuelan president Betancourt, and the
funds were to be distributed among the Cuban revolutionary exiles in
Mexico.31

28 Anderson, Che, 393, 411–412.
29 Estevez to Ayudante General, 30 July 1955, AHIC, CE, 24/3.20/1.1/1-222.
30 Ibid., 6 September 1956.
31 Ibid., 12 November 1956.

The full extent of the Cuban–Guatemalan alliance was revealed when

a safe house pertaining to the M26/7 in Mexico City was raided and
a large cache of weapons seized. When interrogated, the owner of the
house confessed that these weapons belonged to Fidel Castro, Eufemio
Fernández and Jorge Torriello, a Guatemalan politician who had been
part of Guatemala’s first democratic junta with Árbenz in 1944.32
Torriello and the M26/7 worked in close partnership, and when Castro
finally boarded his group on an overcrowded yacht to Cuba, he handed
the Guatemalan exiles all the weapons he could not carry with him.33
The other group that worked in partnership with the M26/7 were
the Nicaraguan anti-Somoza exiles. Living in Mexico at the time were
several key figures of the anti-Somoza movement such as Juan José Meza
and colonel Manuel Gómez Flores.34 Alberto Bayo was acquainted with
them: the former had hired him back in 1948 to train the Nicaraguan
rebels in Costa Rica, and the latter had been a fellow instructor at the
Costa Rican training camps and a participant of the Luperón invasion
of 1949.35 Additionally, Gómez Flores had been the sole survivor of
the foiled assassination attempt against Somoza in 1954 with help from
the Caribbean Legion network, as explained in the previous chapter. In
June 1956, Fidel Castro’s group in Mexico City was briefly arrested by
Mexican police. In the raid, Mexican authorities confiscated documen-
tation which revealed that the M26/7 had “links with exiled politicians
of different nationalities living in Mexico, mainly with the Nicaraguans
headed by Manuel Gómez Flores”. Additionally, the police report high-
lighted the “great friendship” between members of the M26/7, Gómez
Flores and Salvador Cancio Peña.36
Events in Nicaragua were unfolding fast: in September 1956 Anastasio
Somoza had been assassinated, and the ensuing turmoil prompted rev-
olutionary preparations against the regime. Batista’s spies in Mexico
became anxious, reporting on Nicaraguan security as if it was their
own: “my constant worry has augmented due to the recent events in
Nicaragua”, wrote the Cuban military attaché to Mexico a few days
32 Ibid.,
17 November 1956.
33 Ibid.,
7 December 1956.
34 ‘Nicaraguan Sees Exiles Uniting’, The New York Times, 28 September 1956.
35 Bayo, Tempestad, 191.
36 Leandro Castillo Venegas, 26 June 1956, Archivo del Ministerio de Exteriores,
Havana, Cuba (MINREX hereon), no file number.

after the assassination.37 “We must not ignore what happened to general
Somoza” he warned again some weeks later.38 He had reasons to be con-
cerned, as he recently witnessed the collaboration between Cuban and
Nicaraguan exiles. The latter were in communication with Castro and
the attaché feared such partnership: “they’re preparing to strike against
Cuba and Nicaragua; possibly Nicaragua will go first as they think it’s
weaker”.39 To make matters worse, a few weeks after Somoza’s mur-
der, Castro and Cancio Peña travelled to Costa Rica to meet Gómez
Flores, where he was training a Nicaraguan guerrilla.40 In the end, the
Cuban–Nicaraguan invasion against Somoza did not materialize in 1956:
it had to wait until June 1959 when an outfit of Nicaraguan exiles was
trained and equipped by Castro’s revolutionary government to attack the
Somozas.
The third main supporter of the M26/7 in exile was Caribbean
Legion patron José Figueres, elected president of Costa Rica in 1953.
Bayo was a fervent admirer of Figueres, whom he considered a champion
of the oppressed and exiled from any part of the Hispanic world. “I am
bound to José Figueres by ties of admiration and personal gratitude”, he
wrote in 1950, “regardless of political differences”, as Figueres was more
conservative than many in the Legion network.41 As soon as he won the
election, Figueres granted asylum to many Cubans fleeing Batista’s per-
secution. In Mexico City, Castro became acquainted with Luis Alberto
Monge, a Costa Rican and head of the Inter-American Regional Labour
Organization (ORIT), a continental organization considered to be “one
of the pillars of the Democratic Left”.42 Monge’s friendship was valu-
able, given that he was a well-connected Tico and his brother was the
Costa Rican consul to Mexico. Using ORIT money, Monge paid for the
printing of Cancio Peña’s anti-Batista leaflets in Mexico.43
In June 1956 Castro travelled to Costa Rica to meet with govern-
ment officials, receptive to his plans and, after four days of meetings and
37 Estevez, 23 September 1956, AHIC, CE, 24/3.20/1.1/1-222.

38 Ibid., 22 October 1956.
39 Ibid.
40 Esteban M. Beruvides, Cuba: Archivos Confidenciales, vol. 3 (Miami, FL: Colonial
Press International, 2001), 15.

41 Bayo, Tempestad, 88.
42 Szulc, Fidel, 355.
43 Estevez, 4 December 1956, AHIC, CE, 24/3.20/1.1/1-222.

negotiations, he secured the support of the government.44 Later that

summer Castro showed his passport to an American journalist and the
writer noted that it showed “several trips between Mexico and Costa
Rica, and [Castro] indicated that he planned to go [again] to Costa Rica
shortly”.45 Indeed something was afoot in the Cuban-Tico connection,
as Batista’s spies indicated that Figueres had joined the conspiracy and
was “amassing semi-heavy weapons” in the Caribbean port of Limón to
ship to Cuba.46 Additionally, Figueres visited Mexico in September 1956
and the Cuban military attaché to Mexico feared that he was in town
to meet with Castro, Sánchez Arango and Eufemio Fernández.47 Facing
these reports, Batista decided to dispatch an additional military attaché
to Central America, based in Costa Rica. This new position would be
responsible for reporting on activities in Costa Rica, Nicaragua and
Panama, alleviating the workload of the attaché to Mexico who was pre-
viously expected to cover the whole isthmus. Describing the move in a
dispatch to the Department of State, the US embassy in Havana high-
lighted the main reason behind it: “it has been reported several times
that Figueres, Prío and Fidel Castro are working closely together against
Batista. The location of a loyal colonel in Costa Rica will provide more
first-hand information of anti-Batista activities”.48
The alliance with Figueres’ government bore fruit. In October 1956,
Batista’s spies reported that “approximately 400 Cubans” were receiving
training in Figueres’ personal finca.49 The figure was as exaggeration but
the report had some truth to it: a handful of M26/7 members exiled in
San José were receiving training by members of the Costa Rican National
Guard in haciendas outside the capital. Every week, the Cuban exiles
travelled to a different estate where instructors taught them how to use
weapons and grenades. Additionally, they received tactical classes on how
to assault an enemy position.50 Eventually this small group linked up
44 Acosta, Palabra Empeñada, vol. 2, 54.

45 Havana Embassy to State Department, ‘Weeka 32’, 8 August 1956, available at lat-
inamericanstudies.org.
46 Estevez, 19 September 1956, AHIC, CE, 24/3.20/1.1/1-222.
47 Ibid., 8 September 1956, 9 September 1956.
48 Havana Embassy to State Department, ‘Weeka 39’, 26 September 1956, available at
latinamericanstudies.org.
49 Estevez, 22 October 1956, AHIC colección Ejército, 24/3.20/1.1/1-222.

with the rest of the movement in Mexico and sailed on the expedition to
Cuba in November 1956.
In sum, during their time in Mexico City, members of the M26/7
became fully embedded in the Caribbean Legion network of transna-
tional revolutionary activity. Through their tactical alliance with dis-
affected Auténticos, Castro’s group managed to tap into a pool of
resources previously unavailable to them. It was a move not too dissim-
ilar from the way Figueres became involved in the Legion back in 1948:
accessing the network through the introduction of a senior figure. This
period in exile internationalized the Cuban revolutionary movement,
turning the struggle from a national affair to a truly Caribbean revolu-
tion with far-reaching consequences. As we have seen, networking with
fellow exiles was key for the development of the M26/7. The Cubans
were able to build on a foundation already provided by the Caribbean
Legion network, which in turn shaped the anti-Batista struggle and its
participants: the incipient Cuban Revolution adopted the pro-democratic
and anti-dictatorial character of the Legion.
The Complicated Batista–Trujillo Relationship

In 1956, Spanish exile Jesús de Galíndez described the Caribbean as a
place where “a crisscross of interests and forces” had been created, one
“in which exiles seek to attack the dictatorships of their respective coun-
tries, and often dictators and democracies help each against the other. The
Dominican Republic is in the centre of that volcano”.51 In order to under-
stand this complicated “crisscross of interests and forces”, we must turn
to the Caribbean Legion’s counterpart. By understanding the dynamics
involving the Transnacional de la Mano Dura, we will be able to compre-
hend the apparently contradictory pact between Caribbean Legion-linked
Auténtico exiles and members of the M26/7 with the regime of Rafael
Trujillo.
As mentioned in Chapter 1, Trujillo and his government in the
Dominican Republic led the Transnacional de la Mano Dura, the alli-
ance between Trujillo, the Somoza dynasty of Nicaragua and the
counter-revolutionary exiles of the region. By the time of Batista’s coup
in 1952, the group had added the Venezuelan dictatorship of Pérez
51 Jesús de Galíndez, La Era de Trujillo (Santiago de Chile: Editorial Marimar, 1962), 317.
Jiménez to their ranks and Trujillo was ecstatic to hear about Batista’s
ousting of his enemies, the Cuban Auténtico party. Immediately after
Batista’s coup, Trujillo threw the full weight of his regime behind
Batista’s new government, and sought to ally with Cuba’s new strong-
man.52 The two regimes worked very close on security matters: both
Trujillo and Batista feared their opposition in exile and were happy to
help each other with their respective enemies. For example, in the ensu-
ing raids after the Moncada attacks, Dominican exile Juan Bosch was
arrested after his name was suggested by a Dominican official to Cuban
intelligence.53 In a meeting between the Cuban defence minister and the
Dominican ambassador, the Cuban defence minister stated this clearly
by saying that “Batista’s enemies have allied with the enemies of the
Dominican government” and thus they wanted to establish a “mutual
defence plan against our common enemies”.54 As of 1953, both gov-
ernments began their defensive alliance. Such cooperation was further
secured by Trujillo’s strategy of courting prominent Cuban generals,
gathering support of the top brass through all types of courtesies and
gifts. So much so that the Dominican naval attaché to Cuba counted on
a special budget for “atenciones varias”, meant to be used in dinners and
receptions with the Cuban military establishment.55 As a result of this
charm offensive, it was reported that the Dominican government had
managed to secure a “beach-head” within the Cuban military.56
Batista’s relations with Trujillo, however, were not free of problems.
Many Cuban officials seemed to show more loyalty to the Dominican
Generalissimo than to Batista. This was due to a perceived weakness of
Batista within the Cuban military, where he faced significant hostility
from a sector of the army nicknamed the “tanquistas”. Despite having
seized power through an illegal coup, Batista dreamt of popular legiti-
macy, and this often drove him to making some paradoxical apertures of
his regime, such as announcing elections only to sabotage them later, or
52 Eliades Acosta Matos, La Telaraña Cubana de Trujillo (Santo Domingo: Archivo
General de la Nación, 2012), vol. 2, 521–522.

53 Ibid., 526.
54 Ibid., 534–535.
55 Ibid., 533.
56 Wm. Affeld, Jr to State Department, ‘Dominican-Cuban Relations’, 14 February
1956, available at latinamericanstudies.org.

lift and impose censorship irregularly.57 Batista’s government was divided

between the civilians, seeking to liberalize the regime to some degree,
and the tanquistas, admirers of Trujillo’s 25-year unbreakable rule of the
Dominican Republic, pushing to end the democratic charade and step
up repression. Batista sought to play each faction against the other in an
uneasy balance.58
Despite the friendly start, by 1955 relations between both rul-
ers began to deteriorate. Several factors pitted Trujillo against his sup-
posed Cuban ally. Firstly, the Cuban press launched an attack against
Trujillo’s regime when the latter was about to celebrate the anniversary
of his rule. The influential weekly Bohemia led the offensive against the
Dominican dictator and Trujillo was outraged at Batista’s permissive-
ness. Additionally, rumours and reports of revolutionary activity in the
Caribbean alarmed Trujillo, who feared a repetition of the Cayo Confites
or Luperón invasions. But perhaps more importantly, Trujillo profoundly
resented Cuba’s preferential position in the United States’ sugar market.
1955 was marked in the Dominican calendar as the 25th anniversary
of Trujillo’s ascendancy to power, making him the longest-ruling strong
man of the region. However the celebratory ceremonies were tarnished by
an international press campaign against his rule. Cuban weekly Bohemia
enjoyed continent-wide circulation and had an ample readership in Latin
America, making it a very influential opinion-maker. In the anniversary
of trujillismo, this leading editorial voice directed its criticism towards the
Dominican dictator. Reporting on the special fair set to commemorate the
date, Bohemia headlined “The FAIR of TERROR and DEATH”.59 These
attacks over such a special year angered Trujillo, who demanded Batista to
put an end to the magazine’s circulation, like Pérez Jiménez had done in
Venezuela. Batista’s inability or unwillingness to confront Bohemia encour-
aged several other newspapers to join the anti-Trujillista chorus. The
Dominican dictator was losing patience with his Caribbean neighbour.60
Constant reports of possible revolutionary activity had Trujillo in a
permanent state of unease. Particularly worrying were news of his old
57 Rolando E. Bonachea and Nelson P. Valdés, Revolutionary Struggle: The Selected Works
of Fidel Castro, volume 1: 1947–1958 (London: The MIT Press, 1972), 61.
58 Ibid., 62.
59 ‘La Feria del Terror y de la Muerte’, Bohemia, 1 January 1956.
60 Acosta Matos, Telaraña Cubana, vol. 2, 562.

foes Carlos Prío, Jacobo Árbenz, Rómulo Betancourt and Eufemio

Fernández meeting in Mexico City during the spring of 1955.61 To
make matters worse, it was reported that Betancourt had created an exile
junta, tasked with bringing down the dictatorships of the Caribbean.
This junta was allegedly composed by the foremost anti-Trujillistas of
the region, the aforementioned Prío, Árbenz, Betancourt, plus Costa
Rican Figueres acting as chief of the junta, and Lázaro Cárdenas and
Vicente Lombardo Toledano as the Mexican allies of the group.62 The
possibility of a new expedition against Santo Domingo became increas-
ingly likely in the mind of Trujillo, sending him into a panic where his
distrust towards allies like Batista became exacerbated.63
An equally important factor in the deterioration of relations was sugar.
In the late 1940s, Trujillo had decided to expand his personal fortune
into the sugar business. He began to purchase and construct sugar mills
in the country to the point that, by the mid 1950s, he was the largest
producer in the Dominican Republic.64 The most profitable destina-
tion for this commodity was the United States but unfortunately for
the dictator, the United States bought most of their sugar from Cuba,
giving the Dominican Republic a meagre share of their quota. Thus
by 1954, Trujillo embarked on a mission to reduce Cuba’s quota to
his advantage.65 As the United States debated drawing up a new quota
agreement with their suppliers in spring 1955, the Dominican govern-
ment stepped up its effort to undermine Cuba’s position.66 As a show of
force, Trujillo ordered the assassination of a Dominican exile called Pipí
Hérnandez in Havana, who was stabbed to death in a well-off neigh-
bourhood in August 1955. This murder prompted the outrage of the
Cuban society, launching a full-blown anti-Trujillo campaign by more
dailies than just Bohemia magazine.67 Batista’s government, desperate to
61 Cartaya, 30 April 1955, AHIC, CMG, 28/1.3/1.4/1-57.

62 ‘Constituyen Junta Revolucionaria de Exilados Políticos’, Diario de la Marina, 10
June 1955.
64 Frank Moya Pons, ‘The Dominican Republic Since 1930’, in Cambridge History of
Latin America, ed. Leslie Bethell, vol. 7, 515.

65 Galíndez, Era de Trujillo, 292.
66 Alan Dye and Richard Sicotte, ‘The US Sugar Program and the Cuban Revolution’,
The Journal of Economic History, 64:3 (2004), 694.

cash-in some sympathy from the Cuban population, jumped behind the
propaganda war against Trujillo.
Trujillo’s objective in this confrontation with Batista was clear: to
undermine Cuba’s sugar industry and to intimidate Batista into sub-
mission. If this could not be achieved, then Batista would have to be
replaced by a Tanquista general friendlier to the Dominican generalísimo.
Trujillo decided to reach out to an unlikely ally: his old nemesis Carlos
Prío.
One of Trujillo’s secret agents was a Cuban gangster with a nefarious
reputation called Policarpo Soler. In early 1956, Prío abandoned the
peaceful stance he had adopted the previous summer, returned to his
exile in Miami and reverted to revolutionary scheming through his
own Organización Auténtica (OA). Eufemio Fernández, as one of the
lieutenants of the OA, met with Soler, who informed him of Trujillo’s
wishes to ally with Prío. Eventually Fernández met Trujillo person-
ally and an alliance was struck between both parties.68 The Cuban mil-
itary was alarmed, and informed the US military attaché of the weapons
Trujillo was supplying the OA: “1000 double-action American rifles
given by the US government to the Dominican Republic, 600 M-1
rifles, 3000 pounds of dynamite”; the list continued to include 26
jeeps and 4 trucks.69 Further confirmation of this alliance was received
in the spring of 1956, when the new Dominican ambassador made a
tremendous blunder: The Cuban senate had undertaken an investiga-
tion of Dominican meddling in Cuban affairs, focused on its infiltra-
tion of the Cuban military and its execution of exiles on the island. The
leader of this commission was Rolando Masferrer, a publicity hound
who had switched sides from a paramilitary action group to Batista’s
employ. Masferrer was a veteran of Cayo Confites and wanted to lever-
age his anti-Trujillismo at this heated time to increase his popularity. The
Dominican ambassador, Joaquín Llaverías, tried to bribe Masferrer in a
private meeting, without knowing that the latter was secretly recording
the conversation. In the course of the meeting, the Dominican ambas-
sador confirmed that Eufemio Fernández and the OA were allied with
Trujillo, but the Dominican dictator did not trust them and thought
68 Havana Embassy to State Department, ‘Weeka 33’, 8 August 1956, available at lat-
inamericanstudies.org; Vinton Chapin, ‘Cuban-Dominican relations’, 28 August 1956,

available at latinamericanstudies.org.
69 Cantillo to Joseph Treadway, 21 March 1956, AHIC, CE, 24/2.1/13.9/1-149.
Masferrer would be a better agent: Llaverías pointed out “the advantage

that you have always appeared as an enemy of his”.70 As a result of this
alliance, scores of OA members flew to the Dominican Republic to
receive military training by the Dominican military, a Spanish Francoist
mercenary and a US soldier of fortune.71
There was a surprising third party to the Trujillo–Prío alliance: Fidel
Castro’s M26/7. As described during the previous section, from his exile
in Mexico, Castro closed ties with the Auténtico-aligned Triple A organ-
ization. By the time Prío returned to exile in May 1956, he additionally
joined the alliance with the M26/7. It is well-known in the literature of
the Cuban Revolution that Prío paid for the purchase of the expedition’s
yacht and provided funds to Castro’s group.72 However the implication
of the M26/7 in the Prío–Trujillo triangle is less developed.73
On 21 June 1956, the leadership of the M26/7 in Mexico City was
arrested, including the Castro brothers and Guevara. In the subsequent
raids of their safe houses, Mexican police managed to seize some weap-
ons and around 50 kilograms of dynamite.74 On 5 July, Cuban intelli-
gence reported on some suspicious activity in the Dominican Republic:
“these past few days [the Dominican weapons factories] are working
on full capacity to fulfil a $3 million armament contract paid jointly by
Carlos Prío and Rafael Trujillo”. This “urgency” was due to the fact
that “many arms have been seized and several leaders of the movement
have been arrested”.75 As implied by this report, these weapons were
being sent to the M26/7 in Cuba. In the Oriente province, M26/7
leader Frank País was accepting all the weapons he was being offered
by Dominican agents. The exchanges involved a considerable degree of
collaboration: on one occasion, a Dominican ship with a cargo of weap-
ons arrived to a secluded spot of the Oriente coastline. A local Triple A
70 Chapin, ‘Cuban-Dominican Relations: Alleged Transcript of Conversation Between
Dominican Ambassador and Cuban Senator’, 25 May 1956, available at latinamericanstud-

ies.org.
71 Pedro Valdivia, 19 November 1956, AHIC, CE, 24/3.80/7.1/1-175; Estevez, 7
December 1956, 24/3.20/1.1/1-222.

72 Szulc, Fidel, 366–367.
73 According to Hugh Thomas, the M26/7 received some weapons from Trujillo “by
mistake”. Hugh Thomas, Cuba: A History (London: Penguin Books, 2010), 587.
74 Castillo, 26 June 1956, MINREX.
75 Valdivia, 5 July 1956, AHIC, CE, 24/3.80/7.1/1-175.

leader in communication with Policarpo Soler arranged the encounter,

and invited local M26/7 leader and Moncada veteran, Léster Rodríguez,
to help him move the weapons in exchange for half of the cargo.
Members of the M26/7 moved the weapons to Santiago de Cuba and
divided the lot between the different Triple A and M26/7 safe houses.76
The FBI received information that confirmed this alliance: two secret
informants “both of whom have furnished reliable information in the
past” disclosed that “Trujillo has been supplying money to Fidel Castro
Ruz (…) which is aimed against Batista”. Additionally, “Trujillo had
supplied [censored] and their confederates, with approximately twenty
tons of arms and ammunitions” during the first half of 1956, and more
crucially, that Pedro Miret and Ñico López, both Moncada veterans
and influential members of the M26/7, had travelled to the Dominican
Republic in August 1956 to carry “important papers from Trujillo to
Fidel Castro”.77
These convoluted alliances stood purely on pragmatic grounds. All
parties thought they could take advantage of each other for their own
benefit and could temporarily make use of any help that would come
their way. Batista’s government kept making denunciations of this triple
alliance but received little credence from the US government mainly for
two reasons.
Firstly, Batista refused to share any evidence of the Castro–Prío–
Trujillo collusion despite having some significant leads.78 This was due
to the fact that Batista did not actually want a serious confrontation with
Trujillo: the feud was sustained by Batista in order to unite an increas-
ingly disloyal army (which had threatened twice to overthrow him in
1956)79 against an external enemy, and to try to gain some sympathy
from the population. Therefore, the feud was always kept below a
boiling point that would entail violent confrontation. Hence, the US

77 FBI, ‘Alleged Revolutionary Activities: Cuba-Dominican Republic’, 30 August 1956,
available online at https://archive.org/details/Anti-CastroAndCuba109-12-210/page/
n2. Accessed April 20, 2019.
78 Chapin, ‘Cuban-Dominican Relations’, 28 August 1956, available at latinamerican-
studies.org.
79 The US military attaché was secretly informed by a Cuban officer that a military coup
against Batista was being planned for that year. Havana Embassy to State Department,
‘Weeka 39’, 26 September 1956, available at latinamericanstudies.org.
government officials could not support Batista in his denunciation

without any evidence.
The second reason, and perhaps the most revealing, was the
state of the greater Cold War at the end of 1956: in the aftermath of
the Hungarian Uprising and the Suez Crisis of October, the State
Department stressed to the Cuban government that “the critical world
situation demands utmost efforts on part all American states retain their
normal solidarity. [The] Free World by remaining strong and united can
take good advantage of present crumblings within communist world”.80
Therefore, the United States strongly encouraged Trujillo and Batista to
make peace.
By late 1956, the Dominican government began to reduce their sub-
versive campaign. Reports from a Dominican spy within the M26/7
leadership revealed that Trujillo’s schemes could be costly in the future:
“If the M26/7 is successful, they will help the Caribbean Legion against
our government in reciprocity” for the help the Legion network had
given the M26/7.81
Additionally, the sugar situation was improving for Trujillo, so his
anti-Cuban campaign could begin to relax. A new quota was approved in
the United States which granted the Dominican Republic a larger share
of the market, in detriment of the Cubans, and the disruption caused by
the Suez Crisis meant that the international sugar market was “unusually
strong”, allowing Trujillo to reap its benefits.82 With these elements into
account, and Fidel Castro’s apparently failed landing in the Oriente coast
on 2 December 1956, Trujillo and Batista struck peace in the New Year
of 1957.
Conclusion
On the night of 24 November 1956, after more than a year in exile,
Castro’s group was ready to invade Cuba. A yacht named Granma
was bought with money donated by Prío, and boarded by a selection
of recruits: the objective was to land in the eastern point of the island,
coinciding with an uprising in Santiago, and quickly move to the nearby
80 Hoover to Havana Embassy, 11 December 1956, available at latinamericanstudies.org.

81 AcostaMatos, Telaraña Cubana, vol. 2, 609.
82 Dye and Sicotte, ‘US Sugar Program’, 677.
Sierra Maestra. From there, they would launch a guerrilla campaign

against Batista’s army. 82 men landed in the Oriente province after an
arduous journey in an old, badly maintained, overcrowded boat. The
landing was a disaster: the ship ran aground in some shallows, the expe-
ditionaries lost part of their materiel and some days after disembark-
ing, they were ambushed by the army, killing and capturing most of the
group. However, the leadership of the M26/7 survived and moved to
the Sierra Maestra mountains, where the guerrilla war began.
This expedition was made possible thanks to the help provided by fel-
low exiles to the M26/7 during their stay in Mexico, the United States
and Costa Rica. As this chapter has shown, between 1955 and 1956,
the Cuban Revolution became a truly Circum-Caribbean phenomenon,
enlisting the support and participation of men and women from all over
the Basin. Castro’s uncompromising revolutionary attitude gained him
the favour of many fellow revolutionary exiles from other countries and
more importantly, from those who were part of the Caribbean Legion
network. This experienced network of support, to which the M26/7 was
introduced thanks to their Auténtico allies, became the crucial supporter
of Castro’s guerrilla. Launching the war against Batista was possible in
great part thanks to Castro’s ability to mobilize and appropriate the
pre-existing revolutionary network in the region, the Caribbean Legion.
This in turn shaped the early Cuban revolutionary movement, which
adopted the democratic and anti-dictatorial emphasis of the Legion.
The opposition to Batista was divided but yet it managed to reach
some common ground, as this chapter has shown. The M26/7 and the
Auténticos were capable of reaching an understanding to further their
aims. Despite much rhetoric, both organizations formed a pragmatic
alliance during these years of struggle, and the pragmatism of both
groups stretched to the point of including the nefarious Rafael Trujillo.
This adds nuance to common understandings of the Cuban Revolution,
emphasizing the overlap between different revolutionary factions.
Furthermore, this chapter has shown how the Caribbean was sub-
merged in an international divide of its own, not exactly aligned to
US–Soviet lines. As the global Cold War heated up in flashpoints like
Hungary and Suez, the governments of Cuba, Dominican Republic,
Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Venezuela were embroiled in a
regional power struggle of their own. Just as the exiles organized and
coordinated across borders, so did the dictatorships, with the repres-
sion of Cuban, Dominican and Nicaraguan exiles spilling beyond their
borders. Despite their tumultuous relationship, Trujillo and Batista were

joined in the end by their common security concern: the threat posed
to their regimes by exiles. The divide breaching the Caribbean was
not on the question of Communism, like the larger Cold War, but on
democracy.
Political refugees were at the centre of Batista–Trujillo relations:
on the one hand, the alliances between Cuban and Dominican exiles
made the two dictators agree to a security coalition and narrow the ties
between both countries’ militaries; on the other hand, exiles were the
main beneficiaries of the Trujillo–Batista dispute: both the Auténticos
and the M26/7 received much-needed weapons and funds from the
Dominican dictator to support their efforts against Batista. These events
shed light on how internationalized the fight against Batista was, and
how it was interconnected to neighbouring countries in a truly transna-
tional phenomenon centred around exile. Despite being expelled from
their homelands, the men and women described in this chapter man-
aged to play an influential role in their countries and in the wider region,
shaping the sensibilities of a generation towards a shared, transnational
awareness.
As 1957 began, the M26/7 initiated a guerrilla campaign in the
mountains of the Sierra Maestra. Their army however was small, deci-
mated by the Cuban army’s ambush, and found themselves starving
and in dire need of supplies. With Batista making every effort to iso-
late the guerrilleros in the mountains, the M26/7 had to look abroad
to find the much needed weaponry and supplies to defeat the Cuban
army. Fortunately for them, they could count on the Caribbean Legion
network as an ally.
CHAPTER 4
The Caribbean Legion Supplying the Sierra

Maestra, 1957–1958
Abstract  In this chapter, Prados highlights the crucial aid that Fidel
Castro and his guerrillas received from the democratic governments of
the Circum-Caribbean, namely from Costa Rican president José Figueres
and Venezuelan politician Rómulo Betancourt. Focusing on the transna-
tional networks that supplied the Cuban guerrillas, this chapter provides
a new perspective of the Cuban Revolution as a flashpoint in a Caribbean
Cold War. It shows how the guerrillas enjoyed the international backing
of those in the region pushing for increased democratization and against
dictatorship.
Keywords  Cuban Revolution · Romulo Betancourt · Jose Figueres ·

Fidel Castro · Caribbean Legion
In December 1956, Fidel Castro and his group of 82 guerrilleros landed

on the coast of Cuba’s Oriente province. Shortly after their arrival,
the expeditionaries were ambushed and decimated by an army patrol.
A handful of survivors scattered and quickly made their way to the
mountains of the Sierra Maestra. The guerrilla phase of the Cuban
Revolution was underway.
This chapter will examine how the Cuban guerrillas were sup-
plied from abroad, mainly from Costa Rica and Venezuela. Its aim is

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46363-2_4
to show how military supplies to Castro’s guerrilla were channeled

through the Caribbean Legion network. It will also examine how
prominent leaders of the Legion attained positions of power in several
Caribbean governments during 1957–1958 and how this propelled the
cause of the Cuban rebels, providing it with some international legit-
imacy. The general purpose of this chapter is to show how Castro’s
M26/7 guerrilla counted with significant and decisive support from
abroad, structured through the channels, agents and leaders that con-
formed the Caribbean Legion. It will be divided in two sections: the
first will offer an account of the involvement of the Costa Rican gov-
ernment in supplying the Sierra Maestra with materiel, and will explain
how, after Figueres handed over power, many Cuban exiles relocated
to Honduras. I will briefly outline the role of the new Honduran gov-
ernment in the Caribbean Legion network before moving on to the
second section, Venezuela. This part will examine the extent to which
the new Venezuelan government became involved in the fight against
Batista, providing insight into how the Caribbean Legion links forged
during the 1940s came into play during the Cuban Revolution and
greatly benefitted Castro’s guerrilla. Events at the national level such
as a regime fall in Venezuela, or democratization in Honduras, will
look very differently when seen through a transnational lens that con-
nects it with larger processes. Combined, we will be able to locate the
Cuban Revolution in a new regional context of discontent and resist-
ance against authoritarianism. Support from the Caribbean Legion
network embedded the Cuban fighting into a larger frame of regional
anti-dictatorial struggle.
During most part of 1957, Castro’s priority was to rebuild the rebel
army and consolidate their position in the mountains, as well as their
own position vis-à-vis the urban division of the M26/7, and the other
revolutionary organizations. The M26/7 had split between the lead-
ership in the Sierra, headed by Fidel, and the urban cadres organizing
resistance in the main cities, the Llano. Desperate for supplies, Castro
exhorted the urban section to devote their energies to furnishing the
guerrillas. The Llano was reluctant to hand over full authority to Castro
and wanted to prioritize the urban struggle. Meanwhile, other revolu-
tionary groups such as Prío’s OA or the university students’ Directorio
Revolucionario (DR) were trying to establish guerrillas of their own, to
stake out their claim to revolutionary supremacy.
4 THE CARIBBEAN LEGION SUPPLYING … 69
For the OA’s attempt, Prío had hired Alberto Bayo, after his success
with Castro’s group, to train another expedition in Miami.1 The group
of OA volunteers that had been trained in the Dominican Republic
(as seen in Chapter 2), were expelled from the country as part of the
Trujillo–Batista understanding of January 1957. These exiles received
further training in Miami and were sent on an expedition mirroring the
Granma: aboard a yacht, the Corynthia, 27 recruits sailed to the Oriente
province. Their plan was to establish a second guerrilla front in the
Sierra Cristal, east of the Sierra Maestra, in coordination with Castro’s
group. Unfortunately for the expeditionaries, Cuban intelligence services
were aware of the plan and days after landing, the aspiring guerrilla was
ambushed and annihilated.2 The few survivors were aided by the M26/7.3
The DR tried a different approach: they believed that if Batista was
assassinated, the regime would collapse. In March 1957, commando
groups of the DR with the collaboration of members of the OA planned
an attack on Havana’s presidential palace. The aim was to blitz through
the building to Batista’s office, execute him and call for a provisional
government. Many of the participants of this plan were Caribbean
Legion veterans, “beginning with the action at Cayo Confites, up to the
one at Luperón, and now in the fight against Batista”.4 The assailants
however failed to locate Batista once inside the palace and were even-
tually gunned down by police. The plan had failed and much of the DR
were either killed or arrested, but it showed how Caribbean Legion vet-
erans were deeply embedded in the Cuban revolutionary movement, in
more than one organization.
After these two failed attempts, the M26/7 saw their position
strengthened. Castro’s organization was now the main threat to Batista’s
rule. Accordingly, the other groups reluctantly agreed to supply the
Sierra Maestra guerrilla with much needed weapons and materiel.
In the Circum-Caribbean, events were unfolding that would signifi-
cantly impact the Cuban Revolution. During 1957 and 1958, members
1 Julia Sweig, Inside the Cuban Revolution: Fidel Castro and the Urban Underground
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 19.

2 Report to CMGE, 21 April 1957, Archivo del Instituto de Historia de Cuba, Havana,
Cuba (AHIC hereon), Colección Ejército (CE hereon), 24/2.1/13.9/1-149.

3 Sweig, Inside the Cuban Revolution, 20.
4 Carlos Franqui, Diary of the Cuban Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1980), 158.
of the Caribbean Legion attained positions of power in several govern-

ments of the region: In Costa Rica, José Figueres entered the last year of
his presidency, significantly stepping up his efforts to support Cuban rev-
olutionaries. In Honduras, a new democratic president, Ramón Villeda
Morales, was sworn-in in late 1957 and appointed two Caribbean Legion
commanders to cabinet positions in his government. This saw a shift in
the wider alliances of the Caribbean Cold War: Honduras moved from
a partner of the Transnacional de la Mano Dura under Tiburcio Carías,
to a participant in the wider Caribbean Legion network with Villeda
Morales. And finally and perhaps more crucially, in January 1958, dic-
tator Marcos Pérez Jiménez fled Venezuela and left for the Dominican
Republic. Former Caribbean Legion patron and Acción Democrática
leader, Rómulo Betancourt, was elected president of Venezuela some
months after. During 1958, Venezuela became a “Mecca” for Cuban
exiles, harbouring the headquarters of the main revolutionary organiza-
tions. With the deep pockets of an oil-rich country, Venezuela supplied
Castro’s guerrilla with tonnes of weaponry and ammunition.
Meanwhile, since late 1957, the relationship between Batista and the
United States’ government had been souring. After Batista’s govern-
ment infringed the terms of their military agreement, the United States
became reluctant to continue providing the Cuban army with weapons
and eventually enforced an arms embargo in March 1958. The Cuban
government would now have to pay for weapons for the first time, and
to negotiate costly deals with the United Kingdom and the Dominican
Republic.
Costa Rican Support for the Guerrilla

In 1957, Figueres was reaching the end of his term as president of Costa
Rica. Elections were due in early 1958 and Figueres was not running
for re-election. After successfully repelling the invasion attempt from
Nicaragua in 1955, the Costa Rican president remained as committed as
ever to the fight against the Transnacional de la Mano Dura. As seen
in the previous chapter, Figueres had agreed to lend official support to
the Cuban exiles, providing military instruction to several volunteers.
Once guerrilla warfare commenced in Cuba, Costa Rica became one of
the central suppliers of weaponry and materiel to the rebels in the Sierra
Maestra. Through 1957 and 1958, tonnes of military equipment were
sent to the Caribbean island, both by sea and air.
Figueres had become one of the main patrons of the Caribbean

Legion network and put to use the relationships he had forged during
the 1940s to support the M26/7. Veterans of the 1948 Costa Rican
Civil War and leading members of the Legion were employed as smug-
glers and military instructors to support the fighting in Cuba. But Cuba
was not the only front that the Caribbean Legion network was fight-
ing on: Nicaraguan exiles led by Manuel Gómez Flores (Legion veteran
and Castro ally) were hoping to strike at the Somoza dynasty as it tran-
sitioned from Anastasio Somoza (assassinated in 1956) to his son Luis.
The Cuban revolutionary movement became further entangled with
the anti-Somoza resistance: Cuban exiles in Costa Rica and Honduras
agreed to support the Nicaraguans in exchange for reciprocal aid in case
of success. If the Nicaraguans failed, all efforts would turn towards Cuba;
Somoza’s removal would have to follow Batista’s. The projected Cuban
and Nicaraguan revolutions were interdependent movements.
Batista’s intelligence service reported constantly and with alarm on
the activities taking place in Costa Rica. The Figueres government’s sup-
port for the Cubans was so blatant that the Costa Rican guardia civil
was providing the exiles with Italian machine guns in public.5 Costa Rica
was acting as a safe haven where exiles from all over the Caribbean could
send the weapons they purchased or received, and then ship them to
Cuba from a safe port. Limón became the main port for weapons des-
tined to Cuba. The collusion of Costa Rican authorities was evident: on
one occasion, a schooner arrived in Limón from Mexico carrying 500
hand grenades, 80 sub-machine guns, 20,000 rounds and 300 rifles. The
cargo was handed over to the head of the Limón military outpost, who
in turn made arrangements to ship the cargo to Cuba on boats carrying
timber.6 Limón had become “the only place in this country where weap-
ons can leave without being inspected”.7 The Cuban military attaché
centred his efforts on this port, trying to bribe the people in charge and
succeeding to some extent in forcing the occasional cooperation of the
authorities.8 The attaché denounced a cargo of weapons which included
a couple of Argentinian mortars and resulted in the arrest of three men:
5 Manuel Larrubia to Ayudante General, 26 January 1957, AHIC, CE, 24/3.20/5.1/
1-148.
6 Ibid., ‘Informe sobre actividades subversivas en el extranjero’, 21 May 1957.
7 Ibid., to Tabernilla, 13 November 1957.
8 Ibid.
two Cubans and a Venezuelan.9 However, their interdiction efforts were

mostly fruitless. Despite counting on significant amounts of information
on a particular boat named “Blue Ship”, they were unable to stop this
vessel crewed by Cuban exiles from making frequent trips ferrying weap-
ons from Miami to Cuba via Mexico and Costa Rica.10 Similarly, another
boat doing the route Limón–Puerto Rico (where the governor, Luis
Muñoz Marín was a personal friend of Figueres and suspected by Cuban
authorities of helping the rebels) was flagged as suspicious, thought to be
carrying weapons for the Cuban rebels.11 The military attaché was pow-
erless to stop it.12
As 1958 began and Figueres reached the final days in government,
he stepped up the efforts to rid himself of all the weapons he person-
ally owned. According to intelligence, Figueres and a handful of personal
allies controlled the arsenals of the reserve army, a group of around 5000
volunteers tasked with helping in the defence of the republic and loyal
to Figueres.13 Figueres wanted to hand over these weapons as quickly
as possible, as once the new government was in place in May, arsenals
would be audited, weapons would be counted, tagged and it would be
impossible to move them.14 Dominican intelligence officers were shar-
ing information with their Cuban colleagues, warning them that there
were plans to move all of the Costa Rican arsenal to Cuba by the end
of March.15 Indeed, a large haul of weapons to the Sierra Maestra was
being prepared.
Huber Matos was a Cuban schoolteacher affiliated to the M26/7.
Wanting to join the rebels in the Sierra, he received word from Castro
saying that they had plenty of volunteers: what they were desper-
ately short of were weapons and ammunition. Matos thus left Cuba
9 Ibid.,to Ayudante General, 10 February 1957.

10 Ibid.,to Tabernilla, 23 December 1957, 24/3.80/1.2/1-332.
11 Alberto García Navarro to Gonzalo Güell, 16 December 1958, Archivo del Ministerio
de Exteriores, Havana, Cuba (MINREX hereon), no file number.

12 Larrubia to Tabernilla, 13 November 1957, AHIC, CE, 24/3.20/5.1/1-148.
13 ‘Conclusiones a las que he llegado de los informes que se me han suministrado y de mi
observación personal’, 26 April 1958, AHIC, CE, 24/3.20/5.1/1-148.

14 Larrubia, ‘Informe sobre actividades subversivas’, 13 February 1958, AHIC, CE,
24/3.20/5.1/1-148.
15 Estevez to G-3-EME, 4 March 1958, AHIC, CE, 24/3.20/8.1/1-130.
and moved to Costa Rica, hoping to enlist the support of Figueres.16

During his time in exile, Matos met the fellow Caribbean exiles residing
in San José; his hostel was one of the headquarters of the Venezuelan
resistance. He also became acquainted with Dominican exiles, as well as
Cubans such as Caribbean Legion veteran Eufemio Fernández, “an intel-
ligent and brave man who enjoys wide respect”. Reflecting on the shared
experience of the Caribbean exiles, Matos wrote in his memoirs: “We
all speak an almost identical political language. Tyrannies have much in
common. The suffering of the oppressed varies in intensity and details,
but it’s the same drama”.17
After almost a year in Costa Rica organizing the local branch of the
M26/7 and securing the support of Figueres and top figures of his
government, in early 1958, Matos and his colleagues from the M26/7
obtained weapons from veterans of the Caribbean Legion such as Frank
Marshall (a decisive figure in the Costa Rican Civil War) and from
Figueres himself, who donated the arsenal located in the presidential
palace.18 Figueres stressed that any weapons had to go to Castro him-
self and to no other group, and insisted on the limited time frame: he
told Matos the weapons had to leave before the end of March, just as
Dominican intelligence had predicted.19 On 30 March 1958, a plane
belonging to a Costa Rican general was loaded with five tonnes of mil-
itary equipment.20 The plane landed successfully and provided the
guerrilla with crucial supplies. According to British intelligence, it was
suspected that as many as three similar flights had taken off from Costa
Rica to Cuba during the early months of 1958.21
This stream of supplies towards the Sierra Maestra was occurring
parallel to similarly ambitious schemes. As mentioned in the previous
chapter, just as Castro was preparing an invasion of his homeland from
16 Huber Matos, Cómo Llegó La Noche (Barcelona: Tusquets Editores, 2002, digital edi-
tion), 54.
17 Ibid., 57–58.
18 On Marshall’s role in the Costa Rican Civil War, see Guillermo Villegas Hoffmeister,
Frank Marshall: El Último Soldado, available at https://elespiritudel48.org/frank-mar-

shall-el-ultimo-soldado/. Accessed April 20, 2019.
19 Matos, Cómo Llegó la Noche, 63–65.
20 Ibid., 69.
21 ‘Supply of Arms to Cuban Rebels’, 15 May 1958, National Archives, London (NA
hereon), FO371/139661.
exile, Nicaraguan colonel Manuel Gómez Flores was planning a similar

attempt. He was a participant in the same network as Castro, and thus
enjoyed the backing of the Caribbean Legion’s patrons: namely Prío and
Figueres. Gómez Flores was based in Costa Rica, where he was training a
guerrilla army of fellow Nicaraguan exiles. To this end, he received finan-
cial support from Prío and the collaboration of Cuban exiles in Costa
Rica, headed by Eufemio Fernández.22 Like in the many pacts made
along the Caribbean Legion network, aid from one group of exiles to
another was reciprocal: after the attack on Nicaragua, the Nicaraguans
had to help the Cubans. The Cuban military attaché in Costa Rica man-
aged to tap into phone conversations held by Cuban exiles and their
Nicaraguan counterparts and discovered a smuggling ring of weapons
and propaganda to be shipped from Costa Rica to Havana.23 In return,
Cuban exiles in Costa Rica volunteered to participate in Gómez Flores’
attack against the Somozas. Additionally, Alberto Bayo, who was in
Mexico training Cuban expeditionaries loyal to Prío, quickly received an
invitation to “join [Gómez Flores] in Central America in order to assist
him with training troops for a projected military action against the cur-
rent Nicaraguan government”.24
In preparation for this expected attack, the Nicaraguan govern-
ment had been secretly reinforced by a shipment of weapons from the
Dominican Republic, courtesy of Trujillo, and the Colombian and
Venezuelan navies were patrolling the Nicaraguan Pacific coast.25 Just
as the Caribbean Legion was teaming up against the Somozas, the
Transnacional could count on the help of the area’s dictators, Trujillo,
Pérez Jiménez and the Colombian Rojas Pinilla.26 However, trou-
ble was mounting on the Nicaraguan regime, north of their border. In
Honduras, a new president had been democratically elected in late 1957,
22 Financial support is mentioned in L. Pérez Coujil, ‘Actividades Insurecionales’,
6 September 1958, AHIC, CE, 24/3.14/111.5/1-151. The participation of Cuban

exiles is mentioned in Larrubia to Ayudante General, 26 January 1957, AHIC, CE,
24/3.20/5.1/1-148.
23 Ibid., 10 February 1957.
24 Legat Mexico to FBI Director, 29 November 1957, John F. Kennedy Assassination
Records (hereafter JFKAR) 124-10290-10196.

25 Larrubia, ‘Informe sobre la toma de posesión del Honorable Señor Presidente de
la República de Nicaragua, y los acontecimientos posteriores’, 8 May 1957, AHIC, CE,

24/3.20/5.1/1-148.
26 Gustavo Rojas Pinilla was dictator of Colombia from 1953 until May 1957.
Ramón Villeda Morales, and appointed two veterans of the Caribbean

Legion to his cabinet, Francisco “El Indio” Sánchez and Miguel
Francisco Morazán.27 Both were veterans of the Costa Rican Civil War
and Sánchez had been living in exile in San José.
Cuban intelligence reports began to note how, as Figueres’ term was
coming to an end and Villeda Morales started his in Honduras, Cuban
exiles had begun flocking towards the latter country.28 According
to Dominican intelligence shared with the Cuban government, El
Indio Sánchez was acting as the link between the Cuban exiles and the
Honduran government.29 With this official help, a Cuban exile living in
Honduras by the name of Silvio Peña was reported smuggling weapons
from Costa Rica to Honduras, to be used by the Nicaraguan exiles in
their attempt. Peña was seen using a car with a government licence plate
to drive weapons into Honduras from El Salvador.30 This scheme culmi-
nated in April 1958, when the Honduran government arrested a group
of Nicaraguan exiles in an airfield near the border with Nicaragua. The
Nicaraguan exiles had stolen a plane belonging to the Somoza govern-
ment in Miami and flown it to Honduras to load up the accumulated
weapons and use it in their expedition.31 Perhaps pressured by the inter-
national scandal, the Honduran government was forced to step in and dis-
solve the plot, as the OAS clearly condemned any kind of interference in
other countries. In the resulting raid, the Honduran army seized “enough
rifles and ammunition to arm 600 men” and arrested Gómez Flores,
caught red-handed.32 Revealingly, Silvio Peña’s car was found parked in
the airfield.33 As this attack had failed, it was time for the Nicaraguans
to put their efforts to use in the Cuban cause. Since early 1958, another
force had been gathering south of the Nicaraguan border, in Costa Rica.
Caribbean, 1945–1959 (Coral Gables, FL: University of Miami Press, 1974), 219.
28 Guerra, ‘Informar sobre el trasiego de cubanos asilados en Costa Rica hacia otros
países centroamericanos’, 9 May 1958, AHIC, CE, 24/3.20/9.1/1-39.

29 Estevez to G-3-EME, 16 April 1958, AHIC, CE, 24/3.20/8.1/1-134.
30 Guerra to G-3-EME, ‘Actividades de los Cubanos asilados en Honduras’, 1 May 1958,
AHIC, CE, 24/3.20/9.1/1-39.

31 Ibid., ‘Informe sobre tráfico de armas’, 5 May 1958.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid., ‘Cubanos asilados en Honduras’.

In January 1958, chief of staff of the Caribbean Legion, the

Dominican general Miguel Ángel Ramírez, arrived in San José as a
petition from Figueres. Ramírez was put in charge of what the exiles
started calling “la Gran Conspiración del Caribe”, and contacting the
Nicaraguan, Dominican and Cuban exiles living in Costa Rica. In these
contacts he met frequently with a Cuban exile called Feliciano Maderne.
Maderne and Ramírez already knew each other since the days of Cayo
Confites, where Maderne had been the head of one of the companies:
Fidel Castro served under him during those weeks at the cay.34 Maderne
at the time was living in Honduras and shuttling back and forth between
Honduras and Costa Rica, trying to shift the focus of the Legion’s
network to the Cubans’ advantage.35 This diplomatic labour bore its
fruit, since Ramírez was put at the head of an aerial invasion of Cuba.
Ramírez’s aide secretly confessed to the Cuban military attaché that
Ramírez’s mission was to attack Cuba and not Nicaragua. This infor-
mation was corroborated by a second source in Costa Rica, an inform-
ant reporting on the activities of two Legion veterans, a Cuban and a
Nicaraguan, who had been storing arms in a finca near the Caribbean
coast. This informant reported that the main target had become
Cuba and in exchange, as usual, “Fidel […] would help them against
Nicaragua and finally Trujillo”.36 The expedition against Cuba headed by
Ramírez was finally ready to take off from Limón on 10 May 1958, just
two weeks after the press announced Gómez Flores’ failure and arrest in
Honduras. However, it seems that the pilots got cold feet and decided
to change the course mid-flight and landed in a Costa Rican airfield near
Nicaragua. The men were arrested, including Ramírez, and testified that
they were going to Cuba “to fight with Fidel Castro”. It is unclear why
the pilots decided unilaterally to change the plans at the last minute.37
As shown, the Cuban Revolution was not being fought in isolation.
By joining the Caribbean Legion network, the M26/7 had become
enmeshed in a wider web of revolutionary schemes, smuggling and plot-
ting; it had been subsumed into the larger Caribbean anti-dictatorial cru-
sade. Support to the Sierra Maestra guerrilla was now interdependent on
34 ‘Fidel y la expedición de Cayo Confites’, Bohemia, January 2019, available at http://
bohemia.cu/wp-content/uploads/2018/12/pag-36-37.pdf. Accessed April 20, 2019.

35 Guerra to G-3-EME, ‘Actividades de los Cubanos asilados en Honduras’.
36 Larrubia, ‘Informe sobre actividades subversivas’.
37 Garcia to Güell, 12 May 1958, MINREX.

the fortunes of other ventures along the network, such as the Nicaraguan
attempted guerrilla. The survival of the anti-Batista resistance was not
just the preoccupation of Cuban exiles, but it had become the focus of
a wider movement that spanned different nationalities and countries.
A veritable transnational web of exiles and patrons was at work in the
Caribbean, trying to oust the region’s dictatorships. The examples of
Costa Rica and Honduras described in this section illustrate how it was
a time for revolution in the Caribbean, and all it took to set the region
aflame would be for one of the guerrillas to succeed. As pressure slowly
increased on the region’s dictatorships, one event would kick-start the
downfall of Batista: on 23 January 1958, a group of disgruntled mili-
tary officers and members of Rómulo Betancourt’s AD party, staged a
coup against dictator Marcos Pérez Jiménez in Venezuela. Thus, with
Caribbean Legion veteran Betancourt back in his native Venezuela, one
of the largest economies of the region had just shifted its weight from
the Transnacional de la Mano Dura to the Caribbean Legion.
Venezuela Joins the Rebels

By 1958 Venezuela had been under a military dictatorship for a decade.
In 1948, a group of officers staged a coup against the government of
Rómulo Gallegos, from the Acción Democrática party. Gallegos, along
with fellow party leader Rómulo Betancourt (together they were known
as “Los Rómulos”), had ruled Venezuela for three years, since 1945.
During this period, known as the trienio Adeco, Venezuela made some
strides to pass wide reforms and internationally aligned itself with the
Caribbean Legion against the region’s dictators.38
The country was sympathetic to exiles and numerous Spanish immi-
grants arrived after 1945, many of them receiving valid papers from the
Spanish Republican consulate in exile. All this however changed after
the 1948 coup. The new dictatorial government aligned Venezuela
with the Transnacional and Franco’s regime in Spain. Undocumented
Spanish immigrants or those with papers provided by the Republican
government in exile were sent to Guasina, a concentration camp in the
swamps of the Orinoco delta. Conditions at the camp were appalling.
Diseases were rife, with outbreaks of malaria, dysentery, tuberculosis and
38 Harry Kantor, ‘The Development of Acción Democrática de Venezuela’, Journal of
Inter-American Studies, 1:2 (1959), 237–255.

typhus, worsened by a regime of forced labour. A group of exiles arrived

in Venezuela after traversing the Atlantic on a schooner, “in worse con-
ditions than Columbus”, from the Canary Islands. Upon arriving they
were informed that they would be interned in the deadly Guasina camp
and one of the refugees slit his own throat rather than face the horrors
of the jungle camp. Guasina would continue working as a concentration
camp for political prisoners, mainly AD party members, until 1952.39
By 1957, dictator Pérez Jiménez was slowly losing the support of
the Venezuelan elite, the Church and eventually even the army. On
23 January 1958, a joint military-civilian uprising ousted the dicta-
tor. Admiral Wolfgang Larrazábal took over, called for elections for the
end of the year and began a purge of Perezjimenistas from the army and
business sectors.40 Cuban exiles were ecstatic with this turn of events.
Batista’s spies had reported that the fall of Pérez Jiménez would be
disastrous, as the opposition were “open partisans of Carlos Prío and
Fidel Castro”.41 Indeed, the Cuban revolutionaries found helpful allies
in both Larrazábal and Betancourt. Exiles began flocking to Caracas as
early as February, when the M26/7 inaugurated its Venezuelan branch,
and soon every revolutionary organization set up their headquarters in
Caracas.42 Venezuela had become the new port of call of exiles in the
fight against Batista.
Cuban rebels received significant military aid from Venezuela.
Larrazábal sympathized with the M26/7 and was willing to lend a hand
in the struggle against Batista.43 Manuel Urrutia, the M26/7’s presi-
dential candidate for a post-Batista election, arrived in Caracas to secure
arms and ammunitions for Castro.44 The Cuban military attaché was
reporting increased contacts between the Venezuelan government and
the local branch of the M26/7, fearing a “joint attack” by exiles coming
39 Untitled and undated report, FUE, CGRE, MEX 85-3; Ameringer, Democratic Left,
139.
40 Judith Ewell, ‘Venezuela Since 1930’, in Cambridge History of Latin America, vol. 8,
ed. Leslie Bethell, 752–753.

41 Pedro Barrera to Díaz-Tamayo, 16 January 1958, AHIC, CE, 24/3.20/2.1/1-78.
42 Ibid., 12 February 1958; Pedro Rodríguez Ávila to Tabernilla, 29 April 1958, AHIC,
CE, 24/3.20/1.2/1-332; Barrera to Tabernilla, 21 July 1958, AHIC, 24/3.20/2.1/1-78.

43 Jonathan Brown, Cuba’s Revolutionary World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2017), 225.

44 CIA, ‘Cuban Political Situation’, 12 March 1958, JFKAR, 104-10177-10068.
from Honduras, Costa Rica, Colombia and Venezuela.45 Indeed, the

Venezuelan government was hosting several groups of Cuban exiles pre-
paring expeditions against Cuba: some aiming to attack the westernmost
province of Pinar del Río and others to reinforce Castro in the Sierra.46
Larrazábal allowed Cuban exiles to fly from Venezuela loaded with weap-
ons and money over to Castro.47
Additionally, Larrazábal’s government cooperated with Betancourt,
now back in Venezuela after a decade in exile, to help the Cubans.
In one operation, the Venezuelan junta bought a cargo of weapons
from Figueres through the mediation of Betancourt and Gallegos.48
Betancourt was very active in supporting the Cuban rebels. He commis-
sioned his friend Juan Juarbe, a Puerto Rican exile who had befriended
Castro in Mexico, to ship weapons Betancourt had bought in Mexico
to Cuba. These weapons were destined to support Castro’s “total war”
campaign that had started in spring 1958.49 Betancourt also became
the channel through which Figueres, no longer in power since May
1958, could ship his arsenals to Venezuela, en route to Cuba.50 Just like
in the late 1940s, the Caribbean Legion network was active and work-
ing closely to depose a dictator. Betancourt purchased and handed two
planes to Legion veteran Eufemio Fernández, and jointly with Prío
bought 10 tonnes of weapons, which were stored in Caracas for use in
Cuba.51
As the Cuban ambassador in Costa Rica observed with alarm, M26/7
rebels were receiving supplies “at a LARGE-SCALE and in regular
periods”. The ambassador noted in capital letters that “the large-scale
aid being provided by Venezuela to the Cuban revolutionaries” was
45 Estevez to G-3-EME, 12 April 1958, AHIC, CE, 24/3.20/8.1/1-104.

46 José Aguiar to G-3-EME, ‘Actividades subversivas en el extranjero’, 20 June 1958,
AHIC, CE, 2 4/12/1.17/1-63; Pérez-Coujil to JEMC, ‘Actividades insurreccionales’, 22
August 1958, AHIC, CE, 24/3.14/1:1.5/1-151.
47 Brown, Cuba’s Revolutionary World, 226.
48 A.P. Chaumont to Tabernilla, 28 May 1958, AHIC, CE, 2 4/3.20/1.2/1-332.

49 Chaumont to Tabernilla, 22 April 1958, AHIC, CE, 24/3.20/1.2/1-332. On the
friendship between Castro and Juarbe see Heberto Norman Acosta, La Palabra Empeñada,
vol. 1 (Havana: Oficina de Publicaciones del Consejo de Estado, 2005).
50 Pérez-Coujil to JEMC, 5 June 1958, AHIC, CE, 24/3.14/1:1.5/1-151.
51 Barrera to Tabernilla, ‘Informando sobre actividades subversivas contra el gobierno
de Cuba’, 21 July 1958, AHIC, CE, 24/3.20/2.1/1-78; Estévez, to G-3-EME, 24

September 1958, AHIC, 24/3.20/8.1/1-134.
intensifying.52 These supplies were being delivered by plane and boat,

but also, allegedly, by submarine. In reports from December 1958, the
diplomat stressed repeatedly that in the last days of Pérez Jiménez’s
dictatorship, the tyrant had acquired two submarines which arrived in
Venezuela after his ousting. Allegedly, one of these submarines was being
used to supply Castro with weapons, and this information had been cor-
roborated by the allied Dominican government.53 It is unclear if indeed a
submarine was being used, but it is worth noting that the previous year,
British intelligence had reported several submarine sightings in the coast
of Costa Rica. These sightings had been produced in 1957 however,
before the delivery of the submarines in 1958.54
A new route being exploited by the exiles at this time was Haiti.
Despite François Duvalier’s sympathy towards Batista, Cuban rebels
kept trying to use Haiti as a base.55 Enjoying a close proximity with
Cuba’s eastern coast, Haiti was in a prime position to smuggle weapons
to the Sierra Maestra. Numerous exiles arrived in Haiti with cargos of
military equipment, trying to smuggle them into Cuba. However, the
Haitian government moved to stop this, resulting in the arrest of sev-
eral Cubans.56 The rebels did however find a friendly face in the Haitian
military attaché in Caracas. He sympathized with the Cuban rebels and
arranged the sale of military aircraft to the Venezuelan junta, to be used
by the Cubans.57
In addition to military supplies, oil-rich Venezuela was providing the
Cuban rebels with significant donations. The Venezuelan government
gave money to the M26/7 in exile, as well as US$10,000 to Castro’s
sister.58 When the plane that had taken Huber Matos from Costa Rica
to Cuba was rendered useless upon landing, the Venezuelan government
reimbursed the Costa Rican owner for his loss.59 At a smaller scale, the
52 García to Güell, 3 December 1958, MINREX; Ibid., 16 December 1958.

53 Ibid.
54 ‘Copies of the File Following the Sightings of Russian? Submarines in Costa Rican
Waters’, 2 September 1957, NA, FO371/126609.

55 I. Leonard to G-3-EME, 2 May 1958, AHIC, CE, 24/3.20/7.1/1-175.
56 Valdivia to G-3-EME, 29 November 1958, ibid.
57 Leonard to G-3-EME, 2 May 1958, ibid.
58 Chaumont to Tabernilla, 19 April 1958, AHIC, CE, 24/3.20/1.2/1-332; García to
Güell, 12 May 1958, MINREX.

59 Ibid.
Venezuelan junta was running with the transport costs of Cuban exiles,
paying the passage of several exiles to Venezuela—not just Cubans, but
also Dominicans and Nicaraguans.60 The government was also providing
passports and papers to lists of M26/7 members in exile.61
But perhaps more ambitiously, Rómulo Betancourt was sparing no
expense to reinforce the Caribbean Legion. According to several sources,
Betancourt made available US$700,000 to “reorganize the Caribbean
Legion and help the revolutions in Cuba, Nicaragua and the Dominican
Republic”.62 Reports from Honduras, where Legion veterans served
in the government, echoed this information. “The Legion has been
reorganized and readied to act” warned the report, which stated that,
according to a “trusted source”, it was being led by Betancourt.63 The
Cuban ambassador in Costa Rica also warned that Betancourt, after
winning the Venezuelan elections of December 1958, would increase
the financial and materiel support to the rebels: “people linked to the
Caribbean Legion have reported that deposing Batista has become an
obsession for them, especially for Figueres and Betancourt”.64
Indeed, in the fall of 1958, the nephew of Miguel Ángel Ramírez sent
a letter to his uncle from Caracas, informing him that a group of M26/7
members would arrive shortly in Costa Rica to speak with Ramírez.
“They want to speak to you personally on behalf of their cause, which
I believe is also ours”, stressed the nephew, adding: “this could be of
great benefit for the common cause of both our peoples”.65 Ramírez
was working from Costa Rica for the cause of the Cuban rebels. In
November, Feliciano Maderne (mentioned earlier in this chapter) arrived
in Costa Rica “with a great deal of money”. Maderne was working as an
aide for Ramírez and both of them sat with Frank Marshall, a Legion
veteran from the Costa Rican Civil War, to purchase weapons for the
60 Pérez-Coujilto JEMC, 5 June 1958, AHIC, CE, 24/3.14/1:1.5/1-151.

61 Ibid.,22 August 1958.
62 García to Güell, 12 May 1958, MINREX. The same quantity is mentioned again in
Chaumont to Tabernilla, 22 April 1958, AHIC, CE, 24/3.20/1.2/1-332.

63 Guerra to G-3-EME, ‘Actividades de los cubanos asilados en este país’, 1 October
1958, AHIC, CE, 24/3.20/9.1/1-39.

64 García to Güell, 16 December 1958, MINREX.
65 Guillermo Yriarte to Miguel Ángel Ramírez, 14 October 1958, scanned PDF sent to
me by Dr. Aaron Moulton.

Cubans.66 Contrary to most of the secondary literature, in 1958 the

Caribbean Legion could not be more alive and kicking.67
Support to the Cuban rebels from Venezuela also came in the form
of propaganda and international legitimacy. With the opening of an
M26/7 branch in Caracas, Castro’s group had the opportunity to
expand their publicity. By April 1958, a radio station was operating
from Venezuela manned by Cuban exiles.68 An informant arriving in
Cuba from Venezuela reported to the chagrin of Batista’s secret services
that cars were driving around Caracas adorned with M26/7 insignia,
the movement had opened several public relations offices, and cinemas
were projecting newsreels praising Castro’s fight in the Sierra Maestra.69
Venezuela had become a thorn on Batista’s side, and a powerful ally to
the Cuban revolutionaries.
The Venezuelan press joined the anti-Batista crusade and the wider
cause of the Caribbean Legion. The Cuban military attaché in Caracas
reported that the Venezuelan press had begun an “intense campaign”
against the dictatorial governments of Spain, Nicaragua, the Dominican
Republic “and even against the United States”. He reported that the
Cuban exiles were taking advantage of this campaign by funding rhetor-
ical attacks against the Cuban regime and using every means to further
anti-Batista propaganda. These media campaigns had clearly succeeded in
earning the sympathy of the Venezuelan population for the rebels. As the
attaché finished his report, he remarked: “It’s the eve of the 26th of July,
so you can imagine my situation in a completely hostile environment and
surrounded by enemies everywhere”.70
There were signs that hemispheric opinion was slowly but surely turn-
ing against the dictatorial regimes of autocrats like Batista, Trujillo or the
66 García to Güell, 30 November 1958, MINREX.

67 Ameringer’s, The Caribbean Legion: Patriots, Politicians and Soldiers of Fortune, 1946–
1950 (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1995) and The Democratic Left
state that the Legion ceased to exist in 1950, as does Piero Gleijeses in his article ‘Juan
José Arévalo and the Caribbean Legion’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 21:1 (1989),
135–145.
68 ‘Arms Carried to Cuban Rebels from Costa Rica’, 24 April 1958, NA,
FO371/139661.
69 Aguiar, ‘Actividades subversivas en el extranjero’, 29 June 1958, AHIC, CE, 24/12/
1.17/1-63.
70 Barrera to Tabernilla, ‘Informando sobre actividades subversivas contra el gobierno de
Cuba’, 21 July 1958, AHIC, CE, 24/3.20/2.1/1-78.

Somozas. The rhetorical and ideological battle against these dictatorships

was also being waged in influential magazines by some of the brightest
Latin American thinkers of the time. Support from the region’s intellec-
tuals was providing the Cuban rebels with a powerful legitimizing boost
in the eyes of international opinion and the United States in particular.
From Mexico City, Cuban exile and future foreign relations minister
under Castro, Raúl Roa, was directing a magazine called Humanismo.71
This publication had become a platform for the ideological current
that sustained the Caribbean Legion, featuring articles and essays
by prestigious intellectuals, writers and politicians like Juan Bosch,
Betancourt, Gallegos, Haya de la Torre, Laura de Albizu Campos,72
Raúl Osegueda,73 Juan José Arévalo, Edelberto Torres,74 Felipe Pazos,75
Luis I. Rodríguez76 or figures of worldwide renown like Octavio Paz,
Lázaro Cárdenas, Raúl Prebisch and Rafael Alberti.77 In February
1958, the magazine was distributed in Venezuela for the first time after
a 5-year ban by the Pérez Jiménez dictatorship. To mark the occasion,
Humanismo devoted their issue to the Cuban Revolution under the
headline “Homenaje al Pueblo de Cuba”. This number contained texts
by authors such as Fidel Castro, José Martí, the former Colombian lib-
eral president Eduardo Santos, Teresa Casuso78 and the Nicaraguan
revolutionary Juan José Meza. It also featured a treatise on Cuba’s eco-
nomic development authored by the M26/7.79 The support for the
Cuban guerrillas was grounded in this intellectual current, which for the
71 During their time in Mexico, Guevara and Castro would frequent the house of
Lucila Velásquez, writer in Humanismo, and flatmate of Hilda Gadea. Acosta, La Palabra
Empeñada, vol. 1, 67 and 171.
72 Wife of Puerto Rican nationalist leader Pedro Albizu-Campos, and a close ally of
Castro in Mexico.
73 Mentioned in Chapter 1, Guatemalan foreign minister under Árbenz and Caribbean
Legion collaborator.
74 Nicaraguan exile, writer and revolutionary; mentioned in Chapter 2.
75 Prestigious Cuban economist and member of the M26/7.
76 In Chapter 2, one of the Mexican PRI politicians that shipped weapons to Cuba.
77 Some numbers of Humanismo are available online http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/
portales/revistas_de_migraciones_y_exilios/partes/684930/humanism. Accessed April 20,

2019.
78 Friend of Castro and Prío, who stashed weapons in her Mexico City house for the
M26/7, OA and Guatemalan rebels. Mentioned in Chapter 2.

79 Humanismo, 47, 1958.
time being were passionate backers of Fidel Castro and his group. In
an open letter in September 1957, exiled Adeco, Ildegar Pérez-Segnini,
compared Castro to Sandino and Martí, linked the liberation of Cuba
to that of Venezuela and thus, emphasized the hemispherical nature of
his struggle.80 It was for all to see that the sympathies of some of Latin
America’s most respected writers lied firmly with the Cuban and Circum-
Caribbean anti-dictatorial revolutionaries.
In Costa Rica, another magazine was founded in 1958, fuelling the
momentum of the anti-dictatorial struggle in the wake of Venezuela’s
democratic transition. After leaving power, Figueres established the
International Institute of Political and Social Sciences to further the
democratic, anti-dictatorial agenda. The institute published a politi-
cal journal called Combate with a board of editors which reflected the
intellectual make-up of the Caribbean Legion, and showed the affinity
of this journal with Humanismo. The board was composed by Figueres,
Betancourt, Haya de la Torre and the Colombian Eduardo Santos, who,
according to British intelligence, had been one of the key financial and
diplomatic supporters of the Caribbean Legion in its origins back in the
late 1940s.81 Combate was managed by Luis Alberto Monge, the Costa
Rican head of ORIT who had collaborated with the M26/7 in Mexico,
as mentioned in the previous chapter. He came up with the name as a
reference to the magazine Albert Camus had published during his time
in the French Resistance against the Nazis, and saw it as the “mouth-
piece (…) of the fighters for democracy”.82 In such capacity, Combate
featured an article by Triple A leader Aureliano Sánchez Arango.83
As 1958 went on, Fulgencio Batista’s grip over Cuba slowly eroded.
During this year, it seemed as if the time for dictatorships in Latin
America was coming to an end. In 1954, Brazilian autocrat Getúlio
80 Ibid., 45, 1957, available at http://www.cervantesvirtual.com/portales/revistas_de_
migraciones_y_exilios/obra/num-45-septiembre-octubre-1957/. Accessed April 20, 2019.

81 Leslie Boas, ‘The Caribbean Legion’, 2 March 1957, NA, FO371/119802.
82 ‘Entevista: Luis Alberto Monge de nuevo en Combate (Parte I)’, Cambio Político, 20
December 2011, available at https://cambiopolitico.com/entrevista-luis-alberto-mon-

ge-de-nuevo-en-combate-parte-i/2884/. Accessed April 20, 2019.
83 ‘Izquierda-Centro-Derecha’, Combate, nº2, May–June 1957. Mentioned in CEPAL’s
bibliography of Latin America’s historical evolution: https://repositorio.cepal.org/bit-

stream/handle/11362/3416/S6900468_es.pdf. Accessed April 20, 2019. Unfortunately,
copies of the magazine are hard to come-by nowadays.
Vargas had committed suicide; in 1955, Argentinian leader Juan

Domingo Perón had been ousted; in 1956, Peruvian despot Manuel
Odría lost power and, in 1958, Pérez Jiménez had been expelled from
Venezuela. New York Times journalist Tad Szulc published a book on the
fall of these five dictators, titling the historical moment (and the book)
as the “Twilight of the Tyrants”.84 Batista’s outlook was not bright, as
indeed sympathy from his northern neighbour was beginning to switch
towards those democrats in the region like Betancourt and Figueres, and
slowly pulling away from the autocrats like Trujillo and himself.
In March, the United States decided against giving any more weapons
to his regime after Batista had used US military aid to supress an upris-
ing the previous year. This breached the terms of hemispheric aid and
thus, shipments of weapons were interrupted. Up until then, Cuba had
received weaponry from the United States virtually for free, as part of the
hemispheric aid agreement.85 The move signalled an important shift in
US foreign policy and tolerance towards dictatorial regimes, and in more
practical terms, it placed a large financial strain on the Batista regime. In
1958, for the first time, the Cuban government saw itself forced to buy
significant amounts of military materiel to confront the Sierra Maestra
rebels. As the rebels were receiving financial backing from Venezuela,
Batista was forced to purchase weapons in the world market. The war
was now being waged in the economic arena too.
Batista first turned to the United Kingdom, asking for an extensive list
of arms and ammunition, as well as vehicles and airplanes. The British,
tempted by the “excellent commercial possibilities” of the deal, agreed
to a contract with the Cuban government for an estimated US$4 million
worth of weapons; “an important export order”.86 Additionally, Batista
turned towards Trujillo, on whom he had become increasingly reliant
for security matters after their “peace” in 1957. Towards the end of the
summer of 1958, as Batista’s offensive against the Sierra Maestra rebels
lost momentum, the Cuban regime approached the Dominicans for an
urgent order of ammunition: more than one million rounds, delivered as
84 Tad Szulc, Twilight of the Tyrants (New York: Henry Holt & Co, 1959).
85 Rolando E. Bonachea and Nelson P. Valdés, Revolutionary Struggle: The Selected Works
of Fidel Castro, volume 1: 1947–1958 (London: The MIT Press, 1972), 106.
86 ‘Export of Arms’, 11 October 1957, NA, AK1192/1; ‘Arms for Cuba’, 29 November
1957, ibid.
quickly as possible. The Cuban military attaché recommended periodical

purchases of ammunition to avoid shortages in the fight against Castro.87
Batista saw himself in an arms race against the economic might of
oil-rich Venezuela, no rival for the island’s sugar economy. According to
British intelligence, “the tremendous flow of arms and financial support
sent from Venezuela to the Castro movement, particularly towards the
end, was a prime factor in the final outcome: not because by the end
Castro’s side already possessed overwhelming strength but because it was
felt on Batista’s side that with such aid from Venezuela (and the US) it
very soon would”.88 It is telling that Foreign Office officials included the
United States as a supporter of Castro against Batista.
In the early hours of 1 January 1959, as the demoralized Cuban army
lost ground to the guerrillas, Fulgencio Batista and his closest allies
boarded a plane towards the Dominican Republic. After almost seven
years in power, Batista’s dictatorship had been finally defeated.
Conclusion
This chapter has looked at how the anti-Batista guerrilla war became
internationalized through the work of the Caribbean Legion network,
chiefly exiles. Democratic governments with presence of Legionnaires in
their make-up provided significant backing to anti-dictatorial revolution-
aries in the region during these years: mainly Cubans and Nicaraguans,
whose struggles as we have seen were not parallel but rather intercon-
nected. It has shown how the Cuban rebellion was being waged in a
profoundly transnational environment, with supplies and equipment
flowing from multiple countries, through agents of several nationalities.
Additionally, the rhetoric and intellectual work undertaken by leading
writers ideologically linked to the Caribbean Legion provided an invalua-
ble legitimating boost to the Cuban revolutionaries.
The fight in Cuba was not occurring in a vacuum, nor it was a purely
Cuban affair, concerning only those affected by the dictatorship. For a
decade, the Caribbean Legion had set up a transnational revolutionary
network available to any credible anti-dictatorial fighters willing to enlist
their help. This network was remarkably and crucially active during the
87 Estevez to G-3-EME, 5 August 1958, AHIC, CE, 24/3.20/8.1/1-134.

88 ‘Cuban Venezuelan Relations’, 27 January 1959, NA, FO371/90774.
late 1950s. As we saw in this chapter, the Costa Rican government pro-
vided substantial material backing to the M26/7. It did so through the
network of exiles at their disposal; a web of personal relationships woven
throughout many years on the premise of a shared ideological mission:
the ousting of every dictator in the Caribbean. Participation in this web
interconnected the M26/7 and the Cuban Revolution with the for-
tunes of fellow exiled freedom fighters, such as the Nicaraguans under
Colonel Gómez Flores, the Hondurans under “El Indio” Sánchez, or
the Dominicans under Miguel Ángel Ramírez.
A victory in Venezuela or an electoral success in Honduras or Costa
Rica gave the Cuban rebels a vital lifeline. In this regard, the provisional
junta of Wolfgang Larrazábal and the work of Rómulo Betancourt from
Venezuela provided invaluable and, perhaps determining help to the
Sierra Maestra rebels. Tonnes of military equipment were made availa-
ble to the guerrilleros precisely at the time when the war was entering
its toughest stages. Increasingly large donations were sustaining the rebel
war effort, allegedly allowing Castro to pay as much as one dollar per
bullet in his counteroffensive against the government.89 To borrow from
historian Barry Carr, “developments that have been examined as discrete
events look very different when examined as parts of a larger transna-
tional process”.90 But furthermore, it seemed as if finally the Caribbean
Legion was reaching regional dominance after a long decade of defeats
and exile. All the responsible parties in supporting Castro’s guerrilla,
starting by Castro himself, had been participants in this Legion. Either
as patrons footing the bill, such as Prío, Figueres or Betancourt; as mili-
tary instructors such as Alberto Bayo or Miguel Ángel Ramírez; as agents
and middlemen such as El Indio Sánchez, Feliciano Maderne or Eufemio
Fernández, Caribbean Legionnaires were at the heart of the fight against
Batista.
As this chapter has shown, exiles were once more extremely active
in their support of the Cuban fighting. Not just Cuban exiles, but their
Nicaraguan, Dominican, Guatemalan, Honduran and Venezuelan coun-
terparts played a role too. After all, as Betancourt, who had endured
89 Bonacheaand Valdés, Revolutionary Struggle, 111.

90 BarryCarr, ‘Across Seas and Borders: Charting the Webs of Radical Internationalism
in the Circum-Caribbean’, in Exile & the Politics of Exclusion in the Americas, eds. Luis
Roniger, James N. Green, and Pablo Yankelevich (Eastbourne: Sussex Academic Press,
2012), 235.
a lifetime of intermittent exile remarked in 1958, there was a “deep

American conscience ready to manifest itself in active cooperation against
dictators and in favour of democratic causes”.91 The common practice of
the region’s dictators to send their opponents into exile backfired in cre-
ating a revolutionary community joined by links of solidarity and com-
mon support.
Due to their influential role during the anti-Batista struggle, it comes
as no surprise that Havana became in 1959 the new port of call for the
political exiles of the Hispanic world. Remarkably, not only Caribbean
exiles relocated to the island, but even Portuguese and Spanish exiles
flocked to Cuba. In the years that succeeded, Cuba’s revolutionary com-
mitment to the support of exiles and internationalism was not grounded
on just Marxist–Leninist dogmas, but on an important debt of gratitude
acquired during 1952 to 1958.

CHAPTER 5
Conclusion: The Demise of the Caribbean

Legion, 1959–1961
Abstract  This chapter ties together the main findings of the book,

while also analysing how and why the Caribbean Legion disbanded.
Prados explains how the invasions launched from Cuba in the summer
of 1959 were the last efforts coordinated through the Caribbean Legion,
and how diverging ideological positions drove a wedge between Fidel
Castro’s regime and their partners in the revolutionary network, Rómulo
Betancourt and José Figueres. This split signalled the demise of the
Caribbean Legion, as international revolutionary activism quickly took a
new shape under the direction of Cuba’s new “Liberation Department”.
However this chapter shows how the Legion network provided the foun-
dation for revolutionary attempts beyond the region, examining the
case of Portuguese exiles attempting to start a guerrilla in Angola with
support from Legion veterans.
Keywords  Cuban revolution · Internationalism · Nicaragua ·

Angola · Dominican Republic
In February 1959, as the new Cuban revolutionary government took

its first steps, a US official in Havana noticed some familiar faces in the
stream of newcomers arriving to the island:

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46363-2_5
A number of Dominican exiles are in Cuba, including ‘General’ Miguel

Ángel RAMÍREZ. The revolutionary leaders, as distinct from the officers
of the provisional Government, seem to feel that they have a piece of
unfinished business to take care of in connection with the Dominican
Republic, in the form of the abortive Cayo Confites expedition of 1947, in
which a number of the revolutionary leaders, including Fidel Castro, were
involved.
(…)
A number of Nicaraguan exiles are in town, including Manuel GÓMEZ
Flores. The Embassy has today received a report from a fairly reliable
source that the Nicaraguan group feels that they will be the first to attack.
… This report mentions Guevara specifically as actively participating in
the plotting, and as training some of the participants. It was indicated that
they hoped to be able to launch an invasion within two months.1
US intelligence was correct: mere weeks after arriving to power, lead-

ers of the M26/7 such as Raúl Castro, Ernesto Guevara or Fidel Castro
himself, were already plotting the downfall of neighbouring dictator-
ships. Influential members of the Caribbean Legion such as the afore-
mentioned Ramírez or Gómez Flores moved to Cuba, hoping to
organize a new invasion against their homelands. The summer of 1959
would witness the last operation of the Caribbean Legion, its third and
final attack on Rafael Trujillo.
In Chapter 1 of this book we identified the structure, political context
and purpose of the Caribbean Legion. We saw how the Auténtico party
in Cuba called in the support of the Legion to fight against Batista’s dic-
tatorship, and outlined Cuba’s political landscape during the early 1950s
to establish the relationship between the Auténtico and Ortodoxo parties
towards revolutionary struggle. The chapter concluded with an examina-
tion into the Transnacional de la Mano Dura, the counter-revolutionary
network established by Caribbean dictators to supress democratic exiles.
In doing so we identified the Caribbean Cold War unfolding during the
period.
In Chapter 2 we turned towards Fidel Castro’s movement, the
M26/7 and their experience in exile. During this time, the M26/7
established alliances with fellow exiled groups from multiple coun-
tries. By doing this, the Cuban Revolution became enmeshed in a
1 Jon Lee Anderson, Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life (New York: Grove Press, 2010),
987–988.
5 CONCLUSION: THE DEMISE OF THE CARIBBEAN LEGION, 1959–1961 91
wider revolutionary network, involving not just Cuban politics, but a

region-wide anti-dictatorial phenomenon. The second part of this chap-
ter was devoted to understanding the intricate relationship between
Batista and Trujillo, and how it affected both the Legion and the
Transnacional in unexpected ways.
Chapter 3 analysed the support given to the Cuban guerrillas by
Legion patron and Costa Rican president, José Figueres. This was fol-
lowed by a similar look on Venezuela, and how after a democratic coup
of 1958, this country’s junta became a staunch supporter of Castro’s
war effort. This was coupled with the relentless activity of Legion leader
Rómulo Betancourt in supplying the Cubans with materiel. Through the
connections forged in the Caribbean Legion, the M26/7 received mili-
tary, financial and diplomatic backing from Venezuela.
In what follows, the conclusion will highlight the main findings of this
book and provide an epilogue to the Legion’s activity and its eventual
demise.
The Caribbean Legion and the network of exiles that composed
it played a crucial role in the rise to power of Castro’s guerrillas. The
Cuban Revolution was a profoundly international fight since its begin-
ning; the latest flashpoint in an undeclared Cold War between the dem-
ocratic governments of the Caribbean and the autocratic regimes. As we
have seen in the course of this book, Batista’s coup d’état and the sub-
sequent resistance to his regime was not taking place in a vacuum. The
Caribbean was in a state of turmoil, witnessing a surge of democratic
demands in a context of authoritarianism and Cold War anti-Communist
paranoia. These demands for freedom could not be absorbed by the rul-
ing generals of Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela or the Dominican Republic
and thus, military insurrection was embraced by the increasingly large
number of exiles. The physical proximity between the different countries
and the technological advances in communications and travel improved
the possibilities of transnational alliances and the Caribbean Legion was
precisely this: a transnational network designed to coordinate revolu-
tionary activity. The fight against Batista’s dictatorship was taking place
in this context, and as we have seen, the international dimension had a
major influence not only in the Revolution itself, but also in its after-
math and the Castro regime. Histories of the Cuban Revolution cannot
limit their international outlook to the United States. The involvement
of neighbouring countries had an undeniable and defining impact on
both Batista and his rivals. We would have had a very different history if
Batista could not have counted on his allies from the Transnacional de la
Mano Dura, or if the M26/7 had not had allies in foreign countries and
fellow exiles.
These events in turn shed light on the Cold War itself. The conflict
was not just a totemic East versus West undeclared war, in which the two
superpowers moved their pawns in the world’s chessboard. Instead what
we have seen is that a different, smaller cold war was taking place under
the umbrella of Soviet–US struggles. In this Caribbean Cold War, dif-
ferent actors invoked the menace of Communism to discredit their ene-
mies and attempt to reverse the power play: to provoke the United States
to do one’s bidding; to fuel fears of a Communist Guatemala to defeat
a regional enemy, for example. The events of the Caribbean during the
1940s and 1950s add nuance to Cold War historiography, detailing how
beneath an overarching global conflict, we can find regional power strug-
gles along different lines. This Caribbean Cold War would eventually be
subsumed into the wider Global Cold War during the 1960s, with the
United States’ failed attempt to oust the Castro regime in 1961 and the
subsequent adherence of the Cuban government to Marxism–Leninism.
Throughout this Caribbean Cold War, exiles played a crucial role.
Post-World War II advances in communication, international forums and
organizations, and the increased importance of human rights saw the rise
of transnational networking that changed exile in Latin America. The rise
of this “four-tiered exile”, as described by Sznajder and Roniger, defined
the events of the Caribbean region during the late 1940s and 1950s.2
In contrast to previous experiences of exile in decades or centuries prior,
this period of the Caribbean Cold War saw frenetic exchange, contact
and collaboration between exiles on both sides of the ideological divide.
The creation of the Caribbean Legion as a transnational network for rev-
olution shaped the conflicts of its time. It imbued its participants with
a strong commitment to internationalism that would eventually become
one of the cornerstones of Cuba’s revolutionary government, and it pro-
voked an alliance between the opposing dictatorships that would fore-
shadow the Operación Condor of the 1970s, when the dictatorships of
Argentina, Brazil and Chile coordinated closely against their opponents.3
Cambridge University Press, 2009), 153–154.

3 Ibid.
Just three weeks after reaching power, Castro flew to Caracas on his
first official trip, an unsurprising visit considering the support he had
received from the Venezuelan government. Castro and Betancourt met
for over three hours to discuss the future of their governments. During
that conversation, Castro asked Betancourt for a loan of US$300 mil-
lion to avoid having to rely on the United States. Betancourt refused,
and according to historian Jonathan Brown, “his negative response to
Castro foreclosed future collaboration between them”.4 Betancourt
and Castro had fundamentally opposite views on a topic as salient as the
United States and the role it should be allowed to play in Latin American
affairs. Besides ideological differences (Betancourt had moved away from
the Marxist philosophy that influenced his youth, while Castro seemed
to be entering his flirtation with Communism), a generational gap sep-
arated both leaders and the political movements they represented. The
Cuban revolutionaries were significantly younger than Betancourt
and his cohort, and had been deeply scarred by the US intervention in
Guatemala, as well as by their frequent support to dictators like Trujillo
or the Somozas while disregarding democratic exiles. This fuelled a
strong scepticism and dislike of the United States. Betancourt and many
of the veterans of the AD party on the other hand had been contem-
poraries of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s shift towards the Good Neighbour
policy, the social-democratic reforms of the New Deal and the passionate
defence of democracy during the Second World War. Those conflicting
and opposite images of the region’s hegemon created a schism between
the Cuban revolutionaries and their Venezuelan allies.
However, not all “future collaboration” had been foreclosed. There
was still something on which both the Venezuelan government and the
barbudos could agree. In that same meeting, Betancourt had an offer to
make to Castro: an invasion of the Dominican Republic by Caribbean
Legion veterans, Dominican exiles and Cuban and Venezuelan volun-
teers. Castro mentioned the high expenses of such an enterprise but
Betancourt offered up to half a million US dollars for the operation.
Castro agreed and the Caribbean Legion’s last plan was put in motion.5
4 Jonathan Brown, Cuba’s Revolutionary World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2017), 226–227.

5 Delio Gómez Ochoa, Constanza, Maimón y Estero Hondo: La Victoria de los Caídos
(Santo Domingo: Comisión Permanente de Efemérides Patrias, 2007), 28.

By June 1959, an expeditionary force was ready to depart Cuba. The

army was composed of mainly Dominican exiles, including several prom-
inent Caribbean Legion veterans occupying key positions. For example,
José Horacio Rodríguez, a veteran of Cayo Confites and Luperón was
named Chief of Staff.6 Rodríguez was the son of Juan Rodríguez, head
financier of the Caribbean Legion during its early years. Betancourt pro-
vided US$150,000 for the expedition (substantially less than promised)
and military equipment such as rations or boots that had been given to
his government by the United States.7 The expedition bore the hall-
marks of Caribbean Legion operations: a multinational army composed
of Dominican, Cuban, Venezuelan, Puerto Rican and Spanish volunteers,
divided into a two-pronged invasion, by air and sea, financially backed by
Betancourt and Castro, the Legion’s new patron.8
On 14 June 1959, the final Caribbean Legion adventure departed
Cuba and attacked the Dominican Republic. Over the course of the
oncoming weeks, the invasion force was repelled and decimated. Trujillo
relied heavily on his contacts along the Transnacional de la Mano Dura
to defend his country: the airborne invasion was repelled by Spanish
Legionnaires sent by dictator Francisco Franco, and the seaborne attack
was strafed from fighter jets piloted by Cuban exiles loyal to Batista.9
However, the attack succeeded in the long term. The expedition inspired
the sympathy of the Dominican population. Fearful, Trujillo devoted
increasing amounts of money to matters of defence, spending around
60% of the Dominican budget in a time of decreasing export prices.10
This led to economic trouble and eventually Trujillo lost support of
Dominican elites, his traditional backers.11 On 30 May 1961, Trujillo
was assassinated, putting an end to his more than 30 years of rule. In
the country’s first free elections in December 1962, exile leader and
Caribbean Legion member Juan Bosch was elected president.
Another invasion was being plotted in the opening months of
1959 from Cuba. Nicaraguan exiles had travelled to the island-nation
6 Ibid.,36–37.
7 Ibid.,43, 57.
8 Ibid., 69; Brown, Cuba’s Revolutionary World, 67.
9 Alfredo Sánchez-Bella to Fernando Castiella, 27 June 1959, Archivo de la Fundación
Nacional Francisco Franco (hereafter AFNFF), Madrid, Spain, 13233.

10 Ibid., 2 November 1959, 17400.
11 Ibid., 29 June 1959, 13233.

hoping to secure the revolutionary government’s backing to depose the

Somozas. This operation would signal the split and eventual dissolution
of the Caribbean Legion.
Unlike the Dominican invasion, the Nicaraguan exiles did not
come together under a single junta, but remained divided among fac-
tions. Figueres hoped to integrate Castro and his government to
an anti-dictatorial axis headed by himself and Rómulo Betancourt.
However, both parties disagreed as they held essentially different con-
ceptions of the Caribbean Legion: Figueres and Betancourt wanted the
Legion to be firmly anti-Communist and deny their participation, while
the Cubans, headed by Ernesto Guevara’s “Liberation Department”,
sympathized with pro-Communist exiles.12 This division became appar-
ent in the anti-Somoza struggle. Conservative Nicaraguan exiles,
mainly Legion veterans, moved to Costa Rica, supported by Figueres
and Betancourt while the Communist exiles had their headquarters in
Havana.13 This resulted in two different invasions: one that departed
from Costa Rica in late May 1959 and another from Cuba in late June.
Both attacks were unsuccessful.
The Cuban and Costa Rican governments would not collaborate
again until 1978, when Castro and then Costa Rican president Rodrigo
Carazo collaborated to support the Frente Sandinista de Liberación
Nacional in their fight against the Somozas.14 The Sandinistas would
eventually oust the Somoza dynasty in 1979, after over 40 years in
power.
The experience of the Caribbean Legion set the stage for some-
thing larger, once the M26/7 reached power. On the one hand, the
transnational experience of allying with a regional network of exiles
and revolutionaries reinforced the internationalist outlook of the new
Cuban government. Drawing from the Caribbean Legion network to
fight Batista had shaped the Cuban revolutionaries into a particularly
12 Foreign Relations of the United States (hereafter FRUS), 1958–1960, Volume VI,
Cuba, ed. John P. Glennon (Washington, 1991), Document 267; FRUS, 1958–1960,
Volume V (Washington, 1991), Document 90; Anderson, Che, 990.
13 Brown, Cuba’s Revolutionary World, 71.
14 ‘Los pactos y las rupturas de Fidel Castro con los gobiernos de Costa Rica’, La Nación,
26 November 2016, available at https://www.nacion.com/el-mundo/conflictos/los-

pactos-y-las-rupturas-de-fidel-castro-con-los-gobiernos-de-costa-rica/FMXW6MZV35D
6VJLO3U3JTZPZDM/story/. Accessed April 20, 2019.
internationally minded insurgency, and that carried on into the revolu-

tionary government. However, the Caribbean Legion network also came
with a specific ideological inclination, which although diffuse it was
clearly non-Communist and hopeful of earning the favour of the United
States administration.
In my view, this set an ideological constraint on the new Cuban
regime that many in the M26/7 were unwilling to abide by. In March
1959, merely three months into the new Cuban regime, José Figueres
was encouraged by a US State Department official to travel to Cuba and
persuade Fidel Castro to steer the revolutionary government towards
a more prudent direction.15 US officials were wary of Castro’s unpre-
dictability and wanted Figueres and Betancourt to exercise a moderat-
ing influence. In a private meeting in January, the US ambassador to
Costa Rica had told Figueres: “it seems to me that those of you such as
Muñoz Marín, Romulo Betancourt, yourself and others who have been
supporting and sponsoring the Fidel Castro movement, have a tremen-
dous moral responsibility to see that things come out right in Cuba”, to
which Figueres replied: “I agree with you, and I think we are going to
be able to do something”.16 Figueres visited Cuba some weeks later but
he was unable to persuade Castro. The trip was a fiasco, resulting in a
bitter public disagreement between him and Castro during a rally when
Figueres encouraged the Cubans to embrace US influence while Castro
and one of the labour leaders present retorted that Cuba was a sovereign
nation and it didn’t have to support the United States.17
Over the course of 1959, the Cuban regime broke with its Caribbean
Legion allies. For the new Cuban government, the scope of oper-
ations looked beyond Latin America and for the first time, strict ideo-
logical discipline was enforced: since early 1959, the new Cuban patron
would only support pro-Communist groups, with the exception of the
Dominican expedition. This alienated the other backers of the Legion
and broke down the fundamental objective of the alliance: to fight
dictatorships. A British diplomat noted that “the crusading triumvi-
rate” between Castro, Figueres and Betancourt “was stillborn”.18 The
15 D. J. Mill Irwing, ‘Visit of Ex-President Figueres to Cuba’, 25 March 1959, National
Archives, London, UK (NA hereon), FO 371/139661.

16 FRUS, 1958–1960, Volume VI, Cuba, ed. John P. Glennon, Document 242.
17 Ibid., Document 266.
18 British Havana Embassy to American Department, 8 April 1959, NA, FO371/139661.

new objective of Cuba’s internationalism was to support and spread

Marxism–Leninism across the world. Ernesto Guevara had created the
Liberation Department within Cuba’s defence ministry to promote revo-
lution abroad, effectively signalling the end of the Caribbean Legion as it
had been known. The loosely defined, flexible network of personal con-
tacts with no specific ideology beyond a commitment to democracy and
against dictatorships was replaced by an organized department within a
politicized government institution. Ideological discipline was enforced
and guided, and this new department was not a network of individuals,
but a well-structured instrument of Cuba’s revolutionary government.
Future operations from the Liberation Department would be more
professional affairs, in contrast with the more “artisanal” expeditions of
1959, which like Caribbean Legion plots, “relied on personal relation-
ships”.19 Therefore, by creating a home for the more leftist or Marxist
exiles, the Liberation Department undermined the broad church appeal
of the Legion.
However, there is an interesting plot that serves as a bridge between
both types of internationalism, and shows how the experience of the
Caribbean Legion and its members was the seed for future Cuban inter-
ventions. Some of the most famous internationalist interventions of the
Cuban Communist government in the world, namely those in Angola
and Nicaragua, have roots in the Caribbean Legion. The experience of
exile and revolution during the late 1940s and 1950s had far-reaching
consequences for the Cold War, which went beyond the immediate Latin
American context as these forays into Angola or the Iberian Peninsula
will show.
In 1959, Spanish exile Alberto Bayo moved to Cuba to re-join his
pupils. In Havana, Bayo was put in charge of a guerrilla school tasked
with organizing a rebel force in Spain. Bayo, a Caribbean Legion vet-
eran, was now training his last expeditionary force. For this plan, he
counted with around 100 Spanish volunteers and the support of Cuba’s
revolutionary high command.20 In early 1959, Bayo received the visit
of Fernando Queiroga, a Portuguese Communist exile and an agent of
Humberto Delgado, a Portuguese politician exiled in Brazil. Queiroga
was sent to Havana to secure the support from the revolutionary
19 Anderson, Che, 990.

20 Lojendio to Minister of Foreign Affairs, 17 April 1959, AFNFF, 21770.
government for an attack against the dictatorship of António de Oliveira

Salazar.21 Out of this collaboration came an ambitious plan: Iberian
exiles were trained in Cuba for guerrilla warfare in the Portuguese col-
ony of Angola. The plan was to drag the Salazar regime into a protracted
colonial war that would eventually drain its resources and collapse the
dictatorship.22 Unfortunately for the revolutionaries, the transatlantic
ship they kidnapped to travel from the Caribbean to Africa was forced to
dock in Brazil, where the would-be guerrilleros claimed asylum.23
Alberto Bayo would die in Havana in 1967 of old age, without being
able to fulfil his dream of an anti-Francoist guerrilla that would return
Spain to democracy.
The world of exile changed after 1959. If the divide during the
1940s and 1950s was on the issue of authoritarianism versus democ-
racy, by the 1960s the cleavage was on the question of Communism:
pro-Communist exiles would find refuge in Cuba while non-Communist
exiles would look towards Europe, the United States, Venezuela or Costa
Rica. This shift re-aligned the alliances forged during the 1950s, as for
example Prío, in exile from Miami, allied himself with the Somozas, his
old nemeses, against Castro’s regime.24 Betancourt also turned on Cuba,
agreeing to support US efforts against Castro on the condition that
Trujillo was ousted first. Speaking to US diplomats in 1959, Betancourt
ridiculed former Guatemalan president (and an old ally of his) Juan José
Arévalo, adding that he supported the US intervention in Guatemala in
1954. As historian Stephen G. Rabe wrote, “ten years of exile had been a
harsh and bitter experience for the Venezuelan leader”.25
Indeed, exile took a toll on many of the participants of the Caribbean
Legion. Juan Rodríguez, the Dominican financier of the Legion
21 Untitled report, 30 April 1959, AFNFF, 21766.

22 Morales to Minister of Foreign Affairs, 25 January 1959, AFNFF, 6159; Manuel Rojas
to Ernesto Guevara, 1960, AFNFF, 5164; ‘Santa Maria Case Linked to a Cuban’, New
York Times, 11 February 1961.
23 Ibid.
24 CIA, ‘Support of Luis Somoza for Military Plan of Carlos Prio Socarras to Liberate
Cuba’, 31 October 1963, JFKAR, 104-10220-10104, available at https://documents.

theblackvault.com/documents/jfk/NARA-July2017/JFK-July_2017_Release-Formerly_
released_in_part/104-10220-10104.pdf. Accessed April 20, 2019.
25 Stephen G. Rabe, ‘The Caribbean Triangle: Betancourt, Castro, and Trujillo and U.S.
Foreign Policy, 1958–1963’, Diplomatic History, 20:1 (1996), 63–64.

committed suicide in 1960, a year after his son had died in the 1959
expedition. Árbenz briefly sought solace from his exile in Havana, at the
invitation of the revolutionary government. However, the new regime
used him as a public example for failure, stressing the mistakes his gov-
ernment had committed and how the new Cuban regime was avoiding
them. Humiliated, he eventually moved to Mexico City, where he died
one night of 1971, tormented and in complete solitude.26 Carlos Prío,
returned to Cuba in 1959 and defended the new revolutionary govern-
ment for over a year, before defecting to Miami. From there he made
some attempts to return to power through military action, but he no
longer had the influence in the new exile generation that he had enjoyed
in the past. One morning of 1977, a financially troubled Prío shot him-
self in his Florida home.27
Much of the historiography highlights the many defeats of the
Caribbean Legion, its inability to fulfil the grand schemes it plotted. The
majority of their military actions were unsuccessful, however despite this
they managed to turn the tide of the region from dictatorial darkness to
a hopeful opening of democracy during the late 1950s. Perhaps its true
success did not lie in its invasions and revolutions, but in the fact that
despite the defeats they kept going; representing those in the region and
the Hispanic world in general that refused to submit to dictatorship. The
triumph of the Legion was its unwavering commitment to the ideal of
democracy in the face of overwhelming odds: the victory of the Legion
lied in that it never accepted defeat.
Writing from Adeco-ruled Caracas in early 1948, Cuban writer Alejo
Carpentier finished his novel El Reino de Este Mundo with a paragraph
that perfectly summed the sentiment underpinning the Caribbean
Legion:
(…) la grandeza del hombre está precisamente en querer mejorar lo que

es. En imponerse Tareas. En el Reino de los Cielos no hay grandeza
que conquistar, puesto que allá todo es jerarquía establecida, incógnita
26 Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States,
1944–1954 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 391.

27 ‘Prio Socarras, Cuban Ex-Leader, Dies of Gunshot Wound in Florida’, New York
Times, 6 April 1977.

despejada, existir sin término, imposibilidad de sacrificio, reposo y deleite.

Por ello, agobiado de penas y de Tareas, hermoso dentro de su miseria,
capaz de amar en medio de las plagas, el hombre sólo puede hallar su gran-
deza, su máxima medida en el Reino de este Mundo.28
28 Alejo Carpentier, El Reino de Este Mundo (Barcelona: Austral, 2015).

Bibliography
Archives
Abbreviations in parenthesis indicate the way in which files are referred
to in footnotes.
In Havana, Cuba:
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the 1950s, as well as documents from the Movimiento 26 de Julio.
• Colección Marina de Guerra (CMG)

– Fondo Jefe del Departamento de Dirección
• Colección Ejército 1952–1958 (CE)
– Fondo Agregados Militares.
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Index
A B
Acción Democrática party (AD), 20, Batista, Fulgencio, 1, 5, 7, 10, 11, 14,
26, 35, 36, 70, 77, 78, 93 15, 17–20, 25, 27–32, 34, 36,
Agostini, Felipe, 44 37, 40, 41, 44–49, 52–60, 62–65,
Alberti, Rafael, 83 68–71, 77, 78, 80–82, 84–87, 90,
Albizu Campos, Laura de, 83 91, 94, 95
Albizu Campos, Pedro, 44 anti-movement, 11, 15, 29, 31, 41,
Alianza Popular Revolucionaria 45, 49, 54–56, 77, 82, 86, 88
Americana party (APRA), 8, 9, Bayo, Alberto, 24, 50, 53, 54, 69, 74,
20, 51 87, 97, 98
Angola, 97, 98 Betancourt, Rómulo, 3, 6, 16, 21,
Árbenz, Jacobo, 3, 6, 18, 23, 28–30, 23, 35, 36, 39, 51, 52, 59, 70,
34, 37, 38, 40, 43, 47, 51–53, 77–79, 81, 83–85, 87, 91, 93–96,
59, 99 98
Arévalo, Juan José, 10, 21, 23, 31, 51, Bohemia magazine, 31, 58, 59
52, 83, 98 Bosch, Juan, 3, 6, 22, 39, 51, 57, 83,
Argüello Jr, Rosendo, 37 94
Auténtico party, 9, 15, 17, 20, 26–30, Browder, Edward, 35–39
32–34, 40, 41, 44–47, 49, 56,
57, 61, 64, 65, 90
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive 109
license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-46363-2
110 Index
C Costa Rica, 6, 15, 18, 19, 25, 28, 34,

Cairol, Francisco, 49 39, 40, 44, 45, 49–54, 64, 67,
Calderón Guardia, Rafael, 39, 52 68, 70, 71, 73–77, 79–81, 84,
Camus, Albert, 84 87, 95, 96, 98
Cancio Peña, Salvador ‘Saviur’, 49, Costa Rican Civil War, 25, 26, 30, 37,
53, 54 39, 71, 73, 75, 81
Carazo, Rodrigo, 95
Cárdenas, Lázaro, 59, 83
Carías, Tiburcio, 70 D
Caribbean Legion, 2, 15–19, 26, Darío, Rubén, 7
28–32, 34–37, 39–41, 44–46, Delgado, Humberto, 97
48–54, 56, 63–65, 68–71, 73, Directorio Revolucionario (DR), 68,
74, 76, 77, 79, 81–84, 86, 87, 69
90–92, 95, 97, 99 Dominican Republic, 2, 6, 9, 15, 18,
Cayo Confites expedition, 2, 24, 25, 19, 21, 23, 25, 26, 36, 45, 56,
29, 30, 39, 44, 49, 58, 60, 69, 58–61, 63, 64, 69, 70, 74, 81,
76, 90, 94 82, 86, 90, 91, 93, 94
Constanza, Maimón and Estero Duvalier, François, 2, 80
Hondo expeditions, 93, 94
disbandment, 89, 95, 96, 98
historiography, 3, 9, 14 E
ideology, 7–9 El Salvador, 75
Luperón expedition, 26, 29, 30, 39,
49, 50, 53, 58, 69, 94
origins, 9, 22 F
participation in the Costa Rican Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI),
Civil War, 26 15, 50, 62
structure, 22, 24 Fernández, Eufemio, 28, 29, 31, 39,
Carpentier, Alejo, 99 40, 47–49, 52, 53, 55, 59, 60,
Carrillo, Justo, 49 73, 74, 79, 87
Castillo Armas, Carlos, 37, 38 Figueres, José, 3, 15, 19, 25, 26, 28,
Castro, Fidel, 1, 2, 5, 6, 11, 13, 32, 34, 37–39, 51, 52, 54–56,
15, 16, 19, 25, 33, 34, 44–56, 59, 68, 70–76, 79, 81, 84, 85,
61–64, 67–74, 76, 78–80, 82–84, 87, 91, 95, 96
86, 87, 90–96, 98 Franco, Francisco, 14, 15, 44, 77, 94
Castro, Raúl, 32, 90 Frente Sandinista de Liberación
Casuso, Teresa, 83 Nacional (FSLN), 95
Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), 15
Colombia, 19, 22, 79
Communism, 20, 27, 44, 52, 65, 92, G
93, 95–98 Gadea, Hilda, 51
Corynthia expedition, 69 Galíndez, Jesús de, 56
Index 111
Gallegos, Rómulo, 50, 77, 79, 83 Marshall, Frank, 73, 81

García Bárcena, Rafael, 30, 33 Martí, José, 83, 84
García Montenegro, Adolfo, 52 Marxism, 8, 13, 20, 88, 92, 93, 97
Gómez, Juan Vicente, 20 Masferrer, Rolando, 60
Gómez Flores, Manuel, 39, 53, 54, Matos, Huber, 36, 72, 73, 80
71, 74–76, 87, 90 Matthews, Herbert, 2
Grau San Martín, Ramón, 32, 47 Mexican Revolution, 8
Great Depression, 19 Mexico, 8, 29, 30, 38–40, 43–50,
Guasina, 77 52–56, 59, 61, 64, 71, 74, 79,
Guatemala, 6, 9, 17–19, 21, 23, 26, 83, 84, 99
28–31, 38–40, 44, 47, 48, 51–53, Meza, Juan José, 53, 83
64, 92, 93, 98 Miret, Pedro, 62
Guevara, Ernesto ‘Che’, 51, 52, 61, Moncada barracks, 19, 34, 40, 47, 51,
90, 95, 97 57, 62
Monge, Luis Alberto, 54, 84
Morazán, Miguel Francisco, 75
H Movimiento 26 de Julio, 2, 15, 34,
Haiti, 2, 18, 80 44–56, 61–65, 68, 69, 71–73, 76,
Hart Phillips, Ruby, 1, 2 78–84, 87, 90–92, 95, 96
Haya de la Torre, Víctor Raúl, 8, 20, Muñoz Marín, Luis, 9, 72, 96
21, 51, 83, 84
Henríquez, Enrique ‘Cotú’, 30, 39
Hérnandez, José ‘Pipí’, 59 N
Hernández, Melba, 50 Nicaragua, 2, 6, 8, 16, 18, 19, 21, 28,
Honduras, 6, 18, 19, 21, 38, 68, 70, 34, 36–39, 44, 53, 55, 56, 64,
71, 74–77, 79, 81, 87 70, 74–76, 81, 82, 91, 97
J O
Juarbe, Juan, 50, 79 Odría, Manuel, 85
Organización Auténtica (OA), 60, 61,
68, 69
L Organization of American States
Larrazábal, Wolfgang, 78, 79, 87 (OAS), 75
Leiva de Holst, Elena, 51 Ornes, Horacio, 49
Llaverías, Joaquín, 60, 61 Ortodoxo party (PPC), 27, 30, 32,
Lombardo Toledano, Vicente, 59 33, 40, 47, 49, 52, 90
López, Antonio ‘Ñico’, 51, 62 Osegueda, Raúl, 29, 30, 83
M P
Machado, Gerardo, 20, 27 Partido de Liberación Nacional
Maderne, Feliciano, 76, 81, 87 (PLN), 26
112 Index
Partido Socialista Popular (PSP), 27 Santos, Eduardo, 22, 83, 84

Paz, Octavio, 83 Second World War, 9, 10, 13, 14, 19,
Pazos, Felipe, 83 21, 35, 40, 92, 93
Peña, Silvio, 75 Servicio de Inteligencia Militar (SIM),
Pérez Jiménez, Marcos, 16, 18, 56, 14
58, 70, 74, 77, 78, 80, 83, 85 Sierra Maestra, 34, 46, 64, 65, 67–70,
Pérez-Segnini, Ildegar, 84 72, 73, 76, 80, 82, 85, 87
Perón, Juan Domingo, 85 Soler, Policarpo, 60, 62
Prebisch, Raúl, 83 Somoza dynasty, 2, 28, 52, 54, 56, 71,
Prío, Carlos, 3, 6, 17, 18, 23, 27–33, 74, 75, 82, 93, 95, 98
37, 39, 45, 47–49, 55, 59–63, Anastasio, 18, 22, 34, 36, 39, 40,
68, 69, 74, 78, 79, 87, 98, 99 53, 54, 71
Puerto Rico, 44, 52, 72 Anastasio “Tachito” (son), 38
anti-movement, 50, 51, 53, 71,
95
Q Luis, 71
Queiroga, Fernando, 97 Soviet Union, 3, 12, 13, 51, 64, 92
Spain, 14, 18, 50, 77, 82, 97, 98
Spanish Civil War, 6, 7, 24, 50
R Spanish Republicans, 15, 24, 26, 44,
Ramírez, Miguel Ángel, 26, 30, 76, 50, 77
81, 87, 90 Suez Crisis, 63
Ribas Montes, Jorge, 39
Roa, Raúl, 83
Rodó, José Enrique, 7 T
Rodríguez, José Horacio, 94 Torre, Cándido de la, 49
Rodríguez, Juan, 23, 25, 94, 98 Torres Espinosa, Edelberto, 51, 83
Rodríguez, Léster, 62 Torres Rivas, Edelberto, 51, 52
Rodríguez, Luis Ignacio, 83 Torriello, Jorge, 53
Rojas Pinilla, Gustavo, 74 Transnacional de la Mano Dura, 15,
Roosevelt, Franklin Delano, 93 18, 34–40, 46, 52, 56, 70, 74,
77, 90–92, 94
Triple A, 47–49, 61, 84
S Trujillo, Rafael, 2, 15, 18, 21, 22,
Salazar, António de Oliveira, 98 34–37, 45, 46, 56–65, 69, 74,
Sánchez Arango, Aureliano, 29, 30, 76, 82, 85, 90, 91, 93, 94, 98
33, 40, 47–49, 55, 84
Sánchez, Francisco ‘El Indio’, 75, 87
Sandinistas. See Frente Sandinista de U
Liberación Nacional United Kingdom, 70, 85
Sandino, Augusto César, 8, 84 British intelligence, 22, 73, 80, 84,
Santamaría, Abel, 33 86
Index 113
United States, 3, 7, 8, 10–13, 15, 19, Venezuela, 6, 16, 18, 19, 21, 26,
28, 29, 31, 35–39, 44, 45, 47, 35, 39, 58, 64, 67, 70, 77–80,
50, 51, 55, 58–64, 70, 82, 83, 82–87, 91, 98
85, 86, 89–94, 96, 98, 102 Villeda Morales, Ramón, 70, 75
Urrutia, Manuel, 78
V
Vargas, Getúlio, 84

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ST ANTONY’S SERIES

Cuba in the Caribbean

More information about this series at

Cuba in the Caribbean

ISSN 2633-5964 ISSN 2633-5972 (electronic)

Cover illustration: Hufton+Crow-VIEW/Alamy Stock Photo

1 Introduction: The Caribbean Legion Revived 1

2 A Caribbean Cold War, 1947–1955 17

3 The Internationalization of the Cuban Revolution,

4 The Caribbean Legion Supplying the Sierra Maestra,

5 Conclusion: The Demise of the Caribbean Legion,

Nicolás Prados Ortiz de Solórzano (Madrid, 1992) is a doctoral

Abstract This chapter introduces the concept of transnational

Keywords Transnational history · Networks · Exile · Cold war ·

© The Author(s) 2020 1

Caribbean Legion Revived.

The return of this mysterious legion seemed significant, since Fidel

4 Understood as the fight against Fulgencio Batista, 1952–1958.

experienced revolutionaries for help. Over the course of the insurrection,

is to make a contribution to histories of exiles in Latin America, high-

5 Ann Curthoys and Marylin Lake, “Introduction”, in Connected Worlds: History

in Transnational Perspective, eds. Curthoys and Lake (Canberra: Australian National

aeon.co/essays/is-global-history-still-possible-or-has-it-had-its-moment. Accessed April

where cultural and linguistic affinities have circulated dynamically mainly

9 Íñigo ­García-Bryce, Haya de la Torre and the Pursuit of Power in Twentieth-Century

(Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2014), 17.

World’, Journal of Peace Research, 49:4 (1992), 455.

The Rise of Caribbean Transnational Networks

in the Circum-Caribbean’, in ibid., 218.

16 Ileana Sanz, ‘Early Groundings for a ­ Circum-Caribbean Integrationist Thought’,

Green and Yankelevich, 222–223.

this feeling in his 1905 poem “A Roosevelt”, where he wrote against

20 Rubén Darío, A Roosevelt, available at https://poemario.org/roosevelt/. Accessed

April 20, 2019.

22 García-Bryce, Haya de la Torre, 14.

Cubano—Auténtico, the Venezuelan Agrupación Revolucionaria de

Domingo.25 Historian Charles Ameringer wrote, to the best of my

Writing the History of Revolutionary Transnationalism and Militant Networks in the

1946–1950 (University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1995).

American Studies, 21:1 (1989), 135–145.

Left in the Caribbean Basin, 1945–1954’, Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y

Cuban historiography has become “simultaneously overpopulated and

lemas para la investigación (I)’, La Tizza, 27 March 2018, available at https://medium.

This recent trend in Cuban historiography is reflecting a wider move-

History, 16:4 (2016), 339.

Scholarship on United States-Latin American Relations’, Diplomatic History, 27:5 (2003),

historiography places its emphasis on the transnational character of its

39 Joseph, ‘Border Crossings’, 9.

dios y avances teóricos’, Estudios Interdisciplinarios de América Latina y el Caribe, 20:1

Sznajder and Roniger argue, exile during the nineteenth century

diplomatic reports from Franco’s diplomats in the Caribbean, and the

Additionally it will show how this support was enmeshed in larger

A Caribbean Cold War, 1947–1955

Abstract This chapter provides a much-needed examination of the

Keywords Revolutionary networks · Caribbean · Exiles · Dictatorship ·

On 10 March 1952, Fulgencio Batista overthrew the democratic gov-

© The Author(s) 2020 17

Embassy to State Department, available at www.latinamericanstudies.org.

Origins of the Caribbean Legion

(London: Yale University Press, 2018), 49.

and Ameringer observed, a small democratic opening was sweeping the

4 Ameringer, The Caribbean Legion: Patriots, Politicians and Soldiers of Fortune,

9 Ameringer, Caribbean Legion, 2–5.

Cuba in the Caribbean

Abstract   This chapter introduces the concept of transnational

Keywords  Transnational history · Networks · Exile · Cold war ·

9 Íñigo García-Bryce, Haya de la Torre and the Pursuit of Power in Twentieth-Century

The Rise of Caribbean Transnational Networks

16 Ileana Sanz, ‘Early Groundings for a Circum-Caribbean Integrationist Thought’,

Abstract  This chapter provides a much-needed examination of the

Keywords  Revolutionary networks · Caribbean · Exiles · Dictatorship ·

Origins of the Caribbean Legion

Democracy Is Overthrown in Cuba

Records (hereafter JFKAR), 124-10224-10230.

The Internationalization of the Cuban

Abstract  This chapter re-examines a crucial period of the Cuban

Keywords  Fidel Castro · Exile · Caribbean Legion ·

The M26/7 in Exile: Tapping