On the evening of 15 February 1957, the New York Times correspondent Herbert Matthews stepped into a jeep with some anti-government activists and went to meet the young Fidel Castro in the Sierra Maestra. Castro was supposed to be dead: sailing from Mexico a few months earlier, he had arrived on the coast of Oriente province with 82 men, and was immediately bombarded by coastguard vessels and army aircraft. The Havana bureau of the United Press, relying on information from the Cuban military, reported that the insurgents had been wiped out; one Cuban general even claimed that the army had the bodies of Fidel and Raúl Castro.

LRB 5 July 2007 | PDF Download