Armando Hart was a central organizer of the urban underground and is one of the historic leaders of the Cuban Revolution.

The Militant is publishing a series of selections from the book. In the firsthand report below, Vilma Espín, a leader of the July 26 Movement in Santiago de Cuba in Oriente province, describes the police murder of Frank País on July 30, 1957, and the popular outpouring in Santiago in response to that crime. País was the central leader of the movement in Oriente and the main organizer of the Nov. 30, 1956, uprising in Santiago. The revolt was timed to support the landing on the country’s southeastern coast by Castro and 81 other revolutionary combatants who had traveled from Mexico on the yacht Granma to launch the revolutionary war against the dictatorship. País also carried responsibility for the clandestine work of the July 26 Movement in cities across Cuba.

In an extensive manifesto issued in November 1957 and published elsewhere in the book, Fidel Castro, writing for the National Directorate of the July 26 Movement, paid tribute to “the formidable mass support demonstrated at the time of the death of our unforgettable Frank País.” Castro observed that throughout the Rebel Army’s base of operations in the Sierra Maestra mountain range of eastern Cuba, the revolutionary movement could count on “a people organized and tempered by war,” as well as “a powerful and disciplined organization throughout the country.”

The revolutionary war culminated in a popular insurrection leading to the overthrow of the dictatorship on Jan. 1, 1959. Workers and farmers took political power and opened the door to the first socialist revolution in the Americas. Vilma Espín is today the national president of the Federation of Cuban Women. Copyright © 2004 by Pathfinder Press, reprinted by permission. Material in brackets has been added by the book’s editors. The section of the book titled, “Swift Action that Saved Armando Hart’s Life,” referred to in a footnote below, was printed in the Jan. 12, 2004, Militant. The “action in Cienfuegos” referred to near the end was an uprising in the naval base in Cienfuegos on Sept. 5, 1957 that was brutally repressed by the dictatorship.
 

Following that I had contact with Frank only by phone. After he left the house where I last saw him, he had moved to another; but a pregnant woman lived there, and she became very nervous out of concern he might be caught. He worried about this very much, and he went to a house that he himself had once rejected because there had already been an attempt to capture a compañero there. The compañero had managed to escape, but the house had no back exit. It belonged to a very trustworthy person—Pujol—but the house itself was a mousetrap. Frank phoned me two days before, asking me to make an important contact for an operation to send a compañero abroad to obtain weapons. When I called him later, he was no longer at home and he did not call me. Nor did he call the following day—much to my surprise because he used to call as soon as he changed houses so that we could be in contact with him. On July 30 I was hiding in a house near the zoo. Around four o’clock I got a call; they told me there was a big stir in the area where Pujol lived, but I didn’t know that Frank was there. He had just phoned me twice. I had immediately started asking him why he hadn’t called, and telling him the result of the tasks he had given me, but I talked very fast. Perhaps he was going to tell me something but I spoke first. He let me tell him everything, and hung up. About ten minutes later he called again, but I can’t remember what he said to me—I think it was about the same mission he had given me. At that moment he was about to leave, and he did not tell me anything about what was happening there, either.

After that, contacts we had at the Telephone Company called me; they told me there was shooting—I even heard the shots in the distance—and that someone was being chased on the roofs. I told them to inform everybody so that they would go there and see if they could help....

They called me and asked if I wanted to listen in on Salas Cañizares’s call to Tabernilla, if I remember correctly. I listened, and heard them say: “Hey, chief, I’m going to put on the guy who won———.” I don’t remember exactly what he said, some dirty word. “Here’s Sariol,” and the latter said: “Are the three thousand mine, chief? We just killed Frank País.” And right then the compañeros hung up on me. Amat cut me off from the call when he realized what they were saying, out of fear that I might speak and they could hear.¹

It was terrible. We started to call around and found out the details. René Ramos Latour (Daniel) had been there shortly before to coordinate a task. He found Frank very depressed, because it was one month since they had killed Josué [Frank’s brother]. He then left. Later came commander Villa—Demetrio Montseny—with a pickup truck. He wanted to take Frank with him, because they were already being surrounded. But Frank had already spoken with Pujol and Pujol was coming with a taxi to pick him up at the corner. So Frank said, “No, I’d better go with Pujol who is already on his way here. You go first.” Pujol was not living in clandestinity. Then, when Pujol arrived he went up to the house to look for Frank. That cost him time, and as they were coming out of the house they were caught.

We have since more or less reconstructed what happened next, from Ñeña—Pujol’s wife—and from Raulito, who was thirteen years old at the time. They were there and saw it all. They say that when Frank and Pujol came out, they were beaten and put into a car. Ñeña started running after the car, and the whole neighborhood came out too. The police realized that if they did not kill them quickly, they would not be able to kill them later—the same thing had already happened to them the last time. When they reached the alley, two and a half blocks down, the cops took them out and killed them right there.

That same afternoon we learned that it had been a woman who had fingered them—a mistress of Laureano Ibarra, who had seen Frank enter Pujol’s place. They immediately got this woman out of the house and sent her to the home of a girl we knew from the university, the daughter of one of Laureano Ibarra’s henchmen known as Black Martínez. It was all very fast. From there she was put on a ship that was in port and sent directly to Santo Domingo.

As part of the operation, [the police] had even brought the guy who had identified Frank once before at the garrison, someone named Randich. They had been classmates at the Teachers College. This Randich was brought to identify Frank after the woman said she had seen him. They brought Randich there and he was the one who identified Frank. So the police immediately surrounded the place. We later brought Randich to justice. But that was a terrible afternoon for all of us.

We immediately phoned Frank’s mother and his fiancée, América Domitro, so they could go right away to claim the body.

Frank was lying in the middle of the street and all the people were gathering there. The area was cordoned off. The popular response was tremendous. Frank was dead and Santiago de Cuba was boiling. That same afternoon, the owners of establishments and people from the Civic Resistance began calling me to say that the people wanted to shut things down and go out on strike—bosses and workers, everybody. And indeed everyone came to agreement and began shutting things down.

At last I got [Frank’s mother] Rosario on the phone. I told her: “You have to go down and fight any way you can, with your teeth—anyway you can—so that they hand over Frank’s body to you.” So then Rosario, who was a woman of great courage, went down there with enormous forcefulness.

He had already been taken to the coroner’s when she arrived, because at first the people wanted to get close to the body and there was pushing and shoving with the cops. The popular response was spontaneous, very powerful, and from that moment on the city stopped—the people just flocked to Frank’s body. Then the body was handed over. The police acted intelligently at that moment; what they did was to withdraw all the public forces to their barracks while the people crowded together around América’s house, where the body was laid out in state.

There they dressed him in his uniform, because Frank had two well-defined callings, but I would say that the first one was that of a soldier, and the second that of a teacher. I insisted that they dress him in uniform with his beret on his chest— because he liked the beret very much and had used it for some time—and that a white rose be placed on top of the beret and the July 26 armband. In addition, the three-star rank corresponding to the new plan of ranks that he was preparing to send to Fidel.

The funeral procession was a demonstration by the entire people. Workplaces closed. There were no police anywhere; the whole city was taken over by the people. Those who were not going to the burial threw flowers as he passed by. There was the case of the men who belonged to the navy who waited for the funeral procession and stood at attention as it went by. These were the ones who, less than two months later, participated in the action at Cienfuegos (this I learned afterwards). . . .

The next morning [the day after the murder of País] U.S. Ambassador [Earl] Smith arrived, I don’t know for what reason. I think the visit by him and his wife was meant to give an appearance of normality on the island, or something like that.

We immediately organized a demonstration of women in mourning who were to march to Céspedes Park facing City Hall, and make a lot of noise. Everybody dressed in black and went there. They clashed with the police. Gloria Cuadras bit Salas Cañizares on his finger—almost tore it off. They were all attacked with water hoses. Nuria García was roughed up. Most of these people could not go to the burial because they were arrested, but they managed to make a huge scandal.

The ambassador’s wife, who was “unaccustomed” to watching such things so close up, was upset to see the police beating the women, who were shouting, “Murderers!” Later in the afternoon women went to the funeral. There was a situation of very great emotion and indignation. It was genuine. Frank had enormous prestige. He was head of the underground action movement of the entire island, not just in Oriente.²

¹For information on the July 26 Movement’s monitoring of telephone lines in Santiago de Cuba, see page 268, “Swift Action that Saved Armando Hart’s Life.”

²From the magazine Santiago, June-September 1975.  
 
 
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