Book on Fidel Castro’s visits to Granma updated with new findings

A new edition of a book on Fidel Castro’s travels through Granma has added four previously undocumented visits, bringing the total recorded by the study to 64. The presentation took place at the birthplace museum of Carlos Manuel de Céspedes during events marking the centenary of Castro’s birth.

Historian Ludín Bernardo Fonseca García’s research draws on newspapers and archival records for 60 visits. Four others came from oral accounts by local residents and did not appear in the first edition, published in July 2006. Fonseca cautioned that 64 remains an approximate figure, particularly for the early years of the Revolution, when Castro traveled without the later protocols and sometimes made surprise visits.

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The other day I was reading the speech Fidel gave on Feb. 24, 1959, in Guantánamo. Among other things, he said that the night before he had slept at the Charco Redondo mines and had spoken with the miners.

He cited a speech Castro gave in Guantánamo on Feb. 24, 1959, in which the revolutionary leader said he had spent the previous night at the Charco Redondo mines speaking with miners. That visit was not included in the earlier count, Fonseca said, suggesting that further discoveries could emerge, especially from 1959 and 1960.

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I have visited it quite a few times; generally, quietly: I pass through, cross it, see things, visit places.

The book records visits to every municipality in Granma and speeches in each one except Cauto Cristo. Thirty-one of the visits took place in the 1960s, reflecting the attention the research attributes to the province during the Revolution’s founding years. Yudelkis Ortiz Barceló, the Communist Party’s first secretary in Granma, said the work documents not only Castro’s wartime activity in the Sierra Maestra but also his involvement in economic and social development projects, including reservoirs and roads.

Castro himself described his visits in understated terms: “I have visited it quite a few times; generally, quietly: I pass through, cross it, see things, visit places.” Ortiz said the book shows that these trips involved leading and planning strategic programs for Granma and Cuba.

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It is not a chronological book, but a profound investigation that details Fidel’s special ties with the province of Granma, a land he came to recognize as his own.