From ERIC SHACKLE, in Sydney, Australia.
ericshackleATbigpond.com.>
The Patria Grande will never forget
Chávez
was the heading of the lead story of the online edition of the
strangely-named Cuban newspaper GRANMA the other day.
“ PREMIERS and political leaders from a number of
countries expressed their sorrow at the death of Venezuelan President Hugo
Chávez, with messages of condolences for his family and the people of the
Bolivarian Republic.”
Every Cuban
knows Granma. It's the nation's leading daily newspaper. How did a
Spanish-language newspaper acquire that ludicrous English language title? It
took a long time and many emails in both Spanish and English to discover the
details.
Granma was the
name of the 60-foot (18 metre) motor yacht in which Fidel Castro and his men
sailed from Mexico to Cuba in 1956 to start the revolution.
Castro had been
exiled to Mexico. where he joined forces with Che Guevara, a young Argentine
doctor who had abandoned his profession and native land in an ill-fated bid to
help the world's poor. Castro bought the yacht Granma from a Texan (who
had named it after his grandmother).
With a small group
of supporters, Castro and Guevara crossed the Caribbean in the decrepit and
leaking boat, vowing to invade Cuba and overthrow dictator Fulgencio
Batista.
"On December 2,
1956, the Granma cabin cruiser arrived on the eastern coast of
Cuba, at Los Cayuelos, two kilometers from Las Coloradas beach," Granma
International recalled in 2001, on the 45th anniversary of the landing. "It
had left from Tuxpan, in the Mexican state of Veracruz, on November 25, with 82
men aboard, commanded by Fidel Castro. The purpose of the voyage was to return
to Cuba and initiate the war for the island's definite
independence."
Landing in a
hostile swamp, in a province now also named Granma, losing most of their party,
the survivors fought their way to the Sierra Maestra, a mountain range in
south-east Cuba. Two years later, after a guerrilla campaign in which Guevara
was named comandante, the insurgents entered Havana and launched the
first and only successful socialist revolution in the
Americas.
Granma
newspaper was established in 1965 by the merger of two major publications:
Hoy (Spanish: for Today), the organ of the Communist Party of Cuba, and
Revolucion, the daily newspaper of Castro's 26th of July
movement.
Granma's
website (*2) offers an impressive list of news
stories in Spanish, and a link to Granma Internacional (*3), which deserves an award as one of the world's
most comprehensive multi-lingual sites. The newspaper's weekly edition offers
an array of news stories, facts, figures, politics and economy in Spanish,
English, French, Portuguese and German.
Granma has its
critics on the Internet. A report (in German) from "independent journalists in
Cuba" says the paper is "the Party Gazette which is distributed throughout the
country and which is the only and worst Gazette in the Republic. The page-long
speeches of the Great Leader are also useful for toilet paper." (It's next to
impossible to find a front page without at least one picture of Fidel Castro or
his brother, Raúl Castro, plus reports of their activities and
speeches).
What happened to
the historic yacht named Granma? It rests behind thick layers of glass
outside the Museum of the Revolution in Havana. You can see a picture of
the yacht, kindly made available by David Mericle (*4).
A Cuban Government
website says that one of Havana's tourist attractions is the Museum of the
Revolution and Granma Memorial, adding, in halting English: "In the exterior
areas it is the Memorial Yate Granma, where is exhibited, protected by an
inmense (sic) glass case, the ship used by Fidel Castro and over 80
combatants in the return to Cuba from the exile in Mexico."
You can visit Granma at http://www.granma.cu/ingles/ouramerica-i/6marz-chavez.html
Boat Granma in Havana museum: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Granma_(yacht)
Boris Becker praises Cuban cigars:
Tomorrow May Be Too Late: http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2010/06/01/95109/cubas-granma-newspaper-publishes.html
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