Vol. 76/No. 32 August 27, 2012
“Barrón is a Cuban revolutionary combatant of the old vanguard,” said Ricardo Alarcón, president of Cuba’s National Assembly, in awarding him the medal.
The ceremony was held at ICAP’s national headquarters. Also attending were ICAP president Kenia Serrano; Pedro Núñez Mosquera, Cuba’s ambassador at the United Nations; and leaders of the New York-based organization that Barrón helped found, Casa de las Américas, led by Cuban-Americans who support the revolution. Accompanying the honored guest was Gloria Barrón, his wife and lifelong comrade-in-arms.
Alarcón noted that in the 1940s and ’50s thousands of Cuban workers emigrated to the United States in search of work and, after the 1952 military coup by Fulgencio Batista, fleeing the repression under the U.S.-backed Batista regime. Many of them became active in the fight against the dictatorship. Among them was Barrón, who was born in Camagüey, Cuba, and moved to New York, where he worked in construction and other jobs.
“Barrón, alongside thousands of Cubans in the U.S. who supported the leader of the revolution, Fidel Castro, helped lead the way to the victory in 1959,” Alarcón said. Their story “is an inseparable part of our history but it is not well-known today.” He noted that the U.S. capitalist media hides this record to falsely portray all Cuban-Americans as opposed to the revolution.
Nancy Cabrero, president of Casa de las Américas, told those in attendance that in the fall of 1955 Fidel Castro visited New York and other U.S. cities to organize local units of the July 26 Movement. Castro and other revolutionaries in Cuba had launched the organization a few months earlier to lead the mass struggle against the Batista dictatorship. Units were organized in New York; Bridgeport, Conn.; Union City, N.J.; and Miami, Tampa and Key West, Fla.
In New York, the July 26 Movement unit was a merger of three groups, including the local support committee of the Orthodox Party, of which Barrón was chairperson. Two years later they founded Casa Cuba as a broader formation to win support for the revolutionary struggle.
The working-class militants of Casa Cuba carried out fundraising and other activities. They printed and distributed copies of History Will Absolve Me, the 1953 courtroom speech by Fidel Castro that popularized the aims of the revolutionary struggle led by the July 26 Movement and Rebel Army.
N.Y. expedition backs Rebel Army
In March 1958 Barrón led an expedition of 36 supporters of the armed insurrection from New York. They were attempting to deliver munitions and weapons to the Rebel Army in Cuba aboard a rented boat, El Orión, which set off from a beach on the Gulf of Mexico.The U.S. Coast Guard intercepted the 83-foot trawler off Padre Island, Texas, and arrested the men, “all uniformed and heavily armed,” according to a March 28, 1958, Associated Press dispatch. They were charged with violating the U.S. Neutrality Act.
The case made national headlines as the 36 combatants, jailed in Brownsville, Texas, launched a hunger strike together with July 26 Movement members in New York.
“The little band’s fiery commander, Arnaldo G. Barron, said all 36 had saved for months to buy the $20,000 in arms seized with the men,” AP reported.
“Barron, in a jail interview, told the Associated Press that most of the men are United States citizens. All were born in Cuba except one Puerto Rican. Some fought for the United States in World War II.”
After winning their release on bond, “the rebels launched a wave of handbill propaganda, apparently to drum up popular support for their position,” the Brownsville Herald wrote. “The rebels’ newest ‘manifesto’ asked that ‘the people of Brownsville be present at Federal Court when we stand accused of fighting for liberty and democracy in our country.’”
The defendants were convicted in May 1958. The judge gave them three to five years’ probation.
“This expedition was stopped by the United States Coast Guard but there will be lots of others,” Barrón told the press from the Brownsville jail.
Later that year, Barrón was again indicted by the U.S. government, this time on charges of acting “as an agent of Fidel Castro and the July 26 Movement of Cuba without having filed the registration statement required” under the Foreign Agents Registration Act. He pleaded no contest and was given a suspended sentence and five years’ probation.
Government harassment did not deter Barrón and his comrades. With the overthrow of the Batista regime in January 1959 and the opening of a deep-going revolutionary transformation of Cuba, they stepped up their work in the United States.
Over the years Casa Cuba organized many public actions in defense of the Cuban Revolution. It successfully stood up to police victimization and to violent assaults by counterrevolutionary Cuban groups. In 1962, at the urging of Argentine revolutionary leader Ernesto Che Guevara, the organization changed its name to Casa de las Américas to underscore its solidarity with popular struggles across the continent.
At the July 25 tribute to Barrón, Cabrero pledged Casa’s commitment to continue along the road that Barrón and others forged.
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