Tony Cuesta, Freedom Fighter

Book excerpt: Close friends: Tony Cuesta and Fidel Castro attended the University of Havana together in the mid 1950s. The two were involved in sports, hung out at trendy bars and cafés, and, of course, chased girls together. But eventually, these two close friends would be torn apart by world events and political situations they had no control over. Cuesta went to the hills with Fidel, Raúl Castro, and the trigger-happy revolutionary-for-hire Che Guevara, to overthrow the dictator Fulgencio Batista. When the US refused to help finance the rebuilding of Cuba, Fidel accepted assistance from the Soviet Union. The trade-out: submarine pens, refueling docks for ships and planes, and medium size and long-range missile launching pads just ninety miles from US soil. Cuesta and other top leaders around Fidel fled to Miami to escape the future of a USSR-run Cuba. Tony Cuesta couldn’t bear to see how his friend had deceived the Cuban people. He and his band of daring young men made dozens of clandestine raids on the Cuban and Russian installations in Cuba (sometimes in broad daylight). Cuesta lost half of his left arm, his eyesight, his wife, and twelve years of his freedom attempting to take back his country. After years in a Cuban prison, he returned to Miami to reestablish his Commandos-L and to keep fighting. He was the only man to sink a Russian freighter in peacetime and live to tell the tale. Today: Tony Cuesta remains a hero to the Cuban people. This book tells his story.