Documents Used

Discovering the mysterious true-life events leading to my father’s unsolved assassination and the impact of those experiences on my family was not an easy task. It took nearly a lifetime. I was at first encumbered by a numbing inability to remember almost anything about my childhood or about an estranged father I had not seen in nearly a decade. The quest for answers that would, in turn, lead to a journey of self-discovery about my forgotten childhood began by reading my father’s political activities described in a comprehensive history of Cuba written by historian Hugh Thomas titled Cuba: The Pursuit of Freedom. The story of his life outlined in that book led me to research his life further from other books, newspapers, magazines, Cuban and U.S. government documents, among others.

Particularly eye-opening was the uncovering of declassified CIA, FBI, U.S. embassy dispatches and State Department memorandums, court cases, and homicide investigation reports detailing my father’s life.

Below is an example of one of the nearly one hundred declassified documents unearthed mentioning my father’s activities from the 1930s to the present used in the writing of Childhood Forgotten. This one is a Foreign Service Despatch dated August 9, 1955, from the U.S. embassy in Havana to the State Department in Washington.