Field Notes
Field Notes will be a corner of this website where I'll post a variety of informal odds and ends and impressions collected during the course of my research:
- Truth, lies and the Cuban American National Foundation: My goal in writing “Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection” is to stick to the facts, reconstructing key events of the case in order to produce an in-the-moment narrative that will help readers understand the true story of what really happened even as it entertains them. But whose facts? Whose truth?
- Miami Progressives Take 2: Andrés Gómez—a shambling, friendly, 63-year-old bear of a man—is the director of Areito Digital, an online magazine of “progressive Cuban immigrants,” the leader of the Antonio Maceo Brigade, a Miami-based pro-Cuba activist organization, and one of the best known moderate voices in Miami’s el exilio.
- Miami progressives, Take 1: We are sitting in the cramped, cluttered offices of Radio Miami, which look more like a 1960s commune than a modern radio station. Radio Miami—“radio para la difusión de ideas”—is located in a nondescript strip mall well beyond the stifling political and cultural confines of Little Havana. That, I have been told, is more a safety precaution than an accident. Lesson #1. I have come here on this June day to try to learn what it is like to be a progressive Cuban-American in militantly right-wing, pro-blockade, Castro-must-die, our-terrorists-are-freedom-fighters Miami...
- Livio Di Celmo remembers: I was in Montreal recently to interview Livio Di Celmo, the brother of Fabio, a 32-year-old Italian-Canadian who was killed in a September 4, 1997 bombing that was part of a larger terrorist campaign anti-Castro militants were then waging against Cuban tourism.
Copyright 2010 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
-
About
This is the site for Sting of the Wasp, collected research and other materials for an in-progress narrative nonfiction book about the Cuban Five by Stephen Kimber.
The Cuban Five were members of "La Red Avispa"—the Wasp Network—spies Havana dispatched to Florida in the early 1990s to infiltrate militant anti-Castro exile groups that Cuba believed were plotting terrorist attacks on its soil. The Cuban Five were arrested, tried, convicted and are all now serving long prison terms in the United States.
In the United States, they are virtually unknown. In Cuba, they are heroes.
That’s the short version of the story. The long version is… well, more complicated... Stay tuned.
Subscribe
