Word: sosa
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Castro rambled loquaciously on. He said that the U.S. role in the 1898 Spanish-American War was merely belated intervention after the Cubans had effectively beaten Spain. He attacked demagoguery and nepotism (his brother Raul is chief of the armed forces). He saw to it that Captain Jesus Sosa Blanco-the Batista officer convicted of mass murder in a circus trial in Havana's Sports Palace-got a new hearing. The judges were the same and so was the verdict: death by firing squad. Counting Sosa Blanco, 14 "war criminals" were executed last week, bringing the latest total...
...Captain Jesus Sosa Blanco, convicted of "war crimes" in the famed Roman-circus setting in Havana's Sports Palace, was scheduled for retrial this week. Invited guests: the Knights of Columbus, Rotary and Lions Clubs. Judges: the same three-man tribunal that convicted him before...
Those who have been tried and executed so far have not been the one or two shot assassins. They have been the most notorious and sadistic of Batista's henchmen, some of whose individual acts of cruelty number in the hundreds. They have been men like Jesus Sosa Blanco, recently condemned killer, who allegedly took the lives of 108 persons, and whose name has become synonymous with cruelty throughout Oriente province...
...night long the trial went on; 45 witnesses offered facts, hearsay, gossip. "This is the worst criminal in the world!" screamed Maria Jacinta Galvez Martinez. "He killed every member of the Argote family -my neighbors." Argelio Argote, 12, confirmed that Sosa Blanco "came and took my father away." A wrinkled woman named Tomasa Batista Castillo fought to get at the prisoner: "I begged you not to kill my husband, because of our eleven children. You said the rebels could raise them." A soldier of Sosa Blanco's said calmly that he had seen the prisoner shoot 17 defenseless farmers...
...Sosa Blanco's lawyer, a regular army attorney who had been cleared by the rebels of any Batista ties and appointed just before the trial began, pleaded eloquently for calm justice. He argued that there was no death penalty in Cuba when the crimes took place, that Captain Sosa Blanco was a soldier serving under orders in a civil war. He had not a single witness to call. At dawn, after 13 hours and when the crowd had thinned to 500, the tribunal returned the verdict: death. But the court agreed to hear an appeal, and the execution...