About the Author:
Rich Haney built a long career in radio, TV and newspaper journalism, serving as Sports Anchor/Director for regional CBS affiliates. For several years he also published a weekly, The Rich Haney Report, and a syndicated newspaper sports column. Ten years ago, Haney began researching and writing historical works; he lives in Laramie, WY, and is a full-time writer. Haney recently published a Civil War novel, Chattahoochee, and a nonfiction book, Sacajawea: Her True Story. He has researched and written two Western novels.
Rich Haney has studied the Cuban Revolution for over twenty years, particularly how it relates to America. This all-consuming interest in Cuba began innocently enough. Throughout the 1970s, he was Sports Anchor/Director of WTVR-TV, the CBS affiliate in Richmond, Virginia. After airing an interview with the Brown Bomber, Joe Louis, he received a telephone call from an elderly black woman named Nora Peters. As a retired free-lance journalist, she knew Joe and he fondly remembered her. Over the next twelve years, until she died at the age of 82, Haney and Peters established a warm friendship. Ms. Peters first met Celia Sánchez in 1953 in Batista s Cuba.
The letters Ms. Peters received from Celia between 1959 and 1979 describe Celia s life during and after the overthrow of the U.S.-backed Batista regime, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the continuing harassment from Florida-based Cuban émigré groups. Haney writes from the basis of this remarkable collection of letters, plus personal correspondence with Cuban journalist Marta Rojas and information gathered from Cuban archives and museums and the US National Archives. He went to Cuba in March 2004, on a legal license from the U.S. Treasury, to attempt to confirm the mystical hold Celia exercises over Fidel Castro to this day.
That confirmation was realized. Celia Sánchez was and is the heart and soul of the Cuban Revolution, and it will be her Cuba as long as Fidel Castro is in place.
Review:
This biography makes the case that Celia Sánchez was the prime force behind the Cuban Revolution and the most significant decision- maker in the revolutionary government of Cuba until her death in 1980. Based on archival research and Sánchez's correspondence with longtime friend Nora Peters and Cuban journalist Marta Rojas, the book tells of Sánchez's involvement in overthrowing Batista and her activities in defending the Revolution from the Batistianos and their American government supporters. --Booknews
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