Jesús Sosa Blanco

Jesús Sosa Blanco (December 25, 1907 – February 18, 1959) was a colonel in the Cuban army under Fulgencio Batista. After Fidel Castro came to power, Sosa was arrested and charged with having committed 108 murders for Batista. His show trial took place in the Coliseo de la Ciudad Deportiva, before 17,000 spectators. Sosa was given a public trial in January 1959. The trial was televised.

Trial During his trial, Sosa smiled and laughed at the crowd, which was screaming for him to be killed immediately. "This is the Colosseum in Rome. I met brave rebels in the mountains, not types like you here. All you do is talk." The trial lasted through the night. Forty-five witnesses testified against Sosa. One woman, Maria Jacinta Galvez Martinez, said he massacred nearly an entire family. After one of Sosa's men refused to open fire on the family, he had him executed as well. "This is the worst criminal in the world! He killed every member of the Argote family -my neighbors." "In all my 36 years of newspaper work, I have never seen a worse job of journalism than the coverage of the Cuban revolution during the last three weeks. All you saw in most papers was how many people Castro shot. The real picture of a country under Batista's brutal dictatorship was not made clear." Castro himself called the coverage "the most criminal, vile, and cowardly campaign ever conducted against any people."

After Sosa's trial, other trials and executions were no longer broadcast live. Gabriel García Márquez attended the trial and execution and used the incident as the basis for his 1975 novel, The Autumn of the Patriarch.

In popular culture

In Rachel Kushner's 2008 novel Telex from Cuba, Sosa Blanco is described as having been convicted and imprisoned for murdering his wife, mother-in-law and sister-in-law before Batista released him to help establish the Rural Guard.