Miguel Ángel Quevedo

Miguel Ángel Quevedo y de la Lastra (July 31, 1908 – August 12, 1969) was the publisher and editor of Bohemia, the most popular news-weekly in Cuba and the oldest Latin America, known for its political journalism and editorial writing.

Early life Quevedo was born in 1908 - the same year as the first short-run issue of Bohemia. His father was Miguel Ángel Quevedo y Pérez, founder of that magazine. Boy Scouts in Cuba

Quevedo was 6 years old when his father advocated for the creation of a Cuban scouting movement in Bohemia. The Cuban Scouting Movement was founded in the lobby of Bohemia on February 20, 1914. Quevedo seen here in the 40's, poking the sand with a stick. Almost immediately, Quevedo became one of the principle voices of opposition to the dictatorship of Gerardo Machado, a distinction for which he was jailed several times in the early 1930s.

During the reign of Batista, the President ordered his men to abduct Quevedo from his home in the middle of the night. They brought him to the Lagüito and tortured him. They forced him to drink a liter of castor oil (Spanish: palmacristi), in a practice that Cubans called Palmacristazo. Quevedo suffered stomach problems for the rest of his life. Quevedo sought political asylum in the Venezuelan embassy in Havana in the summer of 1960 and arrived in Miami on September 7, 1960.

In October 1960, Quevedo went to New York City, where he gathered talent and partners for a version of his publication to be published in exile, Bohemia Libre.

After the CIA realized the futility of sponsoring Bohemia Libre, they cancelled US government funding.

In this letter, Quevedo appears to have written:

"Bohemia was nothing more than an echo of the street. That street contaminated by hatred that applauded Bohemia when it invented "the twenty thousand dead." [This was a] Diabolical invention of the dipsomaniac Enriquito de la Osa, who knew that Bohemia was an echo of the street, but that the street also echoed what Bohemia published." Soon, the journalism community came to the consensus that the letter sent to Ernesto Morando was a forgery.

In an interview with CiberCuba, Lilian Castañeda said:

"He was not sorry for anything, not for his political position, not for his beliefs, not for anything like that. Miguel would never have written that letter."

The journalist Wilfredo Cancio Island wrote in 2020:

"This is not the only one of the pseudo-myths that have marked numerous episodes of national history, on the island and in the diaspora. But the responsibility of historical memory, which is always the best antidote to oblivion, is to pave the way to the strictest truth for Cubans of the present and the future. Not a single lie is needed to denounce the iniquities of our national history or to be proud of what we are."