He’s been called a spy, a traitor, and worse, but Calzón remains undeterred in his mission for freedom.
Frank Calzón has spent the majority of his life advocating for a free Cuba, and, now, at 81 years old, he is seeing Cubans speak out again in a way he hasn’t seen in decades. Cuban university students are peacefully protesting en masse, and Cuban Catholic bishops are speaking out against the Cuban communist regime after the church fell silent on the issue for years, Calzón said.
Shortly after Fidel Castro took power and the police visited his house after he was a bit too outspoken at school, he left the country. He was a teenager at the time. What he thought might be a year or two of lying low during a testy political transition turned into a life of speaking out for Cubans whose voices are silenced.
“My life has been Cuba—writing about Cuba, talking about Cuba, organizing Cuban Americans,” he told The Epoch Times. “Sometimes people ask me, ‘When did you leave Cuba?’ Oh, I never left Cuba. Wherever I go, Cuba goes with me.”
Castro Comes Down the Mountain
Calzón remembers the beginning of Castro’s regime well, because these were his last months in Cuba.
Castro had made a name for himself in the revolution-filled decade before he took power, as his speeches about justice and condemning inequality resonated with listeners across the nation. When Cuban military leader Fulgencio Batista made his escape on New Year’s Eve in 1958, Castro himself had been hundreds of miles away in the mountains. But, in the following week, he would treat his journey down the mountain and into the heart of Cuba like a campaign trail, stopping often to make rousing speeches, take photos, and recruit hundreds into his march.
“That’s the tragicomedy of the beginning,” Calzón said. Cuba was full of optimism, expecting the years of dictatorship coming to an end. With Batista’s exit, his police force had gone, too, and Casto called on the Boy Scouts to help with those duties. At the time, traffic signals had to be changed manually by a police officer. Calzón, weeks from turning 15, was a leader in the Boy Scouts and took seriously his duty of directing traffic at one of his city’s busiest intersections with a friend.
But the curtain fell on those happy times quickly. Months later, the teachers in his school changed. One of the new teachers “knew grammar, and she knew Marxism,” Calzón said. She would write in Spanish on the blackboard words like “means of production,” “class struggle,” “Lenin.”
“Can we talk about Cuba?” Calzón would ask, tired of hearing about Karl Marx yet again.
Soon, police visited his house, asking for him by name. “They cut the mattresses with a knife,” Calzón said. “My parents got scared.”
They sent him to live with his godfather in Miami, and Calzón said he remembers bringing a notebook with the names and phone numbers of his fellow Boy Scouts.
“I kept that for a couple of years because I thought, when I come back, I’m going to call them up, and we’re going to go camping again—that kind of thing,” he said. “I also, I guess I should say, brought with me a deep love for Cuba and Cuban history.”
