They risked everything to open a door to Cuba. They were shunned for it.

They risked everything to open a door to Cuba. They were shunned for it.

Tina Griego • January 5, 2015

In the complicated, sometimes violent, always emotional history of relations between the United States and Cuba, resides an obscure chapter about 55 young exiles. All were still children when they left Cuba in the early 1960s, after Fidel Castro took power. In 1977, they returned.

“Los Cincuenta y Cinco Hermanos.” The 55 brothers and sisters. Better known as the Antonio Maceo Brigade, named for a revered general in the Cuban war for independence against the Spanish. Decades before President Obama and Cuban leader Raul Castro announced the restoration of diplomatic relations, the brigade was the standard bearer of an equal relationship between the two countries. Its youth risked everything to become a post-revolution bridge between Cuba and its exiles, shattering the persistent myth that all exiles were of the same mind, bent on the destruction of the Castro regime.

In Cuba, they would come to be welcomed as the brave heart of the revolutionary movement among youth throughout the world.

In the United States, they were called traitors, and one of their founders would be assassinated.

The young men and women of the Antonio Maceo Brigade brimmed with the zeal of the politically awakened and the anguish of childhoods interrupted. And they wanted to judge the results of the Cuban revolution for themselves. You could say they have been working and waiting 37 years for this new chapter to be written. And, true to their roots, you also could say they will believe its authenticity only when they see it.

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