I am privileged to have called Don Eugenio de Sosa Chabau a friend and a colleague. I wish I had taken copious notes during our many conversations in Miami, Mexico City, Port of Prince, and other places during the 90’s. In life, one often thinks there will be time until there isn't. The year 2022 marks twenty years since Eugenio passed, and it is befitting to put my recollections to paper.
Jon Erii August 2022.
Don Eugenio de Sosa Chabau,
He was an ex-political prisoner in Castro's Cuba and a Miami resident until his death (2002).
Eugenio de Sosa, born in the early 20th century in Havana, Cuba, entered a world steeped in tradition and privilege. His family's roots traced back generations as sugar plantation owners, a status that placed them firmly within the Cuban upper class. Eugenio's marriage to a scion of the influential "Diario de la Marina" family, the oldest and largest newspaper in Cuba, was nothing short of a societal event.
Growing up in early 20th-century Cuba, Eugenio's childhood starkly contrasted with modern times. Love and tenderness were not openly expressed in his upbringing, especially in the esteemed de Sosa Chabau household. Nannies and household staff attended to his basic needs while his mother instilled in him the values of manners, respect, and discipline within their strict Catholic family. His father, often absent due to business and social obligations, navigated the male-dominated high society of the era. Eugenio's early childhood education at home was strict - characterized by discipline.
At the tender age of eight, Eugenio embarked on an adventure, leaving behind the familiar sights of the plantation outside Havana for a boarding school in Scotland, a foreign land where he knew no one. His younger brother joined him at the boarding school a year later, and their parents occasionally visited from their European sojourns. This experience forged a tough, resilient, tenacious young man with a persistent character. The life ahead of him required it all and then some.
After seven years in Europe, first in Scotland and then in Paris, Eugenio returned briefly to a Cuba he barely recognized. But his parents had more educational plans in store for him. In 1931, he enrolled at the prestigious Choate Rosemary Hall Academy in Connecticut, where he would become classmates with a future U.S. President, John F. Kennedy.
A moment of Eugenio's life intersects with JFK in a yearbook, where he is mentioned for his tenacity as a member of the boxing team and JFK as the most likely to succeed. Their paths would cross once more in the future.
I met Eugenio in 1991, a proud and dignified man at the age of 75. His intense gaze and stature captivated me as he introduced himself as a political consultant for the Cuban American owned engineering firm with operations across South America and Mexico, where I worked. His age seemed unusual for the role, and initially, I thought his employment was an act of benefaction, but little did I know about the extraordinary life behind him.
We bumped into each other every time I returned to the office in Miami and conversed often. Occasionally, I would give him a ride to his modest Miami apartment. Our odd friendship grew, and sometimes later, we collaborated on projects, including a large-scale hospital development for the "Secretaria de la Marina" in Mexico. Over the following years, I realized Eugenio's many stories were not embellishments or exaggerations but genuine accounts of his remarkable life.
I had the privilege of glimpsing Eugenio's life before and during his quarter-century imprisonment under the Castro regime. Only in the early 1980s did he regain his freedom, thanks to negotiations by the United Nations, led by Javier Perez de Cuellar, the Secretary-General. A remarkable twist of fate connected the two in Buenos Aires during the mid-1940s. Javier Perez de Cuellar, a young diplomat from Peru, and Eugenio de Sosa as a Cuban editor and maybe a diplomatic envoy with many connections in the United States and South America.
Returning from Choate Academy, Eugenio joined the family business in Havana. The 1930s brought economic challenges, but by 1940, business boomed, with the family selling sugar on the U.S. commodity market. Eugenio married Silvia Caridad Rivero Hernandez and began his career at the "Diario de la Marina," facilitating his interactions with powerful figures throughout Latin America at diplomatic and business events.
Eugenio's reach extended throughout the sub-continent as a prosperous businessman and influential editor. He became rich, owned a yacht, a private plane, and champion thoroughbred horses running on racetracks from New York, Hialeah, Mexico, to Buenos Aires. But the winds of change were approaching, and when Castro's revolution triumphed, Eugenio ensured his family's safety in the United States while remaining defiant in Havana. He might have thought he was untouchable.
In the early days, "Diario de la Marina" openly criticized Fidel Castro's government, leading to Eugenio's arrest in late 1959 on conspiracy charges. Though he was released briefly after his first hunger strike, with intervention from the recently elected President of the United States, JFK, subsequent arrests followed, culminating in a thirty-year prison sentence.
Eugenio's recognition as a political prisoner in a 1969 U.S. publication[1] carried profound implications. In an era where political prisoners often succumbed to the brutalities of torture or met their end due to acts of defiance or vindictiveness, Eugenio distinguished himself as a man who refused to bow in submission. Unbelievably, he found himself sentenced to death on three separate occasions, a grim fate foretold not by official announcements but rather through the sinister act of blood extraction. Fidel Castro's government routinely drained two liters of blood from prisoners before their execution. The blood meant hard currency on the open market, with an added advantage in that the condemned prisoners, rendered half-lifeless, now posed less resistance when facing their ultimate fate. Yet, despite the imminent specter of death, Eugenio's life was punctuated by miraculous interventions, with one such savior being the very pastor who had baptized his children.
Eugenio's years were spent in a harrowing rotation of different prisons, each with its horrors. These included the notorious prison la Cabaña, the Modelo Prison on an island south of Cuba, where saltwater crocodiles lurked menacingly in the surrounding waters, and the Mazamorra psychiatric hospital in Havana. His recounting of these years was a chilling litany of suffering and despair. On several occasions, he found himself confined to an unimaginably cruel form of solitary cell akin to a wooden mortuary drawer. He was bound, force-fed sporadically, and left to defecate and urinate upon himself. Infrequent hosing-downs provided little relief. In one particularly gruesome episode, he endured an entire month within such a drawer, with insects crawling relentlessly over his agonized body. To maintain one's sanity under such unyielding conditions required an indomitable willpower, a quality Eugenio possessed in abundance.
The Red Cross, in a choreographed display of goodwill, routinely inspected the prison facilities. These visits were meticulously planned, with the designated prison wing scrubbed clean and the prisoners given a rare respite of nourishment. During one such visit, an empathetic Red Cross official bestowed a precious chocolate bar upon one of Eugenio's fellow inmates. Rather than savoring this small delight, the prisoner chose to preserve it for his forthcoming visit with his wife and young daughter. Secretly, he concealed the chocolate within a crevice of the cell's wall, nurturing the anticipation of witnessing his daughter's joy. Tragically, on the day of the visit, a heartless guard intruded into the prisoner's cell moments before the family reunion, removed the hidden chocolate, and devoured it. The devastation experienced by the inmate upon the shattering of his cherished illusion was immeasurable, a testament to the prison's pervasive culture of cruelty and betrayal, with correctional officers having informants at every turn.
The physical and emotional anguish borne by Eugenio and his fellow prisoners was beyond human endurance. Some sought to escape, especially from the Modelo Prison, nestled on the "Isla de la Juventud," where opportunities for evasion were easier because of the inhospitable nature of the surroundings. Yet, those daring enough to flee were invariably met with a grim fate, becoming targets for ruthless practice by their pursuers, never venturing far beyond their captors' reach.
At the Mazamorra psychiatric hospital, Eugenio's tormentors subjected him to the agonizing ordeal of electric shock therapy, a sadistic practice designed to break one's will to resist. Eugenio's descriptions of these traumatic sessions were disturbing. Eventually, he became a vital witness before the United States Congress in the early 1990s and again, shortly before his passing, providing damning testimony against one of the doctors responsible for administering the electroshock therapy. Eugenio's life was a testament to the enduring human spirit in the face of unspeakable brutality, and his testimony bore witness to the atrocities inflicted upon him and countless others in the darkest chapters of history.
Eugenio's release date remains uncertain, but I believe he said 1983 or 1984. He received an exit visa to Venezuela, where he worked as an advisor for a renowned bank before ultimately settling in Miami.
With a background in the sugar industry and a deep desire to challenge Fidel Castro's regime, Eugenio embarked on a mission to disrupt Cuba's sugar trade.
He advocated for alternative sugar imports from the Caribbean and Venezuela. He traveled to Saint Petersburg in the early 90's, possibly even engaging with figures like Vladimir Putin in the city's administration at the time. Eugenio's determination knew no bounds as he sought to compete with Cuba's sugar exports.
On another occasion, while we were both in Mexico, we visited a sugar mill in Guadalajara. Eugenio again tried to facilitate sugar export to Russia with the intent to deny Fidel's Cuba hard currency from its sugar exports. He never let up.
In the year 1996, at the ripe age of 81, I had the privilege of spending time with the ever-enthusiastic Eugenio. He told me about a dormant and unused sugar mill in Haiti, a French-backed enterprise only ten years old. The surrounding peasant farmers now used the sugar cane for homemade Rhum rather than legitimate sugar production. However, Don Eugenio had other plans. He wanted to resurrect the mill to produce and export sugar. His motivation? To go head-to-head with none other than Fidel Castro's Cuba, a man who had earned his ire. A man he knew when Fidel Castro worked summer jobs on Eugenio’s family plantation.
But the Haitian government, at first, seemed to harbor doubts about his identity, suggesting that their records indicated an untimely demise for one Eugenio de Sosa in a Cuban prison. Not one to be easily deterred, Don Eugenio brandished his Cuban exit visa and urged the Haitian authorities to contact their Cuban counterparts for confirmation. It wasn't long before his identity was validated, and immediately Eugenio found himself orchestrating a group of senior business leaders, lawyers, and bankers for an expedition to Haiti. He invited me as an engineer to assess the sugar mill's electric installations and, I dare say, as a friend.
In Port au Prince, Don Eugenio and I were roommates, allowing us plenty of opportunities to talk freely. There, I witnessed his rigorous exercise regimen, beginning his day with push-ups and other forms of physical activity, a practice he had honed during his prison years.
Our hosts, members of the Haitian parliament, chauffeured us around the city, offering explanations and, to some extent, excuses for why the sugar mill had fallen into disuse. To my surprise, Eugenio conversed fluently in French. But of course, I remembered he had attended school in France as a young boy.
The next day, we embarked on a journey beyond the chaotic streets of Port au Prince, venturing into the countryside to the sugar mill's location. After navigating through the hustle and bustle of the anarchic capital, we arrived at a substantial brick edifice nestled amid the sugar fields. Its exterior still bore the gloss of newness, but a scene of utter desolation greeted us upon entering. Not even a single electrical cable or switch remained; the place had been stripped bare, a stark testament to Haiti's mismanagement of foreign aid. It dawned upon us that re-educating the local farmers and reinvesting substantial resources would be imperative for success. It was a somber realization for Eugenio and a stark reflection of the disorder plaguing Haiti. It is with despair, now more than twenty-five years later when I write this story, I realize Haiti is much worse.
As night descended and our departure for Miami loomed, Eugenio, a lawyer, and I - gathered on the hotel terrace for dinner. The conversation meandered through various topics until something triggered a memory in Eugenio. He embarked on a vivid account of a pre-revolution trip to Mexico, recounting his attendance at a bullfight in Mexico City, where he occupied a VIP seat. He painted a colorful picture of the other dignitaries sharing his enclosure - captains of industry, politicians, actors, and actresses. Eugenio spoke at length, weaving a captivating narrative that eventually circled back to its origin. It was a testament to his intricate connections and that the engineering firm in Miami hadn't hired him because he knew Latin American decision-makers but because he had access as he knew their parents.
Our final encounter occurred in 1997, when Eugenio resided with a friend in Deering Bay Harbor, Miami. It was a bittersweet farewell, for I was soon to return to Europe. At the same time, Eugenio remained deeply engaged in his tireless crusade against Fidel Castro and those Cubans who had gained entry to the United States under dubious pretenses. Don Eugenio's spirit remained undiminished, a testament to the indomitable resolve that defined his remarkable life.
During the years I knew Eugenio, I asked about his family, his ex-wife, and his children. He was proud of them, he said, of what they had become. But at the time, my understanding was he had minimal contact. Therefore, it was with great joy to read that he had reconnected and spent time with his family during Christmas before he passed away.
[1] Libertad newspaper, 18 Jan 1969, page 11