On this date in 1959, in the city of Santa Clara lately captured by Cuban revolutionaries, Col. Cornelio Rojas Fernández, commander of the city’s defeated government garrison, was shot without trial by the order of Che Guevara.
It was just one among hundreds of vengeful executions being visited in those weeks upon authorities of the deposed Batista regime.
Viewers of the televised public shooting saw the stocky commander — the grandson of a hero of the 19th century Cuban War of Independence — walk unafraid to his death in an armed escort, where he exhorted his onlookers until the firing detail sent his fedora flying.
Rojas’s granddaughter Barbara Rangel remains an energetic advocate of her father’s innocence, from Florida. A kinsman named Pedro Rojas Mir was among those killed in the 1961 Bay of Pigs debacle when anti-Castro exiles mounted a failed invasion of Cuba.
On this day..
- 1829: William Maxwell, the last hanged for sodomy by the Royal Navy
- 1528: Augustin and Christoph Perwanger
- 1755: Henri Mongeot, Lescombat assassin
- 1859: William Burgess
- 2015: Ahmed Ali and Ghulam Shabbir, Pakistan terrorists
- 1355: Ines de Castro, posthumous queen
- 1889: Alfred Schaeffer, diabolical dynamiter, lynched near Seattle
- 1612: John Selman, Christmas cutpurse
- 1611: Three accomplices of Elizabeth Báthory, the Countess of Blood
- 2009: Haidar Ghanem, human rights activist
- 1898: Theodore Durrant, the Demon of the Belfry
- 2007: 23 Shia hostages