Never to Return

About the Book

SEVERAL PEOPLE CONTRIBUTED to my writing of this book that is part memoir and part history, in places held together with the cartilage of fiction. First of all my wife, the former Mary Anne Hendon, with her sharp intellect and logical mind encouraged me to record this piece of my past and gave me helpful critiques. I made a cold call on John Lawrence Tome, associate professor of history at Georgia Tech, and author of War and Genocide in Cuba, 1895-1898. He met me with the gracious greeting “I’ll shake the hand that shook the hand of Leon Trotsky.” He suggested that I meet Dr. Ondina Gonzalez who at the time was teaching Latin American history at Emory University. I called on her and found an enthusiastic friend and supporter of this work. Ondina introduced me to her uncle and co-author, Dr, Justo Gonzalez, a noted Methodist minister, historian and writer. He graduated from the same Candler College in Havana that I had attended. As we talked we discovered we had lived only two blocks apart in the Havana of our younger days. Justo’s father had been instrumental in founding the ABC Party around a group of liberal intellectuals opposed to the dictatorship of the Cuban president, Gerardo Machado. My conversations with the two Doctors Gonzalez gave me good background material as well as a boost to my spirit. Ms. Lesbia Varona, research librarian in the Roberto Goizueta Collection at the Otto Richter Library of the University of Miami was most helpful in providing me access to microfilmed Cuban newspapers of the 1930’s and 1940’s and to the library’s material on Santería, the unique mixture of West African religious practices with those of Roman Catholicism

About the Author