Meet the ABC: Cuba’s Radical Group in the 1930s
In 1932, Captain Miguel Calvo Herrera, one of the leading members of the secret police, was entering a flower shop in relation to an anonymous call about a secret weapons warehouse. In those times, the Cuban police were suppressing all attempts of insurrection against the government of general Gerardo Machado.
Just one year earlier, two noted members of the military, who in the past were the former President of the Republic of Cuba and the leading candidate for the presidency in 1925(respectively), were caught in Rio Verde, trying to raise arms and topple the government. Calvo Herrera expected to find the usual; university students plotting some kind of revolution and a wide range of weapons, part of a grand conspiracy. But little did he know (and his policemen), that the anonymous call was a deadly trap. It didn’t take long for two colleagues of Calvo to enter the flower shop and finding themselves blown to pieces by an implanted bomb. The Modus Operandi: the bomb, and the boldness to take out one of the leading members of the secret police, had the signature of the leading counter-government group at the time, the ABC.
The ABC might seem like an innocent name, but the dealings and formation of the group made 1931 to 1933 Cuba, one of the most unstable places in Latin America. The group was a response against the President of Cuba…
