When Gladys Trava appeared on the cover of Jet magazine, she was not the typical beauty queen in swimwear or entertainer in evening wear or socialite in mink who regularly provided the cheesecake wrapping for a lively mix of news and gossip inside the pocket-sized magazine. She was, the caption said, a "woman rebel leader" – a lieutenant, to be exact – in the "mixed race battalion of Castro's Rebel Army."
While Jet’s editors could not resist emphasizing the comeliness of the former school teacher in military garb, their intense coverage of the first days of Fidel Castro's triumph over the U.S.-backed government of Fulgencio Batista was practically giddy – as it was in most of the leading black newspapers and magazines in 1959 and 1960.
“Dr. Castro,” as he was generally addressed, was the thirtysomething lawyer who early on found an American champion in Harlem’s popular Adam Clayton Powell Jr. Powell was one of only two blacks in Congress and “one of the few members of Congress to espouse the Castro cause while the rebels were waging their hit-and-run guerrilla warfare against superior and better-armed Government troops,” the Afro-American pointed out on Jan. 31, 1959. With blacks in the U.S. battling Jim Crow segregation and terrorist acts like the lynching of Emmett Till, and with black Africans waging independence fights, the victory
Pages From The Archives
By E. R. Shipp | Jet magazine | Feb. 19, 1959
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