Herbert Lionel Matthews (January 10, 1900 – July 30, 1977) was a reporter and editorialist[1] for The New York Times who, at the age of 57, won widespread attention after revealing that the 30-year-old Fidel Castro was still alive and living in the Sierra Maestra mountains.
President Fulgencio Batista claimed publicly that the young guerrilla leader had been killed during the landing of the yacht Granma, bringing him and others back to Cuba from Mexico in December 1956.
[2] His coverage of that war and later the Cuban political situation were subject to substantial criticism for showing communist sympathies, a charge Matthews rejected for years, although the pro-Soviet magazine New Masses insisted that he should have won a Pulitzer Prize for "dramatic and fearless reporting [that] has set a new high in foreign correspondence.
Constancia de la Mora, head of the Republican Press Office, described him as “Tall, lean, and lanky, […] one of the shyest, most diffident men in Spain.
He used to come in every evening, always dressed in his grey flannels, after arduous and dangerous trips to the front, to telephone his story to Paris, whence it was cabled to New York.” [5] According to Paul Preston, during the initial Republican offensive to recapture Teruel, in December 1937 “.
[8] Batista, still trying to crush the uprising by revolutionary forces in Cuba, claimed the photograph was a fake and continued to assert that Castro was dead.
In his article, published on 24 February 1957, he wrote of Castro[12] [His] program is vague and couched in generalities, but it amounts to a new deal for Cuba, radical, democratic, and therefore anti-Communist.
[17] One of Matthews' most famous statements concerning Castro was made on 5 July 1959, and he stated that:[17] There are no Reds in the Cabinet and none in high positions in the Government or army in the sense of being able to control either governmental or defense policies.
[23] Matthews' later journalism has been likened to that of three other US foreign correspondents who covered wars and revolutions from the "other side" and became controversial figures by openly demonstrating their sympathy for the enemy and the revolutionaries: Richard Harding Davis, John Reed, and Edgar Snow reported, respectively, on the Russo-Japanese war (1905–1907), the October 1917 coup d'etat in Russia and the 1949 Communist Revolution in China.
[24] The conservative National Review published a caricature of Castro with the caption, "I got my job through the New York Times," parodying a contemporary campaign for the newspaper's classified ad section.
[25][26] In 2017, the British historian Paul Preston referred to Matthews as "the great New York Times correspondent"[27] regarding his coverage of the Spanish Civil War.
It reads: "In this place, commander-in-chief Fidel Castro Ruz met with the North American journalist Herbert Matthews on February 17, 1957".