Jesús Sosa Blanco (December 25, 1907 – February 18, 1959) was a colonel in the Cuban army under Fulgencio Batista.

After Fidel Castro came to power, Sosa was arrested and charged with having committed 108 murders for Batista.

[3][4] Sosa's defense attorney was a regular army lawyer who had been cleared of any involvement in war crimes or connections to Batista.

Sosa's lawyer said Cuba did not have capital punishment when the crimes took place, and that his client was a soldier following orders during a civil war.

Democratic Congressmen Adam Clayton Powell Jr. and Charles O. Porter, whom Castro invited as observers, both stated that despite the atmosphere of the trials, they saw "no evidence of injustice."

[3] The Harvard Crimson said that despite criticism of Cuba's "blood bath", the courts had acquitted dozens of suspected war criminals.

Herbert Matthews, a New York Times reporter who secured an exclusive interview with Castro in 1957, called the coverage of the executions the worst he'd ever seen in his entire career.

[5]"In all my 36 years of newspaper work, I have never seen a worse job of journalism than the coverage of the Cuban revolution during the last three weeks.

Gabriel García Márquez attended the trial and execution and used the incident as the basis for his 1975 novel, The Autumn of the Patriarch.

[citation needed] In Rachel Kushner's 2008 novel Telex from Cuba, Sosa Blanco is described as having been convicted and imprisoned for murdering his wife, mother-in-law and sister-in-law before Batista released him to help establish the Rural Guard.