1957: Humboldt 7 Shootings

Cuba History Timeline Events
April 20, 1957
The police find four DR student leaders sought for their participation in the Presidential Palace and Radio Reloj attacks in their Havana hideout, apartment #201 at 7 Humboldt Street. All are killed by Col. Esteban Ventura Novo and his men. The event is called “The Humboldt 7 Massacre”. Contemporaneous news accounts reported that a weapons cache and bomb-making equipment were found at the Humboldt hideout.

The four decedents were Fructuoso Rodríguez (one of the DR founders, who took over FEU Presidency after José Antonio Echeverria's death), Joe Westbrook Rosales (also one of the founders of DR), José Machado Rodríguez, and Juan Pedro Carbó Serviá. Carbó was additionally sought by police for the assassination of Col. Antonio Blanco Rico, Chief of Batista's secret service. The deaths of the four effectively left the DR leaderless.

There is some indication that the Communists set up the DR survivors to eliminate revolutionary competitors, and it has been noted that their two confederates (Faure Chaumon and Raúl Díaz Argüelles) left the hideout shortly before the police arrived. In 1964 Castro’s revolutionary courts convicted Communist Marcos Rodríguez Alfonso, aka “Marquitos”, of tipping off the police to the Humboldt hideout, and he was executed by a revolutionary firing squad.

7 Humboldt St, Havana c1957. (photo: Bohemia)	(L to R) Fructuoso Rodriguez, Joe Westbrook, Faure Chomon, Juan Nuity. Mexico City, 1956

based on Manuel Márquez-Sterling's Cuba 1952-1959 and
Cuba 1952-1959 Interactive Timeline