Through life one gets to know certain characters that engrave their colorful images in one's mind. Even after many years one remembers them in the dimension they had in our memory at the time. One of them is Charles “Carlos” Moore, self-proclaimed Cuban by birth.

Charles came to my attention when he started working as a translator from English and French under my supervision in the International Post Department in the Ministry of Communications at the beginning of the 60's when I was head for the Department.

He was a very friendly individual of easy smile with a certain air of joie de vivre and a bon vivant. He was a womanizer with a clear characteristic, he loved White women. I never saw him with any other.

As a worker he was not much of. He kept on wandering thru the halls of the Ministry of Communication selling “Pa'lante” a weekly newspaper mostly dedicated to make people laugh that had substituted the much more satiric Zig-Zag closed by orders of the highest authority of the Cuba Revolution for its sardonic approach to things, especially government affairs.

Charles was running around with the UJC members doing mostly tasks in the agenda of the Communist Youth and not paying much attention to his duties as a translator.

Charles was a black man with strong muscular phisique and a beard that later on was similar to the ones that one could see in the picture Camelot.

Charles and I used to chat mostly about the Cuban Revolution that he had gotten to know while being a translator for Fidel Castro at the Hotel Theresa in Harlem, New York in 1960 when Castro went to speak at the UNO in Lake Placid, New York.

 

I was not satisfied at all with Charles performancc but kept thinking that it would be a passing trend that once he had matured and got to know Cuba, the Revolution and the general environment would fade away. In our conversations Charles told me he had been born in New York of Jamaican parents which I did not have any reason not to believe it. Once I commented that he [Charles] could not fully understand what made the revolution tick ‘cause he was a foreigner, he was Black and had not lived enough time in Cuba. I totally forgot my comment till one day when several members of the UJC came to see me and told me that Charles Moore was accusing me of being a racist, due to the remark I had made him not thinking much of it.

We had a meeting the UJC members, Charles and myself and in brief I brushed off Carlos (as he liked to be called instead of Charles] accusing him to be the real racist that only wanted to go out with White women, never a Black or Mestizo.

Time passed by and I was notified that Charles wanted a transfer to the Ministry of Foreigh Affairs –I guess thru his contacts with Black African embassies and his former boss –my predecessor Jorge Roche that was working for that Ministry. I did not mind for him to go where he pleased because I thought and still think that everybody should be free to work wherever he wanted. The General Post Master was not agrreable to the transfer mentioning that the State Security thought he was an CIA operative. Nevertheless I signed his petition authorizing him to go to the Foreign Affairs Ministry. Some time later his previous boss casually mentioned to me that Charles had asked for asylum in an African embassy in Havana.

I lost track of Charles Moore for many years till one day I saw his name mentioned in an article in The Miami Herald that I was translating.

He came to Miami to lecture as an invited professor to Florida International University and had problems with students there due to his opinions about Miami Cuban exiles, Marti and many other Cuba patriots. He was forced to willingly or not retired from his post at the University.

He appeared as a professor at the West Indian University and went to live in Martinique. Some time passed by and once again Charles sprung before my eyes with a book named “Pichón” [he had written several books while at the same time earning a PHD from a University in El Cairo an later on in Paris where he wrote for Presence Africaine a leftist newspaper edited in Paris].

My curiosity sprung and I tried to read his book to see what he woul say in particular about his time at the Communications Ministry.

I had always thought that Charles was a complete liar that insisted on fabricating a personal biography far, far from his real own.

After reading Pichon and checking out the supposed facts of his staying in the Ministry of Communications where he did no say one truthful word and also comparing what Charles said about his work at the Foreign Ministry I reaffirmed myself that Charles has been going on with his fabricated biography and that he was and is a reverse racist. In other words he wants to change a White Cuban society plagued by discrimination against Black into a Black Cuba where White would be second class citizens.