Frank Calzón has spent the majority of his life advocating for a free Cuba, and, now, at 81 years old, he is seeing Cubans speak out again in a way he hasn’t seen in decades. Cuban university students are peacefully protesting en masse, and Cuban Catholic bishops are speaking out against the Cuban communist regime after the church fell silent on the issue for years, Calzón said.
Shortly after Fidel Castro took power and the police visited his house after he was a bit too outspoken at school, he left the country. He was a teenager at the time. What he thought might be a year or two of lying low during a testy political transition turned into a life of speaking out for Cubans whose voices are silenced.
“My life has been Cuba—writing about Cuba, talking about Cuba, organizing Cuban Americans,” he told The Epoch Times. “Sometimes people ask me, ‘When did you leave Cuba?’ Oh, I never left Cuba. Wherever I go, Cuba goes with me.”
Castro Comes Down the Mountain
Calzón remembers the beginning of Castro’s regime well, because these were his last months in Cuba.
Castro had made a name for himself in the revolution-filled decade before he took power, as his speeches about justice and condemning inequality resonated with listeners across the nation. When Cuban military leader Fulgencio Batista made his escape on New Year’s Eve in 1958, Castro himself had been hundreds of miles away in the mountains. But, in the following week, he would treat his journey down the mountain and into the heart of Cuba like a campaign trail, stopping often to make rousing speeches, take photos, and recruit hundreds into his march.
“That’s the tragicomedy of the beginning,” Calzón said. Cuba was full of optimism, expecting the years of dictatorship coming to an end. With Batista’s exit, his police force had gone, too, and Casto called on the Boy Scouts to help with those duties. At the time, traffic signals had to be changed manually by a police officer. Calzón, weeks from turning 15, was a leader in the Boy Scouts and took seriously his duty of directing traffic at one of his city’s busiest intersections with a friend.
But the curtain fell on those happy times quickly. Months later, the teachers in his school changed. One of the new teachers “knew grammar, and she knew Marxism,” Calzón said. She would write in Spanish on the blackboard words like “means of production,” “class struggle,” “Lenin.”
“Can we talk about Cuba?” Calzón would ask, tired of hearing about Karl Marx yet again.
Soon, police visited his house, asking for him by name. “They cut the mattresses with a knife,” Calzón said. “My parents got scared.”
They sent him to live with his godfather in Miami, and Calzón said he remembers bringing a notebook with the names and phone numbers of his fellow Boy Scouts.
“I kept that for a couple of years because I thought, when I come back, I’m going to call them up, and we’re going to go camping again—that kind of thing,” he said. “I also, I guess I should say, brought with me a deep love for Cuba and Cuban history.”
Political Prisoners
A core part of Calzón’s advocacy has been calling for the release of hundreds of political prisoners in Cuba—people who have been imprisoned for speaking out against the Cuban communist regime.
“If we forget our heroes, our people imprisoned, then we do not deserve to be free,” he said.
Calzón attended Rutgers University and, later, Georgetown, where he organized student associations to advocate for a free Cuba, and led a student protest during a United Nations meeting that made headlines. He later went on to work for Freedom House, which regularly took him across Europe and before policymakers and international bodies, to testify about the human rights conditions of various countries. He later served as the executive director of Center for a Free Cuba, where he remains an advisor. The U.S.-based group advocates for a peaceful transition to a free Cuba, raising awareness of Cuban citizens’ efforts to promote democracy and the communist regime’s human rights abuses.
In 1978, Calzón authored a study that noted that Cuban’s political prisoners per capita number five to eight times that of the Soviet Union. At the time, the United States estimated between 15,000 and 20,000 political prisoners were held by Castro, and a UCLA estimate put it between 25,000 and 80,000.
Spain-based Prisoners Defenders estimated that the number of Cuban political prisoners at the end of 2024 was 1,161. In February, after talks with the Catholic Church, the Cuban regime announced it would release 553 of these prisoners.
Calzón says he’s often asked how he knows so much about Cuba and says it shouldn’t be a surprise that someone in a free society has more information about Cuba than someone inside Cuba, which remains a totalitarian state.
“The people in Cuba only know what’s happening around them,” he said. “I read the Cuban government newspapers’ propaganda. I talk to foreign diplomats when they come back from Cuba. Sometimes, I send people to take humanitarian assistance in and things like that.”
He cannot go himself, of course, as Cuban officials have labeled him “a spy, a traitor to the motherland, a narco trafficker, a CIA agent, [and] a number of other things like that,” he said. “I don’t think it’d be a good idea for me to go back.”
Spirit Lives On
Calzón said his time in America has been nothing but positive, with friendly, generous people at every turn.
A few years after he landed in Florida, Calzón’s father traveled to Spain for Calzón’s grandmother’s funeral, and Calzón received a call from his mother asking that he tell his father, who would be landing in New York, not to come back to Cuba because the situation had worsened. Calzón caught a Greyhound and somehow managed to intercept his father.
Calzón remained in the White Plains, New York, area after that, working as a busboy for a German couple who owned a restaurant. They had numbers on their arms, and he hadn’t known at the time that they were Holocaust survivors, only that they treated him as if they were family, he said. He worked there while saving up money for the visa fees that would bring his mother and sisters from Spain to the United States, and, when the applications were approved and Calzón was $300 short, the couple and even some regulars pitched in to cover the remainder.
“I really believe we are here for a reason, and I’ve had so many good friends,” Calzón said.
Calzón said the Cuban Americans he meets today include “kids whose parents have never been to Cuba—whose parents have never been to Cuba,” but still care about the country as their own.
“The spirit of Cuba is alive everywhere a Cuban lives. Cuba is with us. Cuba is not simply a geographical expression. Cuba are millions of Cubans who love Cuba,” he said.
