Radio announcer Fernando Alcorta Castellanos, one of the founders, half a century ago of Radio Havana Cuba, received of one of the thirty old brass lapel buttons with the radio station’s logo embossed stamp, which were donated by Ecuadorian writer Marigloria Cornejo Cousin.

Alcorta was the announcer that the April 16, 1961 presented the act in which Commander Fidel Castro delivered a speech at the funeral of the victims of the bombings before the invasion at Playa Girón. The then Prime Minister of Cuba said goodbye to the grief for those killed in air strikes in a ceremony held in the vicinity of Cristóbal Colón Cemetery in Havana, and in that historic speech, the Cuban leader proclaimed the socialist character of the Revolution and announced the existence of a radio station transmitting as a pilot and two weeks later would be identified as Radio Havana Cuba.

These distinctive brass buttons, which in Ecuador are called rosettes, are being delivered to all the living founders of the Cuban shortwave radio station. In recent days the announcer Lilia Rosa López, whose voice, along with that of Fernando Alcorta, is currently identified Radio Habana Cuba, received one.

This decoration will be also given to the first Minister of Communications of the Revolution,  Enrique Oltuski, engineers José Altshuler, Luis Mir and Carlos Estrada and musicians Leo Brower and Cesar Portillo de la Luz.

These beautiful lapel pins, twenty-two millimeters in diameter, were delivered by Marigloria Cornejo to Pedro Martinez Pirez journalist, deputy director general of Radio Havana Cuba, in a ceremony held at the City Hall of the mayor’s office of Milagro, in the Ecuadorian province Guayas, in honor of journalist Carlos Bastidas Arguello, who was killed by a gunman of Fulgencio Batista dictatorship in Havana on May 13, 1958.

Ecuadorian Bastidas was born 76 years ago and was in the Sierra Maestra where he interviewed Fidel Castro and spoke for Radio Rebelde under the pseudonym of Atahualpa Recio. In the ceremony held in the town of Milagro, with the presence of the mayor and Carlos Bastidas’s relatives, tribute was also paid to Radio Havana Cuba on its fiftieth anniversary.

Translated by: Daysi Olano

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