The Eduardo “Guayo” Hernández Papers collection contains documents, letters, newspaper articles, photographs, slides, correspondence, films, documentaries, and ephemera. “Guayo” was one of the premiere cameramen and journalists of pre-revolutionary Cuba. A pioneer in the use of film (“moving pictures”) to document the news, “Guayo” was an internationally famous photographer in the world of Latin American media, especially in the pivotal decades of the 1940s through the 1960s. In Cuba, Guayo owned and directed Noticuba, a news documentary production company that created footage for newsreels shown in movie theatres, then the main forum for informing the public of contemporary events, as well as Cuba’s eleven national television broadcast stations. Until Fidel Castro’s Communist regime eliminated the independent press, Cuba was an unmatched leader in the development of radio and television across Latin America. Guayo’s contributions were fundamental to its pre-1959 success.
Guayo was most known for his methodologically and politically daring photography. He recorded a wide array of events, from unprecedented hurricanes and earthquakes to the raucous political struggles that defined Cuba’s back-to-back dictatorships of Fulgencio Batista (1952-1958) and Fidel Castro. During the war against Batista that gave rise to the Revolution of 1959, Guayo accompanied fellow Cuban journalist Agustín Alles Soberón and legendary Life photographer Andrew St. George to interview Fidel Castro at his guerrilla headquarters in La Plata, Sierra Maestra. Quickly disenchanted with the ideals and policies that characterized the radicalization of the Cuban Revolution under Fidel Castro, Guayo left Cuba immediately after the nationalization of the Cuban press, in the summer of 1960, to work in Venezuela, Puerto Rico, and Miami. Everywhere Guayo went, he proved his credentials as a pioneer. In Puerto Rico, Guayo became a key founder of El Nuevo Día in 1970, Puerto Rico’s most popular newspaper to this day. In Miami, Guayo helped create the Spanish-language version of the Miami Herald, which is today’s El Nuevo Herald.
This collection, donated by his son Luis Hernández Abreu, is an invaluable resource that documents the history of Cuba before, during, and after the revolution, including counter-revolutionary missions to Cuba with Brigada 2506 and Alpha 66. As a prominent, leading intellectual in the Cuban exile diaspora, Guayo also documented the rise of Cubans’ cultural contributions to the United States, especially in Puerto Rico and Miami.
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12 pages of photos and captions from Guayo's Collection
