[Congressional Record Volume 152, Number 62 (Thursday, May 18, 2006)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Page E878]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                        HONORING FAUSTO MIRANDA

                                 ______
                                 

                        HON. ILEANA ROS-LEHTINEN

                               of florida

                    in the house of representatives

                         Thursday, May 18, 2006

  Ms. ROS-LEHTINEN. Mr. Speaker, I would like to address the House in 
honor of Fausto Miranda, a legendary sports reporter and one of the 
most outstanding members of our Cuban-American community. Last week, 
Fausto Miranda passed away in his Miami home at the age of 91.
  Miami and the Cuban people grieve in the face of this loss. Fausto 
Miranda was born on July 4, 1914, not knowing that history would turn 
this date into two reasons for him to celebrate. In 1960, Fausto 
Miranda came to the U.S. where, like so many other Cubans fleeing the 
newly installed Castro regime, he found a safe haven and the 
opportunity to continue his extraordinary journalistic career. The 
fourth of July from now on provided him with two reasons to celebrate--
the day he was born and the day America became independent and turned 
into a home for the oppressed and persecuted.
  Born and raised in the town of Puerto Padre in eastern Cuba, Fausto 
Miranda dreamt of becoming a lawyer; instead his poor background forced 
him to work in the sugar industry for a mere 30 pesos a month. Young 
Fausto was very shrewd when it came to making a living--he took on such 
diverse jobs as street vendor, prison guard, trumpeter, orchestra 
manager, doorman, cleaning person, music critic, social annalist, and 
political reporter.
  At the age of 20, fate showed him where his real talent lay buried. 
Working as a stadium announcer, he one day passed his notes on to a 
journalist of Diario de Cuba, one of the count's major newspapers. The 
next day, the article on the baseball game that appeared in the Diario 
was signed by `Fausto Miranda, Special Correspondent'. Years later, 
Fausto Miranda recalled: ``The night the newspaper came out and I saw 
the article with my name, I did not sleep.''
  His career began to take off when he moved to Cuba's capital city of 
Havana in 1933. He started writing a column called ``Stardust'' which 
soon brought him further writing assignments for the newspapers El 
Crisol, Informacion, Diario de la Marina and Alerta as well as a job as 
sports commentator for radio COCO. Fausto Miranda rose to become ``an 
all-time pillar of Cuban sports journalism with an encyclopedic 
knowledge of baseball'', according to Felo Ramirez, a veteran sports 
commentator and member of the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 
Cooperstown.
  During Fausto's time in Havana, the Cuban people were fortunate to 
have the best sports journalists in the hemisphere, including great 
personalities like Eladio Secades, Jessie Losada, and Pedro Galiana. 
When Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, Miranda was president of the 
Sports Writer Association. Like so many other branches of the vibrant 
Cuban civil society, the Association was closed down by the dictator 
and Fausto Miranda was forced to flee the tyrant's grasp.
  He arrived in New York City, the haven to so many freedom-seeking 
immigrants, where he once again started off by taking on a simple job 
as doorman before entering the American sports journalism. While his 
little brother Willy Miranda was out on the field playing for the New 
York Yankees, Fausto was reporting from the American sports world for a 
wide variety of national and international media. He wrote for the 
newspaper La Prensa, the Gesto magazine as well as the French news 
agency AFP, and broadcast for the radio stations Canal 47, Radio X and 
WQBA-La Cubanisima.
  In 1975, Fausto moved to Miami where he founded the sports section of 
El Miami Herald, predecessor of El Nuevo Herald, the Spanish-language 
version of the Miami Herald. In his famed weekly column ``Los viejos'', 
Fausto Miranda revived the Cuban-American's community memories of their 
tropical homeland. The popularity he gained was so great that even 
after his retirement in 1995, Fausto continued to publish the popular 
weekly column.
  The Cuban-American community mourns an outstanding man, whose love of 
sports would always drive him forward. Calling himself a ``very bad 
athlete . . . very bad in everything'', his passion for the athletic 
world paved his way from a stadium announcer to one of the Western 
Hemisphere's most high-profile sports journalists. Not even the 
murderous dictator Fidel Castro could stop him--from stardom in Havana, 
Fausto went to stardom in Miami.
  Fausto Miranda was not only an annalist of the times when legends 
like the boxers Kid Chocolate and Joe Louis were attracting huge 
crowds, and baseball legends Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig were filling the 
stadiums, but through his writing he also helped the Cuban American 
community to keep our memories of our native Cuba alive, ``the most 
beautiful land human eyes ever beheld,'' as he once said. We will 
greatly miss him.

                          ____________________