Frank de varona biography of martin luther

Frank de Varona remembers when he first smelled a rat, when the Cuban American history teacher realized he was the product of an educational conspiracy designed to deny him his heritage. It was the day he met Ronald Reagan.

In celebration of National Hispanic Heritage Week, Reagan handed de Varona a presidential proclamation a decade ago extolling the contributions of Hispanics in general and of Bernardo de Galvez in particular.

There was just one problem.

“Who the hell is this guy?” de Varona wondered. “I didn’t have a clue who Galvez was. And neither did anyone else in the room.”

It was then that de Varona began his crusade to lead a national movement that is now struggling to give credit where credit is due to Hispanics in U.S. history.

It turns out that Bernardo de Galvez was the Spanish governor of Louisiana who opened the Port of New Orleans to American ships during the Revolutionary War, which attacked British forts along the Mississippi and captured Mobile and Pensacola, thereby denying the British the Gulf Coast and Mississippi Valley.

And what thanks did Galvez and Spain get for their troubles – not to mention the gift to the American revolutionaries of 216 brass cannons, 209 gun carriages, 27 mortars, 12,826 shells, 51,134 bullets, 300,000 boxes of gunpowder, 30,000 guns with bayonets, 4,000 tents and 30,000 uniforms?

“We get Lafayette and France in our face,” de Varona says of the French general who was George Washington’s friend and who appears in almost every grade school account of the War for Independence.

“To read our history books,” he says, “you would never know that Spain played a decisive role in the Revolutionary War.”

After his Galvez Experience, de Varona, now a regional superintendent for Miami’s Dade County Public Schools, said he could not find a single reference to the Spanish hero in the county’s textbooks.

“History is the propaganda of the victors,” said Ernst Toller, the German expressionist poet and playwright.

“So true,” says Frank de Varona, who believes he has discovered an anti-Hispanic bias permeating American textbooks, and so has taken it upon himself to write books on the achievements of Hispanics, while also serving as a consultant to textbook publishers, cajoling them to include more references to Hispanics. His books are being used widely in heavily Hispanic jurisdictions, including Chicago, Miami, Texas, California and New Mexico.

“Look, on TV, we’re always shown as drug dealers or as wetbacks,” de Varona said, as he lounges in his book-strewn condominium high above the Atlantic on Miami Beach. “And in the history books? We’re the bloodthirsty conquistadors. Of course, the Anglos are always settlers and pioneers. But we’re never explorers. We’re never pioneers. We’re greedy murderers.”

De Varona warms to his subject. “Let me ask you,” he says and takes a bite of his wife’s lovely voliche, an aromatic Cuban pot roast, “what’s the first permanent settlement in the United States?”

A reporter, fed a lifetime of anti-Hispanic, pro-English propaganda in school, ventures, “Jamestown?”

Totally incorrect. Jamestown was the first permanent English settlement, established in 1607. The first permanent settlement was St. Augustine, established in 1565, by – you know it – Spain.

To wit: It was Pedro Menendez de Aviles who founded St. Augustine, after slaughtering a bunch of French Huguenots from Fort Caroline in what is today Jacksonville (“which was not a permanent settlement,” de Varona illuminates). De Varona maintains that generations of Hispanics, who now comprise 10 percent of the U.S. population and by 2010 will make up the country’s largest minority, have been denied heroes and role models of all sorts – not only by having Hispanic accomplishments purged from texts, but by an insidious whitewashing of Hispanics themselves.

“You know, of course, about Raquel Tejada?” de Varona asks. Born of a Bolivian father and an English mother, Tejada is better known as Raquel Welch.

How about Rita Hayworth, “the all-American gal,” the ultimate gringo? She began life as Margarita Cansino, a dark-haired flamenco dancer, but Hollywood changed her name and hair color.

Most controversial of all – and de Varona loves this one – is Walt Disney. De Varona and an independent biographer of Disney maintain he was born in Almeria, Spain, under the name Jose Luis Girao. His parents died in Chicago, and little Jose was adopted by Elias Disney, who changed his name to Walt.

Though some of Disney’s heirs say Walt was not Hispanic, de Varona’s research indicates he was. “And what could he do?” de Varona says. “Arrive in Hollywood and announce, ‘Hi, I’m Spanish!’ Don’t forget, during the Depression, they were rounding up Hispanics and shipping them to Mexico.”

De Varona believes the contributions of Spaniards and Hispanics in the New World were blotted out by Anglophile historians for several reasons: the four wars the United States fought against Hispanics in the space of a century.

Andrew Jackson, for one, invaded and took Florida from Spain, an event, de Varona enjoys telling a visitor, that is referred to in the history books as “the Purchase of Florida.” Then, of course, there was the Texans’ war against Mexico, the U.S.-Mexican War, and the Spanish-American War, which glamorizes Teddy Roosevelt’s Rough Riders, de Varona says, “while ignoring the fact that the Cubans themselves were fighting for independence for years.” De Varona says he will continue to write new textbooks and revise existing ones, inserting the deeds of Bernardo de Galvez and Raquel Tejada wherever he can, much as African-Americans have fought for inclusion.

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