Louise Stansbery's Great Adventure, Part 5

by Glenn N. Holliman

Cuba...an Island of Political Unrest....

This concludes a five part series on Louise Stansbery Sherwood's beauty pageant trip to Havana, Cuba from her home in Bristol, Tennessee in 1935....a era gone by....Louise is a grand daughter of G.W. and Frances Wilson Osborne.

Below International Radio Club beauty contestants, one being Louise Stansbery Sherwood  (1915-2006), met President Carlos Mendieta of Cuba, December 9, 1935.  Two days later Mendieta was forced out of office in yet another turnover of leadership in an unstable nation.   

 To most 21st Century Americans, Cuba is known as an island controlled by the two Castro brothers who led the 1959 revolution that overthrew a former Cuban army sergeant and quasi-dictator, Fulencio Batista.  

Somewhere in the average American's high school memory is knowledge of the 1898 Spanish-American War when Teddy Roosevelt and his Rough Riders, plus the U.S. Navy, expelled the Spanish colonial administration from Cuba.  For a few years, the U.S. cast a protectorate over Cuba, before the Cubans began, fitfully, to expeerience governmental independence.

After four centuries of Spanish rule, exercising that sovereignty proved vexing.  Cuba was a deeply class ridden society with a few who were very wealthy and the many who were very poor.

 Below, Louise Stansbery Sherwood and other beauty pageant young ladies await to shake hands with President Mendieta in the ornate Presidential Palace reception room.

Amazing in the memorabilia of Louise Stansbery was a tourist booklet highlighting the 'charms' of 1935 Cuba.  Appearing in the visitor's puff piece was this photograph below of a 'typical' Cuban family.  Cuba seethed with political unrest and violence, and studying the picture below suggests why.

While in Havana, Louise was interviewed on the Havana radio.  The next day, she wrote home that the building in which the broadcast had been made, was bombed by would be revolutionaries!  Such was the unrest in the culture, that each contestant was issued a police card, see below.

However this being a beauty contest, the International Radio Club had to crown a queen (below left). The winner was not Louise, but the twenty year old girl from Bristol, Tennessee had had the time of her young life as the tickets indicate!  

 
      December 12th, the ship sailed back to Florida, and the Havana excursion ended.  The next day, the WOPI Bristol, Tennessee party boarded a bus in Miami, and undertook a more than 24 bus ride, with several lay overs, back to East Tennessee. Louise took home wonderful memories and saved numerous mementos of that marvelous week, including, alas, a Greyhouse bus luggage stub, a reentry ticket, if you will, back to reality!

Next posting more reunion photographs from the John and Rebecca Wilson family of Ashe County, North Carolina....

 We invite you to rediscover your heritage at a Wilson, Greer, Wilcoxson, Osborne, Forrester, Adams and other families Forum, Saturday, 9 :30 am, July 19, 2014 in the community room of the Boone, North Carolina public library.  Sunday, July 20th is also the annual Wilson Homecoming at Sutherland United Methodist Church in Ashe County.

 In addition, a detailed family tree of the above families is growing at a MyFamily.com site. For details and schedule on the above event and web site invitation, contact glennhistory@gmail.com.  Isaac and Caroline Greer Wilson are great, great grandparents of this writer.