Orestes
Ferrara
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Orestes
Ferrara was a man who lived the life of a thousand men. In 1896,
at age 20, when Orestes was a law student at the University of Naples,
Italy, he ran away and left behind his well-to-do family and beloved
friends to go fight a faraway war for the liberty of a nation in
a
small island in the American Continent named Cuba.
The young Italian fought like a lion, or better, like a Cuban, a Cuban
"Mambi," to expel the Spanish Colony from the Caribbean island and became
a Colonel in
the "Cuban Independence War" better known as the "Spanish
American War."
After the "Spanish American War" victory, Cuban Army Colonel
Orestes Ferrara returned to his native country to finish his law education
and visit his family and old friends.
Immediately after Orestes became an attorney, he went back to Cuba where
he established one of the best and most well-known law firms in the young
Cuban Republic.
During the first half of the twentieth-century Orestes Ferrara's popularity
in Cuba was bigger than the one of a rock star! Married couples named
their sons after him and, to this day, people constantly quote him and
tell about his anecdotes and political debates.
Orestes survived an assassination attempt in 1940 on his way to the Cuban
Senate. None of the ten bullets that entered his body completed the task.
As the cowardly assassins escaped in their getaway car in fear of being
caught, Orestes got into a taxi and went to an emergency room.
Throughout
his life Orestes Ferrara occupied many of the highest-ranking jobs
in Cuban Politics. He was Secretary of State, Cuban Ambassador
to The United States of America and Delegate to UNESCO, just to
name a few. Had Orestes been born in Cuba, chances are he would
have taken the Presidency, also.
Orestes was an intellectual and a man of action. He wrote more than forty
books and took part in more than a dozen duels, which, needless to say,
he won. His books are part of the common persons library collection,
public
libraries,
historians, intellectuals and Governments around the world for consulting
purposes and interesting and knowledgeable reading.
It
is hard to comprehend that when Orestes Ferrara was born in the middle
of the Nineteenth Century, there was no electricity, cars, airplanes,
army tanks, machine guns, movies, radio, television, plastic, phones,
penicillin, two world wars, baseball, I Love Lucy, Communism, Women
lib, computers, jeans, internet, The Beatles, you, me, and NASA sending
men into space and to the moon. By the time he passed away Orestes
Ferrara had seen the birth of all these marvelous wonders, discoveries
and inventions come true, and befriended many of the individuals that
revolutionized and brought unthinkable prosperity to mankind, and in
many cases shrank the world we live in, like the Wright brothers. |
