BOHEMIA

BOHEMIA.  An illustrated magazine, founded by Miguel Ángel Quevedo in Havana in 1908, which became Cuba’s most influential weekly.  In the 1940s and 1950s, when it was a consistent critic of Fulgencio Batista, this “revista enciclopédica” had a 200,000 circulation.  During the struggle to overthrow Batista, it portrayed Fidel Castro as a true Cuban hero in the model of Thomas Jefferson.  This may explain its surviving the Revolution.  After 1959 it was transformed into an official organ of the Marxist government.  A second series began in 1968.  A rival Bohemia libre international was started in Caracas, October 9, 1960.