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"Brigada Venceremos — Zafra 1970 — Trimillonaria" T-shirt
Clothing/Dress/Costume
Short-sleeved white cotton T-shirt with a ribbed crew neckline and ribbed sleeve cuffs. The front carries a screen-printed graphic: "TRIMILLONARIA" in an arched black banner over three overlapping five-pointed stars (yellow, blue, green), above "BRIGADA VENCEREMOS" in red and "ZAFRA 1970" in black. The shirt is heavily worn, soiled, and stained throughout — discoloration, ground-in dirt, and abrasion consistent with hard manual labor (cane cutting). No maker's label is visible in this view.
2025.12.1
T-shirt belonged to Ramón Oroza Naveran (alias Demetrio), Deputy Director of the Ministry of Interior's Dirección General de Inteligencia (DGI). Oroza Naveran was in charge of supervising the Venceremos Brigade.
The "Zafra 1970" is the Zafra de los Diez Millones — the campaign to harvest ten million tons of sugar, the defining economic mobilization of post-1959 Cuba. It was officially launched by Fidel Castro on 27 October 1969 and ran into mid-1970. Cane-cutting brigades competed on output, and "trimillonaria" designates a brigade that reached a three-million(-arroba) cutting milestone — a productivity honorific (cane cutters who reached a million arrobas were "millonarios"; brigades earned millonaria/bimillonaria/trimillonaria status by collective totals). The "Brigada Venceremos" was a US solidarity brigade organized by Students for a Democratic Society, proposed in a June 1969 resolution to send volunteers to Cuba to cut cane for the 1970 harvest. The garment is a primary artifact of the mass-labor campaign, its staining and wear evidence of actual fieldwork.
2025.12
Gift
Shirt
Unisex
small
Jersey
Cotton
White
circa 1969
Cuba
Caribbean
Central America
Venceremos Brigade
Inscription
front
Trimillonaria. Brigada Venceremos. Zafra 1970
Spanish
Trimillionaire. Venceremos Brigade. Zafra 1970
Ink
small size
Single garment: body, set-in short sleeves, ribbed crew neck and sleeve cuffs; screen-printed front graphic.
Poor
Ramón Oroza Naveran
owner
Havana
Cuba
Caribbean
Central America
preservation
According to a report on Cuban political activity in Puerto Rico: "Venceremos Brigade activities are of such great importance to the DGI that they are controlled by a special section of the Political and Economic Intelligence Division, ranking on a par with similar sections on the UN, the U.S. Department of State, and U.S. political parties. The Brigade section is under the direct supervision of the Deputy Director of the DGI, Ramon Oroza Naveran, known under the nom de guerre of "Demetrio." Demetrio personally supervised the creation and subsequent activities of the Brigade, and he assigned such priority to the project that all other DGI operations were held to be subordinate to the collection of intelligence from the members of the Venceremos Brigade. Practically every Cuban national attached to the Brigade camps, right down to the food service and maintenance personnel, is a member or a co-opted member of the DGI. These DGI operatives are so skilled in their impersonations that few Brigade members are aware of their true identities. In fact, so many DGI personnel are needed to staff these camps that nearly all other operations must be suspended when the camps are active. Even maintenance and clerical personnel of the Directorate are pressed into service, as numerous photographs obtained by the Subcommittee indicate." http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/terrorism/cuban-connection-pr-app.htm According to an FBI report: "Since 1969, for example, the DGI has been totally controlled by the KGB "liaison team," originally headed by Gen Vitaliy Semenov, which shares its offices, The KGB supplies a special fund to enable the DGI to carry out foreign missions on its beha.f, The DGI contains seven divisions, or lineas, The Political and Economic Intelligence Division has primary responsibility for espionage and subversion in Western countries, Its chief, Ramon Oroza Naveran, used the nom de guerre of "Demetrio" when he ran the DGI's notorious Section III, responsible for deploying “illegals” (spies who do not use diplomatic or other official cover) in target countries, The division chief's previous employment provides a clue to why the KGB sets a high valuation on Castro's secret service when it comes to spying on the United States, Given the presence of a Cuban exile community of some 700,000--not to mention several million other Spanish-speakers, mostly of Mexican or Puerto Rican origin--it is Singularly easy for the DGI to smuggle in illegals." https://archive.org/stream/fbis-report_prex-710fbis-weu-79-174/fbis-report_prex-710fbis-weu-79-174_djvu.txt