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In August 2020, social media users circulated a photograph meme said to depict a priest giving the last rites to a Cuban farmer who was being executed because he refused to work for the Castro regime: This image was indeed a Pulitzer Prize winner for United Press International (UPI) photographer Andrew Lopez in 1960, who snapped a series of four photographs of a man executed by a Fidel Castro firing squad, of which this picture was one. However, some of the other accompanying details in this meme are not quite accurate. Fulgencio Batista was the military dictator of Cuba from 1952 until the end of 1958, when he was overthrown by forces led by Castro and his allies during the Cuban Revolution. This photograph does not depict a farmer [who] refused to work for the Castro regime, but rather a member of Batista's army who had been charged as a war criminal by the victorious revolutionaries a few weeks after they finally ousted Batista. The UPI caption for this picture read as follows: Father Domingo Lorenzo performs last rites for Cuban Army Cpl. Jose Cipriano Rodriguez on Jan. 17, 1959. Rodriguez, who had served in Fulgencio Batista's army, was executed by firing squad after being found guilty for the deaths of two brothers. His tribunal lasted just one minute. A UPI account of the circumstances behind the photograph, which was published in May 1960 when Lopez was awarded the Pulitzer Prize, stated that Rodriguez's trial lasted two hours rather than four minutes (although deliberations afterwards lasted only a minute), and it made no mention of Ernesto Che Guevara, a Castro lieutenant, being personally involved in the case (although Guevara reviewed the appeals and firing squad sentences of those convicted as war criminals in post-revolutionary Cuba):
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