Independence Day weekend 50 years ago was truly one to celebrate for a Watertown family.

That was partially due to Raul Castro. But then again, today’s president of Cuba, brother of Fidel Castro, was just as responsible for the heartache that the family of Howard A. Roach had endured for nearly eight days.

Mr. Roach had been held captive by Cuban revolutionaries.

Eleanor Harris Roach and her three children, Deborah, 7, Howard Jr., 6, and David, 5, were spending the weekend in her hometown of Tupper Lake, anxiously awaiting her husband’s return. She could take comfort in knowing that Mr. Roach, 30, had been freed on July 2, 1958, by the band of rebels led by Raul Castro, but she wasn’t sure how soon she would see her husband of eight years.

All she knew was that the State Department wanted her out of the reach of the news media and had asked her to leave Watertown.

Mr. Roach, a chemist with Stebbins Engineering and Manufacturing Co. of Watertown, telephoned his wife from Guantanamo on July 4, 1958, his second call to her in two days, reassuring her that he was coming home. He wasn’t sure when, but it would be sometime the next week, he said.

He got a flight out of Guantanamo that Friday night, sooner than he could have hoped for. After being quizzed in Florida by State Department officials about the situation in Cuba, he was put on a plane for New York City, arriving at 6:10 a.m. Saturday. He caught another flight that landed at 9:30 a.m. at Saranac Lake.

A short time later, a taxi pulled up to the home of his wife’s parents, Mr. and Mrs. Henry Harris of Tupper Lake, prompting a surprise reunion.

Then, on Sunday, they were off to 105 Main St. in Ogdensburg for hugs and kisses with the parents of the former hostage, Charles H. and Vera Woodley Roach, who were proprietors of Scoop’s Restaurant on Isabella Street; his brother, Charles Jr., and a sister, Elizabeth Spears.

After graduating in 1946 from Ogdensburg Free Academy, Howard Roach gave some wartime service to the Army. When he put that behind him, he was married in May 1950 at Tupper Lake Presbyterian Church.

At the time, he was a student at the St. Lawrence State Hospital school of nursing in Ogdensburg, but eventually he changed his education goals, taking a turn that would ultimately land him in Cuba. He received a degree in engineering from Clarkson College, Potsdam, in 1956.

His next stop, with degree in hand: Stebbins Engineering. The couple established their home at 154 High St.

Early in 1956, Stebbins became involved in construction of a nickel operation at Moa Bay in northeast Cuba. In December 1957, the Castro brothers, Fidel and Raul, began leading an attempt to overthrow the island nation’s president, Fulgencio Batista.

Mr. Roach had made one trip to Cuba but was turned back by the political upheaval. He was sent again, in April 1958, and he arrived on the 17th to assume his job of supervising the installation of a coating he had developed for tanks.

There were occasional small raids on the work site, but they were quite harmless, Mr. Roach reported in his calls home. The rebels would take some equipment and trucks, but they left notes saying they would return them. And they did.

That changed on the evening of June 26, 1958, as the Moa Bay work crew was sitting and having dinner. A heavily armed rebel band of about 200 slipped into the miners’ camp, and suddenly, guns were held to the backs of the workers, according to Eleanor Roach Cosgrove, now of Surf City, N.J.

Mr. Roach was among 11 men taken prisoner that night. Another man, Edward Cannon, was from Cornwall, Ontario. They were paraded to an encampment in the hills in southeastern Cuba.

The following day, Mr. Roach’s wife learned of his capture, but it was not from the government, not from Stebbins, not even from a reporter.

“I learned about it from the phone company,” Mrs. Cosgrove said. “They called me asking how we were going to pay my phone bill now that my husband had been captured in Cuba. We had a high phone bill because of all his ship-to-shore collect calls to me.

“I called Stebbins, and they confirmed he had been captured. ‘We were going to get to you next,’” she said she was told.

Raids continued, with the number of captured Americans climbing to 40. Wire services reported the Castro rebels were justifying the raids as retaliation against alleged American aid to the Batista government’s army in the form of gasoline from the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo.

“We have no information that would substantiate the charge,” a State Department official was quoted as saying.

Meanwhile, families back home waited to hear from or about their loved ones. Were they safe? Would they be coming home soon? For the time being, they could rely only on a rebel’s promise to the wife of a kidnapped California engineer that the captives would be well-cared for and released in a few days.

And indeed it was just a few days. On Thursday, July 3, not long after midnight, Mrs. Roach got her first call from her husband since his capture. He had been released just a few hours earlier.

Mr. Roach told his wife that he had been “very, very well treated” and “we were fed as well as Castro could possibly feed us with the supplies he had,” she told the Times later that day.

Years later, Mr. Roach would tell one of his sons that one day “he thought he was a goner,” according to David Roach, Haskell, N.J.

“He was being walked down a tunnel by a guard who was hunching over, and Dad turned around,” he said. “The guard had pulled his gun, and his holster poked him, the guard, in the groin.”

Howard Roach told his wife that he never saw Fidel Castro, that all the captives’ contact was with the rebel leader’s brother, Raul.

The rebels had an “impregnable stronghold” in the mountains and “plenty of ammunition,” Mr. Roach reported from Guantanamo.

Mr. Cannon, in his call to Cornwall, told his wife that the sibling rebel leaders were at odds about the capture of Americans. He said he was present at a conference with Raul Castro, who promised to stop kidnapping foreigners.

Wire service reports added that Fidel Castro denounced his brother’s actions in carrying out the captures, citing them as violations of the very individual liberties that were the rebel causes.

As Mr. Roach was being released from captivity, he was aware that Raul Castro and an interpreter were writing a letter of apology. His wife later received a copy of the letter.

It read, in part, “Our purpose for doing such a thing was to bring to the attention of the people of the United States and the world the fact that American bombs and ammunitions were used to murder innocent people on the Provence of Oriente in Cuba, this includes women and children.”

Raul Castro promised, “Under no curcumstance (sic) will any North American be harmed in any manner while in the Free Territory of Cuba.”

Mr. Roach was given a souvenir by one of his captors — one of their armbands denoting the revolution.

The family’s phone bill was paid by Stebbins.

Mr. Roach quit his job with Stebbins a few months after his ordeal in Cuba, which Mrs. Cosgrove said left him insecure.

“He could never settle down, was always hunting for a safer job,” she said. “He was so hesitant about having to travel.”

His first move was to Lowville, where he went to work for AMF, developing plastic coating for bowling pins. He became plant manager, Mrs. Cosgrove said.

He moved the family in 1961 to Nutley, N.J., where he was hired by Sonneborn Building Products as a supervising research chemist. A few years later, he went to another New Jersey company, W.R. Grace building products.

Mr. Roach — called “Dubby” by family and friends — was still with W.R. Grace when on Dec. 1, 1975, he was without warning stricken with a massive heart attack. He died at 47 in a Belleville, N.J. hospital.

Mrs. Cosgrove in 1964 was honored as one of New Jersey’s “women of distinction.” The recognition acknowledged her many activities, including being chairwoman of fundraising events; participating in the school mothers club, Girl Scouts, the Red Cross swimming program and the women’s auxiliary for Little League baseball; and being a junior bowling instructor.

Her second husband, Thomas Cosgrove, is deceased.

Raul Castro officially succeeded his brother as president of Cuba in February.

Our recognition goes to Times librarian Lisa Carr for discovering this moment in local history. We also thank Timothy J. Abel, director of the Jefferson County Historical Society, for assisting with photo reproduction, and members of the Howard Roach family for their assistance.