Camilo Cienfuegos

This article is ambiguous. For further meanings see Camilo Cienfuegos (disambiguation) .

Camilo Cienfuegos 1959

Camilo Cienfuegos Gorriarán (born February 6, 1932 in Havana , Cuba ; † October 28, 1959, probably in a plane crash over the ocean between Camagüey and Havana, Cuba) was a Cuban revolutionary .

Alongside Ernesto “Che” Guevara , Fidel and Raúl Castro, Camilo Cienfuegos was one of the leading revolutionaries and guerrilla leaders of the “ Movement of July 26 ” or the rebel army against the Batista regime.

Childhood and youth

Cienfuegos was born as the second of three sons of Spanish immigrants José Ramón Cienfuegos Flores and Emilia Gorriarán Zaballa in the Lawton district of the Cuban capital Havana in simple circumstances. Shortly thereafter, the family lived in the San Francisco de Paula neighborhood for several years and then returned to Lawton. Cienfuegos attended school until the eighth grade before he enrolled in an art school in 1949, but due to the worsened financial situation of the family, instead of attending school, he began to work as an assistant in a tailor's shop. In May 1953 he traveled to the United States on a tourist visa, where he worked illegally until he was deported to Cuba in June 1955. In December 1955, Cienfuegos took part in a student demonstration in Havana in honor of the Cuban folk hero Antonio Maceo and against the dictatorial government of Fulgencio Batistas. In the course of the demonstration there were clashes with the police; while Cienfuegos was hit by a bullet in the foot. He describes his subsequent emotional experience in the hospital as the most important of his life. Hundreds of enthusiastic people received him at the entrance to the hospital. It was carried up with tears and applause. He later said that since that experience he had been convinced that Cuba must be liberated under all circumstances. In the context of another protest demonstration in honor of the national hero José Martí , Cienfuegos was arrested at the end of January 1956 and registered as a riot by the BRAC, the anti-communist special police unit notorious for its repression measures. After marrying Isabel Blandón, a nurse from Guatemala, whom he had met during his first stay in the USA and who was a US citizen, he returned to the USA in March 1956 with a regular residence permit. After breaking up in September 1956, Cienfuegos decided to go to Mexico, where he joined the members of the July 26th Movement .

Cuban Revolution

After a short period of preparation in Mexico , Camilo Cienfuegos was part of the 82-strong invasion force that landed in Cuba in December 1956 on the yacht “ Granma ”. Within the troops fighting in the mountains of the Sierra Maestra, he proved himself to be a capable fighter and demonstrated his suitability as a leader. On April 16, 1958, he was raised to the rank of Comandante . As such, he eventually led the 700-strong third column of the rebel army . He fought several skirmishes with Batista troops in the province of Las Villas , of which the battle of Yaguajay in December 1958 is considered one of the decisive ones in the civil war. After a hard fight and 20 days of siege, the commander of the Yaguajay garrison had to give up. The battle earned Cienfuegos the nickname Hero of Yaguajay .

While Cienfuegos advanced into the province of Camagüey , Che Guevara fought for the city of Santa Clara . Using a small radio and a few couriers, Cienfuegos kept in touch with Guevara. Cienfuegos' men also invaded Las Villas province after being embroiled in numerous skirmishes with their far superior opponents. They besieged the barracks of Yaguajay and took it after fierce fighting. The subsequent division of the island was the cornerstone for further action. After two years of guerrilla warfare against the numerically outnumbered Batista army in the mountains of the Sierra Maestra , supported by the USA, the breakthrough in the plain was made and the way to the capital Havana was clear. On January 1, 1959, dictator Batista fled Cuba. Under the command of Comandante Che Guevara, the two groups advanced on Havana.

On January 2, 1959, Cienfuegos led the first columns of the rebel army into the capital. He and his 500 guerrilla fighters disarmed the more than 10,000 soldiers at Batista's headquarters in Havana, who had lost all morale .

After the revolution

After the victory he worked in the army high command and fought against counter-revolutionaries ; he was also instrumental in the agricultural reform. Camilo Cienfuegos was only able to influence the development of the new political system little. His position on building a purist Marxist-Leninist system is controversial.

His brother Osmany is also a politician and has temporarily served in several higher offices in the state and party in socialist Cuba.

death

Depiction of Cienfuegos, facade of the Ministry of Information, Havana

On October 28, 1959, less than a year after taking power, Cienfuegos was killed in an aircraft accident on the way from Camagüey to Havana. His machine, a Cessna , was never found despite the rescue operation being quickly initiated.

There are various conjectures about what happened that day. The fact is that Camilo Cienfuegos had carried out Fidel Castro's order to arrest his friend Huber Matos a week earlier . He had just resigned from the post of military commander in Camagüey province in protest against Castro's course. Shortly before, Cienfuegos allegedly had a discussion with Castro in which he accused Castro of misusing the prestige of the revolution and the revolutionaries to establish a personal dictatorship. As a plausible motive for the murder of Cienfuegos, suspected by most of Castro's critics, on his behalf, the popularity of the comrade in arms can be seen, with which, in the event of an open dispute over the communist course of the revolutionary government, large parts of the population and the rebel army against Fidel Castro could have mobilized. In the autumn of 1959 prominent revolutionary fighters had already resumed the armed conflict, this time against Castro. This thesis was u. a. represented by Huber Matos himself. Camilo Cienfuegos' position in the hierarchy of the revolutionary leadership had been reduced by Fidel two weeks earlier when he promoted his brother Raúl Castro, next to Ernesto Guevara, the most prominent representative of the communist forces, to the position of defense minister and thus superior to the chief of staff.

Captain Roberto de Cárdenas , also a friend of Cienfuegos from times of resistance and involved in the search operation as the then commander of the Camagüey airport and air force base, doubted in his report published in Argentina in 1961 that the former rebel leader had even been in Camagüey on the supposed day of departure and his machine had flown the route officially stated for that day (from Havana via Camagüey to Santiago and back). Instead, he reports shots in the presidential palace the night before. According to other reports, the Cessna was shot down by the Cuban Air Force. Several confidants of the chief of staff as well as witnesses and participants in a reconnaissance commission died unnatural deaths within a short period of time. For example, his personal adjutant, Captain Cristino Naranjo, was shot dead two weeks later while entering the military headquarters in Havana. The perpetrator is said to have been Lieutenant Manuel Beatón , who was caught a few months later as a rebel in the Sierra Maestra and then stated in custody before his execution that the brothers Castro, Guevara and other high-ranking members of the revolutionary troops, Félix Torres and Jorge Enrique Mendoza , are directly responsible for the death of the comrade in arms. Lieutenant Agustín Onidio Rumbaut , who was involved in the criminal proceedings against Beatón, documented these statements in a confidential report and died shortly afterwards in a hunting accident. An Air Force mechanic on duty reported that a fighter ( Hawker Sea Fury type ) with no ammunition, i.e. H. the projectiles were fired when he returned from his patrol . He died in a traffic accident in Havana four days after Cienfuegos' disappeared.

The official government version of the incident assumes an accident. Fidel Castro himself pointed out that Huber Matos could not prove a murder, which is why the latter was only punished for his insurrection against Havana (which Matos vigorously denied).

Commemoration

Although Cienfuegos is not as well known worldwide as the other Cuban revolutionary leaders, it occupies a high place in the official iconography of Cuba. The anniversary of his death is an annual national commemoration day on which Cuban schoolchildren are encouraged to throw a flower into the Caribbean Sea accompanied by the slogan "Una flor para Camilo" (a flower for Camilo) . His portrait is also shown on the 20- CUP banknote, his monument on the 20- CUC banknote.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Homenaje a Camilo Cienfuegos , documentary, accessed via Vimeo on August 31, 2013 (Spanish)
2. ↑ Alejandro Cremata Sánchez: De Lawton: Camilo Cienfuegos , historical study, November 2007, in the blog Isla al Sur , accessed on August 31, 2013 (Spanish)
3. ↑ ^{a b c} Luis Guardia: ¿Asesinaron a Camilo? 2007 documentary, accessed from Vimeo on January 13, 2012 (Spanish with English subtitles)
4. ↑ Aún persiste el misterio de la muerte de Camilo Cienfuegos ( Memento of August 9, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) (Spanish) In: El Nuevo Herald of October 28, 2010, accessed on May 8, 2011
5. ↑ Roberto de Cárdenas: La muerte de Camilo Cienfuegos (Spanish; PDF; 4.8 MB) In: Reconstruir from November / December 1961, pp. 19-23, accessed on May 8, 2011
6. ↑ Pedro Corzo: El hombre que le hacía sombra a Fidel ( Memento from August 31, 2013 in the web archive archive.today ), in: El Nuevo Herald from October 25, 2009, accessed on August 31, 2013 (Spanish)
7. ↑ Camilo Cienfuegos (Spanish) In: EcuRed.cu, accessed on May 8, 2011

literature

• Carlos Franqui : Camilo Cienfuegos, Planeta 2001 (Spanish)
• Frédéric Couderc: Le jour se lève et ce n'est pas le tien, Héloïse d'Ormesson 2016 (French)
• Regine Deforges: Camilo, Fayard 1999 (French)
• William Gálvez: Camilo: El señor de la vanguardia, 1979 (Spanish)
• William Gálvez: El joven Camilo, Gente Nueva 1998 (Spanish)
• Ernesto Che Guevara, 2002: Pasajes de la Guerra Revolucionaria. Cuba 1959-1969 . Reimpresión La Habana.

Web links

Commons : Camilo Cienfuegos  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

• Pedro Corzo: El hombre que le hacía sombra a Fidel , in: El Nuevo Herald of October 25, 2009, accessed on August 31, 2013 (Spanish)
• Alejandro Cremata Sánchez: De Lawton: Camilo Cienfuegos , historical study paper, November 2007, in the blog Isla al Sur , accessed on August 31, 2013 (Spanish)