Héctor Rodríguez Llompart

Héctor Rodríguez Llompart (* before 1940) is a former Cuban diplomat and politician . From 1965 to 1972 he was the first Cuban ambassador to the GDR , minister and president of the Central Bank of the Republic of Cuba .

Life

Rodríguez was actively involved in the fall of Fulgencio Batista as an underground fighter in Havana in the 1950s . In October 1957 he was arrested along with other activists of the July 26th Revolutionary Movement in Havana. By decision of the Board of Directors of the Movement of July 26th, Rodríguez became a member of the Propaganda Commission of the Movement of Civil Resistance (Movimiento de Resistencia Cívica, MRC) in mid-1958.

Immediately after the victory of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, he was a commissioner in the Regla district . In the same year he received the post of Deputy Foreign Minister . On behalf of the revolutionary government, he traveled to Mexico in November 1959 to meet the Soviet Deputy Prime Minister Anastas Mikojan and to send him an invitation to Havana. These were the first high-ranking Cuban-Soviet government contacts, which culminated in the conclusion of a purchase agreement for Cuban sugar in early 1960 and in Cuban-Soviet trade and credit agreements in February 1960, the first formal steps in the integration of Cuba into the economic and political sphere of influence of the Soviet Union . In the following years, Rodríguez was a member of the delegation on official trips to numerous socialist countries, from October 1960 onwards at Guevara's side to the Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia and the GDR, and then as head of the delegation to Vietnam, Poland, Hungary, Romania and Albania. In 1963 he accompanied Fidel Castro to Vietnam.

Rodríguez later became ambassador . He arrived in East Berlin on February 3, 1965, and on February 5, 1965 presented the Chairman of the State Council, Walter Ulbricht, with the letter of authenticity as the Ambassador of the Republic of Cuba in the GDR. He replaced the previous Chargé d'Affaires Armando Bayo Cosgaya . At the beginning of June 1967 he took an unscheduled traineeship at the economics faculty of the Berlin Humboldt University. Most recently he was the longest serving ambassador doyen of the diplomatic corps in the GDR. On October 11, 1972, he was received by Erich Honecker for a farewell visit and started his journey home the next day.

Rodríguez then worked from November 1972 to 1976 as Vice-President of the National Commission for Economic and Scientific and Technical Cooperation and then from 1976 to 1985 with the rank of Minister, Chairman of the State Committee for Economic Cooperation. In this capacity, he participated, among others, the RGW part -Tagungen in Moscow. From 1985 to 1995 he was President of the Central Bank of Cuba. During his term of office, he was responsible for the legalization of the possession and use of foreign currency for the population in August 1993 and, with the Peso Cubano Convertible (CUC) in addition to the Peso Cubano (CUP), the introduction of a currency equivalent to the value of the US Dollar-pegged second currency in December 1994, which had a significant impact on the economy and the living conditions of Cuba's residents.

At the first congress of the Communist Party of Cuba , which was founded in 1965 , Rodríguez was elected a member of the Central Committee and was confirmed in this position by the second, third and fourth (1991) congresses. However, since the fifth party congress held in 1997, he has not been a member of this governing body.

Since retiring from active politics, Rodríguez Llompart has appeared in public primarily as an author and contemporary witness on Cuban contemporary history. He is vice-president of the Club Martiano "Faustino Pérez Hernández" for research into the Cuban revolutionary history between 1940 and 1963 at the University of Havana .

publication

• as editor together with Enrique Oltuski and Eduardo Torres-Cueva: Memorias de la Revolución, Imagen Contemporánea, Havanna 2007, ISBN 959-7078-94-5 (Spanish)

See also

→ List of the Cuban ambassadors in the German Democratic Republic

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Arnold Rodríguez Camps: Fangio: Un secuestro en Cuba ( Memento of the original from July 9, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The  archive link has been inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF). Ciencias Sociales, Havana 2008 (Spanish)
2. ↑ Jorge Alberto Serra: El Movimiento de Resistencia Cívica en La Habana / (PDF), p. 251
3. ↑ A 55 años del nombramiento del Che como presidente del Banco de Cuba ( Memento of the original of July 8, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. , Radio Cubana on November 26, 2014  
4. ^ Michelle Denise Reeves: Extracting the Eagle's Talons: The Soviet Union in Cold War Latin America. (PDF), The University of Texas at Austin, Austin 2014, p. 88 f. (English)
5. ↑ Gabriel Molina: Che 1959. ( Memento of the original from July 9, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The  archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. In: Granma Internacional (German edition) from July 2008, accessed on July 8, 2015
6. ^ Helen Yaffe: Ernesto 'Che' Guevara: socialist political economy and economic management in Cuba, 1959-1965. P. 96, ProQuest, Ann Arbor 2014 (English)
7. ^ Testimonio de Héctor Rodríguez Llompart, sobre viaje de Fidel Castro a Vietnam. Video on YouTube, accessed July 8, 2015 (Spanish)
8. ^ Ambassador Hector Rodriguez to Walter Ulbricht . In: Neues Deutschland , February 6, 1965, p. 1.
9. ↑ Prominent aspirant . In: Neues Deutschland , June 3, 1967, p. 10.
10. ↑ Back to Cuba . In: Der Morgen , October 13, 1972, p. 2.