Huber Matos

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Huber Matos (2009)

Huber Matos Benítez (born November 26, 1918 in Yara , Cuba ; † February 27, 2014 in Miami , Florida ) was a Cuban guerrilla leader of the Cuban Revolution and later dissident , a political prisoner for twenty years and then an opposition politician in exile .

Live and act

Cuban Revolution

After his training as a teacher in Santiago de Cuba, Matos worked at various schools in the Oriente province . In 1944 he obtained a doctorate in education from the University of Havana , and then continued to work as a teacher and as a lecturer in teacher training in Manzanillo . He was Vice President of the National Teachers Association. He also ran a rice-growing business with his father and brothers in his hometown of Yara . Politically, he was involved in the Partido del Pueblo Cubano (Ortodoxos) party of Eduardo Chibás, which called for social reforms .

As an opponent of Batista - dictatorship he had in 1957 when transporting reinforcements for the rebel army to Fidel Castro helped, but then went to Costa Rica into exile. In March 1958 he returned on board an airplane that was bringing a shipment of arms for the rebel army to Cuba. Fidel Castro appointed him officer and divided him the III. Front of the rebel army under the then Comandante Juan Almeida . In August 1958 he was appointed Comandante of the 9th Column "Antonio Guiteras", which operated northeast of Santiago.

He took part in the guerrilla war against the Batista regime, which was initially supported by the USA, alongside the better-known comandantes Fidel Castro, Che Guevara , Raúl Castro and Camilo Cienfuegos , who had landed in Cuba on December 5, 1956 with the yacht Granma from Mexico part and besieged the strategically important city of Santiago de Cuba with his combat group. As one of several prominent comandantes, he moved into Havana on January 8, 1959, together with Fidel Castro, and three days later took over the post of military governor of the largest province of Cuba, Camagüey , a rich and conservative region.

Political case

After the victory of the rebel army over the dictator Fulgencio Batista, he became more and more the spokesman for the anti-communist wing of the July 26th Movement . He thought about addressing the Cuban people directly to prevent what he believed to be the tacit establishment of a communist dictatorship instead of the one that had just been overthrown.

He demanded that Fidel Castro convene a meeting of the National Directory of the July 26th Movement to discuss the "communist infiltration". In letters to Fidel Castro, he vehemently opposed what he believed to be the increasingly communist orientation of the country, which he rejected because of his liberal convictions. He explicitly criticized the particularly driving forces behind this development, Raúl Castro and Che Guevara, whom he accused of pursuing a “second plan” for communist infiltration in addition to the successful first revolution.

On October 20, 1959, after Raúl Castro was appointed Minister of the Armed Forces , he offered to resign. About 15 of his officers wanted to resign with him. Thereupon he was accused of treason and arrested by Camilo Cienfuegos (according to Matos' statements rather reluctantly and doubtfully) on Castro's orders and then brought before a "revolutionary court" in La Cabaña , the fortress of Havana , which he was charged with counterrevolutionary in December 1959 High treason sentenced to twenty years' imprisonment, which he served in full. He was spared the death penalty, unlike many others accused of "counterrevolutionaries" at the time, although Fidel Castro himself testified in a speech that Matos had prepared an armed uprising, which, however, has not been proven.

In March 1975 he was named Political Prisoner of the Month by Amnesty International . In 1979 he was released from prison after serving the full sentence and on mediation by the government of Costa Rica and flown to the Central American country, in which he had already found temporary exile in 1957 and where his wife and four children now lived. He later moved to the USA .

exile

He has written a book about his break with Fidel Castro, his trial and the years of imprisonment under the Spanish title “ Como llegó la noche ” (German: “How it became night”). In it he reports u. a. of severe torture during his detention in Cuba. Huber Matos was General Secretary of the Cuba Independiente y Democrática (German: “Independent and Democratic Cuba”) (CID) party, which he founded in 1981, with headquarters in Miami and members both inside and outside of Cuba.

Huber Matos died of a heart attack in Miami in 2014 at the age of 95. According to his wishes, he was buried in San José (Costa Rica) and is to be reburied in his hometown of Yara after a future overthrow of the Cuban system.

Trivia

He received his unusual first name in honor of the Swiss bee researcher François Huber .

In 1993, an investigation was opened against his son, Huber Matos Araluce, who acted as CID spokesman, for fraud involving millions with the help of falsified medical bills charged to the state health insurance company Medicare , whereupon he moved to Costa Rica and the Costa Rican one to protect himself from threatened extradition Obtained nationality.

Autobiography

  • Huber Matos: Como Llegó La Noche , Edition Fabula / Tusquets Editores, Barcelona 2004, ISBN 84-8310-944-1 (Spanish).

literature

Web links

Commons : Huber Matos  - Collection of Images

German-language press articles

Spanish sources

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Laura Wides-Munoz: Matos, Cuban rebel leader turned Castro foe, dies. (No longer available online.) In: newstimes.com. February 27, 2014, formerly in the original ; accessed on March 4, 2014 .  ( Page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.newstimes.com  
  2. ^ Huber Matos cumple 95 años de edad . Curriculum vitae on the website of his party CID of November 26, 2013, accessed on May 8, 2014 (Spanish)
  3. ↑ Cuba: Germans ask about political prisoners . In: Der Spiegel . No. 31 , 1978 ( online ).
  4. ^ A b Alfonso Chardy: Former Cuban revolutionary Huber Matos is dead . In: Miami Herald , February 27, 2014; accessed on May 8, 2014 (English)
  5. ↑ Familiares y amigos despiden a Huber Matos en su funeral en Costa Rica . In: lainformacion.com, March 8, 2014; accessed on May 8, 2014 (Spanish)
  6. ↑ Huber Matos . In: The Economist , March 15, 2014; Obituary, accessed May 8, 2014
  7. ↑ 11 Admit defrauding Medicare . In: Miami Herald , January 7, 1995 (English), via LatinAmericanStudies.org; Retrieved September 23, 2011
personal data
SURNAME Matos, Huber
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Matos Benítez, Huber (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Cuban guerrilla leader, dissident
DATE OF BIRTH November 26, 1918
PLACE OF BIRTH Yara , Cuba
DATE OF DEATH February 27, 2014
Place of death Miami , Florida, USA