Manuel Piñeiro

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Manuel Piñeiro Losada (born March 14, 1933 in Matanzas , Cuba , † March 11, 1998 in Havana ), called Barbarroja ( red beard ), was a Cuban politician and one of the military leaders of the Cuban Revolution . Piñeiro was from 1961 to 1964 the first director of the Cuban state intelligence service Dirección de Inteligencia and until 1968 Deputy Minister in the Ministry of the Interior with responsibility for the state security services.

Life

Piñeiro came from a wealthy family of an employee of the liquor manufacturer Bacardí . He took part in student protests and demonstrations against the coup of March 10, 1952, with which the dictator Fulgencio Batista put himself at the head of the Cuban government.

In September 1953, his family sent him to study at Columbia University in New York City to keep him away from the political unrest in Cuba. While studying in the USA, he also began to oppose the social, racial and political discrimination in the USA.

In 1955 he returned to his hometown, where he became one of the founding members of the July 26th Movement . Soon after his return he was arrested by Batista's security service for participating in the underground political movement. After his release, he continued his resistance work in Havana. When he noticed that he was still under surveillance by the secret police , he decided to go to the mountains of the eastern Sierra Maestra to support the guerrilla movement around Fidel Castro .

In March 1958 he was honored by Fidel Castro for his services in the Cuban freedom struggle and commissioned with the integration of the newly created second front, which was commanded by Castro's younger brother Raúl under the name of Frank País . During his missions at the front, Piñeiro had many encounters with members of the regular Cuban army of the dictator Batista. As a result, he became head of the Personnel and Inspection Department of the Cuban Revolutionary Army. This also included the guerrilla intelligence service and the resulting Policía Rebelde .

During the fighting for the liberation of the second largest Cuban city, Santiago de Cuba , Piñeiro was promoted to Comandante (Major) of the rebel army, the highest rank. Until the complete victory of the revolution in Cuba, he became the military commander of the garrison in Santiago de Cuba. He was then called to Havana, where he was involved in various functions in the establishment and development of the Cuban security authorities and intelligence services. In March 1959 he was chairman of the revolutionary tribunal against members of the Cuban Air Force , which was repeated on Fidel Castro's personal orders and which aroused international attention as a gross violation of the basic principles of justice. After a detailed trial, the war criminals were acquitted for lack of evidence at the beginning of March, before a second trial, chaired by Piñeiro, ended a few days later with no new evidence and up to 30 years' imprisonment.

In the second half of 1959 he was posted from the eastern Cuban province of Oriente to the capital Havana to build up the security and secret service apparatus of the revolutionary government from there. On June 6, 1961, he was appointed Deputy Minister in the Cuban Ministry of the Interior. In 1964 he took over the management of the Dirección de Inteligencia (DI) that he had initiated . One of the central tasks he oversaw, which allowed him to work closely with Ernesto "Che" Guevara until his death , was the "export of revolution" from the outset, that is, the support of allied left-wing revolutionary organizations in other countries. One of the first target countries was Argentina: the guerrilla group Ejército Guerrillero del Pueblo ("People's Guerrilla Army", EGP), assembled and trained in Cuba, was led in 1963 by Ricardo Masetti in the Argentine-Bolivian border area, which was to be replaced by Guevara after a stable base had been established . However, the EGP was crushed by the Argentine security forces in 1964 and Guevara chose Bolivia as the priority country for a new guerrilla war in South America. In 1965 Piñeiro was responsible for the organization of Guevara's return from the Congo via Tanzania and Czechoslovakia to Cuba and his subsequent journey to Bolivia. During the guerrilla mission in Africa, Guevara was accompanied by over 140 Cubans, and more than 20 went to Bolivia.

In 1965, Piñeiro received support from Markus Wolf to reorganize the Dirección de Inteligencia . In 1967/68 he was involved in the uncovering of a "micro-faction" conspiracy by some leading members of the Communist Party with high representatives of the Soviet Union, which caused a violent crisis between the two governments. After this crisis had been resolved, Piñeiro left the DI and took over the America departments in the Cuban Foreign Ministry and in the apparatus of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba , of which he was a member from 1965 to 1997.

In the early 1970s he lived in Chile for a while to support the government of Salvador Allende . In 1979 he supported the Sandinista revolution in Nicaragua .

In 1997 he gave up all his offices and began to publish his memoirs on Cuban and Latin American history. On March 11, 1998, he died in a car accident. His second marriage was to the Chilean sociologist Marta Harnecker , with whom he had a daughter.

Fonts

  • Che Guevara and the Latin American Revolutionary Movements.
  • Barbarroja: Selección De Testimonios Y Discursos Del Comandante Manuel Piñeiro Losada.

literature

  • Jorge Castaneda: Utopia Unarmed: The Latin American Left after the Cold War.
  • Luis de la Rosa Valdés: Fidelidad. (Biography) Verde Olivo, Havana 2011, ISBN 978-959-224-290-6

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Inter-American Commission on Human Rights: Report No. 47/81; Case No. 4677 (PDF file; 64 kB), investigation report from June 25, 1981, accessed on November 28, 2012 (English)
  2. ↑ Actuará como Fiscal en juicio contra aviadores el Ministro de Defensa , in: Diario de la Marina of March 4, 1959, accessed via the Digital Library of the Caribbean on November 29, 2012 (Spanish)
  3. ↑ a b Entrevista con el comandante Manuel Piñeiro, in: Jornada of October 9, 1997, accessed on January 27, 2017 (Spanish)
  4. ↑ Gustavo Silva: Enero 25 (1971) ¿Micro- fracción o facción? ( Memento of the original from February 2, 2011 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2Template: Webachiv / IABot / eichikawa.com 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: Emilio Ichikawa, January 25, 2011 (Spanish), accessed December 27, 2012
personal data
SURNAME Piñeiro, Manuel
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Piñeiro Losada, Manuel (full name); Barbarroja, Red Beard (nickname)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Cuban politician and revolutionary
DATE OF BIRTH March 14, 1933
PLACE OF BIRTH Matanzas , Cuba
DATE OF DEATH March 11, 1998
Place of death Havana