CUBA: Legendary Commander ‘Red Beard’ Dead at Age 63

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Mar 12 1998 (IPS) - Commandant Manuel Pineiro, better-known as “Red Beard”, a legendary leader of the Cuban revolution, died early Thursday morning in a car accident at the age of 63.

The former head of the Department of the Americas of the Cuban Communist Party’s Central Committee and of the Interior Ministry’s General Intelligence Office, Pineiro was in charge of preparing Argentine-Cuban guerrilla fighter Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s trips to the Congo and Bolivia.

Pineiro shipped guerrilla fighters all over the world without being detected by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), he witnessed Che and Fidel Castro’s final farewell, and informed Castro of Guevara’s death in Bolivia.

“In these revolutionary missions you leave your life under the pillow,” he said a year ago, when for the first time in three decades he decided to break his silence about Che in an interview with ‘Tricontinental’ magazine, published by the Organisation of Solidarity with the Peoples of Africa, Asia and Latin America.

Although in recent times, when his beard was no longer red but grey and he had been left off the Central Committee of the ruling Communist Party at its last congress in October 1997, Pineiro maintained an active political life.

Representatives of the Latin American left and even old enemies were constantly visiting Havana to meet and talk with him for hours.

A tireless conversationalist with an extraordinary level of knowledge about Latin America, Pineiro was frequently seen at receptions in foreign embassies in Havana, where he would usually chat with reporters.

But he granted few interviews, and at the moment of his death was perhaps the least well-known of all the commanders who fought alongside Castro in the 1959 revolution.

“What an absurd death,” was the reaction of an old friend of Pineiro, a contributor to the official daily ‘Granma’, who told IPS that the commandant had never lost the habit of driving to the paper very early every morning to find out the news of the day.

Pineiro left a book of memoirs that was to be published this year on the occasion of the 40th annivesary of the creation of the second revolutionary front in the mountains of the Sierra Maestra, which fought the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista (1952-59).

He first formed part of the column headed by Castro, but in March 1958 was sent to the second front as head of Personnel and Territorial Inspection, the Intelligence Service and the Rebel Police.

Born on May 14, 1934 in the city of Matanzas, 100 kms from Havana, Pineiro was a militant in the clandestine urban movement until joining the Rebel Army in May 1957. By the Jan. 1, 1959 triumph of the revolution, he had risen to the rank of commandant.

He participated in the creation of the Ministry of the Interior, and held the office of Deputy Interior Minister for around ten years. From 1974 to 1992 he headed the Department of the Americas of the Communist Party’s Central Committee, in charge of relations with political movements from the American continent.

Pineiro sat on the Central Committee since the creation of the Cuban Communist Party in 1965, but was one of the casualties of the Committee’s downsizing from 250 to 175 members last year.

On Wednesday night, shortly before his death, he participated in a ceremony held in commemoration of the second front of the revolution, and attended the farewell reception of Mexico’s Ambassador to Cuba, Claude Heller.

Although the details of the car crash have not been released, people close to the family said Pineiro may have suffered a heart attack while driving.

Through Pineiro, Che made contact in Cuba with a number of Latin American leftist leaders: Carlos Fonseca and Tomas Borges from Nicaragua, Turcios Lima from Guatemela, the late secretary- general of Uruguay’s Communist Party Rodney Arismendi and Chile’s former socialist president Salvador Allende, killed in the 1973 coup staged by Augusto Pinochet.

In his last interview, with Tricontinental magazine, published in late February, Pineiro revealed that in the first few months of 1959 Che was already planning to go and fight in Nicaragua, Colombia or Venezuela.