BY MIKE TABER
Manuel Piñeiro, a leader of the Cuban revolution
for more than four decades, died on March 12 in an
automobile accident in Havana. He was 63 years old.
Piñeiro was known by friends as "Barba Roja," or "Red Beard," due to the color of his beard in his youth. The revolution's enemies tried for decades but were never able to turn the nickname into a term of derision.
A native of Matanzas province east of Havana, Piñeiro came from a well-off family. In the early 1950s his father, the Matanzas representative of the Bacardi rum trust, sent him to the United States to study business at Columbia University. In 1955 he returned to Cuba and was among the founders of the July 26 Movement, the revolutionary organization led by Fidel Castro. The movement's aim was to overthrow the U.S.-backed dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista and begin a revolutionary transformation of the country.
Division General Samuel Rodiles Planas, second in command of Cuba's Western Army and one of Piñeiro's fellow combatants in the revolutionary war, gave the farewell speech at his graveside in Havana on March 13. He said Piñeiro was one of the outstanding activists of the youth brigade of the July 26 Movement in Matanzas. His intense efforts helped prepare for the landing of the Granma expedition that launched the armed insurrection against the dictatorship. Piñeiro eventually became head of the July 26 Movement in Matanzas, before being moved to Havana.
In May 1957 the leadership of the movement decided he should join the Rebel Army, led by Castro, in Cuba's Sierra Maestra mountains in southeastern Cuba.
In 1958 Piñeiro participated in forming the Rebel Army's Second Eastern Front under the command of Raúl Castro. Within the Second Front, he became head of the Directorate of Personnel and Territorial Inspection, the Intelligence Service, and the Rebel Police. By the war's end in January 1959, he held the rank of commander.
Following the victory over the Batista dictatorship, Piñeiro served as commander of the Moncada garrison in Santiago de Cuba, the country's second-largest city, and head of Rebel forces in Oriente province.
In mid-1959 he was transferred to Havana, where he assumed major responsibility for the Rebel Army's Directorate of Intelligence, later known as G-2.
This body played a crucial role in the fight against the counterrevolutionary war organized by Washington to overthrow the new workers and peasants government and reimpose the rule of Cuba's capitalists and landlords. Hundreds of small armed units were organized in Cuba in the early 1960s to carry out terrorist acts and appeal for direct U.S. military intervention. These bands were defeated by the mobilization of thousands of Cuban working people in the armed forces and militia. One key weapon was the revolution's ability to infiltrate the counterrevolutionary bands and to track down and apprehend their members. This effort was organized by the intelligence network that Piñeiro helped lead.
Another of its responsibilities was to protect the country from the numerous U.S. sabotage and assassination efforts aimed at the revolution and its leaders.
When the Ministry of the Interior was founded in 1961, Piñeiro became its deputy minister, continuing his responsibilities in the leadership of Cuba's intelligence operations. He held this post until 1975.
Within the Ministry of the Interior, Piñeiro also held the post of head of the General Directorate of National Liberation. In that capacity he collaborated with revolutionary forces throughout the Americas. He "was a valuable anonymous collaborator of Commander Ernesto Che Guevara in his internationalist missions in other lands of the world," Rodiles noted. During the early 1960s, virtually every left-wing leader from Latin America who passed through Cuba met with Guevara and Piñeiro. Among them were fighters from Nicaragua, Colombia, Guatemala, and elsewhere who later took up arms against the dictatorships in their countries.
The Cuban revolution offered its assistance to these fighters and many, many others. Cuban veterans of the revolutionary war volunteered to personally assist these efforts, with the support and encouragement of the Cuban government. When Guevara himself went to Bolivia in 1966-67 to lead a revolutionary movement against that country's military dictatorship, Piñeiro was Cuba's top liaison officer and organized its logistical support to the effort.
In 1975 he became head of the Communist Party Central Committee's Department of the Americas, a responsibility he held until 1992. Piñeiro was a member of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of Cuba from its founding in 1965 until 1997.
One measure of the effectiveness of Piñeiro's work on behalf of working people of the world was the special hatred he earned from the Cuban revolution's enemies in Washington. This hatred - as well as grudging respect - could be seen clearly in the obituary that appeared in the March 13 New York Times, referring to Piñeiro as "the ruthless but urbane spymaster," "a cunning and dangerous foe," and an "espionage wizard."
Among the articles he wrote was "National Liberation and Socialism in the Americas," published in English in 1984 in New International no. 3.
"With the death of compañero Manuel Piñeiro Losada, our party has lost an active member and the revolution one of its veteran soldiers," said Rodiles. "He left us his trajectory, his memory which cannot be erased, and his unforgettable friendship."