Vol. 73/No. 37      September 28, 2009

An Afro-Cuban from Havana, Almeida completed elementary school and got a job as a bricklayer at age 11. He became an opponent of the corruption and exploitation he witnessed under U.S.-dominated pre-revolutionary Cuba, and like Fidel Castro, joined the Orthodox Party.

Fulgencio Batista took power in a military coup on March 10, 1952. Almeida shared the indignation working people in Cuba felt toward the regime and became part of a group led by Castro that set out to organize an armed struggle and popular insurrection to overthrow the dictatorship.

Almeida was part of a rebel contingent in what became one of the opening battles of the Cuban Revolution—the July 26, 1953, attack on the Moncada military barracks in the city of Santiago de Cuba. En route to battle, one of the cars of his contingent got a flat tire and he had to give up his space, preventing him from participating in the fighting. However, as the combatants retreated he was able to link up with them as they regrouped in the mountains. The combatants and Almeida were captured some days later, sent to prison, and released in 1955 following a national amnesty campaign.

Almeida was one of 82 revolutionaries who took part in the 1956 expedition of the Granma, when the July 26th Movement led by Castro launched a yacht from Mexico and landed on the shores of Cuba, opening up the guerrilla struggle against Batista’s forces. “No one here gives up!” shouted Almeida during that assault to fellow revolutionary leader Ernesto Che Guevara—a saying that became a famous motto of the revolution.

In February 1958, he was promoted to commander and led the Third Eastern Front until the taking of power on Jan. 1, 1959. Almeida was buried in Santiago September 15 at the mausoleum of the Third Eastern Front, joining 40 other combatants from that column.

Since 1959, Almeida had taken many major responsibilities leading the revolution, including head of the air force, vice minister of the Revolutionary Armed Forces, and vice president of the Council of State and Council of Ministers. He served on the Central Committee and Political Bureau of the Communist Party of Cuba since 1965. He was one of three guerrilla combatants to have received the title of Commander of the Revolution.

Almeida was the president of the Association of Combatants of the Revolution from its founding until his death. The association is made up of more than 300,000 Cubans spanning several generations who have taken part in revolutionary struggles and internationalist missions. These include the revolutionary war in the 1950s, the fight against the U.S.-organized counterrevolutionary attacks that followed, the mobilization of volunteer combatants to aid national liberation struggles in Angola and other countries in Africa and Latin America from the 1960s to the 1980s, and the teachers and medical personnel working in Venezuela, Haiti, and other countries today.

Almeida wrote about his experiences during the revolutionary war in two trilogies: Prison, Exile, and The Landing and The Sierra, Along the Slopes of Mt. Turquino, and The Sierra Maestra and Beyond. He was also a musician and composed songs about his experiences in the revolutionary movement.

Former Cuban president Fidel Castro said of Almeida in his Reflections column in the September 14 Granma, “I had the privilege of knowing him: a young black man, a worker, a combatant who, successively, was chief of his revolutionary cell, a Moncada combatant, a prison compañero, a platoon captain in the Granma landing, a Rebel Army officer … a compañero who shared the leadership of our force in the last victorious battles to overthrow the dictatorship. I was a privileged witness to his exemplary conduct for more than a half a century of heroic and victorious resistance.”
 
 
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