Cuban dissident Eloy Gutierrez-Menoyo dies

Posted on Friday, 10.26.12

Cuban dissident Eloy Gutierrez-Menoyo dies
By PAUL HAVEN
The Associated Press

HAVANA -- Eloy Gutierrez-Menoyo, who went from rebel commander fighting
alongside Fidel Castro to a foe launching commando raids against the
island before settling inside Cuba as a moderate, pro-dialogue
dissident, died early Friday. He was 77.

Gutierrez-Menoyo died of a heart attack at 5:30 a.m. at a Havana
hospital, his wife Flor Ester Torres Sanabria told The Associated Press.
Funeral plans were not yet known.

Gutierrez-Menoyo had lived permanently in Cuba since August 2003, after
visiting the island during a family vacation and deciding to stay for
good. Cuban authorities allowed him to remain despite his frequent
criticisms of the government, but his immigration status was apparently
never resolved.

The tall, slender man with long, wispy white hair and wire-framed
spectacles had hoped to open an office on the island of his Cambio
Cubano movement - but the dream was never realized. Nearly blind and
hard of hearing, Gutierrez-Menoyo was seen occasionally in Havana at
meetings involving moderate Cuban exiles.

Until his health began to fail him in 2010, Gutierrez-Menoyo frequently
spoke out against the communist government, but in measured tones that
kept him out of jail.

After Fidel Castro retired due to ill health in February 2008 and his
brother Raul formally replaced him as president, Gutierrez-Menoyo
expressed disappointment that Cuba's communist system remained unchanged.

"Cuba cannot continue to corner itself, trying to convince the world
that there is democracy here when a one-party system will never be a
democracy," he lamented.

Formed in Miami in 1992, Cambio Cubano was seen as a centrist group,
promoting dialogue and reconciliation among Cubans of all political
stripes, including officials in Castro's government. But some members of
the exile community considered it soft and politically accommodating.

Born Dec. 8, 1934, in Madrid, Spain, Gutierrez-Menoyo was the son and
brother of men who fought against the Spanish dictator Gen. Francisco
Franco.

One of his brothers died in combat in Spain as a member of the Spanish
Republican forces. The family moved to Cuba in 1945 and another brother,
Carlos, was killed in March 1957 during an attack on the presidential
palace of Cuban strongman Fulgencio Batista.

Gutierrez-Menoyo, who had opposed Batista's government from the early
1950s, participated in the same attack. Later he formed and commanded
the Second Front of Escambray, a rebel group that operated alongside but
independently of guerrilla forces Castro led.

After the Cuban revolution's January 1959 victory, Gutierrez-Menoyo's
Second Front was incorporated into the new government's Revolutionary
Army, but its senior officers were not granted positions of authority.

Although he had arrived in Havana as one of the triumphant "Commanders
of the Revolution," Gutierrez-Menoyo quickly broke with Castro and by
1961 was in exile in Miami helping form Alpha 66, an armed commando
group dedicated to the violent overthrow of Castro's government.

In December 1964, Gutierrez-Menoyo returned to Cuba with an armed band
in hopes of launching an uprising, but they were captured after a month.

Gutierrez-Menoyo spent 22 years in Cuban prisons, losing vision in one
eye and hearing in one ear. He was freed in 1986 through a petition of
the Spanish government after an international campaign for his release.

He went into exile, first briefly to Madrid, and then a year later to
Miami, where he ultimately adopted a position of peaceful dialogue with
Castro's government and founded Cambio Cubano.

He even met with Castro in 1995 - an encounter that was apparently never
repeated.

A former wife, Gladys, and their three sons together, live in Miami. His
daughter by an earlier marriage, Patricia Gutierrez-Menoyo, lives in San
Juan, Puerto Rico, where she runs a publishing house.

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http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/10/26/3068636/cuban-dissident-eloy-gutierrez.html