DEMOCRATIC CUBAN SOLDIER DIES

March 6, 2008

Ramón Barquín, Cuban Colonel, Dies at 93

By ANTHONY DePALMA

Ramón M. Barquín, a respected Cuban Army officer whose struggles to restore the rule of law in Cuba clashed with both the dictator Fulgencio Batista and later the revolutionary government of Fidel Castro, died on Monday at his home in exile in Guaynabo, Puerto Rico. He was 93.

The cause was complications of leukemia, his son, Ramón Jr., said from Puerto Rico, where a funeral was held Wednesday.

Mr. Barquín, who held the rank of colonel in the Cuban Army, played a role in the events leading up to the triumph of Mr. Castro’s rebels. He was imprisoned after leading a group of professional officers in an unsuccessful coup d’état against Mr. Batista in 1956, eight months before Mr. Castro landed on the southeastern coast of Cuba to launch his revolution.

When Mr. Batista fled the country before advancing rebel forces on Jan. 1, 1959, Colonel Barquín, who had the support of United States officials, escaped from solitary confinement. With Mr. Castro still hundreds of miles away in the mountains of Oriente Province, Colonel Barquín assumed control of the Cuban armed forces at Camp Colombia, the country’s principal military base, in Havana.

Colonel Barquín then tried to negotiate with Mr. Castro but was unable to contact him. When the rebel leader Camilo Cienfuegos arrived at the Camp Colombia barracks on Jan. 2 with orders to assume command of the army, Colonel Barquín did not stand in his way, because his orders had been signed by Manuel Urrutia, the man recognized by Cuba’s Supreme Court as the new president. For the next few weeks, Colonel Barquín helped to establish a new government.

But his relationship with Mr. Castro quickly soured. Summary trials of Batista supporters, violating international standards of justice, convinced Colonel Barquín that the new government was moving in a direction he could not support. Realizing that Colonel Barquín was too popular to be imprisoned again, Mr. Castro gave him an ambassadorial position in Europe in 1959, effectively removing him from Cuba.

Colonel Barquín and other moderates in the new government formally broke ties with Mr. Castro in mid-1960. He resigned and went into exile.

Ramon Barquín was born May 12, 1914, in Cienfuegos, Cuba. He enlisted in the Cuban Army in 1933 and advanced steadily. In 1941, he graduated from the Cuban Military Academy as a first lieutenant, later rising to colonel.

Colonel Barquín attended the United States Strategic Intelligence School and became director of Cuba’s War College and Military Academy. During the presidency of Carlos Prio Socarras in the early 1950s, Colonel Barquín was Cuba’s military attaché in Washington. In 1955 he was awarded the Legion of Merit, a Congressional honor given to foreign military leaders.

In April 1956, Colonel Barquín returned to Cuba with plans to lead a cadre of professional officers against Mr. Batista. Word of the attack leaked out, and he was arrested, along with a dozen other officers. He was court-martialed and sentenced to eight years in prison on the Isle of Pines.

By the end of 1958, the Cuban Army — one of the largest in Latin America at the time — was unable to resist some 300 regulars backed by untrained peasants in Mr. Castro’s rebel force.

After breaking with the Castro government in 1960 and going into exile, Colonel Barquín was involved for a time in anti-Castro activities in Miami. In a 1961 interview with The New York Times, he encouraged the Cuban people to rise up against the Castro government, rejecting the Communist doctrine Mr. Castro had imposed but retaining certain aspects of the revolution that Mr. Castro had promised in 1959.

“We want to go back to those ideals of freedom, democracy, dignity and peace,” he said. “We must keep Castro’s land reform, but we must pay for the property expropriated. We must do it in the right way, not like demagogues.”

His son, Ramón Jr., said Colonel Barquín did not participate in the botched Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. Soon after that debacle, Colonel Barquín separated himself from the anti-Castro movement. In Puerto Rico he established the American Military Academy, a K-12 school and other educational institutions.

Colonel Barquín took up running when he turned 60 and ran in more than 20 marathons, including the 1994 New York City marathon.

In 1941 he married Hilda Cantero. She died in 2004. Besides his son, he is survived by a brother, Pedro; a sister, Josefina; and a daughter, Lilliam Consuegra, of San Juan.

Ramón Barquín Jr. said he hoped someday to return a small portion of his father’s ashes to Cuba, which Colonel Barquín left in 1959 and never saw again.


http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/06/world/americas/06barquin.html?ref=americas&pagewanted=print