Havana/Four buses of the Armed Forces parked this Thursday in front of the Yara cinema, in Havana’s Vedado. His passengers – a flood of military men, almost all of them Army and Navy recruits – had tickets for the 2:00 pm performance: I am Barbarossathe documentary by filmmaker Rebeca Chávez about one of the most sinister architects of State Security, Commander Manuel Piñeiro.
Two days had passed since this newspaper called attention to the suspicious cloak of silence with which the ruling party covered the feared Barbarossa – who Chilean writer Jorge Edwards even said “limited and influenced” Fidel Castro’s movements – during the 65th anniversary of State Security.
It is assumed that the Armed Forces contingent had planned, well in advance, to go to the movies. Also drawing attention, in the midst of the current fuel crisis, was the deployment of four large vehicles to attend a recreational function. At the end of the event, the soldiers dispersed to the nearby food stands and, around 3:30 pm, returned to the buses.
Navy recruits, back on the buses after the screening of the documentary / 14ymedio
This Thursday morning, Prensa Latina announced the screening of I am Barbarossa in the Yara and recalled that Piñeiro had been “one of the founders” of Cuban counterintelligence, who owed his nickname “to the color of his beard since he came down from Sierra Maestra with the rank of commander.” He also alluded to his role as promoter – from a distance – of several guerrillas in Latin America.
The agency offered few details about the audiovisual, which recycled fragments of a 1997 CNN interview with Piñeiro, in addition to recordings of his first wife, the American dancer Lorna Burdsall; his widow, the Chilean Marxist Martha Harnecker; and his daughter, economics professor Camila Piñeiro. The documentary has only been screened once, on Cuban Television, at the beginning of the year, but it was not published by the Educational Channel on YouTube, as it usually does with its content.
The name of Barbarossa nor did it appear in the summary of the speech by Miguel Díaz-Canel, during a gala honoring counterintelligence in which Raúl Castro participated and where he described the history of State Security as “the most fascinating, inspiring and patriotic thing” in Cuban memory. For his part, the nonagenarian soldier did not get up from his seat and his speech – actually a small letter – was read by the Minister of the Interior, Lázaro Álvarez Casas.
Army officers and recruits, walking along 23rd Avenue towards the buses / 14ymedio
Piñeiro, son of wealthy Galicians and in the shadow of Castro since the times of Sierra Maestra, died in 1998 under suspicious circumstances. The official version states that “he crashed into a tree” while he was driving his car, which was foreign to his habit. Despite his absolute loyalty to the regime that he helped form, his biography is little known to most Cubans, and he has been largely absent from the festivities for the 65th anniversary of State Security.
However, legendary enmities are attributed to him and he is the protagonist of numerous conspiracy theories. One of them, precisely, points to the strange circumstances of his death after distancing himself from politics while supposedly preparing his autobiography.
2024-03-28 23:21:30
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