APRIL 26, 1999
Former rebel leader sees change for Cuba
Daily Sothtown, Sunday, April 25, 1999
By Ian James,
The Associated Press
MIAMI — Four decades ago, Eloy Gutierrez-Menoyo led a rebel force that helped topple Cuba's government, allowing a young revolutionary named Fidel Castro to assume power.
The loose alliance didn't last. Gutierrez-Menoyo soon turned against Castro and spent 22 years in Cuban prisons, where beatings robbed him of sight in one eye and hearing in one ear.
Somewhere amidst the blows, hunger strikes and years of solitude, Gutierrez-Menoyo says he realized violent insurrection would do no good.
Now 64 and living in exile in suburban Miami, Gutierrez-Menoyo fights on. Not with bullets, but with a conviction that peaceful dialogue with Castro is the only way to create democracy in Cuba.
He says he has buried the hatred he once felt for the Cuban president, and he has done what many of Miami's exile leaders consider unthinkable: He has met with Castro. He has shaken his hand, four times in the past four years.
"We are adversaries, but civilized adversaries," he says. "The peaceful solution, if it happens, is worth shaking hands with him 40 times."
Since 1995, Gutierrez-Menoyo has been asking the Cuban government to allow the group he leads, Cambio Cubano, or Cuban Change, to open an office in Havana. So far the answer is no.
But he keeps pressing, and he keeps speaking out for a less confrontational policy between the United States and Cuba. Although Gutierrez-Menoyo isn't much of a baseball fan, he says two games between the Baltimore Orioles and the Cuban national team this spring should help ease tensions between the countries.
Just as he opposes the United States' trade embargo against Cuba, Gutierrez-Menoyo opposes what he calls the Cuban government's "embargo on the liberties of the Cuban people."
His views make him unpopular among many of Miami's politicians and exile leaders. They call Gutierrez-Menoyo a collaborationist, a spokesman for socialists, a traitor.
"Here the majority of the exiles know that what Menoyo does is nothing more than publicity," says Francisco Hernandez of the exile group Unidad Cubana. "I have the worst opinion of him."
U.S. Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, a Miami Republican and an outspoken Castro opponent, says Gutierrez-Menoyo espouses "a line that is consistently very similar to public positions brought forth by the Cuban government."
Gutierrez-Menoyo's response: "Those who don't believe in what I'm doing, fine. I tell you that I believe less in what they are doing. They have been doing the same thing for 40 years, and they haven't done anything."
This lanky man with silver hair and intense brown eyes plans out his vision of Cuba's future from an office in a strip mall. On the walls hang portraits of Cuban independence hero Jose Marti and South Africa's Nelson Mandela.
The former commander of the National Second Front sits at his desk, a smoldering cigarette between his fingers, and tells his story.
"We supported the revolution that Castro proclaimed in '59," he says. It was a revolution that was supposed to improve conditions for the nation's people while protecting their freedoms, a revolution "as Cuban as the palm trees."
Shortly after dictator Fulgencio Batista fled Havana on Jan. 1, 1959, Gutierrez-Menoyo arrived from the Escambray Mountains with his guerrilla fighters, who he says were never under Castro's orders.
The 24-year-old commander rolled into the capital in a jeep five days before Castro and his top lieutenants. Gutierrez-Menoyo, who was born in Spain and moved to Havana as a boy, was granted Cuban citizenship for his role in the revolution.
But as Castro's revolution began to take shape, Gutierrez-Menoyo decided he wanted no part of it.
He came to Miami and became military leader for the newly formed anti-Castro group Alpha 66. In 1964, he landed in Cuba with three men in hopes of starting an insurrection. But government forces captured him, and the years in prison took their toll.
"One loses all youth there," he says. Unwilling to wear the uniform of a common prisoner, Gutierrez-Menoyo says he spent about 19 years in his underwear. Beatings by jail guards left him with broken ribs, he says. His weight dropped to 75 pounds as he protested in hunger strikes.
His life started anew with his release in 1986. He moved to Florida, where he married a woman 22 years his junior.
The two had three sons, and with the birth of each, Gutierrez-Menoyo planted a palm tree in front of their home on a quiet cul-de-sac in suburban Miami. Gladys Gutierrez-Menoyo says she and her husband try to shield the boys, ages 9, 6 and 4, from those who oppose their politics.
"When we go out with the kids, we go to the Keys, or we go to Hollywood" — places with fewer Cubans than Miami — she says, "just so we can avoid an ugly scene with the kids. We've been kicked out of gas stations for having a logo of Cambio Cubano on our car."
The group claims roughly 2,000 members, and Gutierrez-Menoyo believes opposition is fading, at least judging by his hate mail.
"All these are letters of threats, of insults," he says, pulling a bound stack of envelopes from a drawer in his office. "But something curious. ... The first year of Cambio Cubano, we received a bit more than 100 threat letters, the second year a bit more than 80, the third a bit more than 40. This past year, we received eight, nine letters the whole year."
Gutierrez-Menoyo draws no salary — only expenses for trips to places such as Washington, Spain and Cuba. The family is supported, Gladys Gutierrez-Menoyo says, with the help of her husband's adult daughter from a previous marriage. She owns a publishing company in Puerto Rico.
It might be easy for someone else in Gutierrez-Menoyo's position to retire and leave the past behind.
But he says he worries that Cuba's situation is worsening day by day. He sees it in the hundreds who leave by boat each year and in a spread of corruption he perceives in Cuban society. Without change, he says he is afraid the island could spin into anarchy.
During his first meeting with Castro since his release from prison, Gutierrez-Menoyo says the president — known for sometimes doing all the talking — listened to his request to open the country to opposition. That meeting, in 1995 in Havana, was followed by other meetings in the Cuban capital and in New York.
Years of waiting for an answer have not dampened Gutierrez-Menoyo's hope that Castro eventually will give in.
"My dream is that the Cuban people could freely choose their destiny and freely choose their leaders," he says. "Change is coming, whether Castro wants it or not."
© 1998 Associated Press
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