Manuel Piñeiro, the legendary intelligence chief who ran Cuba's campaign to provide training and weapons to leftist guerrillas throughout Latin America, died in a car accident, Cuban media announced Thursday.

Remembered by friends as a politically moderate intellectual, and by critics as a ``tormentor,'' Piñeiro, 64, was one of the last surviving historical leaders of the Cuban Revolution.

A wreath marked ``From Commander in Chief Fidel Castro'' held the place of honor at his wake in a Havana funeral home jammed with military and security officers, government officials, academics, some Roman Catholic priests and foreign diplomats. Piñeiro was buried Thursday afternoon.

A brief report by Prensa Latina, the government news agency, gave no details of the accident but other reports said Piñeiro, who suffered from diabetes, became ill at the wheel of his car and crashed after he left a party he attended Wednesday night at the Mexican Embassy.

Lost official title

Piñeiro lost his official title in 1992 after a clash with Castro's brother, armed forces chief Raul Castro, but kept in touch with government officials and diplomats and still used his office in Cuba's Communist Party.

Piñeiro was 24 years old when he joined the Castro brothers in the Sierra Maestra mountains to fight President Fulgencio Batista, growing the thick red beard that tagged him with the lifelong nickname of Barbarroja.

Named deputy minister of the interior two years after the rebel victory in 1959, he soon became a mastermind and enforcer of security and intelligence operations at home and abroad.

``Those of us who were in prison during those years remember the torture and brutal treatment we suffered,'' said Ricardo Bofill, a Cuban exile who lives in Miami and heads the Cuban Human Rights Committee. ``He was a great tormentor.''

Training, arming guerrillas

Piñeiro is better known abroad for his role in training, arming and providing other assistance to dozens of leftist groups that launched guerrilla and terrorist attacks around Latin America in the 1960s, '70s and '80s.

Cuba steadfastly denied any involvement in foreign subversion until a book last year by a Havana journalist confirmed its assistance to rebels in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Peru, Uruguay, Venezuela and several other countries.

Years later, Piñeiro's men were still helping leftist guerrillas in El Salvador and Honduras, as well as the pro-independence Machetero radicals in the U.S. Commonwealth of Puerto Rico.

Last year, Piñeiro gave a lengthy interview recalling his work with Ernesto ``Che'' Guevara, the Argentine-Cuban guerrilla killed in 1967 while trying to foment a guerrilla movement in Bolivia.

In 1975, Piñeiro was named head of the Communist Party's Department of the Americas, where he kept in close touch with leftist parties operating openly as well as guerrilla movements throughout the continent.

Kept a low profile

Piñeiro kept a low profile throughout his years at the helm of Cuba's top intelligence networks, considered by U.S. analysts to have been far more effective than those run by the armed forces' intelligence branch.

But he was seen in public more often after he lost the party title in 1992, apparently as part of an effort by Raul Castro to signal to the world that Cuba was no longer involved in foreign subversion.

He began attending diplomatic receptions, and told longtime friends that he favored opening Cuba to more Western influences and embracing more market-oriented reforms.

Born in Cuba to Spanish immigrants, he studied briefly at Colombia University in New York before returning to Cuba in the mid-1950s to join the pro-Castro urban underground. He was a member of the Communist Party's Central Committee from its founding until last year.

Piñeiro had one son, Manuel, with his first wife, American dancer Lorna Burdsall, who still lives in Cuba, and a daughter, Patricia, with his second wife, Chilean writer Marta Harnecker.