While confined to a prison on Isla de Pinos overlooking the Caribbean Sea, Eloy Gutierrez Menoyo gained a reputation as a man of resistance.
He refused to wear prison garb or work in the rock pit. It was wrong to impose hard labor on prisoners of conscience, he told his captors.
Their response was swift. Prison guards beat him for hours, leaving him deaf in one ear and nearly blind in the left eye.
After two decades in prison, the former anti-Castro warrior is still resisting. Only this time he’s taken on Miami’s Cuban exile leadership.
Gutierrez Menoyo, 57, wants to negotiate with his former enemy, Fidel Castro. He advocates dialogue as the only way to avoid a bloody civil war in Cuba.
“Twenty-two years in prison forces you to meditate. Those of us who have made war know what war is,” he says. “If you want Fidel Castro’s head, is it worth the heads of thousands of Cubans?”
Usually, that kind of talk provokes recriminations from the vehement parts of the anti-Castro community.
Not so with Gutierrez Menoyo.
He is respected, even by people who reject his views. And that respect, earned during his years in prison, makes him dare to try to wrest away political influence that once was reserved for more hard-line groups.
In March, he launched Cambio Cubano (Cuban change), a group that seeks to change U.S. foreign policy toward Cuba.
Since then, he has been taking his message to Washington and Little Havana.
“He’s coming from the core of the anti-Castro movement, and that makes his voice resound with authority,” says Lisandro Perez, a Florida International University specialist on Cuba.
Fighting dictatorships has been a lifelong obsession. At age 25, Gutierrez Menoyo commanded a rebel army in the central Escambray mountains, a group that later joined Castro’s forces.
He soon grew disenchanted with the revolution’s shift to Marxism and fled Cuba in 1961. In Miami, he founded the paramilitary group Alpha 66, which smuggled weapons and raided military installations along the Cuban coast.
Seeking to overthrow Castro, Gutierrez Menoyo and three other men infiltrated Cuba in December 1964. They planned an uprising, starting in the eastern mountains.
Instead, they were captured on Jan. 24 while hiding from soldiers sent to scour the countryside.
Thus began Gutierrez Menoyo’s 22 years in prison, where he was sentenced to 25 additional years for inciting rebellion from his cell.
“I had resigned myself to the idea that I was going to die in prison,” he says.
Despite his resistance to Castro, Gutierrez Menoyo’s politics were always different from most exile leaders.
He came from a family of Spanish socialists who fled to Cuba after the Spanish civil war, when Gutierrez Menoyo was a teen-ager. His father was a liberal doctor; his brother, Carlos, died in an attack on the palace of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista.
During his long internment in prison, supporters pressed for Gutierrez Menoyo’s release. Sen. Edward Kennedy wrote to Fidel Castro. Spain’s Socialist Prime Minister Felipe Gonzalez did, too, and eventually persuaded Castro to free Gutierrez Menoyo.
Patricia, his 23-year-old daughter, was waiting at a Madrid airport when her father arrived in December 1986. They had not seen each other in two decades. Yet he knew Patricia, he says, from the years in prison he spent imagining her life.
“I watched my daughter as she was growing up. I talked to her and sang to her. When you are confined, you discover a whole world inside that sustains you. You discover that you are a poet and a composer. This allows you to keep your integrity,” Gutierrez Menoyo says.
Since his release, he has remarried and lives with his wife, Gladys Teresa, and their two sons, Carlos Alberto, 3, and Alejandro Jose, 1, in a suburban home in southwest Miami. Gutierrez Menoyo says he makes his living in a medical equipment business with his wife, a nutritionist.
Although he is a quiet man who chain-smokes and speaks in a self-effacing manner, his iron will is evident.
It shows when he speaks about his opponents — be they Castro or the powerful Cuban American National Foundation, which he says has distorted the image of Cuban-Americans.
“They have helped create a reactionary and caveman-like image,” he says.
The CANF, the conservative anti-Castro lobby, declines to comment on Gutierrez Menoyo’s statements.
He agrees with CANF, however, that Cuba must change. But he does not want the end to come through fighting that he says could turn Cuba into another Bosnia or Somalia.
Instead, Gutierrez Menoyo advocates a negotiated settlement — one in which Castro would agree to retire or hold free elections in exchange for the lifting of the U.S. trade embargo.
An old friend, Huber Matos, also a former Cuban political prisoner, says Gutierrez Menoyo is wrong.
“We who know Fidel Castro know that he doesn’t want to converse with anybody,” Matos says.
Still, Gutierrez Menoyo’s views have attracted attention — from the BBC, from The New York Times, from the halls of Congress.
Although he isn’t fluent in English, he has talked at length to Washington officials about Cuba. His supporters — mostly liberal Cubans with ties to the Democratic Party — served as translators when he visited Sens. Edward Kennedy, D-Mass., and Bob Kerry, D-Neb., in late May.
Some say Cambio Cubano’s chances of influencing Washington are slim. For one, Cuban-American leaders in the Democratic Party want President Clinton to continue his predecessor’s hard line toward Cuba.
Gutierrez Menoyo also is seen as an unlikely political leader, one who doesn’t believe in professional lobbying or campaign contributions.
“I don’t believe he understands how the game is played in Washington,” says FIU professor Perez.
Still, Cambio Cubano reflects a growing diversity in the Cuban-American community when it comes to how to deal with Cuba.
“It shows there are many groups of Cuban-Americans out there, and not all are saying the same thing,” says Jorge Dominguez, a Harvard University professor and author on Cuba.
Says Gutierrez Menoyo: “All these voices are worthy of hearing.”
