Huber Matos Benítez

Cuban counterrevolutionary. He joined the Rebel Army when he drove a shipment of weapons from Costa Rica to the Sierra Maestra. By the end of the War of Liberation he received command of a column and when the triumph of the Revolution occurred he held the rank of commander.

Dissatisfied with the radical direction of the revolutionary process, he began an attempted sedition in the city of Camagüey in October 1958, taking advantage of his position as military chief of Regiment No. 2 Ignacio Agramonte. For this reason he was detained and sentenced to twenty years in prison.

Upon leaving prison he moved to Costa Rica and later settled in Miami, where he became one of the most extremist counterrevolutionaries of the so-called Cuban exile. An ideological enemy of the Cuban Revolution, he has unconditionally supported U.S. policy toward the Island, including the Helms Burton Law and the economic blockade against Cuba. He represents the most radical positions within the Cuban-American Mafia and has always supported the idea of direct confrontation between the United States and Cuba that would definitively end the Revolution.

He was born in Yara. He had rice businesses in the foothills of the Sierra Maestra and in 1957 he collaborated with the guerrilla led by Fidel Castro, facilitating the first major reinforcement that Frank País sent in men and weapons to meet up with Column 1 José Martí commanded by Fidel. After this operation he sought asylum in an embassy fearful of reprisals from the dictatorship.

In his exile in Costa Rica he became friends with the president of that nation, José Figueres, and together with other anti-Batista Cubans who were in that country such as José Assef, Pedro Miret, Samuel Rodríguez and others, he managed to fly a shipment of weapons in a plane piloted by Pedro Luis Díaz Lanz and Roberto Berdague to Cienaguilla, in the same Sierra Maestra.

He then joined the Rebel Army, where he ended the war commanding Column 9 Antonio Guiteras with the rank of commander. During the Summer Offensive carried out by the Army against the rebel forces in order to annihilate them, Fidel entrusted him with the mission of building stepped trenches to defend the Sierra Maestra, a mission he fulfilled excellently.

When the rebel troops went on the offensive, Column 9 Antonio Guiteras, under the command of Hubert Matos, tightened the siege on troops stationed in the town of El Cristo, which were left isolated from possible reinforcements from Santiago de Cuba or Guantánamo. The surrender of the army troops, who escaped one night, before the forces of Column 6 Juan Manuel Ameijeiras, which closed the siege and surprised them, caused a disagreement between the chief of this force, commander Samuel Rodiles Planas, and Hubert Matos, because Hubert refused to share the captured weapons with this chief.

When the regime of Fulgencio Batista was overthrown, Hubert Matos held various positions until he was finally placed as chief of the Rebel Army in Camagüey province.

Soon he showed discontent with the radicalization of the Cuban Revolution and began accusing it of sliding toward Communism. This caused the CIA to look at him as an alternative to revolutionary power. In Camagüey he established close relations with ranchers, large landowners and others who had been harmed by revolutionary laws; he spent thousands of pesos from the Rebel Army budget on propaganda activities to create an image of a great commander, and even managed to confuse some low-level revolutionary officers.

Because of his conservative and anticommunist attitude, he had several confrontations with leftist forces and popular sectors, such as the peasants of Las Maboas, who refused to pay rent to landowners, and with workers from Central Jaronú, and he did everything possible to stop the implementation of Agrarian Reform in the territory under his command.

On October 20, 1959, at the headquarters of Regiment No. 2 Agramonte in the city of Camagüey, under the command of commander Huber Matos, meetings and contacts took place that gave rise to rumors that spread throughout the city.

Hubert Matos drafted a resignation letter, supposedly private, addressed to the Commander in Chief and Prime Minister of the revolutionary government, Fidel Castro. This letter was reproduced and made known to officers, journalists, the Coordination of the 26th of July Movement and other sectors. In this way the letter ceased to be private to serve as a stimulus for a counterrevolutionary sedition. The essential objective was to force Fidel to give an ideological definition of the Revolution, when anticommunist prejudices were still strong.

That night, a provincial act was to be held in the Plaza de Las Mercedes in remembrance of Sabino Pupo and they expected the arrival of Hubert Matos, but he decided not to attend. After the act concluded, captain Jorge Enrique Mendoza, certain that a betrayal was being plotted, since Huber Matos' resignation was publicly known, called Fidel. Camilo Cienfuegos, Chief of the General Staff of the Rebel Army, received instructions to meet immediately with Fidel Castro. Upon concluding the meeting he took an executive plane and headed to Camagüey. Upon arriving in the city of Camagüey, the men of captain Jorge Enrique Mendoza already controlled, by order of Fidel, the two police stations, the airport, the telephone center, all radio stations, the television channel and the newspaper. Camilo went immediately to the headquarters of the Camagüey Regiment, at the Agramonte Barracks, and told Hubert Matos:

"You are under arrest!, accused of treason, and you must come with me. I have come to replace all the officers, until Fidel arrives…."
Hubert Matos offered no resistance. Camilo entered the barracks alone and unarmed and took command of the Camagüey Regiment. Hubert Matos was tried for the crime of sedition and sentenced to twenty years in prison.

Hubert Matos served his full sentence and was released from prison on October 21, 1979. He moved immediately to Costa Rica and subsequently went to Miami where he established his residence. There he founded the organization Cuba Independent and Democratic (CID), which carried out numerous terrorist acts against Cuba in recent decades.

The political discourse of Hubert Matos focused on continued counterrevolutionary attacks and on seeking to create fissures between the Revolutionary Armed Forces and the Ministry of the Interior, encouraging betrayal by officers and fighters. On more than one occasion he made appeals in that sense and proclaimed his interest in creating clandestine cells opposed to the Cuban government within its armed institutions.

An ideological enemy of the Cuban Revolution, Matos has unconditionally supported American policy toward the Island. Without hiding his total adherence to the Helms Burton Law, he defended on more than one occasion all those measures that represent the fiercest blockade against Cuba. Today he represents the most radical positions within the Cuban-American Mafia and has always supported direct confrontation to end the Revolution.

He died in Miami on February 27, 2014 after being hospitalized for a brief time.