Rosendo Canto Hernández

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Graduate of the Manuel Márquez Sterling School of Journalism. He worked and held positions of responsibility at Información, Diario Nacional, Pueblo and Tiempo. Columnist. He was subdirector of Pueblo. He obtained several national awards.

Delegate of Cuba to the Conference for Freedom of Information held in Geneva in 1947. He collaborated with publications from Guatemala, Spain, the United States, Nicaragua and other countries.

The Cuban journalist and diplomat was ambassador of Cuba to Costa Rica, Korea and Taiwan during the years prior to the Castroite Revolution and candidate on several occasions for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Canto was ambassador in Taipei in 1959, the year of the revolutionary triumph, a position he voluntarily resigned from due to ideological incompatibility. On that date he moved to Madrid with his wife, Spanish lawyer Ascensión de Gregorio Sedeño, whom he had married in the Spanish capital in 1948.

Despite his initial opposition to the Castroite regime, Canto promoted reconciliation initiatives such as the Movement for Dialogue and Reconciliation, which made possible a political agreement with Havana for the liberation in 1978 of 2,000 prisoners of conscience and allowed 100,000 exiles to visit their relatives on the island, which led to his candidacy for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Canto himself, an activist of Christian humanism, has traveled to Cuba on some twenty occasions and has defended the dignity of the Cuban Government's position against the blockade imposed by the United States.

Spanish diplomacy took advantage of his experience in mediation for the liberation of 23 Spanish nuns kidnapped in 1964 in what is now the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

In his journalistic work, Canto has published more than 2,000 articles in the press, both Cuban and Spanish, and was one of the organizers of the foreign service of Radio Nacional de España. He was also founder and director of the Casa de Cuba in Madrid (1977-1988).

The diplomat and journalist, born in Havana, although of Spanish parents, has left two daughters, four grandchildren and two great-granddaughters.