Rolando Masferrer

Masferrer was born on 12 July 1918,[4] in Holguín, former Oriente Province, Cuba. He married Lucila Montero and they had two children: Alejandro (Alex) (died as a homeless person in New York and Liudmila. Rolando had two brothers: Rodolfo and Raimundo. All emigrated to the U.S. with Rolando on January 7, 1959.

Masferrer was a member of the leftist revolutionary Joven Cuba organization as a teenager. He participated in an assassination attempt on Colonel Jose Eleuterio Pedraza, chief of Cuban National Police in 1936. He was a member of Cuba's Communist Party (Popular Socialist Party) from 1935, but was expelled in 1945, and later became anti-communist. He was assistant editor of Hoy (Today), the Cuban communist daily between 1939-45. Later he published a socialist weekly called Tiempo en Cuba (Time in Cuba).

He formed part of the Abraham Lincoln Brigade in the Spanish civil war in 1937. He was wounded in the left foot in Spain, and in Europe is said to have been an enforcer for the International Brigades, much feared for the thumping of his wounded gait when he approached his victim.[5] He was lame for the rest of his life.

He graduated as a lawyer from the University of Havana with honors (Dolz Award) in 1945. Masferrer participated, with Fidel Castro and over 1,000 Cubans, in the aborted Cayo Confites expedition of 1947, which sought to overthrow Rafael Trujillo, the authoritarian leader of the Dominican Republic. He was a rival of Castro in the bloody feuds of the trigger happy action groups in Havana and subject of one failed attempt by Castro and others to kill to him in 1948. Masferrer was elected to the Cuban House of Representatives for the Republican Party in 1948. He was fluent in English, and appointed as an English teacher at Marianao High School in 1946. Some think that this was a sinecure. He was founder and leader of the Movimiento Socialista Revolucionario (MSR), that became a gang.

Masferrer was a staunch supporter of Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista after the latter seized power in 1952. He was a Senator for the Partido Auténtico (1954-1958) in the Batista government and the leading founder of Los Tigres de Masferrer, a paramilitary organization set up to protect Batista from guerrilla groups and support Batista militarily. In this period he published two papers Tiempo in Havana and Libertad in Santiago de Cuba which insulted Francisco Franco, but without positive reaction among other leftwing Spanish Civil war exiles.[6]

During the final years of the last Batista regime to the end of 1958, Masferrer and his Tigres operated in Oriente province; from headquarters in Victoria de las Tunas, or others claim from Santiago, Manzanillo and Bayamo[7] He had an array of weapons including lethal large caliber "air rifles." His followers penetrated the Sierra Maestra with silence, terrifying local Escopeteros, who without time to react or appropriate weapons, fled before his forces; then the "tigres" fled. In this fashion the Tigres raided and killed in the foothills of the Sierra Maestra. He is known to have threatened Franciscan priests in Manzanillo, Cuba[8] The Cuban government of Fidel Castro accused Masferrer of 2,000 killings - disputed by some - and said the Tigres were careful to remove all evidence.[7]

Masferrer plotted to buy "La Hacienda Sevilla" and divide up the land so as to reward the local guajiros for informing on Fidel Castro in the first months of his operations in the Sierra Maestra. This connection may or may not explain the attempted betrayal of Castro by Agrarian Organizer Eutimio Guerra.[9]

Despite the fact that Masferrer had been a Communist supporter, after Fidel Castro seized power in Cuba on January 1, 1959, Masferrer had to abandon the island. He fled on his yacht Ola Kun II, an old former US Coast Guard vessel with his family and over 20 followers on January 1, 1959, arriving in Key West, Florida. He received asylum in the U.S. and settled in Miami. Castro accused to Masferrer of stealing US$17 million (disputed), and requested to the US government the extradition of Rolando, back to Cuba. Castro's request was denied.

In the United States, he befriended Mafia bosses such as Santo Trafficante, as well as union leader Jimmy Hoffa. He established the 30th of November organization, with the purpose of killing Castro. Masferrer was known for mistreating Cubans residing in Florida, extorting money from them for what he said would be "to help Cuba".

On September 26, 1960, Masferrer sent an expedition of four boats to Cuba. One boat reached the island, three Americans: Allan D. Thompson, Anthony Zarba and Robert O. Fuller were caught and eventually executed[10] In December, 1960, the Miami Herald, reported that Masferrer was leading a group of 53 people, undertaking training for assassination at a ranch owned by multi-millionaire Howard Hughes. In the early 1960s, Masferrer was associated with El Tiempo, a Spanish-language newspaper, edited by S. Ross, in New York City. In 1961, Masferrer met with President John F. Kennedy, to discuss Castro and the situation in Cuba. But Kennedy disliked Masferrer's radical and fanatical personality, and the two did not have any publicly known conversation after that.

In 1967, Masferrer plotted and accumulated weapons to invade Haiti so as to have a base, free of US law, to attack the Castro government which had foiled direct attempts to land (Project Nassau or Operation Istanbul).[11] Masferrer was imprisoned 2 years for this in the U.S. (1970–72). He owned a security agency in Miami, and published the weekly Libertad (Freedom). The Castro government had sentenced him to the death penalty in 1959. Masferrer was killed by a car bomb (specifically dynamite) on October 31, 1975. Fidel Castro arranged the attack, and it was carried out by Colonel Rodriguez, a member of Cuban Contra-intelligence.

• Morán Arce, Lucas 1980 La revolución cubana, 1953-1959: Una versión rebelde Imprenta Universitaria, Universidad Católica;
• de Paz-Sánchez, Manuel 2001. Zona de Guerra. España ante la Revolución Cubana. Litografía Romero. S.A. Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Canary Islands, Spain ISBN 84-7926-364-4
• Ros, Enrique 2003 Fidel Castro y El Gatillo Alegre: Sus Años Universitarios (Coleccion Cuba y Sus Jueces) Ediciones Universal Miami ISBN 1-59388-006-5