Ramon M. Barquin, a respected Cuban army officer whose struggles to restore the rule of law in Cuba clashed with dictator Fulgencio Batista and later the revolutionary government of Fidel Castro, died Monday at his home in exile in Guaynabo, Puerto Rico. He was 93.
The cause was complications of leukemia, his son, Ramon Jr., said from Puerto Rico, where a funeral was held Wednesday.
Mr. Barquin, who held the rank of colonel, played a role in the events leading up to the triumph of Castro’s rebels. He was imprisoned after leading a group of professional officers in an unsuccessful coup against Batista in 1956, eight months before Castro landed on the southeastern coast of Cuba to launch his revolution.
When Batista fled the country before advancing rebel forces on Jan. 1, 1959, Mr. Barquin, who had the support of U.S. officials, escaped from solitary confinement. With Castro still hundreds of miles away in the mountains, Mr. Barquin assumed control of the Cuban armed forces at Camp Colombia, the country’s principal military base, in Havana.
He then tried to negotiate with Castro but was unable to contact him. When the rebel leader Camilo Cienfuegos arrived at the Camp Colombia barracks on Jan. 2 with orders to assume command of the army, Mr. Barquin did not stand in his way, because his orders had been signed by Manuel Urrutia, the man recognized by Cuba’s Supreme Court as the new president. For the next few weeks, Mr. Barquin helped to establish a new government.
But his relationship with Castro quickly soured. Summary trials of Batista supporters, violating international standards of justice, convinced Mr. Barquin that the new government was moving in a direction he could not support. Realizing that Mr. Barquin was too popular to be imprisoned again, Castro gave him an ambassadorial position in Europe in 1959, removing him from Cuba.
Mr. Barquin and other moderates in the new government formally broke ties with Castro in mid-1960. He resigned and went into exile.
After that, Mr. Barquin was involved for a time in anti-Castro activities in Miami. In a 1961 interview with The New York Times, he encouraged the Cuban people to rise up against the Castro government, rejecting the communist doctrine Castro had imposed but retaining certain aspects of the revolution that Castro had promised in 1959.
“We want to go back to those ideals of freedom, democracy, dignity and peace,” he said. “We must keep Castro’s land reform but we must pay for the property expropriated. We must do it in the right way, not like demagogues.”
His son, Ramon Jr., said Mr. Barquin did not participate in the botched Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961. Soon after that debacle, Mr. Barquin separated himself from the anti-Castro movement. In Puerto Rico he established the American Military Academy, a K-12 school and other educational institutions.
The son said he hoped someday to return a small portion of his father’s ashes to Cuba, which Mr. Barquin never saw again after leaving 49 years ago.