(CHICAGO) - On 12 March 1998 Cuban revolutionary leader Manuel Piñiero died in a car accident at the age of 63, perhaps as a result of a heart attack.

For every 100,000 people who have heard of Che Guevara, there might be only one or two who have heard of Piñiero.

Yet Piñiero (nicknamed "Red Beard") in many ways shared a similar stature--and even a grace and sense of humor--to Che's.

To some it might seem shocking--even almost blasphemous--to suggest that Piñiero was another Che. To some, Che is a strikingly attractive figure symbolizing the romantic individualist who, Christ-like, does not shrink from likely martyrdom in pursuit of justice. To others, his visage is today perhaps the foremost symbol of genuine Revolution. [See Che, Dead or Alive in SeeingRed issue 1.1]

However inspiring these images of Che, Che was a human--not an ethereal--being. On earth, his driving ambition was that common humanity take matters in its own hands against a nightmare-world of napalm, starvation, and humiliation.

And Che didn't just dream of a new world, he bent his every energy to leading humanity to create it. This dedication meant a lifetime selflessly devoted to war--not war against abstract Evil, but war against its earthly source: capitalism.

In short, Che was--in the best and fullest sense--an outstanding communist.

So was his comrade, Manuel Piñiero.

It was Piñiero, after all, who headed Cuba's spectacularly-successful defense against countless U.S. counter-revolutionary operations, including the many attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. The New York Times obituary admitted that "his adversaries at the Central Intelligence Agency ...regarded him as a cunning and dangerous foe." Prominent Mexican professor Jorge Castañeda (a milquetoast-socialist opponent of the Cuban Revolution) devoted nearly his entire "Cuba" chapter to Piñiero in his widely-reviewed 50-year history of Latin American guerillaism, Utopia Disarmed. Obviously appalled, he wrote that "From the very beginning of the Cuban Revolution, this man played a key role in building what became one of the most successful security agencies ever constructed."

Indeed he did.

And it was a wonderful thing.

For the most powerful empire in history was bending its every effort to crush the "first free territory in the Americas." It recruited thousands upon thousands of mercenaries, arming and training them for an invasion backed by the U.S. military. It paid and equipped thousands more to wreak such sabotage as to make life unlivable. It utilized myriad forms of biological warfare against the island. It devoted its Central Intelligence Agency and its "best and brightest" minds to overthrowing the Cuban Revolution. It even came close to unleashing worldwide nuclear war.

Yet all these efforts came to naught: the Revolution deepened, flourished, and gained immense international prestige.

Of course, such great achievements don't spring from the breasts of a small group of people: it was the millions of Cuban people--backed by greater millions of supporters around the world--who not only dared storm heaven, but to hold on to it intransigently.

Clearly, though, the team of revolutionaries led by Fidel Castro--a conscious organization of communists--played a critical role in successfully leading their fellow Cubans to not only overthrow capitalism, but to defend and extend their Revolution.

In all this, Manuel Piñiero was a central figure, whether as an outstanding young activist helping prepare the way launching the armed movement against the Batista dictatorship, head of rebel forces in Cuba's second-largest city following the insurrection, or leader of the Rebel Army's Directorate of Intelligence.

But "Red Beard" was at least as prominent as leader of the General Directorate of National Liberation and head of the Communist Party Central Committee's Department of the Americas--roles which highlight his centrality in Cuba's efforts to aid revolutionary fighters throughout Latin America. In fact it was Piñiero who was Che's chief liaison officer and logistics coordinator when Che went to Bolivia.

"This is a man who ... was on a first-name basis with two generations of Latin American revolutionaries and leaders," Jon Lee Anderson (author of Che Guevara: A Revolutionary Life) told the New York Times.

But Piñiero acted not as "Cuba's Spymaster," as the New York Times put it. Nor was he a sinister Stalinist secret-police bureaucrat, as in Castañeda's social-democratic fantasy. Nor was he a genius locked in personal combat with the CIA, an "espionage wizard" in the Times formulation.

He was a leader, but it was the Cuban people--arming and organizing themselves, volunteering to uncover and even infiltrate counter-revolutionary organizations--who defeated the Northern Colossus. And it was revolutionary fighters by their tens, even hundreds, of thousands who gave Yankee imperialism such nightmares in places like Nicaragua, Grenada, El Salvador and many other countries in the Americas.

And it is they--along with a new generation of young rebels--who will ensure that Manuel Piñiero, like his comrade Che, will still live.

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