Manuel Piñeiro Losada

Manuel Piñeiro Losada (14 March 1933 – 11 March 1998), also known as Commander Barbarroja ("red beard" in Spanish), was a Cuban political and military figure, a leader of the Cuban Revolution, and, between 1961 and 1964, the first head of the Dirección General de Inteligencia of Cuba. Under Piñeiro, the DGI supported armed struggles in Latin America, helping radical leftist guerrilla groups in the region. Between 1964 and 1968, Piñeiro acted as the Deputy Minister of the Interior of Cuba, during this time he was in charge of the state security apparatus. A Soviet reorganization of the DGI forced Piñeiro out of his position, and he was placed in charge of the DGI's Latin American affairs division.

Biography Manuel Piñeiro Losada was born on 14 March 1933 in Matanzas, Cuba. His family, who had immigrated to Cuba from the Spanish region of Galicia, was relatively prosperous—his father was a Bacardi executive. After participating in the student protests against the 10 March 1952 coup d'état which brought dictator Fulgencio Batista to power, Piñeiro's family sent him to study business management at Columbia University in New York. There, he met his first wife, Lorna Burdsall, whom he married in 1955.

On June 6, 1961, he was appointed Deputy Minister of the Interior and head of the so-called Technical Viceministerio, the body that would be later responsible for gathering intelligence and developing strategies to expand communism in Latin America.

In 1965, he was appointed to the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party, a post he held until 1997.

That same year in Havana, he received the visit of Markus Wolf, director of the East German secret police (the Stasi). Wolf, whose real identity would only be known to the Western intelligence services in 1979, had gone to Cuba to advise the socialist government how to set up the new General Intelligence Directorate on the island.

In early 1975, Piñeiro was head of the "Américas Department" of the Cuban Communist Party's Central Committee.

In 1997, he resigned all his active government positions and started to write and edit books dedicated to a retrospective analysis of the Cuban Revolution.