Former Cuban guerrilla comandante who turned against Fidel Castro and became an ardent counter-revolutionary in Miami
One of the most prominent political prisoners to pass through the jails of Fidel Castro's Cuba, Huber Matos, who has died aged 95, was a former guerrilla comandante turned anti-Castro activist. When the Cuban revolutionary war broke out in the late 1950s, Matos was already nearly 40. As a teacher in a provincial school and a small-scale rice farmer, he scarcely fitted the profile of a guerrilla leader, and was certainly no communist. In those days, however, nor was the rebel leader Fidel Castro. His civilian political affiliation, like that of Matos, had been with the anti-communist Partido Ortodoxo (the People's Party of Cuba).
After Fulgencio Batista staged his 1952 coup, Matos began to work against the dictatorship, and in 1953 when Castro's 26th of July Movement launched its armed struggle in the mountains of the Sierra Maestra – not far from Matos's home in Manzanillo and his birthplace of Yara – he arranged transport for the first group of reinforcements that the tiny guerrilla army received.
Forced to go into exile, he obtained fresh recruits, weapons and ammunition in Costa Rica and flew them to Cuba in a C-47 transport plane in March 1958. Castro rewarded him with the rank of comandante (major), putting him on an equal footing with a handful of men – including Che Guevara – who led guerrilla columns. Matos's Column No 9 made the final attack on the second city of Santiago de Cuba, and after the rebel victory he was made military commander of the strategically important central province of Camagüey.
The cattle ranchers of Camagüey were among the most bitter opponents of Castro's proposed agrarian reform, which threatened them with expropriation and Matos's sympathies lay with them rather than with the increasingly powerful pro-communist wing of the movement. A showdown with Castro was inevitable and Matos did not shirk it. He urged the Cuban leader to combat communist infiltration – both in the National Institute of Agrarian Reform and in the military.
Castro ignored the demand, and when Matos then asked to be relieved of his duties he was told: "We still need men like you." However, when Castro's brother Raúl – the regime's most prominent communist – was appointed to head the army, Matos resigned in disgust.
That might have been the end of the story, but for the fact that Fidel Castro regarded Matos as too dangerous a man to remain on the loose. In an exchange of letters, Matos urged him not to treat critics as counter-revolutionaries. "Men fade away," he wrote, "while history collects their deeds and makes the final reckoning … do not bury the revolution." Fidel responded that he was "under no obligation to account to you for my actions."
The revolutionary hero Camilo Cienfuegos, a fellow comandante, was sent to arrest Matos in October 1959 and to take charge of Camagüey. Somewhat reluctantly (according to Matos's version), Cienfuegos carried out the order. On the same day Fidel had Matos and 15 other officers who had supported his stance brought to Havana, where they were confined in the fortress of La Cabaña. Fidel then flew to Camagüey to make a speech in which he accused Matos of planning a counter-revolutionary uprising.
It was a week of extraordinary tension, with the revolution still less than a year old. A prominent defector, the former head of the rebel air force Pedro Luis Díaz Lanz, buzzed Havana in a light plane and dropped anti-communist leaflets. Díaz Lanz had been the pilot of Matos's C-47 that had brought weapons from Costa Rica the previous year. A few days later, Cienfuegos was killed in a mysterious plane crash, with neither the aircraft nor Cienfuegos's body ever found. Some speculated that Cienfuegos had been killed by Fidel for being too close to Matos, but there is no evidence the crash was anything but accidental.
Matos and his fellow officers were put on trial for treason in December 1959. Both Castros gave evidence and Raúl called for the death penalty, although in the end Matos was sentenced to 20 years' imprisonment. From the outset he complained of serious ill-treatment, including torture and long periods of solitary confinement. He staged six hunger strikes to protest at the conditions in which he was being held. Despite the best efforts of human rights groups campaigning against his incarceration, he eventually served the full sentence.
Released in 1979, Matos went initially into exile in Venezuela, where he chaired a conference of counter-revolutionary groups, and then to Costa Rica, where he was reunited with his wife, María Luisa Araluce, and his family. Where once he might have been content to withdraw into the relative obscurity of a teaching post, he had now become a genuine counter-revolutionary plotter.
Unlike his fellow political prisoner Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo, who eventually adopted a diplomatic stance, Matos did not mellow with age. His policy – and that of Independent and Democratic Cuba, the exile organisation he founded when he moved to Miami – remained rooted in the uncompromising rejection of all contacts with the regime. "It's like taking part in the abuses that are going on [in Cuba]," he declared at a 1999 rally to oppose a visit to Cuba by the Baltimore Orioles baseball team.
Matos is survived by Maria. They had four children, of whom a son, Huber Matos Jr, also became a prominent counter-revolutionary figure.
• Huber Matos, military and political leader, born 26 November 1918; died 27 February 2014