Isidoro Malmierca Peoli

Who was Isidoro Malmierca Peoli?

Isidoro Malmierca Peoli, was Cuba's foreign minister from 1976 to 1992 and a founder of the Cuban Communist Party.

Born in Havana, he became involved in Cuba's turbulent left-wing politics as a young man, joining the tiny Popular Socialist Party, the Moscow-line predecessor of the Communist Party, during the years of right-wing regimes that preceded the 1959 revolution. The PSP had only a few thousand members, but was well-organized and had strong links with the urban unions.

The PSP at first played little part in Fidel Castro's armed struggle against the dictatorship of General Fulgencio Batista, which took place mainly in the countryside, and only threw its weight behind Castro's guerrilla campaign a few months before Batista finally fled the country. Until then, it had tended to denounce the young rebels' "adventurism."

Despite this background of mistrust, when Castro moved the revolution sharply to the left in the early 1960s he found a use for the PSP apparatus, and for young but experienced activists such as Malmierca, in giving a disciplined organizational underpinning to his embryonic regime.

Malmierca was one of the founders of the powerful state security apparatus — a role for which his lack of any discernible personality and reluctance to reveal even the most innocuous details about his personal life, must have been a positive advantage. He was also one of the functionaries who supervised the merger of the PSP with Castro's July 26 Movement to form the Cuban Communist Party in 1965.