Pepe San Román

Who was Pepe San Román?

José Alfredo Pérez San Román, known as Pepe San Román, was the commander of Brigade 2506 ground troops in the Bay of Pigs Invasion of Cuba in April 1961. Pérez was his father's last name.

He enlisted in the Cuban Army in 1949 after graduation from high school, when financial problems forced him to give up studying architecture at the University of Havana. In 1950, he was accepted as a cadet at the Military Academy, and, three years later, graduated with honors and was promoted to Second Lieutenant in the infantry. Soon afterwards, he left for the United States, in a program of US assistance to the Cuban Armed Forces. In the United States, he took a combat engineering course for field officers. He spent some time at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. During the next four years, from 1954 to 1958, San Román was an instructor in the combat engineering corps. In 1956, he was promoted to First Lieutenant, second in command of a company. He went to the US Army Infantry Center at Fort Benning, Georgia where he graduated from the infantry course for field officers. In 1957, in Cuba, an incipient guerrilla army was challenging the regular troops. For several months, San Román commanded a company in the zone of operations. There, he felt an aversion toward those military officers who carried out abuses and excesses against the civilian population.