Ricardo Alarcón, once Cuba’s leading diplomat, the third most powerful Cuban communist after Fidel Castro and his brother Raul, and his country’s most prominent mediator with the United States, died Saturday in Havana. He was 84.
His death was announced by the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs. No cause was given.
From 1966 to 1978 and again from 1990 to 1991, Mr. Alarcón was Cuba’s representative to the United Nations. He served a term as Vice-President of the General Assembly and chaired the Security Council for two months.
He was appointed Secretary of State in 1992 and, from 1993 to 2013, he chaired the Cuban National Assembly, a legislative body that typically followed President Castro’s agenda.
Fluent in English and known for his white guayabera shirts and Cohiba cigars, Mr. Alarcón became a well-known figure in the negotiations that ended an uncontrollable exodus of thousands of Cuban refugees to Florida on flimsy rafts when the Clinton administration took over. 1994 Agreed to issue 20,000 visas annually to Cuban immigrants.
In 2000, he was instrumental in arranging the return of young castaway Elián González from relatives in Miami to his father in Cuba after a seven-month fierce legal battle. The boy, then about 5 years old, had landed in a truck tire near Fort Lauderdale, drifting after his mother and a dozen others fleeing Cuba were drowned in a failed ocean crossing in the Florida Straits.
Mr Alarcón’s role in the González case, and his success some ten years later in winning the release of five Cuban spies accused of infiltrating anti-Castro refugee factions into Florida, were a prelude to the eventual normalization of the diplomatic relations between the United States and Cuba.
Despite his success as a negotiator, Mr. Alarcón was aggressive in defending his country’s ideology and denouncing the United States.
“The Americans said as early as 1959 that Mr. Castro had the support of the vast majority of people,” he told The Guardian in 2006. “They had to undermine that support by refusing money and exports to cause hunger, unemployment and immense suffering that would disgust a people so much that they want change.”
“For me,” he added, “the premise is the recognition that democracy should begin with Pericles’ definition — that society benefits the majority — and not be imposed from outside.”
William M. LeoGrande, a professor of government at American University in Washington, described Mr. Alarcón in an email as “a tireless supporter and defender of ‘the revolution'” who “in his dealings with the United States never hesitated in the belief that a more normal relationship would benefit both countries – and was possible.”
But Theodore Henken, a sociology professor at Baruch College at the City University of New York, added, also by email, that Mr. Alarcón felt “far too comfortable in a system where the people don’t have the power to to demand that their unelected leaders remain accountable. to them.”
Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada was born on May 21, 1937 in Havana into a family described as upper middle class.
He entered the University of Havana in 1954 and as leader of the Student Federation and the Union of Young Communists, he organized urban student support for the revolution as a citizen, while the brothers Castro and Che Guevara waged a guerrilla war against the entrenched US government. backed dictator Fulgencio Batista.
Mr. Alarcón graduated with a PhD in Philosophy and Humanities and was appointed Director of the US Department of the Cuban Ministry of Foreign Affairs at the age of 25. Four years later, he was appointed ambassador to the UN, where he also chaired the Committee on the Exercise of the Inalienable Rights of the Palestinian People.
He was also a member of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party until 2013. His close associate had been arrested a year earlier and charged with espionage, and had reportedly fallen out of favor for being known as a Fidel Castro loyalist rather than a close confidant of Raul Castro, who had come to power in 2008.
He was married to Margarita Perea Maza, who died in 2008. Information on survivors was not immediately available.
One of Mr Alarcón’s disciples, Deputy Foreign Minister Josefina Vidal, wrote on Twitter: “For Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada, master of the diplomats of our generation, we will always hold deep respect, admiration and infinite affection.”
