Mario Lierana *43

Mario Llerena, a Cuban writer and early supporter of Fidel Castro, who broke with him over Castro’s move to communism, died Dec. 10, 2006, in Miami. He was 93.

Fluent in English, Llerena was New York area chairman of Castro’s July 26 Movement. Before Castro’s victorious entry into Havana in 1959, Llerena resigned from the rebel movement for ideological reasons. He then worked in Cuba as a political journalist, and wrote critically of Castro’s moving to communism. He flew into exile in New York in April 1960.

Llerena became an important person among Cuban exiles, and published several volumes of his writings about the Cuban revolution. In 1940, Llerena received a Ph.D. in philosophy and letters from the University of Havana. During World War II, he enrolled in the graduate history department at Princeton, but decided instead to become a Presbyterian minister and enrolled at the Princeton Theological Seminary, where he received a bachelor of theology degree in 1947. He then became a writer and later taught Spanish at Duke, before returning to Cuba where he opposed the Batista military dictatorship.

Llerena is survived by his second wife, Noemi, two children, and four grandchildren.