Antonio Veciana, early anti-Castro fighter and founder of Alpha 66, dies in Miami at 91

Antonio Veciana, a Cuban anti-Castro fighter in the early 1960s who helped found the militant group Alpha 66, died Thursday in an assisted-care facility in Miami. He was 91.

His daughter, former Miami Herald writer Ana Veciana-Suarez, said he had been ill for several months and been placed in hospice care.

Known for his work as co-founder of Alpha 66, an organization that took part in the armed struggle against the Cuban government of Fidel Castro, Veciana had been active in the organization since the 1960s and collaborated with other early anti-Castro fighters Andres Nazario Sargen and Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo.

He was trained by the CIA to carry out military actions and is said to have coordinated several attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. When the first of those, from within Cuba, failed, Veciana was forced to flee the island in 1961 and came to Miami.

“My father had a devotion to seeing a democratic Cuba,” said Veciana-Suarez, who remembers as a child attending exile meetings in Allapattah in which children learned about Cuba and played, while adults conspired to achieve freedom in their country.

“I remember they brought us little cakes,” said Veciana-Suarez, indicating that it was a time of many difficulties in which the family did not put up a Christmas tree because they always thought they would soon return to Cuba.

Of Catalan origin, Veciana was an accountant in pre-Castro Cuba, where he also worked with Julio Lobo, a wealthy businessman and owner of sugar mills on the island before 1959.

“My father presided over the island’s accountants organization,” Veciana-Suarez said, noting that perhaps his leadership qualities and ability to learn quickly were what caught the attention of the CIA for his recruitment.

Roger Redondo, who also took part in the exile struggle against Castro with Veciana, recalled him as a smart man who had an ability to raise funds.

“He is the smartest man I have ever met,” said Redondo, recalling the founding of Alpha 66.

In the 1960s and ‘70s, Veciana worked for the CIA in Bolivia, until he fell out with the agent who was running him, David Atlee Phillips, who at one point told him that U.S. policy toward Cuba had changed and that he could not carry out any more operations to help liberate Cuba.

Veciana recounted his exploits in the 2017 book “Trained to Kill: The Inside Story of CIA Plots against Castro, Kennedy, and Che,” along with writer Carlos Harrison.

In the book, Veciana recounts an episode involving Phillips, whose code-name was Bishop, and John F. Kennedy’s assassin, Lee Harvey Oswald.

Veciana said he went to meet Bishop at a hotel in Dallas, Texas, and when he arrived, Bishop was talking to a young man who left immediately. They were introduced in passing, and after Kennedy’s assassination, Veciana recognized from TV images the young man who had been with Bishop: It was Oswald.

During congressional hearings on the assassination, Veciana did not mention the incident, fearing that he or his family would be harmed, his daughter said.

Despite his early hard line against the Cuban government, Veciana later came to believe that Cubans on the island were responsible for freeing themselves from communism, his daughter said.

“Although he had a fixed idea of bringing democracy to Cuba, he was actually quite a liberal and progressive person,” said Veciana-Suarez, who said there was a difference between the public image of her father and the family man and loving father and grandfather she knew.

“The public sees him in a way, like the founder of Alpha 66, the Cuban who participated in attacks on Fidel Castro, but in the end he was my father,” said Veciana-Suarez, who lived with him and cared for him for his last 18 years, in which he suffered from dementia.

“The relationship changed as he got old. I became his mother and he behaved as if he were a small child,” she said.

Because of the coronavirus pandemic, there will be no funeral services for Veciana. The family plans to hold a Mass for close friends and family, and perhaps a more public memorial next year.

This story was originally published June 19, 2020 at 1:58 PM.