Former Senior Official Leaves Cuba

HAVANA TIMES, Jan 27 — Pedro Anibal Riera Escalante, who is former diplomat and a retired Cuban intelligence officer, managed to travel to Spain this past December, reported the Café Fuerte website today.

In 2000, the diplomat was the victim of a scandalous case of political kidnapping and deportation by Cuban operatives in Mexico, the country where he had managed to travel to illegally. Years earlier he had worked there to infiltrate the intelligence apparatus of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (PRI), an effort that he describes in a book that he plans to publish.

After 25 years of service in Cuba’s “Direccion General de Inteligencia,” where he reached the rank of major, Riera Escalante was discharged for political reasons and subsequently kicked out of the Communist Party in 1993.

This case follows what occurred this past April when Max Omar Ruiz Matoses, a former lieutenant colonel of the Ministry of Internal Affairs (MININT), managed to leave the island after serving 20 years in prison on charges of treason against the military.

Riera Escalante is the nephew of Anibal and Cesar Escalante, patriarchs of the Cuban Communist Party, and cousin of General Fabian Escalante Font, a former deputy minister of MININT.