Cuban dissident Gustavo Arcos dies in Havana.

[NNadir]

HAVANA - Gustavo Arcos Bergnes, who fought alongside Fidel Castro in the Cuban revolution but was later imprisoned as a dissident, died Tuesday, according to a close family friend. He was 79...

..."He was one of the most respected people in the human rights movement in Cuba," said Carlos Menendez, of the Cuban Commission on Human Rights and Reconcilation, which traces its roots to the group Arcos led in the late 1970s and 1980s. Menendez characterized Arcos as "moral, selfless and courageous..."

...Arcos deeply opposed the government of Fulgencio Batista and joined Castro's ill-fated 1953 assault on a military barracks that launched the Cuban revolution. Arcos was shot in the right hip and left partially paralyzed.

The survivors were imprisoned and later freed under a pardon and Arcos traveled with the group to Mexico to organize a rebel army.

Arcos, known by the pseudonym "Ulises," traveled throughout Costa Rica, Venezuela and the United States gathering money and munitions for the movement.

The other rebels, meanwhile, traveled back to Cuba on the yacht "Granma" to launch a guerrilla war. Arcos' brother Luis was among those killed by Batista's forces when the boat landed.

Arcos was named Cuba's ambassador to Belgium after the 1959 triumph of the Cuban revolution, but soon became disillusioned by the growing authoritarianism of the Castro regime.

"They shot a lot of people," Arcos told the AP in 2005 of the summary trials held after the revolutionaries took power. "They shot people who could have easily been imprisoned..."

...Arcos began expressing his discontent privately and was soon accused of being a counterrevolutionary. When he was released after three years in prison, the government refused his request to leave the country...

http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20060808/ap_on_re_la_am_ca/obit_arcos

Someone queue up J. McLauglin's "The Unknown Dissident," in memory of dissidents everywhere...