Plane Crashes and Deaths of Dictators' Rivals
Prigozhin's demise is reminiscent of that of Camilo Cienfuegos in 1959
When the TASS story of Yevgeny Prigozhin being on a plane that crashed came out today, my first thought was that a plane is higher than the usual Putin method of dispatching rivals: a “fall” from a window.
This afternoon, a friend reminded me of a topic we had discussed several weeks ago: Cuban revolutionary Camilo Cienfuegos and his death in an October 1959 plane crash.
“Camilo,” as he is known in Cuba, is one of the members of the Trinity of revolutionary Cuba, with Che Guevara and Fidel Castro, who took power in Cuba in January 1959.
On a night in late October of that year, a small plane on which Cienfuegos was flying from Camagüey to Havana disappeared over the Florida Straits. The plane was never found and Camilo was made a saint in the revolutionary movement.
I hadn’t known much about him until I started leading trips to Cuba about a decade ago. I soon came to suspect that Fidel was behind his death. Camilo was very charismatic and a potential rival to Fidel. The same was true of Che, and Fidel more-or-less broke with him. I found that many people in Cuba also think Camilo’s plane crash was very “convenient” for Fidel. When I learned that Fidel had banned rock music and the Beatles specifically as bourgeois decadence but had a bronze statue of John Lennon put up in a park after Lennon died, I said to the guide, “Fidel had broken with Che, too. He seems to like people better when they’re dead.” The guide put his hand to his forehead but was smiling. Subsequently I made the same comment to other guides and got similar reactions.