General Nikolai Sergeyevich Leonov, the man who made the link between Cuba and the Soviet Union, whose effects have influenced politics in Latin America for 60 years, died in Moscow. He was 93 years old and had a legion of fans in the intelligence community and among Russian academics.
Leonov’s story is intertwined with that of the Cuban Revolution of 1959. A young diplomat, he met Raúl Castro, then 22, on a ship returning from a socialist festival in Romania. It was 1953 and, exchanging experiences in chess and ping-pong, the two grew closer.
Three years later, Raúl was in exile in Mexico City with his brother Fidel (1926-2016) and other revolutionaries, and accidentally resumed contact with Leonov — who held a secondary post at the Soviet embassy.
He once left a business card with Ernesto Guevara (1928-67), who was arrested shortly afterwards. Association with the Argentine who would be immortalized in the pantheon of the left as Che eventually led to him being asked to leave Mexico, and Leonov returned to Moscow. He left the diplomatic service and entered academic life as a historian.
In 1958, he was approached for his knowledge of Spanish and Central America by the KGB, the dreaded Soviet secret service. Moscow closely followed every anti-American movement in the region, as the struggle against what was conventionally called imperialism was easily converted to a communist frame.
So, when the revolution broke out in Cuba in 1959, he became the main escort for the powerful vice-premier Anastas Mikoian, who the following year would visit Havana. The movement’s leader, however, was far from the socialist icon he became.
“No, he was never a communist. The US created Cuban communism. Fidel made his first visit to the US, but he was not received,” Leonov told Sheet in late 2007, on one of the occasions when he spoke to the reporter. Conversion for convenience came after the CIA’s botched Bay of Pigs invasion attempt in 1961.
In both that visit by Mikoian and the story of Fidel’s visit to Moscow in 1963, the blond, thin, tall interpreter in all the photographs is Leonov. In 1962, he was one of the ears of the Soviet side during the missile crisis, but he never believed that the leaders would actually go to nuclear wars.
In the late 1960s, he returned to Moscow and rose through the ranks of the KGB, where he rose to lieutenant general (three stars, one rank before the top). He helped set up the operation to try to support Argentina’s anti-communist dictatorship against London in the Falklands War (1982), but it failed. He always said that there were never any shares or “Moscow gold” in Brazil.
He became the main analyst in Latin America and, from 1983 to 1991, he was the deputy director of the intelligence agency. In this role, he was superior to the one he called in 2017 in another interview with Sheet of “mediocre agent”, a certain Vladimir Putin, who had been posted in Desden — a sideline position in the former East Germany.
He always denied being a mentor to Putin and, in fact, was a harsh critic of his government. Leonov remained faithful to the socialist ideology until the end, and had constant conversations with Raúl Castro — in 2016, he spent six months on the island, for a documentary available on YouTube. He refused to criticize the fact that the Cuban regime is a dictatorship.
He even dated politics, being elected deputy in 2013 for a nationalist party, but abandoned his career in his first term. He was surrounded by his former students at MGIMO, the Russian Rio Branco Institute, at which he began teaching in 1998. In 2017, he suffered a stroke, which progressively undermined his health until his death last Wednesday (27).
Already sick, he did not speak about the War in Ukraine. But he was critical of Putin’s military adventures, such as in Georgia in 2008 and in Ukraine itself in 2014. Born in the village of Almazovo, 300 km south of Moscow, he would have turned 94 in August. He leaves his wife Yevgenia and a daughter.
