Carlos Franqui | Cuban writer, activist, 89

Carlos Franqui, 89, a Cuban writer and political activist who was an important figure in the Cuban revolution and later became one of the most outspoken critics of Fidel Castro, died Friday in Puerto Rico after a brief hospitalization for bronchial and heart problems.

The son of a poor farmer, Mr. Franqui entered leftist political movements as a youth, joined and left the Communist Party, and became a journalist who eventually joined Castro's rebellion against dictator Fulgencio Batista.

He edited the movement newspaper Revolucion before and after Castro's insurgents defeated Batista, but increasingly clashed with hard-liners who were restricting cultural and political dissent.

Mr. Franqui moved abroad in 1963 and openly broke with the communist government in 1968 when he denounced the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia.

In a 2006 interview with the Mexican magazine Letras Libres, Mr. Franqui said he had rejected Castro's offers to be a military commander and, later, a minister.

"What I wanted to create was a cultural revolution, not a bureaucratic one, and invite the whole world to get to know Cuba and its revolution," he said. In the end, he said, he decided that freedom of expression was incompatible with revolutionary thought: "Culture is liberty, and the revolution is the negation of liberty."

Mr. Franqui also was a poet and art critic who mingled with artists and intellectuals including Picasso, Miro, and Jean-Paul Sartre, said Angel Padilla, editor of an anti-Castro government publication in Puerto Rico. - AP