Journalist Enrique Meneses Miniaty has died at Hospital La Paz in Madrid, Spanish daily El Pais said Monday in its Web edition. He was 83.
Meneses was the first foreign reporter to bring pictures of Fidel Castro’s guerrillas to the world in the 1950s.
In 1956 he began his contributions to Paris Match. He covered the war of the Suez Canal in 1956 for the magazine and the following year went to Cuba, where he was the first foreign photographer embedded with Castro’s men in the Sierra Maestra mountains, with whom he live for four months.
By having the negatives from this last work sewed to a young Cuban girl’s undergarment, he was able to get them out of the country, but the publication of the photos got him expelled from the island.
Between 1962-1963, Meneses worked in the United States, where he covered events such as the civil rights march on Washington and the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.
Meneses was a war correspondent in Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), Angola, Bangladesh and Sarajevo, his last work because since then he suffered from a chronic obstructive pulmonary illness. [Fox]