Armando Hart Davalos, a historical figure of the Cuban revolution and then a close associate of Fidel Castro, passed away on Sunday at the age of 87 in Havana, due to respiratory failure, state media reported.
"The famous revolutionary Armando Hart Davalos passed away on Sunday afternoon," the website Juventud Rebelde clarified.
Hart, who led the literacy campaign immediately after the Cuban revolution and for decades served as Minister of Education and then Culture in Fidel Castro's governments, suffered from chronic health problems and was confined to a wheelchair.
A lawyer by profession, he had enlisted on Castro's side after the Moncada attack in 1953 and joined the illegal bourgeois nuclei of the July 26 Movement. He was imprisoned and tortured during the days of dictator Fulgencio Batista before being exiled until 1959.
After the victory of the revolution, he became Minister of Education and launched a national literacy campaign in 1961. In 1965, he was elected to the Central Committee of the Communist Party and was elected a member of the political bureau, where he remained until 1991.
In 1976 he took over the then newly established Ministry of Culture and remained its head until 1997.
The Marxist intellectual was married until 1980 to Aide Santamaria, the heroine of the Cuban revolution and one of its most important female figures. They had two children, but both were killed in a car accident in 2008.
From 1997 onwards, Hart devoted his life to the protection of heritage and the dissemination of the work of the poet Jose Marti (1853-1895), the apostle of Cuban independence, taking over as head of the Cuban National Center dedicated to him. position in which he remained until his death.