She was an American dancer, and the first wife of Cuban spy mastermind Manuel Piñeiro Losada, better known as Barbarroja. Newly rediscovered letters from Lorna Burdsall shed light on her life in Cuba during the heady years of the early revolution led by Fidel Castro.
Piñeiro headed Cuba’s intelligence and state security apparatus for nearly three decades, first from the Interior Ministry and then from the Americas Department of the Central Committee of the Cuban Communist Party, before dying in 1998 in a car accident that raised suspicions at the time, since Piñeiro had recently made statements about a memoir he was reportedly writing. A trusted confidant of Fidel Castro, he was in charge of covert operations to create and support guerrilla groups in several Central and Latin American countries, and there were many secrets that he took to the grave.
But in 1955, he was just a student at Columbia University in New York when he married Burdsall, a dancer born in Connecticut who studied at the prestigious Juilliard school and was a member of the Communist Party. As the son of a representative of the Bacardi company in Matanzas, Burdsall could not imagine the life that awaited him. Piñeiro joined the 26th of July Movement led by Castro and rose to the rank of Commander of the Rebel Army.
