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BIOGRAPHY OF CONSTANTINO BARREDO GUERRA.
Constantino Barredo Guerra, was born on April 12, 1911 on the farm "Desempeño", Quintana neighborhood, Municipality of Perico.

Years after his birth, the family will live in the town of Carlos Rojas, in whose civil registry he is registered.

Later, his parents established their domicile in the city of Cárdenas, a town that was then the most industrially developed place in the Province.

With some savings they can make, by moving from a cane cutter to a weigher on a ferry near Carlos Rojas, the father acquires a small cafeteria establishment, from whose business he receives income that allows him to enroll Constantino and his older brother Silvino in school. private called "Piarist Fathers".

Shortly the children attend the classes of this campus because they dislike the religious school, so they move to the public one.

However, his late incorporation into school, due to the insurmountable difficulty of not having any educational center in the place where they live the first years of their childhood, in 1924, when he was in the 4th grade, he won the competition in opposition “ Cosme de la Torriente ”, as the best student of his grade in the Cárdenas School District.

But when he reaches the 6th grade he cannot continue his studies, he is forced to work as a laborer at the Central “Progreso”, during the harvests, he also learns to drive cars, works as a rental driver during the so-called downtime.

Constantino and his older brother sell cigars at the docks and other workplaces.

That job puts him in touch with a reality unknown to him, the life of the workers, whom he sees forming long lines at the doors of the sugar refinery, warehouses and docks, waiting for some permanent worker to be absent to occupy a shift WORK, which makes an unpleasant impression, which you will never forget.

In 1931 the father established a warehouse for the sale of tobacco, which he named El Caicaje. Then we live in the fullness of the economic crisis that began in 1929, the time of the most unemployment, misery and hunger that the Cuban people suffered.

The entire Barredo family works in that tobacco shop, to be able to subsist and in this way Constantine learns the tobacco business. With them some twisting and de-stemming work, including people with communist ideas

Every day in the middle of the work there are discussions about the economic and political situation; and you read the press of the bourgeois opposition to the Machado regime and the communist press, brought to the workshop by workers with radical ideas.

Constantine, at that time, eagerly reads as much revolutionary literature as he gets into his hands, just as when years before he cannot continue attending classes, he continues studying as a self-taught man.

Using his contacts with chauffeurs for hire who have an anti-macha attitude and being one of his sectors of work, Constantino began in the fight against tyranny and in August 1933 he led the strike in the sector in Cárdenas, which converged and It joins the great revolutionary general strike, a decisive factor in the overthrow of this hated regime.

Later, the Cárdenas Rental Drivers Association designates him as delegate to the National Congress of the Sector that meets on November 7 and 8, 1933 in Santiago de Cuba. He is elected member of the Directorate of the National Federation of Drivers of Cuba.

To fulfill the duties of his position in the aforementioned federation, he moved to Havana. Constantino works intensively to strengthen the organization throughout the country, and together with Manuel González Borrero founded the Federation's press body, the magazine Claxon, of which Barredo is an outstanding collaborator.

In 1934, after the reactionary coup that installed the lackey Mendieta-ABC-Caffery-Batista regime in power, Constantino returned to Cárdenas, although he continued to attend to his responsibilities as union leader. Joven Cuba, a revolutionary organization founded by Antonio Guiteras and Constantino, appears among its first income in Cárdenas, becomes a member of its regional leadership.

In May 1935, when Antonio Guiteras and Carlos Aponte died heroically in El Morrillo. In the city of Cárdenas, as a protest against crime, revolutionary activities intensify. Constantine was arrested and taken to the rural guard barracks, where, failing to prove any of the terrorist acts attributed to him, to offend and harass him, they took a horse-shearing machine and cut off part of his hair, leaving him free.

In July 1936, he was working as a tobacco twister in Placetas, where he moved to evade the persecution of the Batista and Pedraza henchmen. From there, he maintains relations with some of his fellow Young Cubans, Cárdenas and Máximo Gómez. Later, when the well-known struggles for leadership and the economic resources that have been acquired for the armed struggle against the dictatorship arise. Barredo disgusted by it leaves the organization.

In 1937 he joined the then nascent Revolutionary Union Party. In this he is a member of the Provincial Management Committee and participates as a delegate for Matanzas in the First National Assembly of the Organization. In Cárdenas he is the Secretary of Records and Correspondence of the PUR

Constantino has an active participation in the dissemination of the Party and acts as a lecturer and speaker. On one occasion, he took the floor in an act called by the PUR at the Cárdenas City Council to demand the conclusion of a trade agreement in the Republic of Uruguay, the police suspended the act and tried to stop it; it does not succeed because the many attendees who applaud prevent it.

The work in favor of revolutionary unity is finally successful in integrating the popular revolutionary bloc formed by the Revolutionary Union, the Authentic Organization, the Communist Party, the National Agrarian Party and other sectors. In the midst of this fight, the recruitment of volunteers to go to Spain to join the International Brigades increases. Constantine, a prominent figure in the Popular Revolutionary Bloc in the Province, immediately included himself with great enthusiasm to go to war.

On the afternoon of February 5, 1938, in the steamer of the English flag Oropeza, a contingent of 73 Cubans left the port of Havana. One of them was Constantine.

On the 19th of that month, the expeditionary group arrived at the French port of La Pallice, from where they moved by rail to Paris. Then they also traveled by rail to the Spanish territory, through the Portbou border post, on the 22nd. And a day later they were registered as combatants of the international brigades in the reception center installed in the castle of Figueras, traveling later by rail. to the city of Albacete, Military Base of the Brigades.

On April 2, 1938, in one of the frequent machine guns, Constantino Barredo Guerra was shot in the forehead and died instantly.

At the young age of 27, not yet completed, that honest, intelligent, dynamic and brave revolutionary dies.

Barredo's corpse, like those of a large number of internationalists killed in this combat, remains in the field occupied by fascist enemies.

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