Antonio Berre Rey (September 23, 1945 – February 3, 2012)
Antonio Berre Rey, a Cuban-American writer, longtime Radio Martí program writer, and later web developer whose life traced the arc of his generation's exile from Havana to Washington, DC, died February 3, 2012, in Arlington, Virginia, at age 66, following an illness with lung cancer.
He was born in Havana around 1945, the son of two figures who would become fixtures of Cuban political and journalistic life on both sides of the Florida Straits: **Fara Rey** (1915–2002), a journalist and historian who had been an activist since her youth in the anti-Machado movement La Joven Cuba, and **Antonio Berre**, a leader in Cuba's Communist youth movement whom she married in 1939. Antonio Berre Rey grew up in a household steeped in the intellectual and political ferment of mid-century Havana; his younger sister, **Rosa Berre** (1941–2006), would go on to found Cubanet, the pioneering independent-press news agency, after her own break with the Castro government.
His military service, which began while he was still a minor, was lived out in Cuba's air force, where he was trained in various other communist countries, including China, Czechoslovakia, and the USSR, and ultimately flew Soviet-built fighter aircraft. A graduation certificate the family has retained, from the Chinese People's Liberation Army's Eighth Aviation School, records that a Cuban national named Antonio Berre completed a special instructor course there from October 1961 to March 1963 — placing him in China, as a teenager, during the brief window of close Cuban–Chinese military cooperation before relations between the two countries cooled later in the decade. Family photographs from the period show him in a Soviet/Eastern Bloc-style winter military uniform and ushanka hat.
A graduate of the University of Havana, Berre worked in the country's cultural institutions. In June 1979, he wrote the introduction to an exhibition of reproductions of the Japanese printmaker Hiroshige's woodblock prints, *Grabados (1797–1858)*, staged at the Galería Amelia Peláez in Havana's Parque Lenin — a credit recorded in the Cuban National Library's official *Bibliografía Cubana 1979*.
The following year, the family's relationship with the Cuban state — already strained by his sister's earlier political troubles — reached its breaking point. In April 1980, amid the crisis at the Peruvian embassy in Havana, Berre Rey's mother and sister were among the thousands of Cubans who sought asylum there before departing the island that year in the Mariel boatlift. Family accounts hold that Antonio Berre Rey left Cuba in the same exodus.
He resettled in the Washington, DC area (later living in Alexandria, Virginia), where, from 1984 to 1990 he was a Spanish-language journalist for UPI and from 1990 to 2000, he worked as a program writer for Radio Martí, the US government-funded Spanish-language broadcaster aimed at Cuba. His decade there placed him among a large cohort of Cuban exile writers and journalists who staffed the station through the 1990s. In 2006, he was among more than 470 Cuban exile writers, journalists, and intellectuals who signed an open letter defending three *El Nuevo Herald* colleagues dismissed over their Radio y TV Martí work — a document in which he is listed as a "web developer/designer," reflecting a career shift from broadcast writing into web development, consistent with his final occupation on government contract work.
That same year, he was named as a surviving family member — "a marvelous person for our whole family," in his own words — in the obituary of his sister Rosa Berre, published in *El Nuevo Herald* after her death from cancer in Miami.
According to family recollection, Antonio Berre married Marietta Ulacia, who would go on to become executive director of the Afro Latin Jazz Alliance (ALJA) and its successor organization, Belongó, in New York. The marriage ended in a 1988 divorce.
He died February 3, 2012, of lung cancer, with respiratory failure as a contributing factor, at a hospice facility in Arlington, Virginia. He was a resident of Alexandria, Virginia at the time of his death. His death certificate lists Lillian Perez, identified as his companion, as the informant on the record. He was cremated at Everly Crematory in Alexandria, through the Everly-Wheatley Funeral Home.
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*Note on sources: This obituary was assembled from the 2002 and 2006* El Nuevo Herald/Cubanet *obituaries of Fara Rey and Rosa Berre, the 1979* Bibliografía Cubana *(Biblioteca Nacional José Martí), a 2006 open letter hosted at latinamericanstudies.org, and a Commonwealth of Virginia certified death record provided by the person who commissioned this piece. The death record independently confirms the September 23, 1945 birth date, Cuban birthplace, father's name (Antonio Berre) and mother's maiden name (Fara Rey) previously established from the Cubanet obituaries
