After his work at the helm of the Latin American news agency was completed, shortly after the victory at Playa Girón on April 19, 1961, Masetti embarked on the path that would make him the Second Commander of the People’s Revolutionary Army.
That insurgent organization was the vanguard in charge of creating the conditions in Argentina for the arrival of Commander Ernesto Che Guevara, who would assume the leadership of the continental emancipation process.
Between the two Argentines, a community of ideas grew about the fight for the liberation of the Great Homeland that emerged in Sierra Maestra, where Masetti arrived in 1958 as an envoy from the Buenos Aires-based station Radio El Mundo to interview Che and Commander-in-Chief Fidel Castro.
On January 9, 1959, he returned to Cuba at the request of Commander Guevara and joined the fight for the consolidation of the triumphant Revolution.
As soon as he arrived in Havana, Masetti was part of the group of Cuban journalists, and from other Latin American countries, who organized Operation Truth, held on January 21 and 22, and the preamble to the creation of Prensa Latina on June 16, 1959.
Under his direction, the emerging news agency made its way into the international context as a dissonant voice in favor of truth, despite the aggressions by the United States and its allies, including media monopolies, then and now.
The restless Argentine, who was born on May 31, 1929, in Avellaneda, developed in Prensa Latina his vision of Latin America’s new journalism, which was objective but not impartial.
In November 1962, Masetti left Cuba to fulfill his dream as a guerrilla fighter in the mountains and jungles of Salta, where he went missing on April 21, 1964, as he was trying to evade persecution by Argentine security forces.
According to the testimony of survivors of that guerrilla, he was very physically weakened and had almost no strength to walk.
Sixty years after his departure for eternity, Masetti lives on in the honest journalism committed to truth that he helped to forge and, most especially, in the international news agency that he created and led with singular intelligence and professional ethics.
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