Cuban envoy to Spain now oversees Latin America and Caribbean

Eugenio Martínez Enríquez (in photo at top), Cuba’s ambassador to Spain, has been appointed the Foreign Ministry’s director general for Latin America and the Caribbean, according to a Twitter posting by the MinRex on Thursday (Nov. 23).

“I assume this responsibility with honor and commitment. I join our comrades in this task,” the tweet quotes him as saying. He replaces Carlos Zamora Rodríguez, who had held the post on an ad-interim basis and will become Cuba’s ambassador to El Salvador. The tweet does not say who will replace Martínez in Madrid.

Only two days ago, on Tuesday (Nov. 21), Martínez spoke in defense of the Venezuelan people in a tweet that said that “the coercive measures against Venezuela adopted by the European Union’s Foreign Affairs Council constitute meddling in the internal affairs of that sister nation and do not contribute to the process of dialogue promoted by the government of President Nicolás Maduro.”

The grandson of an Asturian immigrant to Cuba, Martínez was born in 1970 in Havana and did his first studies at the Mártires de Barbados high school. Later, he studied at the Superior Institute of International Relations in Havana, from which he graduated in 1992.

Afterward, on a scholarship, he specialized in international relations in Fiorenza, Italy, at the Institute for Research and Development of the Italian Foreign Ministry. He holds a master’s degree in International Relations from his Cuban alma mater.

Martínez’s first assignment was as director of the MinRex’s departments of Consular Affairs and Cuban Citizens Abroad. Later assignments were in the Cuban Interests Section in Washington and as Cuban ambassador to Belize. He became ambassador to Spain in January 2014, when he presented his credentials to King Juan Carlos.

[For a 2015 interview with MartÌnez, in which he explains the new economic model for Cuba, click here.]