Arturo Frondizi; Former President of Argentina

Arturo Frondizi, 86, former president of Argentina who tried to mend fences between Cuba and the United States before the Cuban missile crisis. Frondizi, a lawyer, was elected president in 1958 as head of the leftist wing of the Radical Civic Union. He was toppled four years later by a military coup. In 1961, Frondizi held a secret meeting in Buenos Aires with the Cuban government’s representative, Ernesto (Che) Guevara, an Argentine revolutionary. Frondizi urged Guevara to pave the way for talks between Cuba’s Fidel Castro and President John F. Kennedy. But efforts at reconciliation failed. Argentine military intelligence agencies learned of the meeting with Guevara, and anti-Communist sentiment among the armed forces played a part in Frondizi’s ouster by the military seven months later. On April 18 in Buenos Aires of a heart ailment.