Antonio Cubillo

Antonio Cubillo, born on June 3, 1930, in San Cristóbal de La Laguna and died on December 10, 2012, in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, was a lawyer, politician, and activist labeled a terrorist. He was the founder of the Movimiento por la Autodeterminación e Independencia del Archipiélago Canario (Movement for the Self-Determination and Independence of the Canary Islands) in 1963, after going into exile from the Canary Islands due to his activism, as a lawyer, against the Franco regime of the time.

This political movement (MPAIAC), based in Algiers, began a militant campaign against Spanish rule in the 1970s with the support of Algeria, and later the OAU (Organization of African Unity). In March 1977, following a bomb attack at Las Palmas airport that seriously injured one person, the MPAIAC (Movement for the Protection of the Interior and Civil Aviation Authority) was indirectly responsible for the Tenerife air disaster, the worst air accident in history. An airport lacking adequate infrastructure had been designated to divert several flights after the bombing, causing a mid-air collision between two wide-body airliners that killed 583 people.

Antonio Cubillo’s remarkable political success allowed him to present the Canary Islands’ case before the UN in 1978. On the eve of his trip to New York for the UN, on April 5, 1978, Cubillo survived an assassination attempt by the security forces of the Spanish Ministry of the Interior. Stabbed, he was left partially paralyzed. After the group’s dissolution in 1982 (following the creation of the Autonomous Community of the Canary Islands), he received a royal pardon and returned to Spain. He also founded the “National Congress of the Canary Islands” in 1985.

In 2003, the Supreme Court ordered the Spanish Ministry of the Interior to pay €150,000 in compensation to Antonio Cubillo for injuries he sustained in the 1978 attack in Algeria. Since 2007, Antonio Cubillo had been working on publishing a draft constitution for the Federal Republic of the Canary Islands in the newspaper Tenerife Canaria. Among other things, he called for the official recognition of the Tamazight language alongside Castilian Spanish. Cubillo was a close friend of Mouloud Mammeri.