The UM Law community mourns the death of Rear Admiral Rafael C. Benitez, former associate dean and founding dean of the Law School's Foreign Graduate Program (now the LL.M. in Comparative Law Program). He was also founder of UM Law's Inter-American Law Review. Benitez passed away on March 6, 1999, in Easton, MD, where he resided.
Benitez was a revered law professor and guiding force in the development of UM Law's international studies curriculum. Many of his colleagues in Miami were unaware of the extent of Benitez's distinguished and heroic military career before he became a law professor and dean. A native of Puerto Rico, he graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy in 1939, then served aboard Navy submarines in World War II, earning the Silver and Bronze stars in combat. After the war, Benitez attended Georgetown Law School, graduating in 1949.
In August of 1949, Admiral Benitez embarked on a secret intelligence-gathering mission which is recounted in Blind Man's Bluff: The Untold Story of American Submarine Espionage, by Sherry Sontag and Christopher Drew with Annette Lawrence Drew. Commanding the diesel submarine Cochino, Benitez and his crew carried electronic gear designed to eavesdrop on Soviet undersea cable communications. It was feared that the Russians were testing submarine-launched Soviet missiles that might soon carry nuclear warheads.
While on this espionage mission submerged in waters near the Soviet port of Murmansk, the Cochino faced a catastrophic fire in one of its 4,000-pound batteries. Benitez directed the firefighting while trying to protect his crew from the toxic fumes rapidly filling the submarine. Because of weather conditions on the surface, no outside assistance was available. In a heroic effort, Benitez managed to save all but one of his 77 crew members when his submarine sank.
After retiring from the Navy in 1959, Benitez served as vice president for Latin America
for Pan American World Airways.
The Inter-American Bar Association plans to remember Benitez with a minute of silence at its next annual meeting.
