Huber Matos, Cuba's best-known political prisoner, was released on October 21, 1979, after completing "every minute" of a twenty-year prison sentence. Matos had helped make Fidel Castro's revolution, not only as a military commander in the rebel army, but by persuading the then president of Costa Rica, Jose Figueres, to send arms to Castro. When Matos asked to resign from Castro's government because he disapproved of its increasingly Marxist direction, he was charged with "slandering the Revolution," an accusation later changed to "treason."