Don José Ignacio "Pepín" Rivero y Alonso was a Cuban journalist and the 14th director of Diario de la Marina, which was the oldest and most popular newspaper in Cuba.

[6] The contemporary scholar Gerardo Castellanos G. writes that Rivero became feared, admired, respected, and gathered a list of enemies while running this newspaper:[10] "Pepin Rivero is the unmistakable heir of his journalist father in the technique of the simple, synthetic, deep, fluid, caustic, biting and satirical handling of the idea with the pen.... That is why now, in this rejuvenated and evolutionary era, his words continue to be the core of the Journal; the most sought after, the most read, the most feared... Because how singular and paradoxical it is that the same people (and there are many) who hate him, also read and comment on his works daily.

Thus it is that Pepín Rivero, the man they call the terrible Criollo, is not as reactionary and vicious as his army of implacable enemies suppose, but rather a cultured, skeptical, enjoyer of life, experienced connoisseur of men.

He directs the powerful journalistic-commercial company called Diario de la Marina, and turns out to be the one Cuban journalist with the most substance and the greatest influence due to the depth of his pen, although, at the same time, he is the most frequently threatened.

"[10]In the 1920s, Rivero authorized the creation of the "Suplemento Literario Dominical," the literary review supplement to Diario de La Marina.

In Cuba there are men like the philosopher Enrique José Varona, the critic Jorge Mañach, the poets Marinello, Martínez Villena, and Agustín Acosta, the historians Fernando Ortiz and Ramon Guerra, and many others whose enumeration would be long, who deserve to be known in the intellectual circles of Spain.'

"[6] In the Summer of 1936, when the Spanish Civil War broke out, Rivero travelled from France into Navarre, accompanied by Jacques Dugé de Bernonville, who was a member of the Action Française.

[6] Rivero was not a fascist, but as a member of an elevated Spanish noble family, and Carlist, living in Cuba, he felt that communism was worse than fascism.

[6] Furthermore, he wrote in his newspaper that Hitler had raised the German standard of living, and of the "immense popularity of Nazism and of the man who is the guide of its great spirit.

He always distanced himself from any active militancy that could compromise the image of his newspaper, whose institutional solidity he managed to preserve and strengthen even in the most difficult and hazardous years of the Republican period.

[6] On July 14, 1941, Rivero gave a public speech outlining his innermost thoughts: "I appear to be a reactionary and conservative outsider since 1933 and subsequent years when I went out to meet, like a wild beast, the deleterious forces of the Marxist revolution.

I took a picture in Pamplona dressed as a requeté because I was and still am proud to see myself for a few hours in the uniform that my father wore in the mountains of Maestrazgo sixty years ago.

Furthermore, he denounced the awards that he had received from Germany and Italy during the Spanish Civil War, renouncing his German Eagle and his Order of Saints Maurice and Lazarus.