Terrorists, but Our Terrorists
Where can terrorists find safe harbor? If you're of the Cuban exile variety,
right here.
By Kirk Nielsen
Miami New Times
Dec 20, 2001
Ideologically entrenched Cubans on both sides of the Florida Straits have been
calling one another "terrorists" since the term
flared up into our modern-day lexicon three decades ago. But after the September
11 jetliner attacks, hard-liners here and
on the island have taken the opportunity to inflame their long-running war of
words to a new intensity.
Orlando Bosch, whose name is permanently associated with one of the first acts
of airline terrorism, was feeling pretty cranky about the situation one sunny
Friday morning in early October inside his beige stucco home in west Miami-Dade.
Perhaps the white-haired pediatrician's ears were ringing a little too sharply
from the declaration issued the previous day by Cuba's
National Assembly of the People's Power, denouncing him for the "cold-blooded
murder" of the 73 people who died in a
Cuban jetliner bombing in 1976. Worse, the 75-year-old native of Villa Clara
province had learned that the next day, October
6, millions of people would gather in plazas allacross his former homeland to
remember the victims. And no doubt he would
once again be blamed for the despicable deed.
Cuba's Public Enemy Numero Uno, looking grandpalike in a white V-neck T-shirt,
shorts, black socks, and brown buckle-
strap shoes, glared from a wicker rocking chair in his living room. "I
was absolved in civilian jurisdiction and later by a military court," Bosch
growled, referring to acquittals that came during his eleven-year incarceration
in Venezuela while being
prosecuted for planning the bombing. "My participation in that act...,"
Bosch began and then stopped. "Don't ask me. Ask the justice system in
Venezuela."
The justice system in Venezuela sentenced two of Bosch's associates, Freddy
Lugo and Hernan Ricardo, to twenty years in prison. (The two Venezuelans were
released from a Caracas prison in October 1993 after serving half their terms.)
Luis Posada Carriles, an anti-Castro Cuban who trained with the CIA in the early
Sixties and also was charged with planning the bombing, escaped from prison
in 1985 and promptly joined the Reagan administration's covert military operations
against the Havana-backed Sandinista regime in Nicaragua. After his last acquittal,
Bosch returned to Miami without a visa in 1988. U.S. authorities jailed him
because he was wanted for violating parole in 1974 in connection with his conviction
for a 1968 bazooka attack on a Havana-bound Polish freighter at the Port of
Miami. In 1989, after deeming him a terrorist and a threat to public safety,
the first Bush Justice Department decided to deport Bosch but was unable to
find a government (other than Cuba) that would accept him. Amid lobbying from
Cuban-American political leaders, the Bush administration released Bosch in
1990
after he renounced violence and agreed to be monitored by federal agents.
Eleven years later Bosch cannot conceal the contempt he still holds for his
former comrade in arms. "The most criminal terrorist
in all of the Americas is Fidel Castro!" he ranted. "We had to fight
this communist murderer, and now he's claiming he's going to follow the United
Nations conventions against terrorism."
Indeed the Cuban National Assembly had just ratified seven agreements of a
twelve-part UN anti-terrorism accord, bringing
the socialist island into step with its archenemy the United States. The Castro
government had previously signed the five others, including the Convention on
Preventing the Hijacking of Airliners, forged in Havana in 1970. Bosch returned
to his loathing for
the Comandante en Jefe. "Have you seen him on TV recently?" he asked,
then sloppily moved his lower jaw back and forth
(and along with it, the tell-tale reddish birthmark that lies below his bulbous
lower lip). He was imitating Castro's drooling
during the 75-year-old dictator's fainting spell this past June.
If Bosch's ears weren't ringing on Friday, they must have been on Saturday,
when his name spewed out of Castro's mouth
during a speech to a million people who had packed into Havana's Plaza de la
Revolución. "History is capricious and moves through strange labyrinths,"
Castro began. "Twenty-five years ago in this very plaza we bid farewell
to a small number of coffins.
They contained tiny fragments of human remains and personal belongings of some
of the 57 Cubans, 11 Guyanese -- most of them students on scholarships in Cuba
-- and 5 North Korean cultural officials who were the victims of a brutal and
inconceivable act of terrorism." Especially sad, the socialist leader noted,
was that among the dead were nearly all the young
men and women of the Cuban national fencing team.
"Who could have predicted that almost exactly 25 years later, a war with
totally unpredictable consequences would be on the verge of breaking out as
a result of an equally heinous terrorist attack that claimed the lives of thousands
of innocent people in
the United States?" Castro then spent several minutes reviewing a litany
of hijackings, bombings, and assassinations that anti-communist Cubans with
CIA connections had carried out before the deadly Cubana de Aviación
attack. He cited the New
York Times, U.S. News and World Report, and the Church Commission report to
Congress on CIA plots against foreign leaders. He also mentioned the appearance
in early 1976 of Coordinación de Organizaciones Revolucionarias Unidas
(CORU), an anti-communist Cuban group that Bosch founded after fleeing the United
States. CORU sent statements to news
organizations two months before the Cubana de Aviación explosion warning
that "very soon we will be attacking jetliners in
flight." Castro then guided the multitude through Bosch's arrest, the Ricardo
and Lugo convictions, and Bosch's eventual return
to impunity in the United States.
"On a day like today, we have the right to ask what will be done about
Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch, the perpetrators
of that monstrous terrorist act ... and about those who planned and financed
the bombs that were placed in the hotels in
[Havana], and the assassination attempts against Cuban leaders, which haven't
stopped for a minute in more than 40 years."
Could the supreme guerrilla and head of a repressive one-party state possibly
have a point? While President Bush is warning
the nations of the world that they must not harbor terrorists, is South Florida
harboring a legion of its own, who have engaged
in activities that look a lot like terrorism? After all, the list of acciones
terroristas -- from the Alpha 66 and Comandos L raids
of the early Sixties to the group of commandos arrested in Villa Clara province
this past April -- is long enough to fill a 300-
page book (see, for example, Jane Franklin's Cuba and the United States: A Chronological
History). Moreover even the
leading exile scholars cannot point to any actual terrorist acts carried out
on U.S. soil by Castristas.
Today, nine years after the Justice Department legitimated Bosch's release
by saying he had renounced violence, Bosch is sounding awfully bellicose. He
was one of nineteen exiles in the Cuban Patriotic Forum who signed a Declaration
of Principles published in the Miami Herald this past August.
"We recognize and support the right of the Cuban people inside the island
and in exile to avail themselves of all means and methods at their disposal
in the struggle for the freedom of Cuba," the coalition stated. Other signatories
included Armando
Perez-Roura and Juan Ruiz of Cuban Unity; Hubert Matos of Democratic Independent
Cuba; Eugenio Llamera of the World
Federation of Cuban Former Political Prisoners; Sylvia Iriondo of Mothers and
Women Against Repression; Juan Perez
Franco of the Veterans Association of the Bay of Pigs; and several Cuban American
National Foundation board members who resigned from CANF in August.
That "principle" is consistent with the 1979 statement Bosch made
while jailed in Venezuela to investigators for the U.S. House
of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations. "You have to fight
violence with violence. At times you cannot avoid hurting innocent people,"
Bosch proclaimed. According to the investigators, he denied involvement in the
Cubana de Aviación slaughter but said he supported it and called terrorism
a necessary evil in the fight against Castro.
On this recent Friday morning 25 years later, he didn't exactly renounce terrorism
either. He again denied involvement in the jetliner bombing and then offered
a unique, if oblique, definition of terrorism. "All fights are terrorism,"
Bosch posited.
"Suppose I go at you with a knife and you have a pistol." He touched
the reporter's knee for emphasis. "What are you going
to do with that pistol?" (Shoot it, the reporter supposed.)
Bosch, like his nemesis Castro, bemoaned the September 11 attacks in New York
and Washington. "It's unbelievable, man,"
he said. "If you are my enemy, I will fight you, but what the hell is this
killing all those people with that plane?" Yet he went on again with the
inevitability of innocent casualties. "When they attack this guy, some
innocents will be killed," he predicted,
referring to the military assaults the United States would launch two days later
in the hunt for Osama bin Laden. "It's like
Churchill said: "War is a competition of cruelty.'"
Early this month Bosch admitted to shipping explosives to Cuba.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Guys such as Bosch make it easy for the Cuban government to claim that the
United States harbors, or at least tolerates, anti-Castro terrorists. The fact
that many prominent Cuban exiles continue to support, and in some cases plan,
bombings and other violence against targets in Cuba casts an eerie irony over
President Bush's warnings that ambivalence is unacceptable in the
war on terrorism. "Some governments still turn a blind eye to the terrorists,
hoping the threat will pass them by. They are mistaken," Bush admonished
during his United Nations speech on November 10. "The allies of terror
are equally guilty and equally accountable."
Ricardo Alarcon, the president of Cuba's National Assembly of the People's
Power, hastened to point out the disconnect
during an October interview in Havana with New Times. "Bush's words are
very categorical: "He who harbors a terrorist is as guilty as the terrorist
himself.' A government that harbors a terrorist in its territory, that permits
him to act, to live, to raise
money, to organize himself, is as guilty as the terrorist," a guayabera-clad
Alarcon elaborated, waving an unlit cigar as he sat in
an old-fashioned easy chair in a salon inside the assembly building. "Orlando
Bosch has been defined by the U.S. Department
of Justice as a terrorist. "Notorious,' even. Where does he live? In Afghanistan?
Or does he live in Miami? Is he keeping
quiet? No."
Alarcon, a 64-year-old Communist Party Central Committee member and former
UN ambassador, declined to comment on
the latest terrorist mission produced by Miami's hard-core anti-Castristas,
saying it was under investigation. But Cuban Interior Ministry officials had
already released considerable information about it on Mesa Redonda, the island's
state-run evening news
and commentary program. This past April Cuban authorities arrested three Miami-Dade
residents -- Ihosvani Suris, Santiago Padron, and Maximo Padrera -- who had
boated to the island. According to Interior Ministry officials, the three had
several
AK-47 assault rifles, an M-3 carbine rifle, and three semiautomatic Makarov
pistols when they were apprehended in Villa
Clara province, Bosch's old stomping grounds.
In interviews with New Times this past July, Hialeah-based developer Santiago
Alvarez acknowledged "certain responsibility"
for the incursion (see "Spies in Miami, Commandos in Cuba," July 5,
2001). He had little choice but to admit it. Mesa Redonda had featured a videotape
of Suris seated in a chair and placing a phone call to Alvarez. Alvarez is heard
answering the phone, unaware that Suris already was in custody. "Stay calm,"
Alvarez instructed. "Dig yourself in a little. Don't move. You'll see that
everything is going to work out."
Then Suris asked Alvarez if he still wanted him to carry out an operation at
the Tropicana nightclub in Havana. "The other day
you told me about the Tropicana thing. Do you want me to do something there?"
Suris asked.
"If you want to do that, all the better," Alvarez replied. "It
doesn't matter to me. There you have the advantage that with a
couple of little cans [laticas], it's over with, and it's less risky."
Cuban authorities allege the Tropicana operation involved
placing canisters of plastic explosives at the open-air cabaret, one of Havana's
most popular tourist attractions.
The video was part of a Mesa Redonda presentation by Manuel Hevia, director
of Cuba's Center for Historical State Security Investigations, a branch of the
Interior Ministry. Hevia's highly detailed narrative alleged that Alvarez had
promised Suris
$10,000 at a meeting in a Coral Gables parking lot; that Alvarez had ordered
the weapons at a Coconut Grove Convention
Center gun show on March 10 of this year; that Suris picked up the weapons five
days later from Miami Police Supply; that
Suris bought knives, caps, boots, and other items at an Army supply store; that
Ruben Dario Lopez, a member of the
paramilitary Democratic National Unity Party, left a Key Biscayne marina on
April 24 in a boat with Suris, Padrera, and
Padron onboard; that the boat got stuck on a sandbar near Key Largo and then
was searched by a U.S. Coast Guard patrol;
that the Coast Guard found nothing compromising and released them; that Alvarez
and two unidentified men boated
separately toward the southwestern Bahamas; that an unidentified individual
in a third boat transferred the weapons to Suris and crew at a place called
Dog Rocks.
Lopez's name surfaced this past April at the Cuban spy trial. A secret message
one of the defendants had sent to Havana
referred to an undercover meeting among Lopez, Bosch, and a female agent whose
code name was Sol and who eluded
capture. According to the document, Bosch told Sol he had sent explosives to
Havana but did not know if they had arrived. Bosch, who refused to testify as
a defense witness at the trial, told New Times he did not ship any explosives
that year, but he confessed to doing so previously.
"I've sent so many things to Cuba that I can't remember if they were explosives
or not," he added. "You can't destroy a
tyranny by praying to saints in a church."
Hevia maintained that the April operation had been planned and financed by
Alvarez, Lopez, and a third Miami-Dade resident named Ignacio Castro. He noted
that Lopez had been involved in previous acts of terrorism, including an Alpha
66 mission in which several commandos fired machine guns at the Guitart Hotel
in May 1995. Ignacio Castro, he added, traveled to Panama with Alvarez this
past April to visit Posada and three more Miami-Dade men jailed for an alleged
plot to kill Castro with a
bomb last year.
"How were infiltration operations like this financed, organized, and executed
right before the eyes of the U.S. authorities?"
Hevia asked.
For Alvarez the answer is simple. "We didn't violate any U.S. laws,"
he insisted. He said the April mission was not staged from U.S. territory and
therefore did not violate the Neutrality Act, which prohibits exports of arms,
ammunition, or other implements
of war from the United States to another country, unless authorized by the State
Department.
A boat captain, Alvarez served in the U.S. Army's Cuban Units from 1961 to
1963; his role in the Bay of Pigs invasion was to shuttle infiltrators from
the Florida Keys across the straits. During that period he also "spent
some time" with the CIA, he said,
and as a member of Comandos L and the Movement of Revolutionary Recovery participated
in several maritime commando
raids along the coast of Cuba. He declined to confirm any of Hevia's details
about the April operation and offered only a
general refutation of any information the Cuban government puts out. "The
Castro regime is the WWF [World Wrestling Federation] of international politics,"
he scoffed. "I didn't like Castro from the beginning. He was such a demagogue.
He
reminds me of Hulk Hogan." Alvarez chuckled that he can't watch professional
wrestling. "It reminds me of the Castro government."
Despite his videotaped exchange with Suris regarding the apparent plan to bomb
the Tropicana nightclub, Alvarez said the
1997 explosions at Havana hotels (which left an Italian tourist dead and which
Posada took credit for in a 1998 New York
Times interview) didn't accomplish much. "[Such] bombings don't do anything,"
Alvarez declared. "When we start making war, we will start attacking higher
objectives." He cited sabotaging oil refineries and sugar facilities. "There
were no tourists in
Kosovo or Vietnam," he added. "When you have a war going on, you have
no tourism going on there."
Cuba has given up complaining about such incursions through diplomatic channels.
"Lately we are dedicating ourselves to
public denunciations, because our experience with more discreet measures is
that they never have produced a concrete result," Alarcon said. "Sometimes
it is really ridiculous," he chided, and called the U.S. authorities' negligence
in the majority of cases "criminal."
In the post-September 11 atmosphere of Cuban-on-Cuban recrimination, Havana
has taken the opportunity to reassert that deploying spies in South Florida
to detect terrorist plots was and remains just and noble. "These five compatriots,"
Alarcon announced, referring to the five undercover agents convicted this past
June, "tried to help us prevent actions that these people were going to
do because the North American authorities do nothing in relation to that."
During some of his diplomatic contacts in the Eighties and Nineties, U.S. officials
even expressed tacit approval of Cuba's
spying on exiles, Alarcon divulged, although he declined to offer specific names
or dates of the meetings. "Never did any North American [official] say
to me: "Hey, but that is a violation of North American laws,'" he
avowed. "They have always
understood that we have the right, and that we're even obligated to do it....
Because they knew that it wasn't anything against
the United States.... And not only that, they said they would even be grateful
if we would pass along the information, because
in some way it could be useful to them."
The destruction of two Cessnas by a Cuban MiG in February 1996, killing four
Brothers to the Rescue members as they flew toward the island, halted any hidden
spirit of cooperation that U.S. and Cuban officials might have shared regarding
exile
violence. The deadly shootdown doesn't exactly fit the definition of terrorism,
in light of the repeated warnings Brothers to the
Rescue founder José Basulto and the two other pilots received from U.S.
and Cuban authorities. But that doesn't keep Basulto and others from calling
it one of the most brutal acts of "Castro-terrorism" ever. "If
you tell me that a MiG attack on two
unarmed civilian planes isn't an act of terrorism, I don't know what is,"
Basulto remarked.
"Recently, sadly and savagely, this country has learned how much damage
civilian, unarmed aircraft can inflict upon its
population," convicted spy Gerardo Hernandez told U.S. District Judge Joan
Lenard at his sentencing hearing last week. "This
is why, perhaps, its top leaders have warned that any aircraft that threateningly
deviates from its established path could be
shot down even if it carries hundreds of passengers onboard." Lenard sentenced
him to life in prison for espionage and
conspiracy to murder in the shootdown.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The September 11 attacks have breathed new life into an enduring effort by
exile activists to argue that Castro is the real
terrorist. Under the Cuban Patriotic Forum's principles, setting off bombs in
urban areas and shooting at hotels and commercial vessels is not terrorism but
a right. "Down with terrorists and down with the totalitarians of the world!"
Eugenio Llamera
exclaimed to a Radio Mambí reporter as the rain poured down before the
"God Bless America" march in Little Havana on Saturday, October 20.
Llamera, a former political prisoner, organized the demonstration along with
other Patriotic Forum members.
Like Bosch, Llamera is one of the guys Havana points to when arguing that U.S.
authorities have a special tolerance for
terrorists of the Cuban-exile variety.
Llamera, for instance, was in a four-man Comandos L squad that took a boatful
of weapons into Cuban waters on July 4,
1992. After a firefight with Cuban patrol boats, the exiles fled and were about
seven miles off the coast of Varadero when the vessel broke down. The U.S. Coast
Guard rescued them. The FBI later questioned the four and released them. One,
former Black Panther Tony Bryant, stood trial on illegal-weapons charges. He
was acquitted. None was charged with violating the Neutrality Act. At a January
1993 news conference, Bryant warned tourists to stay away from Cuba because
Comandos L
was planning more attacks. Four months later, according to Cuban and U.S. law-enforcement
sources, Llamera financed a machine-gun attack on a Cyprus-flagged tanker, the
Mikonos. Commandos fired on the ship as it steamed toward the Cuban
port of Carúpano. Llamera denied involvement in the Mikonos attack. But
he considers his commando operations to be acts
of war, not terrorism. "You think that is sabotage or terrorism?"
he exclaimed. "That's bravery on the part of four men."
No charges were brought by U.S. authorities in this case or in several subsequent
strafings of coastal hotels.
The local brand-Castro-a-terrorist campaign extends well beyond Llamera and
other small-time anti-Castro firebrands. U.S.
Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-Fla.), University of Miami professors Jaime Suchlicki
and Eugene Pons, and even El Nuevo Herald also are getting licks in.
Of course the Havana government does not have a pristine record when it comes
to terrorists. The authoritarian regime is on
the U.S. State Department's list of nations that promote terrorism (along with
Libya, North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Sudan, and
Syria), though its rationale could apply to Paris, Madrid, or South Boston:
"Cuba continued to provide safe haven to several terrorists and U.S. fugitives
in 2000. A number of Basque ETA terrorists who gained sanctuary in Cuba some
years ago continued to live on the island.... Havana also maintained ties to
other state sponsors of terrorism and Latin-American
insurgents. Colombia's two largest terrorist organizations, the Revolutionary
Armed Forces of Colombia and the National
Liberation Army, both maintained a permanent presence on the island." The
only additional information was that Cuba
provides the Colombian guerrillas with "some medical care and political
consultation"; "some ETA members allegedly have received sanctuary
in Cuba while others reside in South America"; and Cuba "also appears
to have ties to the Irish Republican Army through the two groups' legal political
wings." It makes no mention of any ties to al Qaeda.
Neither do Suchliki and Pons in their pamphlet titled "Castro and Terrorism,
a Chronology," which they rushed to press in late September. They echo
the State Department, noting that Castro has "recently concentrated his
support" on ETA, the IRA, and the Colombian guerrillas. But why not take
the opportunity afforded by the September 11 massacre to retrace the past 40
years of Cuban Cold War turmoil? They revisit the Cuban government's historical
ties to "guerrillas and terrorist groups in Guatemala, Venezuela, and Bolivia"
in the Sixties, to leftist guerrillas in Africa in the Seventies, and to the
Palestine Liberation Organization. "Castro sent military instructors and
advisors to Palestinian bases; cooperated with Libya in the founding of
World Mathaba, a terrorist movement; and established close military cooperation
and exchanges with Iraq, Iran, Southern Yemen, the Polisario Front for the Liberation
of Western Sahara, the PLO, and others in the Middle East."
One of the last entries comes from the spy trial, which produced some evidence
that back in the mid-Nineties, Cuban
intelligence agents were at least discussing potentially violent activities,
though none was on the scale of blowing up a jetliner.
For instance, one message sent from Havana to agent Alejandro Alonso in 1994
asked the spy to suggest how a "maritime
incursion" could be carried out from Cuba to Florida: "The general
idea of all of this, which is under your control, is to operate
in the area and be able to move persons as well as things, including arms and
explosives, between our country and the U.S." (Alonso, who agreed to cooperate
with prosecutors before his January 2000 conviction, is serving a seven-year
sentence.) Another message sent from Havana's Directorate of Intelligence in
1994 instructed Rene Gonzalez, one of the five convicted spies, to explore the
possibility of burning down a Brothers to the Rescue warehouse.
When New Times presented Alarcon with trial documents containing these messages,
the national assembly president perused each for several minutes. "Frankly
I don't have the slightest idea," he said cheerfully. "I don't know
anything about espionage."
He speculated that Alonso's incursion study might have been to explore how easily
anti-Castro groups could stage one in
Florida and falsely blame it on the Cuban government. But he insisted that in
the 43 years of the revolution, U.S. authorities
have never accused the Cuban government of any explosion or other act of violence
committed on U.S. soil. "We have never dedicated ourselves to promoting
any terrorist actions in the United States. And we never will."
The most damning recent evidence is disturbing but only rhetorical -- an excerpt
from a speech Castro delivered in Teheran
this past May. "Iran and Cuba, in cooperation with each other, can bring
America to its knees," the dictator was quoted as
saying.
Even South Florida's award-winning Spanish-language daily, El Nuevo Herald,
seems eager to link Castro to the September
11 attacks. A November 14 news article carried the headline: "They Affirm
That Atta Met in Miami with a Cuban Agent." But
the story, which is a summary of a piece titled "Fidel May Be Part of Terrorist
Campaign" that appeared in the Washington
Times magazine, Insight on the News, contains no one affirming any such meeting.
Rather it cites unidentified "federal investigators" who "suspect
that [Mohamed] Atta's Cuban contact was a top defense-ministry officer with
personal ties to
Castro, who entered the United States under cover of assignment to a Cuban-government
delegation escorting Elian's two
grandmothers...." In the article the unnamed investigators only say such
a meeting was possible.
Congressman Diaz-Balart leaped on the Insight article for a November 15 press
release, turning unsubstantiated speculation
into fact. "Al Qaeda terrorists have been linked to Cuban intelligence
operatives," the statement read. The U.S. representative
then alleged that Castro's recent decision to buy agricultural products from
private companies in the United States in the wake
of Hurricane Michelle was an attempt by the dictator "to divert attention
from his links to international terrorism."
Then there's the book titled The True Terrorist, which Pedro Remon finished
earlier this year in a Panamanian prison. Remon knows a thing or two about the
topic. In February 1986 he and two other alleged members of the Omega 7 terrorist
group pleaded guilty to bombing Cuba's UN mission in 1979 and attempting to
kill Cuban ambassador Raul Roa by rigging a bomb
to his car in 1980 (the device fell off). An FBI investigation also implicated
Remon in the machine-gun murder of Cuban
diplomat Felix Garcia Rodriguez in New York in 1980, but that charge was dropped.
Remon is awaiting trial along with
Posada, Gaspar Jimenez, and Guillermo Novo for an alleged plan to set off a
C-4 plastic explosive somewhere in Panama
City during last year's Ibero-American Summit in an attempt to assassinate Castro.
(They claim they were in Panama to help
the head of the Cuban intelligence service defect.)
Remon offers this humble hope: "Our aspirations are not only to prove
our innocence in Panamanian courts but also to place
on the defendant's chair the true terrorist in this whole trauma: Fidel Castro
Ruz. Terrorist, the dictionary says, is he who
practices terrorism, and terrorism is domination with terror. Both terms depict
the sad reality of the Cuban nation today."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Could there be a better time for the U.S. Attorney and the FBI chief in South
Florida to assure the public they will thwart terrorism wherever it hides, even
when its target is Fidel Castro?
So far they have opted not to comment on any matter whatsoever related to violence-prone
exiles. But they haven't been silent about Castro. "The case is most certainly
about our continued fight to keep and protect this community from Castro's
tentacles," U.S. Attorney Guy Lewis told a news conference in June after
the jury convicted the five spies on all counts,
including one defendant for conspiracy to murder in the Brothers to the Rescue
shootdown. "We will not stand idly by and
allow any foreign government to wreak its havoc upon our way of life. We will
investigate, we will prosecute, and in the end
we will be successful."
FBI special agent in charge, Hector Pesquera, also singled out the aging dictator
that day. "I would like to send this very
special message," he began. "Mr. Castro, sending your agents to the
United States to conduct intelligence operations against
the citizens of this country will not be tolerated. We will pursue you vigorously,
and we will take you and prosecute you to the fullest extent of the law."
But in response to a reporter's question, he failed to indicate whether he would
pursue local leads
regarding the 1997 Havana bombings with the same vigor. During the trial defense
and U.S. government lawyers confirmed
that FBI agents and Cuban government authorities had actually shared information
about the case. Pesquera would only
comment on a semantic issue. "The only thing I can tell you is I take full
exception to the word cooperation," he replied.
"There was some information brought to our attention through diplomatic
channels. We, discharging our duties, looked into it.
But to say and classify that we were cooperating with the Cuban government would
be a misstatement." Pesquera refused to answer any more questions on the
topic.
The FBI chief and the U.S. Attorney are still mum. In late November New Times
asked Pesquera and Lewis to state whether they would consider bombings of tourist
destinations in Havana to be acts of terrorism. They also refused to answer
Alarcon's charge that authorities in South Florida are irresponsible in their
failure to prosecute commando missions such as the one this
past April. Pesquera and Lewis declined to say anything about several other
exile commando raids carried out in the early Nineties, including why the 1992
incident involving Llamera was not prosecuted. "We feel that it is too
close in time to these sentencings to be commenting on issues that also may
be the subject of sentencing litigation and argument," Pesquera said.
Marvelle McIntyre-Hall, special counsel to Lewis, maintained that no one at
the U.S. Attorney's Office could comment on anything related to "how the
FBI handles Cuba," before Judge Joan Lenard sentences all five Cuban spies.
(As of press time, Lenard was scheduled to hand down the last sentence on December
27.)
Orlando Bosch, however, is not keeping quiet. Early this month he again denied
responsibility for the Cuban airline bombing
but added, "There were no innocents on that plane."
©2001 New Times, Inc. All rights reserved.
