The Rag Blog

By Karen Lee Wald/ The Rag Blog / February 11, 2011

See “The Posada trial takes a historic turn,” by Peter Kornbluh, Below.

Flying through the night on the way back to California from two months of research and interviews in Cuba, I’d dozed off when the voice of the pilot over the intercom woke me up. I almost fell back asleep as he told us our altitude. But when he added that the lights we could see below were the city of El Paso, Texas, I sat bolt upright, a shiver running up my spine.

Somewhere below me was the man who’d escaped from a Venezuelan prison while being tried for masterminding the world’s first mid-flight bombing of a passenger airline — Cubana 455 — killing all 73 aboard.

Years later, that same man boasted to a New York Times reporter that he was behind the string of hotel and restaurant bombings that shook Cuba in 1997 — leaving vast material damage, a number of hotel workers and guests injured or badly shaken, and one Italian hotel guest dead.

But Luis Posada Carriles isn’t facing trial in El Paso for any of those crimes.

He’s been charged only with lying to immigration authorities when he reentered the U.S. secretly in 2005; then he blew his cover by holding a press conference and announcing he wanted political asylum.

All the phases of this Castro-hating, CIA-trained terrorist came rushing back to me as the pilot informed us that we were flying over the city where this man is free to walk the streets until a jury decides whether he should be punished for failing to tell the truth about his exploits. It hit me with special force, because I had just come from interviewing one of his near-victims. This is what she told me:

“Elena, Elena, that man left a bag there!” exclaimed Alex, a 12-year-old boy who was waiting with his two sisters and their tour guide in the lobby of the Triton Hotel in Havana for their father to return from the airlines ticketing office. Moments before, across from them on the lobby couches, an olive-skinned man wearing shorts and a baseball cap had been shuffling through photographs he had removed from his backpack, glancing from time to time at his watch.

Thirty-year old Elena, a divorced mother of a six-year-old girl, loved her work showing visitors from the world the natural beauty of her homeland. Among her recent clients was a Latin American family that had won her heart; three children were left motherless the year before by the ravages of cancer. In the hope that a change of scenery would lift their spirits, their father brought the children to Cuba in September 1997, the first anniversary of their mother’s death.

Elena initially did not respond to Alex’s agitation — she had seen nothing unusual — and his sisters, Sandra and Xochi, laughed and teased him, “There’s nothing there; you’ve been watching too many horror movies!”

But Alex refused to be put off and shouted, “Yes, there is. I saw him put it there. He took a bag out of his backpack and put it behind the couch.”

Finally, to appease him, Elena went over to the couch where the man had been sitting, with the two girls scurrying after her. Finding nothing on the couch, they looked behind it. There they spotted a white plastic shopping bag hidden among the planter shrubs. As Sandra reached for it Elena apprehensively pushed her away.

“I don’t know why I did that. I wasn’t thinking of a bomb,” she recalls years later, the first time she has spoken to the press about that fateful day. “If I thought anything, it was that maybe someone had left something gross, like a headless chicken. Some people in Cuba still practice ‘brujeria,’ and someone could have left something to bless or curse someone in the hotel.”

But when she hurried over to tell the hotel doorman about the bag, he shouted for her to get the children out of there. Just as Elena pushed the children up against a wall and spread her arms to protect them, the bomb exploded.

“There was a tremendous roar, a gust — like nothing I’d ever experienced. People were running around, shouting and crying,” Elena recalls. “We threw ourselves down on the floor. The children were screaming, calling for their father. Alex kept repeating, ‘I told you! I told you!'”

They only found out later that moments earlier two similar time bombs had detonated in other nearby Havana hotels; one was at the Chateau Miramar, the other at the Copacabana where an Italian, Fabio Di Celmo, was killed by flying glass. Elena and the children were lucky: because of the bomb’s positioning the blast force was directed outward towards the windows instead of inwards; otherwise Elena and the children likely would have been badly maimed or killed.

According to the testimony of several captured terrorists and declassified CIA and FBI files, the mastermind behind these and other attacks was CIA operative, Luis Posada Carriles, who emigrated to Venezuela as a passionate anti-Castro militant, perhaps with his long-time co-conspirator Orlando Bosch, head of the Miami-based counterrevolutionary group “CORU.”

Their most horrendous terror attack done together was the two time bombs that exploded aboard Cubana Flight 455 in October 1976, killing all 73 on board: the pilots and flight attendants; five members of a cultural delegation from the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea; Guyanese teenagers flying to Cuba to begin medical school; and Cuban teens and young adults who had just won gold medals at a fencing competition in Caracas, Venezuela.

After the bomb exploded and the plane crashed into the sea, one of the two men hired by Posada placed a chilling phone call to Posada’s co-conspirator, Orlando Bosch, with the coded message: ”A bus with 73 dogs went off a cliff and all were killed…”

Both had the silent backing of then-president of Venezuela, Carlos Andres Prestes, and the complicity of U.S. government agencies that knew the group was planning to “take out a plane” but said nothing to warn the Cuban government.

CIA documents released in 2005 indicate that the agency “had concrete advance intelligence,” as early as June 1976, on plans by Cuban exile terrorist groups to bomb a Cubana airliner.

Two of Posada’s employees in his private “security” agency in Caracas — Freddy Lugo and Ricardo Hernan — were arrested in Trinidad-Tobago immediately after the bombing, and implicated Posada and Bosch. They were later convicted and served sentences in Venezuela.

Although Posada and Bosch were arrested and held in prison through several mock “trials,” they were never brought to justice. After numerous threats to prosecutors and the attempted murder of one judge which left his son and chauffeur dead, most judges were afraid to convict them. Venezuela’s president at that time, Carlos Andres Prestes, assured the two ringleaders he would intercede on their behalf, and Bosch was eventually released.

Posada — perhaps because he didn’t believe President Prestes would keep his word in freeing him, or because he tired of waiting in jail — escaped from prison mid-trial. Accounts differ, but either the CIA or the Cuban American National Foundation [CANF] in Miami financed his flight out of the country, and Posada soon appeared at a U..S military base in El Salvador as “Ramon Medina,” where he became part of Oliver North’s “drugs for guns” network supplying the Nicaraguan Contras and Central American death squads.

Having gotten away with history’s first mass murder aboard an airliner, both Posada and Bosch were eager for more actions designed to oust or kill their arch enemy, Fidel Castro. Posada was convicted in 2000 of a plot in Panama to blow up a university auditorium where the Cuban president was scheduled to speak. But in 2005, he and four others convicted in the plot were pardoned and released by outgoing President Mireya Moscoso.

Posada remained in hiding for several years, but eventually rumors that he’d secretly returned to Miami proved to be true. At a press conference he announced he wanted to seek political asylum, despite laws barring emigrating criminals from receiving it.

After his press conference, Bush’s immigration authorities were forced to arrest him for illegal entry. Venezuela, which had an outstanding warrant for Posada, asked the U.S. to honor its decades-old extradition treaty. However, a U.S. immigration judge ruled that while Posada should be deported, he could not be sent to either Cuba or Venezuela because he might be subjected to torture.

In 2007, Congressman Bill Delahunt and Jose Pertierra, an immigration lawyer representing the government of Venezuela, argued the hypocrisy of the U.S. policy of extraordinary rendition of suspected terrorists to Syria and Egypt, both of which practice torture.

In an interview with a New York Times reporter in 1998, Posada, boasting that he had planned and financed the bombings of tourist spots in Cuba, qualified his comments by explaining that the bombs were intended only to “break windows and cause minor damage.” When asked about the Italian businessman who’d been killed in the Copacabana, he said that “the poor Italian” had been “in the wrong place at the wrong time.” He added, “I don’t lose any sleep over it. I sleep like a baby.”

Not so for the three children and the tour guide who happened to be in the hotel lobby on September 4, 1997

Elena, recounts that after the explosion she and the still screaming children hid under a table in the hotel lobby. “I kept trying to get the kids to be quiet, because I was afraid that the bomber would come back and kill us. Because we’d seen him. We’d seen who put the bomb there.” Terrified, eventually they were urged by security men to come out from under the table,

Later, she and the children were taken to a room for questioning. She gave a general description of the man they’d seen, but says, “Alex did much better. He’d been staring at the young man, and was able to describe him in detail. He even noticed the kind of watch he was wearing and the insignia on the cap.” Elena was driven to the airport to see if she could recognize the terrorist attempting to flee the country, but she didn’t spot him.

Later that night, the terrorist, eventually identified as Raul Ernesto Cruz Leon, placed another bomb at the popular Bodeguita del Medio restaurant. There, as in other places Cruz Leon had left his timed explosives, people were able to describe someone who looked like Cruz Leon among people in the crowd before the bomb went off. But Elena and the children were the only ones to actually see him place a bomb, which is why, Elena explains,

…we’ve kept so quiet about it all these years, and have never given anyone the names of the children. Their father said they would cooperate with the police in any way they could, but he asked for complete discretion so his children wouldn’t be in danger. He said, “In your country (Cuba), the government will protect you, but in our country terrorists have free reign and I don’t want any of them to know my children were involved here. I don’t know how I could protect them.”

Elena admits that for a long time she was nervous, afraid other killers would come after her. She had trouble sleeping, waking from fearful nightmares.

Over time the memories faded, and after the trial in which the Salvadorian bombers — who testified that Posada paid them to place the bombs — were convicted and sentenced, she felt a sense of relief.

But now a series of events has awakened memories and fears from that fateful day: the appeal of the captured bombers was recently heard by Cuba’s highest court, where their death penalties were commuted to 30-year sentences. And the trial of Luis Posada Carriles in El Paso, Texas, is in the news every day.

While many believe that Luis Posada Carriles should be convicted for murder and terrorism, instead the 82-year-old is currently facing only charges federal perjury, obstruction, and immigration fraud — not crimes that are likely to put him away for life. And despite abundant evidence about how he really entered the country, Posada has pleaded not guilty, claiming to have slipped into the U.S. across the Mexican border into Texas.

Prosecutors insist that he arrived in Miami using a forged passport on the boat of a “benefactor” — a Miami tycoon named Santiago Alvarez. The key witness in the trial against Posada was also the FBI informant who forced Alvarez and another of his violent anti-Castro cohorts to take a plea deal for possession of a veritable arsenal of guns and explosives. But that information has been kept from the jury by a judge who bends over backwards to rule out any testimony that might be “prejudicial” to the terrorist standing trial for lying.

In an about-face from his boastful claims to the New York Times, Posada is now also distancing himself from the hotel bombings in Cuba. He knows that his bragging is what is most likely to undermine his claim to the U.S. as a safe haven. He now claims his English is poor and he was “misunderstood” in that interview.

But U.S. prosecutors have filed numerous FBI documents showing Posada hired two men to plant the hotel bombs as part of his strategy to disrupt tourism in communist Cuba. In a major breakthrough, one of his intermediaries, Francisco Chavez Abarca, was recently captured in Venezuela and extradited to Cuba, where he testified against his boss.

In an unusual cooperative effort, the Cuban government is sending two policemen and the forensic experts who performed the autopsy on the murdered Italian to testify at the Texas trial, along with reams of other evidence against Posada. Likely to antagonize Florida’s powerful Cuban-Americans, the trial also highlights the lax treatment Posada has received compared to others coordinating international terrorist acts.

When asked how she feels about the Posada trial and the commuted death sentences of the bombers, Elena said,

If that bomb blast had gone in the other direction, we wouldn’t be here to talk about it. You’d have had three dead children and a motherless six-year-old [her daughter]… But I blame Posada more than Cruz Leon. He was a victim, too. He was dirt poor, and he saw it as a way to survive, to get out of poverty. Posada was the mastermind. He says he sleeps like a baby. To me, that means he’s a man with no conscience. It just doesn’t matter to him that we could have all been killed.

“A bus with 73 dogs went off a cliff and all got killed.”

Recalling the phoned-in code for the 73 Cubana Airline passengers and crew killed in 1976, she pauses, then adds, “What would his code have been then? ‘Three puppies and a bitch fell off a balcony’?

“If there is any justice in the world, he should pay for what he’s done.”

[Karen Lee Wald is a writer and researcher who has been reporting on Latin America for many decades.]

The Posada trial takes a historic turn

By Peter Kornbluh / The Nation / February 9, 2011

EL PASO — In El Paso, Texas, the perjury trial of the infamous violent Cuban exile Luis Posada Carriles took a historic turn today. For the first time in a long dramatic history dominated by hostility and aggression, U.S. government prosecutors formally presented evidence of terrorism committed against Cuba in a court of law — against one of its own former CIA operatives.

Even more extraordinary, the evidence comes in the form of a Cuban Ministry of Interior investigator explaining photographs and police reports to the jury relating to a series of explosions in Havana hotels, including the Hotel Copacabana which killed a young Italian businessman Fabio Di Celmo on September 4, 1997.

“Cuba Cooperating in U.S. case against ex-CIA agent,” reads tomorrow’s news headlines.

The godfather of anti-Castro Cuban violence over the last four decades, Posada is being prosecuted for immigration fraud relating to how he illegally entered the United States in March 2005. But the Obama Justice Department added three counts of perjury relating to a far more important crime: Posada’s role in a series of seven bombings that rocked Havana hotels and other tourist sites between April and September 1997.

“The defendant is alleged to have lied about his involvement in planning the bombings in Havana,” state court filings by the Justice Department’s Counterterrorism Division. “The United States intends to prove that the bombings in Cuba actually occurred.”

This week marks the first time that concrete evidence is being presented to the jury on how those bombings took place and the damage they wrought. The jury has been shown photographs taken by Cuban authorities of the bloodstained floor of the hotel. Portions of a Cuban investigative study, known as the “Volcan report,” which discusses the cause of, and circumstances surrounding, Fabio Di Celmo’s death, are due to be introduced as evidence during the testimony of Major Roberto Hernandez Caballero — he was Cuba’s lead detective on the hotel bombing investigation — who took the stand today.

The importance of this moment in US-Cuban relations cannot be overstated. Posada was originally trained in demolitions by the U.S. military and put on the CIA payroll in 1965 to train and supervise other exile groups in sabotage, explosives, and violent operations.

Declassified CIA and FBI intelligence reports, posted on the website of the National Security Archive, identify him as a mastermind of a mid-air bombing of a Cuban jetliner that took the lives of all 73 men, women and children on board in October 1976.

Most recently, Posada was arrested in Panama with a carload of C-4 and dynamite in what he admitted to U.S. officials was a plot to assassinate Fidel Castro at the Ibero-American summit in November 2000. By prosecuting him on charges related to his acts of terrorism, even if they are only perjury charges, the United States is effectively repudiating a dark past that its own Cold War officials and covert operatives set in motion.

For Cuba, where Posada is public enemy number one, having its day in court is also a turning point in a longstanding effort to collaborate with U.S. officials to put Posada behind bars. Cuban authorities have been forced to set aside their understandable suspicion that the trial is all for show, not for justice

(After all, how can the United States, which purports to be the leader in the campaign to fight international terrorism, prosecute one of the world’s most infamous terrorists only on perjury charges?)

Since Posada popped up in Miami some six years ago, Cuban authorities have repeatedly welcomed teams of FBI investigators and Justice Department lawyers to Havana. They turned over almost 1,500 pages of investigative records for use in the trial and made Posada’s accomplices, now in prison in Cuba, available for interrogation.

And they have sent three witnesses to El Paso — another police investigator and a forensic doctor to present the autopsy of the murdered Italian to the jury — who have been waiting for over a week to testify.

If this unprecedented level of Cuban judicial support helps convict the 82-year old Posada and he spends the rest of his natural life behind bars, the United States and Cuba will have arrived at a new level of cooperation and collaboration on fighting terrorism.

More importantly, together Washington and Havana will have turned a page on the dark history of US-sponsored violence against the Cuban revolution and Washington can begin what President Obama refers to as “a new chapter” in U.S. relations with Cuba.

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