CBC’s The Current reports on Abarca, Carriles, Cuban Five
Today’s edition of CBC Radio’s flagship current affairs show, The Current, focused on the recent arrest of Francisco Chavez Abarca in Venezuela. Chavez Abarca, who is wanted in connection with a deadly 1997 terrorist bombing campaign aimed at targeted Cuba’s fledgling tourist industry, has been extradited to Cuba where he is being questioned about his role in the plot.
The Current’s host, Jim Brown, interviewed Livio Di Celmo, whose brother Fabio was killed in one of the attacks, and journalist Stephen Kimber, who is writing a book about the terrorist attacks and the Cuban Five.
You can listen to the program here.
Copyright 2010 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
Field Notes 4: Truth, lies and the Cuban American National Foundation
My goal in writing “Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection” is to stick to the facts, reconstructing key events of the case in order to produce an in-the-moment narrative that will help readers understand the true story of what really happened even as it entertains them.
But whose facts? Whose truth? Those are especially tricky questions in a story such as the Cuban Five, which is fraught with emotion, ideology and vested interests.
Everyone is selling their own version of the facts, and everyone insists theirs is the only true one.
Let’s look at just one example.
Jorge Mas Canosa
On September 10, 1997, when Cuban State Security announced the arrest of Salvadoran mercenary Raúl Cruz León for planting a bomb in the Copacabana Hotel that killed an Italian tourist, it added a stunning accusation: “The investigation revealed, without any doubt, that the operations were carefully planned and executed from Miami by a subversive organization controlled by the Cuban American National Foundation headed by counterrevolutionary leader Jorge Mas Canosa.”
The Cuban American National Foundation is the richest and most influential Cuban exile organization in the United States. Both its critics and its supporters would agree CANF played a central role in determining—and maintaining—America’s hard-line policies toward Cuba. Mas Canosa himself was one of Miami’s most respected businessmen, a confidant of American presidents from Ronald Reagan to Bill Clinton.
Canosa with Bill Clinton
CANF, not surprisingly, denied Havana’s allegations; such charges, it said, were so ludicrous as to be “not worthy of a serious response.”
But, a year-and-a-half later, at Cruz León’s trial, the Cubans upped the ante. One of the trial’s key witnesses was a State Security agent named Percy Alvarado Godoy who claimed to have infiltrated CANF in the early nineties.
According to his testimony, senior CANF officials had set up a secret paramilitary wing of the organization at a meeting in Naples, Florida, in 1992 specifically to carry out violent attacks against Cuba.
Percy Alvarado Godoy
Alvarado named names; he claimed he’d been recruited to act as an agent by Luis Zuñiga, a member of CANF’s executive board. He said that the organization’s president, Pepe Hernandez, had been his handler for a mission to plant a bomb inside Havana’s popular Tropicana Cabaret. Alvarado said the man who trained him to assemble the bombs and gave him the device to take to Cuba was none other than Luis Posada Carriles, the CIA-trained exile militant alleged to have been one of the masterminds of the 1976 bombing of Cubana Airlines Flight 455 that killed 73 people.
Again, the Cuban American National Foundation dismissed the allegations out of hand. As for Percy Alvarado? “If he had infiltrated [the Foundation],” spokesperson Ninoska Perez sniffed rhetorically, “you think he would go unnoticed? No one’s heard of him.”
And that’s the he-said-yes/he-said-no way the story played out for seven years.
But then, in June 2006, there was stunning confirmation of the Cuban version of events.
It came from the most unlikely source and for the least ideological of reasons.
Antonio “Toñin” Llama was not only a member of CANF’s board and inner circle but he was also a bona fide anti-Castro militant—with criminal charges to prove it. In 1998, he had been charged—and acquitted—in connection with a plot to assassinate Cuban President Fidel Castro.
That case, ironically, sowed the seeds for Llama’s discontent and his eventual decision to go public with what he knew about CANF’s secret paramilitary wing. Llama believed that CANF had reneged on a promise to cover his and his co-conspirators’ legal expenses. Worse, while he was on trial, some CANF members sold off $1.4 million worth of equipment he had personally financed on its behalf in preparation for the assault on Cuba.
In June 2006, Llama issued a public statement claiming he had been forced to file for bankruptcy because the bank, “which lent me part of the money to buy 10 airplanes, 8 ships and armaments” wanted its funds back. Llama called on CANF to “deliver the titles and assets that I bought and paid for the campaign that we carried out when I was a director, with the purpose of destabilizing Castro’s communist government.”
In a subsequent interview with El Nuevo Herald, Llama reported that the secret paramilitary project “started to take shape during CANF’s annual meeting in Naples in June 1992… About 20 of the foundation’s most trusted leaders agreed, and designated Jose ‘Pepe’ Hernandez, the current CANF president, and Mas Canosa to choose the armed group.”
In other words, Llama confirmed virtually everything Percy Alvarado and the Cubans had claimed seven years earlier.
By now CANF was—ever so slightly—more circumspect with its denials. Instead of denying the substance of what Llama had said, its spokesperson simply argued: “we consider that it is extremely irresponsible for a press organization to echo what clearly represents an extortion and defamation attempt.”
Whose facts?
Whose truth?
As the American writer Lillian Hellman once put it: “What a word is truth. Slippery, tricky, unreliable.”
Lies, however, are easier to spot.
***
If you'd like to see how this episode is portrayed in the book, you might be interested in reading this draft excerpt. The story will also be expanded in another section focusing on Percy Alvarado's testimony during Cruz León's trial.
Read more Field Notes.
Copyright 2010 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
Field Notes 3: Meet Andrés Gómez, Miami progressive
Andrés Gómez—a shambling, friendly, 63-year-old bear of a man—is the director of Areito Digital, an online magazine of “progressive Cuban immigrants,” the leader of the Antonio Maceo Brigade, a Miami-based pro-Cuba activist organization, and one of the best known moderate voices in Miami’s el exilio.
I met with him while I was in Miami recently trying to understand why lawyers for the Cuban Five had argued at trial and later, in appeals, that it was impossible for their clients to get a fair trial in Miami.
Gómez has traveled a long journey from his beginnings not only as the refugee child of anti-Castro exiles but also as the nephew of a leader of one of the most notorious anti-Castro terrorist groups of the 1960s.
Like much in Miami, his story begins in the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution when his upper middle class parents joined the flood of anti-Castro refugees escaping to Miami in 1960. He was 13 at the time.
Most of his family, Gómez says, were—and are—militantly anti-Castro. “Progressives?” He thinks for a minute, laughs. “There’s me and another first cousin. We’re a pretty lopsided right-wing family.”
His own favourite uncle growing up was Miguel San Pedro, a key member of the Movimiento Nacional Cuba, an anti-Castro terrorist group that claimed responsibility for—among other incidents—a failed bazooka attack on the United Nations during Che Guevera’s speech in 1964 and a bomb blast at the Cuban exhibit during the Expo 67 world’s fair in Montreal.
“I loved him dearly,” Gómez says today. Despite their differences, his uncle not only taught him much about Cuban history and politics, he says, but also happily and “constructively” argued with his young nephew, helping hone his developing views on Cuba.
His uncle, Gómez says now, was actually a Cuban nationalist who not only opposed Castro but also American interference in his country. That eventually brought him into conflict with an increasingly powerful cabal of Miami exile militants—including Luis Posada, Oscar Bosch and others—whose actions would become more and more intertwined with those of the CIA.
San Pedro, Gómez remembers, was “incensed” when anti-Castro exiles bombed a Cubana Airlines plane in 1976, killing 73 people. “His own brand of terrorism involved not harming innocents,” Gómez inists. “It was OK to kill officials to make a point. But never innocents. He saw the [airplane] bombers as decadent Mafia types."
By the time San Pedro died in 1981, Gómez believes his uncle had distanced himself from his terrorist past. “He would have been my age when he died,” Gómez says today, “and I think that, if he’d been raised in different circumstances, a different time, he would have turned out like me.”
Gómez’s own political evolution was gradual. At the University of Miami in the sixties, he was one of the founders of the Federation of Cuban Students, a group that fought to preserve the privilege of a separate loan program for Cuban students (one of the perks available to the children of “good” anti-communist Cuban exiles but not to other immigrant groups). And one of his contemporary right-wing critics says he saw Gómez at an anti-Castro rally in support of jailed exile terrorist Felipe Rivero as late as 1967.
Gómez says his radicalization began with the standard trigger issues for young people in the sixties in America—Vietnam, civil rights—but quickly spread to encompass Latin American revolutionary movements and, particularly, the Cuban experience.
The turning point came in 1977. Thanks to a brief rapprochement between the United States and Cuba during the Jimmy Carter presidency, Cuba invited 55 young Cuban exile professionals and intellectuals—including Gómez—to visit the homeland that had been off limits to them for all of the 18 years since the Cuban revolution. The 55 became founding members of the Antonio Maceo Brigade, named after a 19th century black Cuban military general “known for his fierce fighting against Spain in defense of his homeland.”
That first visit to Cuba, Gómez would write 30 years later, “left an everlasting mark on all of us… We were young, but we were aware of the implications of our resolution… we were the ones who destroyed the monolithic image of the then-Cuban counter-revolutionary exile.”
The “counter-revolutionary exile” monolith in Miami did not take the challenge lightly. Over the years, there were attempts on the lives of Gómez and others.
“Bombs,” Gómez says simply, “a Molotov cocktail thrown against a house.”
One of the members of the original brigade—Carlos Muñiz Varela—was murdered in April of 1979 in San Juan, Puerto Rico. “That was 31 years ago,” Gómez says, “and no one has ever been brought to justice. Even though we know who did it, and we know that they [the FBI and Puerto Rican police authorities] know who did it.”
That isn’t unusual. American law enforcement has, at the least, benignly tolerated exile violence, whether against Cuba itself or against moderates in the Cuban American community. Prosecutions are rare, convictions even rarer.
Gómez tells the story of one 1994 incident to make his point. Members of Miami’s Alianza de Trabajadores de la Comunidad Cubana, a group collecting medical equipment and supplies to donate to Cuba, discovered a plot to burn down a warehouse they were using to store 20 tons of supplies in preparation for shipping it to Cuba.
“We let the FBI know what we knew,” Gómez says.
On the night of November 2, 1994—two months after Max Lesnik’s Replica offices had been attacked with two Molotov cocktails—police arrested three Cuban-American men just after they’d smashed out a window and were climbing into the warehouse. They were armed with 10 gallons of gas, fuses and a fully loaded semi-automatic handgun.
Despite the reality that they’d been caught red-handed, Gómez says, the FBI didn’t want to pursue the case. “’Let’s not go to a trial,’ they said to us. ‘The jury will find them innocent anyway. If we don’t take it to trial, we can reach an understanding with them, we’ll be able to control them better…” Gómez shrugs. “We wanted to go to trial.”
The case didn’t go to trial.
“That’s the way it’s been in Miami,” he says simply.
****
In an unprecedented 1992 report, Americas Watch, a human rights group, published a scathing assessment of the state of free speech in Miami, concluding that exile groups, including the Cuban American National Foundation, the Miami City Commission and local Spanish-language radio stations were so determined to enforce their anti-Castro political views among Miami's exile community that "moderation can be a dangerous position."
The 30-page document catalogued a long list bombings, vandalism, beatings, death threats, violence and harassment aimed at moderate exiles from the 1970s to the nineties.
Intriguingly, the group decided to look into the free-speech climate in Miami—the first time it had ever investigated an American city—while investigating human rights violations in Cuba.
"Ironically," the Americas Watch report concluded, "in their attitude toward dissenting viewpoints, many anti-Castro Miami Cubans have a good deal in common with the regime they loathe."
For more, you can check out this Field Note on Max Lesnik, another of Miami's progressive Miami Cubans.
Copyright 2010 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
Field Notes 2: Miami
We are sitting in the cramped, cluttered offices of Radio Miami, which look more like a 1960s commune than a modern radio station. Radio Miami—“radio para la difusión de ideas”—is located in a nondescript strip mall well beyond the stifling political and cultural confines of Little Havana.
That, I have been told, is more a safety precaution than an accident.
Lesson #1.
I have come here on this June day to try to learn what it is like to be a progressive Cuban-American in militantly right-wing, pro-blockade, Castro-must-die, our-terrorists-are-freedom-fighters Miami.
My guides to this strange netherworld are two of the key figures in Miami’s besieged and beleaguered Cuban-American left, Max Lesnik and Andrés Gómez.
Max Lesnik
Lesnik, now 77 and a regular commentator on Radio Miami, was a close friend and ally of Fidel Castro during the Cuban revolution but the two men had a falling out soon after over Castro’s decision to embrace communism.
In 1961, Lesnik joined the exodus of Cubans fleeing to Miami, but he never became—or attempted to become—part of Miami’s virulently anti-Castro el exilio community.
Instead Lesnik, who published a magazine called Replica, made it a point to include all shades of exile opinion in its pages. But the 1976 bombing of a Cubana Airlines plane that resulted in the deaths of 73 people—the first ever act of airplane terrorism—became his personal “point of no return," he tells me. "Replica was openly democratic, publishing all points of view. Right, left… The bombers wanted only one side represented.”
His criticism of the masterminds of the airline bombing—widely believed to be CIA-trained Cuban exiles Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada—brought him into the crosshairs of the militant exile groups. And not just those directly responsible for the airplane attack.
Replica’s offices were bombed 11 different times and Lesnik's life threatened many times. The threats were anything but idle. In 1975, Luciano Nieves, one of Lesnik's closest friends, was gunned down by a fellow exile after visiting his 11-year-old son in the hospital. Nieves’ sin: speaking publicly in favour of the United States government improving its relations with Cuba.
Miami, Lesnik has said, is a place where “terrorists are heroes” and “political assassination is regarded as heroic.”
Vivien and Max
Lesnik is about to tell me about how he’d first come to know one of those Miami terrorist “heroes”—Orlando Bosch—in Havana in the days before the revolution, but then he looks at his watch. He has to go. His mother, who is 100, is not well and he needs to go see her, he says. He hands me a DVD of The Man of Two Havanas, an award-winning but little seen documentary his daughter Viven Lesnik Weisman made about him two years ago. “It’s all in there,” he says simply as he makes his way out the door.
It is—as I discovered later—all in there indeed. Weisman has produced not only a quirky, entertaining personal documentary about her dad and his strange obsession with Cuba but also an insightful, informative primer on the even stranger world of Miami’s el elixio. I highly recommend it.
After Lesnik left, Andrés Gómez, a journalist and leader of the Miami-based Antonio Maceo Brigade, a pro-Cuban group, who works with Lesnik at Radio Miami, picks up the story of what it’s like to be a progressive Cuban-American in militantly right-wing, pro-blockade, Castro-must-die, our-terrorists-are-freedom-fighters Miami.
And I’ll pick up his story in the next Field Notes.
Copyright 2010 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
Field Notes 1: Livio Di Celmo remembers
I was in Montreal recently to interview Livio Di Celmo, the brother of Fabio, a 32-year-old Italian-Canadian who was killed in a September 4, 1997 bombing that was part of a larger terrorist campaign anti-Castro militants were then waging against Cuban tourism.
The alleged mastermind of that campaign—as well as the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed 73 people—is a man named Luis Posada Carriles who “still walks the streets of Miami, a free man.”
Fabio Di Celmo
During the five years since their first visit to the island in 1992, Fabio and his father Giustino had become familiar visitors to Havana as they worked to drum up business for their import-export company. Rime S.A. had been involved in everything from renovating the city’s iconic Hotel Nacional to sourcing sewing needles for Cuban sewing machines.
That day in September 1997, after a round of morning sales meetings with state authorities, Fabio and Giustino had returned to the Copacabana hotel. Fabio was to meet there for lunch with some Italian friends who’d been honeymooning in Cuba—at Fabio’s suggestion.
Fabio had clearly become more and more enamoured with Cuba. While not particularly interested in politics as a child growing up in Italy and Canada, he’d recently developed such an obsession with the speeches of Fidel Castro his friends would tease him about it. It began after he happened to see Castro deliver one of his famously spellbinding three-hour orations. Fabio told friends he’d never heard anyone speak so passionately about anything. After that, he’d read every Fidel Castro speech he could find, and had even begun to read books of Cuban history. And, of course, to recommend Cuba as a tourist destination to all his friends.
He was with two of them—the honeymooners Enrico and Francesca—in the Copacabana’s lobby bar shortly after 11:30 when a powerful bomb, planted in a standing ashtray, exploded, shattering windows, twisting metal window frames and destroying furniture. Fabio’s throat was slit by a flying piece of shrapnel. He died almost instantly.
It wasn’t lost on either Livio or me that we were getting together to talk about Fabio within days of what would have been Fabio’s 45th birthday.
Livio remembered speaking with his younger brother just two days before his death.
Fabio, who’d begun to emerge from the shadow of his super-salesman father, had just finalized the first two contracts he’d negotiated completely on his own. He was very proud, Livio recalls. In fact, Fabio encouraged Livio—who was then living in Montreal and had just lost his own job with a Canadian airline—to abandon his life as “an office rat” and come work with him in Cuba.
“We’ll have fun together,” he’d said.
Instead, two days later, Livio received the call from his father that told him his brother had been killed.
Ironically, though he had no proof at the time—that would come later—Livio knew instinctively who was responsible for what had happened to his brother:
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Copyright 2010 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
The ‘Gordito’ Connection
Francisco Chavez Abarca
Francisco Chavez Abarca—the Salvadoran man arrested at Caracas International Airport on Thursday (July 1, 2010) and accused of plotting to “provoke violence and destabilization” in the lead-up to Venezuela’s legislative elections in September—was one of the keys player in the 1997 Havana hotel bombing campaign orchestrated by anti-Castro militant Luis Posada Carriles.
Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez said Chavez Abarca will be turned over to Interpol and sent to Cuba where he is wanted in connection with a number of bombings in Cuba. He is also the prime suspect in an explosion at a Cuban government tourist office in Mexico City in May 1997.
Who is Chavez Abarca and what is his connection to the Havana hotel bombings affair?
Luis Posada Carriles
The following excerpt from Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection (a nonfiction book-in-progress) helps connect the dots to Chavez Abarca from both Raúl Ernesto Cruz León—the Salvadoran currently in prison for planting the bomb that killed Di Celmo—and also Luis Posada Carriles, currently awaiting trial on the United States for immigration fraud but wanted in Venezuela and Cuba for his part in masterminding the 1976 Cubana Airlines bombing that killed 73 people , as well as the 1997 hotel bombings:
September 4, 1997
10:30 a.m.
“Bucanero.” The olive-skinned young man could have been any tourist in Havana. Raúl Ernesto Cruz León, a 26-year-old Salvadoran, was casually dressed in yellow polo shirt, shorts, sandals and a tan baseball cap. He carried a small blue backpack slung over his shoulder. To the bartender in the lobby bar of the Copacabana Hotel in the city’s Miramar district, Cruz León would certainly have seemed unremarkable. He nodded, turned and went to the fridge to get the tourist his beer.
Cruz León
Cruz León’s family and friends back in San Salvador also assumed he was vacationing in Cuba. Again. They’d been surprised in early July when he had unexpectedly announced his intention to travel to Havana the first time. They’d never even heard him mention Cuba before. He’d explained his sudden interest in the island as the result of the fact a friend had won a Cuban vacation but couldn’t go. The man had sold Cruz León his ticket at a bargain price.
When Cruz León told Yamilet, a 24-year-old Cuban acrobat at a Mexican circus where he worked—since 1994, Cruz León had spent his summers chauffeuring members of the troupe on their annual two-month tour of El Salvador—that he would be visiting her homeland in mid-July, she asked him to deliver a letter and some clothes to her sister in Havana.
Cruz León had returned with photographs of Yamilet’s sister. But not just of her sister. There were plenty of other pictures he’d taken on the beaches around Havana of other attractive young women in revealing swimsuits. “He talked about the beaches, the girls, the nice people, the girls again,” Richard Richard, another young Cuban acrobat, would joke later. Cruz León also brought back several boxes of Montecristos, the popular Cuban cigars, which he had handed out to friends in the weeks following his first visit.
That first trip appeared to have had a profound effect on Cruz León. He was so taken with Cuba’s beauty, he told his brother William, he planned to go back again as soon as he could afford it.
Even the bombs didn’t deter him. His brother had seen TV news reports about bombs going off in Havana hotels and asked Raúl about them. He acknowledged he’d witnessed one attack himself. He’d been frightened like the rest of the tourists, Raúl told his brother, but not so badly that he would consider not going back.
Cruz León didn’t tell his brother everything he knew about the explosions, or explain why he wasn’t afraid. Cruz León had planted the bombs at both the Hotel Nacional and the nearby Hotel Capri.
It had been remarkably easy to do. Just as his friend “Gordito” had told him it would be.
Cruz León had smuggled C-4, a malleable plastic explosive, into Cuba in his shoes. The security guards at Havana’s José Marti airport hadn’t bothered to check his shoes, and they hadn’t twigged to the real purpose of some of the other items in his luggage. The clocks and pocket calculators he’d claimed were gifts for Cuban friends, for example, were really elementary timing devices, while the highlighter pens contained the detonators he’d needed to set off the C-4.
Between visits to Yamilet’s sister and ogling the girls on the beaches, Cruz León done reconnaissance at the two hotels. On July 12, he returned to plant the devices. He armed the first bomb inside a washroom at the Capri, placed it beside a couch in the hotel lobby and escaped before it exploded. He then calmly walked two blocks down Calle 19 toward the Malécon and up the long, palm-lined entrance drive to the Hotel Nacional.
Designed by a famous New York architect, the eight-storey hotel—built on a bluff overlooking the seawall and Havana harbour—was Havana’s most famous hotel. Before the revolution, the Nacional had been a home away from home for an odd lot of international celebrities from Frank Sinatra and Mickey Mantle to Winston Churchill and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, not to forget the American mobster Meyer Lansky, who became a part-owner in pre-revolution days and transformed an entire wing of its grand entrance hall into a bar, restaurant, showroom and high-rollers’ casino.
The casino, like Lansky, was long gone, but the elegance remained.
Cruz León placed his second timed-to-explode bomb under a couch in the Nacional’s lobby near the public telephones and was about to leave when he noticed a tourist sit down on the couch. “There’s a call for you at the desk,” he improvised. He didn’t want to hurt anyone. He’d told Gordito that. Gordito didn’t seem to care. Just make some noise, he’d said. Create some confusion.
It had worked. Cruz León retreated to a safe corner of the lobby to watch the bomb explode and savour the noise and confusion that followed. He’d even mingled with a group of tourists—joining them in their horrified recollections of what they’d all just witnessed—before slipping into the Havana sunshine soon after the police arrived.
Gordito would have been proud.
Gordito’s real name—he’d picked up his “Fatty” nickname because of his weight—was Francisco Antonio Chavez Abarca. He and Cruz León had become friends through Geo Rent A Car, the San Salvador rental agency Cruz León helped set up and where he sometimes worked. Chavez, one of Geo’s big-spending customers, had a penchant for the agency’s most expensive four-wheel drive luxury vehicles.
Chavez Abarca could afford it. Though he had no job anyone knew about, he was the son of a notorious local gangster, which meant he carried lots of cash and at least claimed to have links to influential people who could protect him from the police. Perhaps he did. According to police investigators, one of the reasons Gordito kept renting those luxury cars from Geo was so that his father could copy their documents and use them to turn stolen cars of the same make and model into apparently legal ones in order to sell them. At one point, the police investigated—seizing a gray BMW and a four-wheel drive Nissan, along with two pistols and a rifle—but didn't file criminal charges against father or son at the time.
The man really responsible for the fact Raul Cruz León was now sitting at the bar in the lobby of the Copacabana, his backpack stuffed with four plastic bags, each containing all the necessary pieces for one of the bombs he planned to detonate was Gordito’s father. Or, more accurately, one of his father’s friends.
“Gracias,” Cruz León said as the bartender placed the beer in front of him. He took a sip, put down the glass, walked through the lobby to the washroom.
Among his many criminal sidelines, Gordito’s father, Chavez Diaz, was an illegal arms dealer. During the 1980s, one of his customers had been a militant Cuban exile named Luis Posada. In the mid-eighties—after Posada escaped from a Venezuelan jail before he could be re-tried by a civilian court for his part in the world’s first incident of airplane terrorism, the October 1976 in-flight bombing of Cubana Airlines Flight 455 that killed 76 passengers—he had settled in El Salvador under the alias Ramon Medina Rodriguez.
Posada worked as a middleman for the CIA—an old employer—helping supply weapons to the Contras, a right-wing paramilitary group in neighbouring Nicaragua. The Contras were attempting to overthrow Nicaragua’s elected Sandinista government.
Chavez Diaz sold Posada weapons; Posada passed them on to his contacts who passed them on to the Contras.
In the mid-nineties, when Posada concocted his own scheme to bomb Havana hotels to destabilize Cuba’s fledgling tourist economy and hasten the collapse of communism, he discussed it with his friend, Chavez Diaz, who, in turn, discussed it with his son.
Gordito, in fact, carried the first bombs to Cuba. On April 13, 1997, one blast had ripped through a bathroom next to the Aché discotheque in Havana’s Melia Cohiba, a 20-storey hotel operated by the Spanish-based Melia chain and attracted the richest foreign tourists and business people. Although the explosion punched a huge hole in one wall, ripped out nearby stalls and shattered a marble sink countertop, the blast occurred shortly before dawn when no one was around, so no one was injured. But police later discovered—and disarmed—a second device hidden in a planter near an elevator on the hotel’s 15th floor.
Nothing to it, Gordito reassured Cruz León when he recruited him for his first mission. Gordito would take care of all the details: buying the airline tickets, arranging visas, fronting travel expense money. For every bomb Cruz León detonated, Gordito promised, he would earn close to $2,000 (U.S.).
But debt wasn’t his only motivator. Cruz León also loved dangers’ “rush of adrenalin.” He had grown up in the middle of a decade-long bloody civil war between El Salvador’s U.S.-backed military rulers and leftist insurgents that left 75,000 of his countrymen dead. Despite that—and his mother’s misgivings—Cruz León chose to enrol in the General Gerardo Barrios Military Academy, one of the country’s elite army training schools, in 1991. Less than a year later, after injuring his back in a fall, Cruz León’s mother finally convinced her son to accept a discharge she hoped would keep him safe. But he immediately signed up for training at another private military school. He dropped out a year later but then signed up for a civilian parachuting course. That adventure came to a crashing end—literally—when he broke his leg on only his third jump.
After he recovered, Cruz León landed a less dangerous job providing security on the sets of television programs being filmed around San Salvador. “Mostly,” his sister would recall, “he just kept girls from bothering the stars.” His easygoing nature brought him to the attention of Mario Villacorta, a local promoter who hired him to chauffeur visiting performers around town and, later, members of the circus troupe. Although those gigs were fun—he had amassed a collection of photos of himself with one-named Latin American singing sensations like Selena and Thalia—Cruz León was always looking for the bigger score.
That’s why he’d started the car rental business with a couple of ex-military school buddies. And why, if the police reports were true, he got involved in side ventures stealing cars and committing armed robberies.
All of which could explain how he’d come to be friends with Gordito. Whatever the reason, they began to spend a lot of time together, often at local shooting ranges where they would practice their marksmanship with paintball pellets.
After Cruz León returned from his first mission to Cuba, Gordito paid him $3,000 and promised he would get the rest after his next trip. Cruz León was eager to return, and not just for the money. ’‘I thought that I had accomplished a heroic mission,’‘ he would later say of the July bombings. “I thought it was an action against the evil.’‘
On August 31, Gordito drove Cruz León to the airport and helped him carry a heavy box to the check-in counter. Cruz León told the agent it contained a television set he was bringing to a friend in Cuba. The box did contain a TV, but it wasn’t for a friend, and the inside of the set was lined with C-4
Bombing aftermath
Now, inside the washroom at the CopaCabana, Cruz León reached into his backpack, removed one of the plastic bags, connected the pieces of a bomb, set the timer and returned to the lobby. He paused beside a standing metal cylinder ashtray and gently placed the bag inside, then he returned to the bar. He looked at his watch. He had more than enough time to finish his beer.
— FROM: Sting of the Wasp
A Nonfiction Book-in-Progress
SOURCES: Cruz León’s personal biography is drawn from a number of sources, the most comprehensive being three separate Miami Herald articles published on September 17, October 1, November 16, 1997. Cruz León himself was interviewed on Cuban television following his arrest and Cuban State Security filmed him re-enacting how he had placed the bombs at each location. He was also interviewed by the United Nations Special Rapporteur, who traveled to Cuba to investigate that country’s complaints about the 1997 bombing campaign. His report was published December 31, 1999. The description of Cruz León’s initial belief about his “heroic” role and the “adrenalin” rush he felt from planting the bombs come from several interviews he gave, including an August 6, 2005 interview from prison.
Copyright 2010 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
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About
This is the site for Sting of the Wasp, collected research and other materials for an in-progress narrative nonfiction book about the Cuban Five by Stephen Kimber.
The Cuban Five were members of "La Red Avispa"—the Wasp Network—spies Havana dispatched to Florida in the early 1990s to infiltrate militant anti-Castro exile groups that Cuba believed were plotting terrorist attacks on its soil. The Cuban Five were arrested, tried, convicted and are all now serving long prison terms in the United States.
In the United States, they are virtually unknown. In Cuba, they are heroes.
That’s the short version of the story. The long version is… well, more complicated... Stay tuned.
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