‘They are weapons for the purpose of assassinating Fidel Castro…’
Off Puerto Rico.
October 27, 1997
Drugs… What else would four middle-aged men with dodgy answers to routine questions be doing floating listlessly in a fancy but battered cabin cruiser off Puerto Rico?
Officers aboard the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Baranof had first spotted the tan, 46-foot La Esperanza during a routine patrol 11 miles off Cabo Rojo on Puerto Rico’s southwest coast at about 3 p.m. that afternoon. Two of its hull portholes were broken and the fiberglass vessel appeared to be taking on water. The officers initially assumed the damage resulted from a storm in the area the day before, and that the men aboard might need assistance.
One of the officers radioed the captain, Angel Hernandez Rojo, and asked where they’d come from. Miami, he said, which made sense, but then he claimed the vessel had made the entire 900-mile journey from Miami to Puerto Rico in a single day, which didn’t make any geographical or nautical sense at all.
Despite protests from the Spanish-speaking men aboard La Esperanza that they were fine and would be able to make their own way from here, thanks very much, the curious officers decided to take a closer look. When they boarded, they found the vessel’s deck awash in suitcases and bags the men had hastily brought up from below after water began filling the holds. But there was no sign anywhere of any fishing gear. When one of the officers asked about that, another of the men claimed they were actually on their way to St. Lucia to sell the boat.
Which was interesting, thought one of the agents, who noticed that the vessel had just recently been retrofitted with 2,000 gallons worth of extra fuel tanks as if in preparation for a long voyage. “Why would I invest more money in a boat that I am going to sell?” the agent asked himself. Interestingly too, the navigational coordinates programmed into the vessel’s computer were pre-set, not for St. Lucia but for Margarita Island off the coast of Venezuela.
When the officers asked to see the vessel’s documents, the best Hernandez could provide were photocopies.
Aristides Jimenez, a U.S. Maritime Enforcement Agent working for the U.S. Customs Service aboard the vessel asked the men if the boat was carrying drugs or weapons. It was a routine question in the circumstances.
The men claimed it wasn’t, an equally routine answer in the circumstances.
More than curious now, however, the officers decided to escort La Esperanza to the Puerto Rico police department dock in Aguadilla for repairs—and a closer look. They expected to find drugs. They didn’t.
At 9 p.m., half an hour after beginning their search of the vessel, Coast Guard engineer Allen Bandrowsky noticed a loose piece of rug on the stairs leading down from the deck. He pulled back the rug and discovered a wooden plank, also loose. When he lifted that, he saw a secret compartment. Inside was a terrorist’s treasure trove: two $7,000, semi-automatic, .50 calibre, armor-piercing Barrett assault rifles, each equipped with night scopes. Such a rifle could take out its target, including even an aircraft, from up to a mile away. Fishing?...
There was more. Seven 10-round boxes of ammunition, six ammunition clips and two tripods. Rummaging around in other parts of the vessel, the inspectors also found three military fatigue outfits, field rations, rifle-range ear protectors, six portable radios, a satellite telephone and night vision goggles.
A federal agents had barely begun reading the men their Miranda rights when one of the men, 57-year-old Angel Alfonso Aleman—whose day job was as the administrator of a New Jersey, textile factory—cut him off. “He burst out and started yelling that the weapons were his,” one of the customs investigators would recall later.
“The others know nothing about them,” Alfonso shouted. “I placed them there myself. They are weapons for the purpose of assassinating Fidel Castro.”
The agents tried to stop him now because he was making incriminating statements before he’d even been read his rights, but Alfonso refused to keep quiet. “Look at all the entries in my passport going to Venezuela,” he told them. “Do you think I went there on vacation? I have a contact on St. Lucia. I have a contact on Margarita.” His only mission in life, he added proudly, was to assassinate Castro.
It didn’t take the Coast Guard long to call in the FBI.
Its investigators quickly discovered a number of facts: One of the two assault rifles found aboard La Esperanza turned out to be registered to Pepe Hernandez, the President of the Cuban American National Foundation.
The vessel itself—license FL1390EM—was registered to a Florida company called Nautical Sports, whose director, president, secretary and treasurer were all listed as one José Antonio Llama, another well-known member of CANF’s executive board.
The vessel had set sail in mid-October from a private dock behind a home in the “tony section” of Gables-by-the-Sea. The home was owned by Marco Antonio Sainz, a Cuban exile businessman who was friends with Llama and had business connections with another CANF member. Sainz claimed he’d kept the vessel at his dock as a “favour” for his friend but that, one morning at dawn a few weeks earlier, he’d seen some people he didn’t know sail off in the vessel.
While the captain of La Esperanza had initially insisted to investigators that the purpose of their trip was to go fishing and other crew members had claimed they were off to St. Lucia, Llama offered yet another response when the FBI contacted him. He said that the men were on their way to Venezuela… to sell La Esperanza.
Margarita, Venezuela—which was the pre-set destination listed on the boat’s computer—was where Latin American leaders, including Fidel Castro, were scheduled to meet in less than two weeks.
A spokesman for the Cuban American National Foundation said she knew “absolutely nothing” about any boat. And CANF was certainly not involved in any assassination plot.
Of course not.
Copyright 2010 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
The Miami Herald, Chavez Abarca and selective amnesia
On October 17, 2010, the Miami Herald published "Mystery Man in Terror Plot Points to Miami Exiles".
Chávez Abarca
The story attempted to cast doubts on Cuba's allegations that Francisco Chávez Abarca—a Salvadoran gangster it recently arrested in connection with the 1997 bombing campaign against Havana hotels—had implicated a number of Miami-based Cuban exiles, including Luis Posada Carriles, in the plot during his confession.
"Francisco Chávez Abarca could be a double agent, a terrorist or just a lackey for hire being held in a Cuban prison," the story began and went on to cast doubt on whether Chávez Abarca's confession was genuine.
"He should get an Academy Award,'' the newspaper quoted Posada's lawyer as saying.
What makes all of that especially interesting is that it was the Miami Herald itself that first publicly made the connection between Posada and Abarca. That story, the result of a joint investigation with a Salvadoran daily, was published nearly 13 years ago.
In this excerpt from "Sting of the Wasp," a narrative nonfiction book-in-progress, a look at that story in the context of its time:
***
Miami
November 15, 1997
SPECIAL REPORT: THE PLOT BEHIND CUBA BOMBINGS…The headline on the front page of Saturday morning’s Miami Herald was stunning: CUBAN HOTELS WERE BOMBED BY MIAMI-PAID SALVADORANS, it declared flatly.
Juan Tamayo’s 2,500-word report—based on a “two-month Herald investigation”—picked up where the headline left off. “A spate of bombings in Cuba this summer was the work of a ring of Salvadoran car thieves and armed robbers directed and financed by Cuban exiles in El Salvador and Miami,” it began. “Luis Posada Carriles, a veteran of the Cuban exiles’ secret war against President Fidel Castro… was the key link between El Salvador and the South Florida exiles who raised $15,000 for the operation.”
With help from Tamayo's friend, Lafitte Fernandez, the editor of Diario de Hoy—who’d assigned an energetic young Spanish journalism intern to handle much of the feet-on-the-ground legwork—Tamayo had slowly been able to fit the scattered puzzle pieces together. The investigation, he would write, involved literally “dozens of interviews with security officials, friends of the bombers, Cuban exiles and others in El Salvador, Miami, Guatemala and Honduras.”
It hadn’t taken long to discover that Cruz León’s “chubby” friend was Francisco “Gordito” Chávez, “a man described by several acquaintances as having a tough face and an even tougher attitude, a man who always packed a pistol and often had a bodyguard.”
The reporters managed to obtain immigration and airline records showing that Chávez had purchased tickets to Havana for himself on two separate occasions during the previous year, including in April 1997. His return flight from Havana departed just hours after the explosion in Havana’s Melia Cohiba Hotel.
The reporters also tracked down half a dozen witnesses who identified Chavez as the man who’d not only arranged Cruz León’s Cuban flights that summer but also drove him to the airport on both occasions.
Perhaps most significant, from Tamayo’s point of view, the travel agent who handled the ticketing remembered that another man had called once to ask about the tickets. He knew it was not Chávez, the agent told the reporters, because the man who called had a distinctive “mumble.” Luis Posada Carriles!
But how were Posada and Chávez linked?
Chávez, it turned out, was the son of a well-connected gangster whose many sidelines included dabbling as an arms dealer. He peddled weapons, which his friends in the Salvadoran army had seized from local guerillas, to Nicaraguan contras. “Two Cuban exiles who fought alongside the contras say that’s how [Chávez’s father] met Luis Posada Carriles,” the story explained. At the time, Tamayo added, Posada was “helping to run a secret contra weapons warehouse and supply route at a Salvadoran air force base established by Col. Oliver North, of Iran-contra fame.”
In Miami, Tamayo also interviewed three “exiles who support armed attacks on Cuba” and who helped him connect Posada back to what would remain the project's mystery exile financiers. Tamayo’s sources claimed it was Posada “who contacted Miami exiles in mid-1996 for the cash needed to pay the Salvadoran mercenaries. ‘He was the political, financial and thinking head on this [operation] because he’s too old to be in the front lines,’” Tamayo quoted one of the exiles as saying. “’But you can write that he commanded the operation,’” added another. “’He doesn’t mind even bad publicity, because it keeps up his image while protecting the safety of the operational commanders.’”
According to Tamayo’s story, Posada himself “did not answer several Herald messages left for him with friends.” But Tamayo did manage to track Posada down in El Salvador and even talk with him on several occasions. But always off the record. “He was a very likeable guy,” Tamayo would remember later. “He dressed like a teenager. Preppie. Tan pants, madras shirts, loafers or dock shoes. He was an engaging guy to talk to, but it was clear he was accustomed to dissembling. He’d say anything to back up his point of the day. But then, you’d see him the next day and he was making a different point, so he’d change his story again.”
Not that Posada seemed worried that anything he might say would prompt authorities in El Salvador to arrest him. That confidence seemed well placed. Salvadoran officials the reporters interviewed admitted the “case has not been investigated vigorously, partly because no bombs exploded in El Salvador and partly because [Salvadoran officials]—like many Cuban exiles in Miami—still doubt Cuba’s allegations against Cruz León. El Salvador’s Deputy Public Security Minister Jorge A. Carranza, for example, was dismissive. “’How could [Cruz León] smuggle explosives into Cuba, a tough police state,” Carranza asked the reporters, “when we’re sure we can detect them at our airport? That is, how to say it, incredible.’”
Copyright 2010 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
Amnesty International calls for review of the case of the Cuban Five
"In a report sent to the US government and released today [October 13, 2010] Amnesty International outlines its concerns about the fairness of the trial of five men convicted in 2001 of acting as intelligence agents for Cuba and related charges...
"In a letter to US Attorney General Eric Holder on 4 October, enclosing its report -- The Case of the ‘Cuban Five’, AI Index AMR 51/093/2010 -- Amnesty International said that, while it did not take a position on whether the five men were guilty or innocent of the charges against them, it believed there were doubts about the fairness and impartiality of the trial which have not been resolved on appeal. (More)
Read the full report.
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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