Cuba gives Americans more than 3,000 pages of Posada evidence
U.S. prosecutors are calling on federal Judge Kathleen Cardone to reject a defence motion to exclude from Luis Posada Carriles’ upcoming immigration fraud trial any evidence the Americans obtained from the Cuban government.
But the prosecutors’ response—filed in El Paso earlier this week (November 25)—also offers an intriguing glimpse into just how much information the Cubans actually handed over to U.S. investigators.
Luis Posada Carriles
The U.S. has charged Posada with lying in a 2005 asylum application by claiming he wasn’t involved in a series of bombing attacks at Havana hotels in 1997 that killed an Italian-Canadian businessman. Prosecutors intend to use evidence the Cuban government collected—as well as witness testimony—to link Posada to those terrorist attacks.
But Posada’s lawyers claim they didn’t get copies of the material until after an earlier court-set deadline, so the evidence shouldn’t be used at all.
Prosecutors counter that the original deadline for producing evidence—December 1, 2009—was based on an expectation the trial itself would begin in March 2010. It’s now scheduled to start a full nine months later—in January 2011.
Perhaps more importantly, prosecutors point out that they initially laid out all the Cuban evidence at a March 2007 discovery conference with Posada and his lawyers in Washington “and encouraged him to view its files… Defendant stayed for 30 minutes, left of his own volition and never sought to return.”
In December 2009, the prosecutors add, they invited “the defendant to travel to Cuba with one of the … government attorneys in order to interview potential witnesses to the bombing events in Cuba. Defendant chose not to travel to Cuba.”
Finally, on November 8, 2010—still a full two months before Posada’s January 2011 trial is scheduled to begin—prosecutors say thay gave the defence a disc containing “the same documents and electronic files the defendant had the opportunity to inspect in March 2007.”
Interestingly, the U.S. Attorney’s motion includes a detailed description of that material—six videos and 3,252 pages of text they refer to as the “Cuba documents.”
Bombed Aché disco
That treasure trove includes eight separate reports “generated by Cuban authorities” as part of their investigation of the Havana hotel bombings.” One, entitled “Reports Handed Over to the FBI American Delegation,” provides a 70-page synopsis of the 1997 bombing campaign, which the Cubans first gave American investigators at a meeting in Havana in June 1998. The remaining seven Cuba documents provide “in-depth accounts” of individual bombing investigations.
The prosecutors’ brief says the government only intends to “seek the admission of a small fraction of the Cuba documents at trial… to prove that the bombings in Cuba actually occurred.”
Judge Cardone is expected to rule on the pre-trial motion in advance of the start of the trial, now slated to begin January 11, 2011.
Copyright 2010 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
Day in the Five: CANF leader dies
On November 23, 1997, Jorge Mas Canosa, the most powerful anti-Castro exile leader in America, died.
Mas Canosa with Bill Clinton
Though he didn't accomplish his ambition of returning to Havana in triumph as its new American-backed, post-Castro leader, Mas Canosa's public creation—the Cuban American National Foundation—did become one of the most effective lobbying machines in Washington and helped influence the anti-Cuba policies of every American administration since Ronald Reagan.
Just as important, Mas Canosa's CANF spawned a secret paramilitary wing in 1992 that set out to undermine Cuba's fledgling tourist economy by bombing tourist hotels and resorts... one of the reasons Cuba dispatched intelligence agents—including the members of the Cuban Five—to Miami to infiltrate the organization in the early 1990s.
For more on Jorge Mas Canosa:
- Check out this excerpt: Truth, Lies and the Cuban American National Foundation
- In 2009, the National Security Archive released another treasure trove of now de-classified CIA material, including documents that not only connect Mas Canosa and Luis Posada but also show Mas Canosa's role as a CIA-sponsored terrorist during the sixties.
- A famous 1993 profile of Canosa by Miami journalist Gaetan Fonzi: Jorge Who?, part of which appeared in Esquire Magazine
- From the Miami New Times, October 7, 2009: The truth at last: Jorge Mas Canosa sponsored terrorism
Copyright 2010 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
Looking for loopholes in El Paso
Cuba's Granma newspaper says Luis Posada Carriles' lawyers are trying to use a legal loophole to prevent the court from hearing key evidence in his case.
Posada, the alleged mastermind of both the 1976 bombing of Cubana Airlines Flight 455 and also the 1997 Havana hotel bombing campaign, is scheduled to go on trial at the Federal Court in El Paso, Texas, in January 2011 on immigration-related charges.
Bombed Aché disco in Havana.
He's accused of lying in his 2005 application for asylum in the U.S. when he claimed he wasn't involved in the hotel bombing campaign. Those attacks resulted in the death of an Italian-Canadian businessman and injuries to dozens of others.
Prosecutors had intended to use evidence originally gathered in Cuba in connection with the attacks as part of its case but the defence is now arguing that material should be excluded because an earlier court order required such evidence be turned over to the court before December 1, 2009.
The defence claims it won't have time to consider that evidence before the January trial.
Ironically, Posada is not charged with organizing the bombing campaign—a terrorist act—but merely of lying about his involvement—a lesser charge.
Copyright 2010 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
Day in the Five: Luis Posada arrested in assassination plot
On November 17, 2000, Luis Posada Carriles and three accomplices—including one affiliated with the powerful Cuban American National Foundation—were arrested in Panama in connection with a planned attempt to assassinate Cuban leader Fidel Castro. Officials seized 200 pounds of explosives.
All were found guilty and sentenced to prison but then, in August 2004, the country's outgoing president, allegedly at the urging of the Bush administration, pardoned all four.
Eight months later, Posada slipped into the United States and requested asylum.
Posada—the reputed mastermind of the 1976 bombing of Cubana Airlines Flight 455 that killed 73 people and the 1997 Havana hotel terrorist bombing campaign that killed one and injured dozens of others—goes on trial again in January 2011 in El Paso, Texas.
But Posada is not charged with either of those terrorist crimes and the United States will not extradite him to either Venezuela or Cuba to face the courts there. Instead, authorities have charged him with the minor crime of lying on his asylum application... lying, in fact, about his role in the major crime of planting those bombs in Havana hotels.
Copyright 2010 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
Terrorism through the eyes of the terrorized
If you’re interested in understanding the broader context of the story behind the Cuban Five and the reasons Cuba sends spies to Florida to infiltrate and disrupt militant anti-Castro exile groups, you should read Keith Bolender’s new book, Voices From The Other Side: An Oral History of Terrorism Against Cuba (Pluto Press).
Cuba has publicly documented what it claims have been more than 800 terrorist attacks against it since 1960—resulting in 3,478 dead and 2,099 injured—most organized and carried out, with impunity, by exile groups based in South Florida.
“It is hard not to find someone (in Cuba) who doesn’t have a story to tell of a relative or friend who has been a victim of terrorism,” explains Bolender, a Canadian journalist with 20 years experience in Cuba. Which is why, when he decided he wanted to write a book about terrorism against Cuba, he chose to look at the issue from “a different perspective—that of the victims. There are many books written about the history of terrorism in Cuba, but from the political viewpoint of Cuba-America relations. There had never been a coverage of the topic from the victim's experiences, not even in Cuba, so I felt it was a valuable and unique way to approach the subject.”
Voices is both a sampler of terrorist acts against Cuba—from Pentagon plots to “contaminate Cuba’s food supplies,” to Alpha 66 commando attacks on Cuban villagers, to the infamous 1976 bombing of Cubana Airlines Flight 455 that killed 73 people—and also a compelling oral history of how those attacks affected individual Cubans.
Jorge de la Nuez, for example, was just five when his father, a fisherman, was killed in the airline bombing. Though that was nearly 35 years ago, Bolender says, “he still carries the pain and memory as if it happened a few days ago.” Nuez tells Bolender that when he thinks of the crash today, he imagines his father’s final moments, “the total confusion, the panic, then death. Why did that happen? Because someone has another point of view? For politics? These were not military men or top government officials on that plane. They were average people, young, old, with brothers, sisters, wives, husbands, children. It was filled with athletes of the fencing team. They were celebrating winning the championship in Venezuela. That’s who they were.”
“The idea of the book,” Bolender explains in an email, “is to let those affected tell their stories in their own words, to make the victim more important than the act.” At the same time, he adds, many of those he interviewed “are getting older, so it was a way to preserve their memories.”
The book includes chapters on the 1997 Havana hotel bombing campaign, which the Cuban Five were in Florida to try to stop, as well as on the Five themselves. Bolender interviews the wives of two of those in jail, including Olga Salanueva, the wife of René González, who has not been allowed to visit her imprisoned husband for more than a dozen years. Being denied a visa to visit her husband, Olga tells Bolender, “has been used as a tool for additional torture.”
Copyright 2010 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
Day in the Five: The terrorist disconnect
United Nations
November 10, 2001
"Some governments still turn a blind eye to the terrorists, hoping the threat will pass them by," U.S. President George W. Bush admonished his fellow world leaders in a speech to the United Nations on November 10, 2001, two months after 9/11. "They are mistaken," he declared. "The allies of terror are equally guilty and equally accountable."
Really, asked Ricardo Alarcon, the president of Cuba's National Assembly?
In an interview in Havana with the Miami New Times, Alarcon dissected the U.S. president's speech: "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.'"
He paused, then added pointedly: "Orlando Bosch [alleged mastermind of the 1976 Cubana airlines bombing as well as other terrorist acts] 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 could certainly have added the name of Luis Posada, another alleged Cuban exile terrorist, currently walking the streets of Miami. Posada goes on trial in El Paso in January 2011, not for committing terrorist acts but for the relatively minor immigration offence of lying—albeit about his role in the 1997 Havana hotel bombing campaign—in his asylum application.
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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