What Lies Across the Water
Speaking at the University of California Center in Washington.
The following is an abridged version of a talk I gave about my forthcoming book, What Lies Across the Water: The Real Story of the Cuban Five, on April 18, 2012 at the Center for International Policy in Washington, D.C..
***
I am a late-comer to the case of the Cuban Five. I stumbled on the story a few years ago while researching a novel—a love story—set partly in Cuba.
During a trip to Havana in the spring of 2009, I struck up a friendship with a guide who was showing me the city I wouldn’t see as a tourist. Partly to make conversation and partly because I was curious, I asked him what he thought of the prospects for improved relations between Havana and Washington now that Barak Obama was in the White House.
He didn’t hesitate. “Forget Obama,” he said. “Nothing will change until the case of the Five is resolved.”
The Cuban Five? I’d barely heard of them.
So he gave me a history lesson—about how a group of Cuban intelligence agents had uncovered a plot to be blow up an airplane; about how author Gabriel Garcia Marquez had carried a secret message from Fidel Castro to Bill Clinton with details of the plot; about how a delegation from the FBI had gone to Havana to meet with their counterparts in Cuban State Security to discuss it; and how, less than three months later, the FBI had arrested not the Miami-based terrorists who were planning to blow up the plane but the Cuban intelligence agents who were trying to stop them.
You can look it up, he said.
I did. I found a Fidel Castro speech on the Internet that outlined the Cuban version of events. Castro even read into the record the entire 4,000-word text of a previously secret report Garcia Marquez had written to Castro following his meeting with White House officials in Washington.
I was hooked. I put the novel on hold and began researching the nonfiction story of the Cuban Five.
***
I came at it as a “story” rather than a “cause,” and I think that’s important. Too often there is a sense of rote in our rhetoric about the Five. They are the “five heroes” who were “unjustly accused,” “unfairly tried and convicted” and then “punitively punished” simply for being “anti-terrorist fighters.”
It’s all true, of course, but it doesn’t help convince those who aren’t already convinced. Many Americans, I don’t have to tell you, are prepared to believe the worst about Cuba, and especially about Cuban government agents.
My goal was to tell the story—and it is a fascinating story—as a nonfiction narrative.
It begins in 1990 when a civilian Cuban pilot named René González “stole” a plane in Havana and flew it to Key West where he “defected.” González, in fact, was the first of the five Cuban intelligence agents sent to set up shop in Florida.
He arrived soon after a debate about the fate of Orlando Bosch had raged in the Miami media. Bosch—a well known anti-Cuban terrorist considered one of the masterminds behind a 1976 explosion aboard a Cubana Airlines plane that killed 73 people—had applied for residency in the U.S.. The justice department (though not necessarily the White House) opposed his application; Miami’s exile community supported Bosch. Guess who won?
I wanted to incorporate into the unfolding narrative details about what the various Miami exile groups were actually plotting (a lot), what the U.S. government was doing to stop them (precious little) and what the Cuban intelligence agents were learning about what the exiles were really up to (plenty).
As part of my research, I read the 20,000-plus pages of transcript from the trial of the Five, examined the binders-full of even more thousands of pages of decoded documents and correspondence between the Cuban agents and their bosses back in Havana.
I began a still-ongoing, still un-won battle with the FBI for documents relating to what I believe is a critically important meeting between the FBI and Cuban State Security in Havana in June 1998. After two years of appeals, I have only finally gotten the FBI to admit there are documents. But I’m still waiting to see them.
I also, of course, interviewed key figures in Havana, Miami and Washington—none of them more intriguing than Percy Alvarado.
Though not one of the Five, Alvarado too was a Cuban intelligence agent who operated in Miami around the same time as the Five. He claims he infiltrated the powerful Cuban American National Foundation. Key members of the Foundation recruited him to plant bombs in Cuba, he says. And Luis Posada himself—an acknowledged anti-Castro terrorist—trained him how to assemble the bombs he was supposed to sneak into Cuba.
Now let’s be clear. Everyone in this business lies. It is the nature of the clandestine world, and you should never take it on faith that anyone—American or Cuban—is telling the whole truth. That said, I was struck by the fact that what Alvarado publicly alleged in 1999 was later corroborated—inadvertently—by a senior official of CANF who just happened to be suing his former comrades in arms.
I also interviewed, by mail and email, members of the Five. I found them to be impressive, courageous figures.
***
I want to talk today about some of what I learned in that process. It wasn’t always what I expected. Or what I'd been told to expect.
The versions I’d read from some Cuban Five supporters, for instance, made it appear as if the FBI had learned the identities of the Five because of the information Cuban State Security turned over to them at those meetings in June 1998.
That’s not true. The FBI had been following the Cubans since at least 1996.
Which raises an intriguing question. Why did the FBI arrest them when they did?
I’ll come back to that.
The Cubans have also been at pains to argue that their agents were only in Florida to monitor the activities of exile terrorists groups.
Again, not entirely true.
One of the agents, Antonio Guerrero had an almost exclusively military mission. That inconvenient truth—rarely acknowledged by Cuban authorities—has provided anti-Castro mainstream journalists and commentators the opportunity to make it appear as if the Cubans’ primary mission was to “infiltrate” American military bases or steal U.S. secrets.
It wasn’t. The military aspect of their duties was minor—and there is an important context to it. Guerrero’s primary function was to serve as the canary in the coal mine, an early warning system of a possible U.S. invasion of Cuba.
The U.S. has satellites to keep an eye on its enemies—a variation on spying we accept as legitimate. The Cubans can’t afford satellites. They have human observers instead. Like Tony Guerrero.
His job was to pay attention to the comings and goings of military aircraft at the Boca Chica Naval Station. Was there a sudden build up of planes on the runways? What kinds? An unusual number of brass-hat visitors to the base?
The Cubans had legitimate reasons to fear an invasion—and not just because that’s what the influential Miami exile leadership prayed for each night. The Cubans knew what had already happened in Haiti, in Panama.
***
What did the Cuban agents actually do in Florida?
Most of the time they kept a close watch on exile groups they believed were plotting attacks on their homeland. They knew that those militant exile groups were rarely arrested, even more rarely tried and almost never convicted.
To keep the exiles from succeeding, the agents had to be inventive.
Consider just one example from July of 1998, two months before they were arrested.
Gerardo Hernandez, the controller of the Miami agents, received an urgent coded message from Havana that there was a vaguely identified “boat bomb” filled with weapons and explosives docked in the Miami River. The vessel was destined to be used as a weapon against Cuba.
Hernandez and his team of agents soon tracked down the vessel at a marina near a populated area.
What to do about it?
They certainly didn’t want to allow the vessel to sail, of course, but Hernandez realized the options Havana had suggested—blowing up the vessel, or sinking it—were all too risky, and might endanger innocent civilians.
Instead, Hernandez messaged his bosses, cleverly suggesting someone call the FBI anonymously and tip them off about the boat’s cargo.
A week later, a story appeared in the Miami Herald. The headline: ANTI TERRORISM RAID COMES UP EMPTY. The story detailed how members of Miami’s Joint Terrorism Task Force, acting on an anonymous tip, had raided vessels in a Miami River marina. They were looking for explosives and guns destined for a “third country.” But the raid was a “bust,” according to an FBI spokesman. They didn’t find anything.
How hard were they looking? The FBI agent in charge was a guy named George Kisynzki. Two weeks earlier, in the pages of the New York Times, Luis Posada himself had described the agent as a “very good friend.”
What was going on? “Law enforcement veterans saw the search as an FBI hint... to cancel any conspiracies,” the Miami Herald reported. “That’s a common practice in South Florida… known as ‘admonishing’ or ‘demobilizing’ an operation.”
We later learned more about this particular incident. The boat’s owner was a man named Enrique Bassas. Bassas, a wealthy Miami businessman, had been one of the co-founders of a sixties-era terrorist umbrella group called CORU, which had been responsible for blowing up that Cuban plane in 1976. More recently, Cuban intelligence had identified Bassas as one of the financiers of a new mercenary, anti-Castro army being organized in Miami.
Perhaps most significantly, the month before the raid, Bassas had been in Guatemala City meeting with Luis Posada. They were, according to a later report, trying to figure out how to sneak weapons and explosives into the Dominican Republic.
The Dominican Republic? That just happened to be where Fidel Castro was scheduled to speak the following month.
The Miami Herald later reported on this botched assassination plot and came up with its own—close to the money—explanation for what had gone wrong. Cuban intelligence agents, explained the Herald, “presumed by most law enforcement and exile experts to have penetrated many exile organizations, tipped the FBI to protect Castro's life during the visit to the Dominican Republic.”
There are a lot of episodes like that in the trial records. It’s also clear from those records the Cuban agents weren’t interested in using violence to achieve their objective of preventing exile attacks on their homeland.
Which is more than can be said for the exiles.
***
But what then are we to make of the most damaging charge—conspiracy to commit murder—against Gerardo Hernandez?
That charge relates to the February 1996 shootdown of two unarmed Brothers to the Rescue aircraft in the Straits of Florida that killed four civilians.
There’s no doubt that charge—filed seven months after the arrests—affected the cases of all five defendants and unduly influenced the harsh sentences they all received. Including, of course, Hernandez himself, who is currently serving two life sentences plus 15 years in prison for his supposed role in the shootdown.
And the allegation continues to resonate today. Whenever the question of pardoning the Five, or swapping them for the American Alan Gross is raised, the inevitable answer is that the U.S. could never consider such a deal because the Five were responsible for the deaths of four innocent men.
I spent a lot of time focusing on that allegation. I read the transcript. I studied the court documents. I read the International Civil Aviation report on the incident.
The reality is that there is no a shred of compelling evidence to suggest Gerardo Hernandez knew about the plan to shoot down the planes, or that he had any control over, or role in what happened.
Indeed the evidence paints a very different picture of what Hernandez really knew.
Cuban State Security is famed for its compartmentalization. I tell another story in the book about two agents who’d infiltrated the same exile group and the efforts Havana undertook to make sure neither man knew the other was actually working for the same side.
The back-and-forth memos between Havana and its field officers in the lead-up to the shootdown make it clear everything was on a need-to-know basis—and Gerardo Hernandez didn’t need to know what the Cuban military was considering.
There are, of course, plenty of other unresolved issues about the shootdown.
Were the Brothers’ planes in international waters as the Americans claim, or in Cuban airspace as Havana argues? The best answer to that question could come from U.S. satellite images taken by any one of more than a half-dozen satellites the American government and its agencies had tracking events that day, but Washington so far refuses to release them.
More importantly, was shooting down the planes a reasonable response to the Brothers’ provocation?
Those provocations had been going on for seven intense months prior to the shootdown. The Cubans had complained. Washington had tried—and failed—to prevent the continuing overflights. And the Cubans had sent several clear messages to Washington that it would take action if there were any more illegal incursions into their territory.
To make matters worse, the Cubans knew—thanks to their agents—that Brothers to the Rescue were test firing air-to-ground weapons they could conceivably decide to use against Cuba. They were more than a nuisance; they were a threat.
That said, I don’t believe the shootdown was the most reasonable response. There were alternatives, including forcing the planes down and putting the pilots on trial.
But my view doesn’t change the only important reality: Gerardo Hernandez was not involved in shooting down the planes and he should never have been charged.
***
Which leads to yet another question: should the Five themselves have ever been charged with anything?
Well, they did commit crimes. They failed to register as foreign agents, and three of them carried false identity documents. Those are minor, commonplace crimes in the world of intelligence; American agents operating in Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Moscow and elsewhere commit them everyday.
But there is no evidence the Cuban agents stole military secrets or threatened American security. That’s why they were never charged with actual espionage—just “conspiracy to commit espionage.” A thought crime versus an actual crime.
***
The other point that’s worth making is that the FBI knew exactly who the Cuban agents were and what they were doing in Florida. They’d been following them for at least two years. They’d broken into their apartments, stolen their computer disks, decoded them. They knew what they did each day, even about their love lives.
Let me give you just one example of how closely the FBI followed the Cuban agents. In April 1998, one of the Five traveled to New York to meet—supposedly secretly—with an intelligence officer from the Cuban Mission there. The FBI knew about the rendezvous—at a Wendy’s on the Hempstead Turnpike—far enough in advance that they were not able to have seven video cameras and countless still cameras recording the meeting but they were also able to plant of their own 35 agents at the fast food restaurant that day. It must have been a surprisingly good day for the operators of that Wendy’s!
So let’s consider the situation from the point of view of the FBI. You have complete access to a Cuban intelligence network and, better, the Cubans don’t know you do. You know that they’re not doing anything to threaten U.S. security; in fact, much of what they’re doing—monitoring compliance with the U.S. Neutrality Act—is your job.
So why arrest them?
The moment you arrest them, you lose access to this unfolding intelligence gold mine. And, worse, you know these captured agents will simply be replaced by another group of agents—and then you’ll have to discover the new guys and start all over again.
So why arrest the Five when they did?
There are things we don’t know about that. But there are some things we do.
In May 1998, the FBI appointed a new Special Agent in Charge of its Miami Field Office. His name was Hector Pesquera, the first Hispanic to head up that very important, very political FBI field office in the heartland of Cuban America.
We know Pesquera quickly made friends with key leaders in the Miami Cuban exile community, including a convicted felon who’d been a former police officer in Batista’s pre-Castro Cuba—not to forget a number of high-profile exile leaders Cuban intelligence had identified as terrorists.
It was just a month after Pesquera arrived on the scene, of course, that the FBI delegation flew to Havana to meet with their Cuban counterparts. That's when the Cubans gave the FBI documents fingering some of Pesquera’s new friends as terrorists.
The Cubans would later say they believed the agents who came to Havana treated the information they turned over to them seriously, and genuinely intended to follow up.
And yet, three months later, FBI swat teams swooped in and arrested the Five, ignoring the exile plotters entirely.
We know Pesquera made that decision. We know because he said so. After he’d initially been appointed, Pesquera told a Spanish language radio station following the arrests, “I was updated on everything there was. We then began to concentrate on this investigation. As far as intelligence[-gathering] is concerned, [I decided] it shouldn’t be there anymore; it should change course and become a criminal investigation.”
We know his agents on the ground objected.
We also know—because Pesquera himself bragged about it—that he lobbied all the way to the top of the FBI food chain in Washington for authorization to make the arrests. He later told the Miami Herald the case “never would have made it to court” if he hadn’t lobbied FBI Director Louis Freeh directly. “To this day there are people in my headquarters who are not completely sold.”
No kidding.
I've tried to interview Pesquera, who retired from the FBI in 2003—after authorizing the destruction of the FBI’s files on Luis Posada—but he continues to give me the runaround.
Late last month, however, Pesquera popped up in the news again; he’s just been appointed the chief of police in his native Puerto Rico.
The universe continues to unfold…
And the Cuban Five remain stuck in the United States, four still in prison, one in the prison of parole.
***
It will not be easy to right this injustice, not in a country where in the past week the manager of a Miami baseball team was forced to make a groveling apology for offering the mildest of praise for Fidel Castro, and where the owner of a Miami restaurant faced anonymous threats because her restaurant just happened to be located on the ground floor of a building whose roof featured (however briefly) a billboard calling for Freedom for the Five.
Those prejudices and fears will be difficult to overcome. But they must be. And that’s why it’s especially important to make the case based on the facts.
I hope my forthcoming book, What Lies Across the Water: The Real Story of the Cuban Five, will contribute to that conversation.
***
We hear a lot these days about Alan Gross, a U.S. government contractor who is currently serving 15 years in a Cuban prison for smuggling illegal communications equipment into Cuba.
His supporters, like those of the Five, are demanding his release.
While the two cases are different in many important ways, the key reality is that the Cuban government is unlikely to consider releasing Alan Gross unless the U.S. government reciprocates by releasing the Cuban Five. And the U.S. government won’t release the Five without considerable public pressure.
That’s why those who are arguing Alan Gross’ case need to know about the Cuban Five.
They need to look beyond the rhetoric, both from supporters of the Five but also—and more importantly—from an American government that disingenuously insists the Five were somehow threatening U.S. security and responsible for the deaths of innocent civilians.
I will close with a quote from Jane Franklin, a widely respected expert on Cuban-American relations. She was responding to a recent column in the Washington Post in which Alan Gross’ wife, Judith, drew heartfelt but false parallels between her husband’s situation and that of the Five.
If she were Judith Gross, Franklin wrote, “I would study the cases of the Cuban Five to find out exactly how they came to be arrested, tried in Miami, convicted, and sent to separate prisons around the United States. Having come to grips with the outrageous injustice of their imprisonment, I would then commit my life to a campaign for releasing the Cuban Five in exchange for my husband Alan Gross.”
Good advice for us all. Thank you.
***
Stephen Kimber’s book What Lies Across the Water: The Real Story of the Cuban Five will be published by Fernwood Publishing in the Spring of 2013. An excerpt—focusing on the circumstances leading up to the shooting down of the Brothers to the Rescue aircraft in February 1996—is available now as an ebook from Amazon.
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You may also wish to read a response to my talk—and book—by Arturo Lopez-Levy. A former Cuban Ministry of the Interior analyst who left Cuba in 2001 " because of serious disagreements with the communist system," Lopez-Levy is now a lecturer in the Josef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver Institute in Colorado.
"Whatever you might think about the Cuban Five, if you want to know how their case fits into the history of relations between Cuba and the United States, you must read this book," Lopez-Levy says. "The author Stephen Kimber presents a well written short narrative about how the Cuban five ended up in US prisons. The book reads more as reportage for the general public than as an academic report. The author has studied the long history of conflict between Cuba and the United States and the use of terror as a political weapon by Cuban right wing groups in Florida..." Read more.
Copyright 2012 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
“Shootdown” ebook now available
“Shootdown,” an excerpt from Stephen Kimber’s forthcoming book, What Lies Across the Water: The Real Story of the Cuban Five is now available as an ebook from Amazon. http://amzn.to/HWl12l
The excerpt unfolds the critically important episode of the shootdown of two Brothers to the Rescue aircraft over the Straits of Florida in February 1996—from Brothers’ first illegal flyover of Havana in July 1995; through seven months of escalating diplomatic back and forth between Havana and Washington; equally escalating provocations by Brothers’ leader José Basulto; on to the February 24, 1996 mid-air confrontation and then the fallout—the unseemly quick passage of the draconian Helms-Burton law, which continues to hobble any serious attempt to improve relations between the United States and Cuba.
The excerpt also documents what members of the Cuban Five did and—more importantly—didn’t do in the lead-up to the Cuban government’s decision to bring down the two civilian aircraft, killing four people.
Seven months after the FBI arrested the Five in September 1998 for failing to register as foreign agents, using false documents and conspiracy to commit espionage—all serious but relatively minor charges—prosecutors tacked on an explosive addendum, charging Gerardo Hernandez with conspiracy to commit murder in connection with the shootdown.
That red-flag charge in Miami’s virulently anti-Castro exile community dramatically upped the stakes of the case, making it even more impossible for the Five to get a fair trial. The shootdown allegations permeated the trial and affected the sentencing, not only of Hernandez—who was handed a double-life sentence plus 15 years—but also of the other members of the Five, whose fates had all inextricably become linked to the shootdown.
As this excerpt clearly shows, there was not a shred of compelling evidence to indicate Hernandez even knew about, let alone had any role in the shootdown.
The full book, What Lies Across the Water: The Real Story of the Cuban Five, will be published by Fernwood Publishing in the spring of 2013.
Copyright 2012 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
Who was Orlando Bosch?
"Orlando Bosch, a prominent Cuban exile militant charged and then acquitted in the bombing of a Cuban jetliner in 1976, died in Miami Wednesday."
The Miami Herald, April 27, 2011.
Orlando Bosch's release from a Miami jail in 1990 marked the beginning of a decade of renewed attacks on Cuba by exile militants. This excerpt from Sting of the Wasp, my nonfiction book-in-progress, offers a profile of the man—as well as the mindset—that made what went before comprehensible, and what came after possible.
Orlando Bosch
Miami
July 17, 1990
Only in Miami! Watching his triumphal, hero-home-from-the-wars televised press conference this afternoon, a casual viewer might have puzzled over how to square the image of this smiling old man in the charcoal-grey suit and open-collared shirt—blinking through thick, over-sized spectacles into the blinding glare of the TV lights while his adoring wife and four children, along with a gaggle of cheering supporters, looked on—with the sobering reality of just who this man had once been. And who he might still be.
Dr. Orlando Bosch Ávila was a convicted felon, a parole jumper, an accused mass murderer, a man who had spent all but six months of the last 14 years behind bars, a man who had most recently entered the United States illegally, a man the FBI agent who’d rummaged through the recesses of his life had labeled “Miami’s number one terrorist,” a man the United States Associate Attorney General had described as “resolute and unwavering in his advocacy of terrorist violence,” a man 31 other countries had already refused to allow to set foot inside their borders and, of course, a certifiable legend and hero in much of Miami’s el exilio community.
Only in Miami. To the rest of the world, Orlando Bosch was a terrorist. But in Miami, the world’s worst terrorist could still be Miami’s most beloved freedom fighter, provided he waged his terror on behalf of la causa. La causa—overthrowing Fidel Castro, killing him if possible, wiping his hated communist dictatorship off the face of the earth by any and all means necessary, and restoring Cuba to its once and future glory—had been Orlando Bosch’s fight, his guiding, sole mission in life for 30 years.
One of the most intriguing twists on their mutual loathing was that Orlando Bosch and Fidel Castro had once been allies. They were Cuban contemporaries, born within a week of each other in 1926. During the 1940s, they’d both studied at the University of Havana. Castro was president of the law students’ association, Bosch headed up the medical students’ group. Both took part in the struggle to topple Cuba’s hated dictator Fulgencio Batista. After the triumph of the rebels, Castro, the revolution’s leader, had rewarded fellow traveler Bosch, who’d returned from a pediatric internship in Ohio to join the fight, with an appointment as governor of his native Las Villas province.
But relations soon soured. Bosch quit and returned to the hills to lead an armed rebellion against Castro’s revolution. By the middle of 1960, he’d fled to Miami with his wife, also a doctor, and their four small children. Like many of his fellow exiles who assumed they would return home soon, Bosch arrived on a 60-day tourist visa.
Bosch's autobiography
He eventually found a job as an assistant director at a small Coral Gables hospital, bought a fixer-upper house in Little Havana, a “beat-up blue Cadillac,” and even watched enough TV to claim that a quirky spy drama called Mission: Impossible was his favorite television show. But la causa remained his primary—some might say only—obsession. (How obsessed? Bosch was eventually fired from his job at the hospital for storing explosives on hospital property.)
He’d signed on for the ill-starred Bay of Pigs invasion, then joined the CIA and became a case officer for Operation 40, a White House-sanctioned, CIA-run covert operation to mount a Cuban exile invasion force to depose Castro.
On the side, Bosch also ran something called the Insurrectional Movement of Revolutionary Recovery (MIRR), one of a plethora of violent, transplanted-from-Cuba exile groups that made their bones by launching attacks against their former homeland. MIRR’s tactics included dropping incendiary devices from small planes on Cuba’s sugar cane fields in order to destroy the country’s agricultural lifeline. According to a CIA document, one 1963 MIRR air strike killed a father and his three children. Bosch denied he had anything to do with the attacks, but also claimed they were carried out at the direction of the CIA.
In 1964, he was arrested in Miami for “towing a homemade, radio-operated torpedo through downtown in rush-hour traffic;” in 1965, he was arrested for trying to smuggle bombs out of the country; in 1966, he was arrested twice more, first for ferrying “six dynamite-stuffed, 100-pound surplus aerial bombs” up the Tamiami Trial “to a secret base where there was a boat we could use to bomb Castro,” and then for trying to extort $21,000 from a fellow exile to finance his various anti-Castro operations.
None of the allegations stuck. Welcome to Miami.
In 1970, Bosch was finally convicted for firing (misfiring, actually) a bazooka at a Polish (which is to say communist) freighter docked at the Port of Miami. He was sentenced to 10 years in prison. He was paroled four years later, soon after a re-election-seeking Florida Governor Claude Kirk boasted to a Latin Chamber of Commerce dinner he had been “quietly and effectively” working to get their hero released. "When I think of free men seeking a free homeland,” Kirk declared, appropriately misty-eyed, “I must necessarily think of Dr. Bosch.”
Back in Miami, Bosch came under police scrutiny again, this time in connection with the mysterious 1974 assassination of an exile leader named José Elias de la Torriente. By the time police showed up to question him, Bosch had skipped the country, thus violating the terms of his parole.
By then, Miami didn’t matter. His first wife had divorced him, he’d lost his job and he’d essentially abandoned any pretence of practising medicine. La causa had become his city—and his life.
Before he left Miami, however, Bosch had had $10-million worth of bonds printed to finance a new scheme to overthrow Castro. He peddled them—in denominations of $10 to $1,000—throughout Little Havana. Three million dollars of the money raised, Bosch claimed, was to be specifically set aside to assassinate the Cuban leader. The bonds, in fact, were only redeemable upon the death of Fidel Castro.
Though Bosch seemed to disappear from public view for the next two years, the American government and CIA kept remarkably careful track of their sometime asset’s whereabouts—and his activities—as he wandered Latin America, changing identities as often as he changed countries. Not that they wanted him back. Between 1974 and 1976, American authorities turned down offers from Venezuela and Costa Rica to return the parole-violator to the United States.
Bosch was arrested in Venezuela after someone tossed dynamite into a meeting of Cuban and Venezuelan diplomats, but he was released—with a new fake passport—after he turned over the key to his apartment, a weapons-filled arsenal, to local authorities.
He then moved to Chile where he lived in a military safe house under the protection of Chile’s military dictator Augusto Pinochet. U.S. Government documents say he filled his days painting naïve Cuban landscapes and his nights mailing bombs to Cuban embassies in Peru, Spain, Canada and Argentina.
In January 1976, Bosch showed up in Costa Rica where U.S. Secret Service agents questioned him in connection with a plot to assassinate Henry Kissinger during a visit to the Central American country. Bosch told Costa Rican authorities his target wasn’t Kissinger at all, but the nephew of Chile’s deposed Marxist President Salvador Allende. Costa Rica packed him off to the Dominican Republic anyway.
There, in June 1976 at a secret gathering in the town of Bonao, Bosch helped found Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations (CORU), an umbrella organization for the most violent of the violent anti-Castro groups. “I told them that we couldn’t just keep bombing an embassy here and a police station there,” Bosch would explain later. “We had to start taking more serious actions.”
According to U.S. government documents, CORU would be responsible for more than 50 terrorist operations during the next few years, “including bombing attacks against Cuban territory; setting off a bomb in front of the Panamanian embassy in Caracas, Venezuela; blowing up the Viasa [Venezuela’s airline] office in Puerto Rico; setting off a bomb at the Mexican Embassy in Buenos Aires, Argentina; and planning the murder of two Cuban diplomats in Argentina who subsequently were kidnapped and disappeared.” CORU’s bloody fingerprints also turned up on the September 1976 car-bomb assassination of former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier in Washington.
CORU’s most “serious”—and deadly—action came on October 6, 1976, when two bombs blew a Cubana Airlines plane out of the sky just west of Bridgetown, Barbados, killing all 73 people aboard. The victims included two dozen Cuban fencers, most of them teenagers returning home with pockets full of gold medals they’d won at that year’s Central American and Caribbean Fencing Championships.
For the next 25 years—until 9/11, in fact—the attack on Cubana Airlines Flight 455 would carry the dubious distinction of being the worst incident of air terrorism in the Americas. The CIA quickly identified Bosch and his CORU co-founder Luis Posada as its masterminds. According to a CIA cable, an informant had overheard Posada boasting a week before the bombing: “we are going to hit a Cuban airliner… Orlando has the details.”
Within a day, Barbadian authorities had arrested two Venezuelan men—Hernán Ricardo and Freddy Lugo—as the actual bomb planters. They’d bought tickets on the Guyana-Havana milk-run but had gotten off the plane during its Barbados stop. Ricardo, who was traveling on a false passport, had done work for Posada’s Caracas-based private investigation company and served as Bosch’s driver. He fingered Posada and Bosch as the men who’d directed the plot.
Ricardo and Lugo were eventually returned to Venezuela where—after several trials—they were found guilty and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
The Posada and Bosch cases dragged on much longer. In 1980, a Venezuelan military judge acquitted both men, but the prosecutors successfully appealed, arguing the trial should have been held in a civilian court. While awaiting retrial, Posada—with help from rich exile friends in Miami—escaped, disguised as a priest, and disappeared.
Bosch wisely waited for the legal process to run its course, which only solidified his martyr status in Miami exile circles. While he was still in prison, Miami’s mayor led a highly publicized (it was an election year) pilgrimage to visit him in his cell. When Bosch went on a hunger strike to protest his incarceration, a dozen sympathizers set up a tent city in Little Havana and joined his fast. City fathers in Miami, Hialeah and Sweetwater even designated March 25, 1983 as “Orlando Bosch Day” to celebrate his lifetime of unstinting devotion to la causa.
In 1986, Bosch was finally acquitted, largely on a technicality: the Venezuelan court refused to allow Barbadian evidence to be used in his trial because it had been submitted too late and only in English. The judge also made the fascinatingly beside-the-point argument that Bosch must be innocent because he wasn’t with Hernán and Lugo “at the moment in which the Cubana plane was destroyed.”
The next year, Bosch, proclaiming “I have a loving wife who resides in the United States and five American children with whom I want to share the last years of my life,” resurfaced in Miami, a city that must have seemed dramatically different—and not—from the place he’d abandoned 13 years earlier.
By then, Miami, as the noted American writer Joan Didion put it in her 1987 nonfiction book, had become “our most graphic lesson in consequences.” Most of those consequences were a direct result of the presence in the city of close to 500,000 Cubans, many of whom had arrived in the years since Bosch left.
The first Cubans to flee to Miami following the triumph of Fidel Castro’s revolution, not surprisingly, had been the most wealthy and most powerful members of the old Batista regime, along with the American mobsters who’d made Havana their own. They were soon followed by the country’s business elite, many of whom already did business with the United States, or who whose companies were owned by Americans. Cuba’s professional classes were next to seek their exit. Many had opposed Castro from the beginning, but others—like Bosch—were early supporters who changed their minds, either because of what they saw as the excesses of the revolution or because of Castro’s quick embrace of Soviet-style communism.
By the end of 1962, close to 250,000 Cubans had landed in the United States. Most settled in south Florida. They saw themselves not as refugees or would-be immigrants but as exiles who had relocated temporarily to wait out the madness that had gripped their homeland. Miami—with its shared sub-tropical climate and an already established Cuban community of close to 30,000—made a natural haven. Havana’s upper classes were hardly strangers to Florida’s charms, of course; before the revolution, many vacationed in Miami Beach. And Miami was conveniently close to Havana—just a 55-minute flight across the Florida Straits—meaning they could return quickly once the political situation improved. They were so confident they would return soon many left their valuables behind in Cuba.
Why wouldn’t they have been optimistic? The American government seemed committed to helping them get their country back. Under cover of an organization code-named JM Wave, the CIA set up shop on the south campus of the University of Miami, doling out $50 million to hire a permanent staff of 300 who would oversee the insurrectionist work of more than 6,000 Cuban exile agents.
Their dismal failure at the Bay of Pigs in the spring of 1961 initially only seemed to make the American devotion to la causa stronger. The CIA shipped off cadres of bright young Cuban exiles—including Bosch’s eventual CORU compatriot Luis Posada; Felix Rodriguez, who would gain fame as the CIA operative responsible for killing Che Guevera and for running Oliver North’s Iran-Contra network; and Jorge Mas Canosa, who would one day become chair of the politically influential Cuban American National Foundation—to American military bases where CIA instructors helped them master the fine arts of bomb-making and sabotage.
But the exiles’ dream turned into a nightmare after the 1962 Cuban missile crisis when the Kennedy administration—as part of the price for getting the Soviet Union to remove its missile bases—agreed not to invade Cuba. Bosch himself wrote “a long bitter letter to Kennedy, charging betrayal.”
By then, however, the exile genie was out of the bottle. Even if it wanted to, the American government couldn’t magically take back all the support and training its CIA had provided to the anti-Castro militants. Not that it wanted to. The Americans were still just as eager for their exile proxies to topple Castro; they just couldn’t be seen to be directing the process any longer.
The result was that militant exile groups flowered in Miami’s hothouse, becoming a law unto themselves as they launched raid after raid against Cuba from the safety of their bases in Florida. Despite the undeniable reality their actions violated the U.S. Neutrality Act—which says paramilitaries can’t organize or carry out attacks against other countries from U.S. soil—the FBI rarely investigated. When police did file charges, prosecutors rarely prosecuted. If they did, juries in exile Miami even more rarely convicted.
It was probably no accident, for example, that Orlando Bosch had been stopped five times in five years before finally being convicted for terrorist activities, mostly because firing a makeshift bazooka at a Polish ship from Miami’s busy downtown MacArthur Causeway made him impossible to ignore.
By the 1970s, this growing culture of lawlessness had also turned inward as various exile groups tried to prove they were purer, more committed to la causa than the others.
In 1978, for example, a respected Cuban-American banker named Bernard Benes brokered a secret, White-House-encouraged deal with Fidel Castro that led to the release of 3,600 Cuban political prisoners and opened the door for Cubans to finally, if briefly, reunite with their relatives in the United States. For his efforts, Benes became, in the words of the New York Times, “the most prominent—and in anti-Castro circles the most hated—member of Miami’s community of 430,000 Cuban exiles.”
Benes, Robert M. Levine reported in his book Secret Missions to Cuba, “remained under FBI protection, surviving at least one and possibly two assassination attempts, and wearing a bulletproof vest… His bank was picketed and firebombed and… he lost almost all of his assets. For years, he could not even visit Little Havana without people refusing to shake his hand or look him in the eye.”
Why? For trying to free Cuban prisoners? For allowing exiles to see their families again? Why did Benes become such a pariah? Andrés Nazario Sargen, one of the founders of the militant Alpha 66 group, put it succinctly in an interview at the time with the Miami Herald: “When an American citizen talks to Castro, or helps a person in Cuba in any way,” he explained, “it gives the Cubans hope, which postpones their need to risk their lives to overthrow him, which hurts the cause.”
One result of that dictum was a frightening outbreak of internecine warfare. During one 18-month period in the mid-70s, there were more than 100 bombings and an average of an assassination a week in Miami. In a report, the FBI described Miami the “terrorist capital” of the United States.
Whoever killed José Elias de la Torriente—the 1974 murder investigators had wanted to question Bosch about before he disappeared—issued a statement calling the exile leader a “traitor to the fatherland” and promised to kill any other leader who got in the way of the “process of liberating their homeland by working only to advance their own bastard ambitions.” They’d been as good as their word, murdering four more exile leaders and blowing the legs off a fifth. The FBI eventually arrested three individuals who, according to the Miami New Times, “had one thing in common. At one time or another, they were all connected with a man named Orlando Bosch.”
Soon after returning to Miami, authorities clapped Bosch into jail for his long-ago parole violation. Before he could finish paying that debt to society, the Justice Department challenged his petition to be allowed to stay in the country. It turned out that when Bosch lived in Miami during the sixties and early seventies, he’d never actually applied for permanent residency. And now, based on more than 700 pages of classified U.S. government evidence cataloguing Bosch’s involvement in terrorist activities, the Justice Department of Justice wanted him deported. The problem was that no other country wanted him, except Cuba, and American authorities refused to send him there.
Thanks to that impasse, Bosch had spent the last two years in limbo at the Miami Correctional Center as prisoner No. 92690-131 while friends in high places lobbied for his release.
Despite—or, more likely, because of—his terrorist track record, Bosch had many friends in high places, friends like Jorge Mas Canosa, the Chair of the Cuban American National Foundation, the most powerful exile lobby group in the U.S.. Florida Congressional Representatives Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Connie Mack wrote letters on his behalf. Ros-Lehtinen’s campaign manager and wannabe Florida governor Jeb Bush talked to his father who was, conveniently, the president. Even the former chair of the Dade County Democratic Party—Bosch was a bipartisan cause, after all, for vote-hungry politicians— spoke out in his favor. Why? “The Cuban community believes the struggle against Castro is a war,” Alfredo Duran explained simply, “and in a war that kind of activity is not frowned upon.”
That kind of activity? Blowing an airplane out of the sky, killing 73 people? Organizing an umbrella group for militant anti-Castro exiles implicated in “more than 50 bombings and, possibly, political assassinations?”
Regardless, the lobbying worked. In early July 1990, the Justice Department—under pressure from an exile-friendly White House and pushed by a federal judge to either deport him or release him—offered a surprise deal for Bosch’s “temporary immigration parole.”
The three-page agreement called for Bosch to wear an electronic monitoring device, have no contact with “convicted felons or members of groups that advocate the use of violence for achieving political goals,” remain in his wife’s modest bungalow on Seventh Street in northwest Miami for 21 hours a day, have his phone calls monitored and maintain a log of every visitor to his house.
At first, Bosch balked at the requirement he keep a log of visitors; he didn’t want to be seen as a chivato, a hated government informant, his lawyer told reporters. After 10 days of negotiation, Bosch finally relented but in his own unrelenting way. Bosch, the Miami Herald reported, “said he would hang a banner on the front of his tiny pink home warning any visitors away: ‘Do not knock. Please go away. No chivato lives here.’”
It wasn’t much of a concession, but it was enough for beleaguered Justice officials. Bosch finally signed the agreement and the Department signed off on it. At 1:45 p.m. on July 17, 1990, Bosch walked out of prison and into his lawyer’s red convertible Mercedes, a sort-of free man. His release had become a subject of such intense public fascination that Miami television stations broke into afternoon soaps to announce it. Several were even broadcasting live his 23-minute press conference from the lobby of his lawyer’s office in Coconut Grove.
Although his lawyer had issued a required boilerplate statement—“Dr. Bosch reaffirms his previous statement that he has renounced terrorism in any form whatsoever as a means of political action and as a means to free Cuba from communism”—Bosch himself sounded remarkably unrepentant.
During the three hours a day—11 a.m. to 2 p.m.—he was permitted to leave his house, Bosch told reporters he would wander Little Havana’s Calle Ocho and Flagler Streets. “I will speak to anyone I want, I will embrace anyone I want and I will answer any questions they might have.”
He also wasn’t allowed to have contact with members of the Bay of Pigs’ veterans’ group, Brigade 2506, because of its support for Castro’s violent overthrow, but Bosch couldn’t help but praise them while slagging the American government for betraying them so many years before. “On April 17, 1961, the United States took and abandoned the Brigade 2506 at the Bay of Pigs… Those that died there are heroes of Cuba and heroes of mine."
Although Bosch told the assembled throng and those watching on TV that he was extremely grateful to his friends and supporters in Miami—“I said I couldn’t find the words to reciprocate, but in the end I chose one, which is what we all say when God grants our wishes: Gracias, muchas gracias”—he remained scornful of the American government for failing to appreciate, or support, the exile cause.
“In my long history fighting for the freedom of Cuba,” Bosch declared, “the government of the United States has built an enormous file giving me the face of a terrorist. But the United States never wanted to go into the depths of that file to understand that my insistence, my persistence, even my intransigence are products of a shameful pact where the destiny and sovereignty of my country was compromised.”
Was he really ready to live up to the terms of his deal with the Justice Department, agreeing not to “own a firearm nor participate in criminal activity.” Could he really give up la causa? Bosch was coy: “They have bought the chain,” he said enigmatically, “but they don’t have the monkey."
The Cuba government, of course, wasn’t amused. “We cannot calmly take the news of the release of Orlando Bosch, who is a terrorist,” explained a spokesman for the Cuban Interests Section in Washington D.C.
Havana had no intention of waiting quietly for the monkey’s next trick.
Copyright 2011 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
Cuba broadcasts Abarca confession
In this, the first of a three-part video from Cubavision, Salvadoran Francisco Chavez Abarca talks about—and reenacts—a number of his missions to Cuba to plant bombs at tourist facilities during the mid-1990s:
For more on who Chavez Abarca is and the story of his involvement in the 1997 hotel bombing campaign, check out The Gordito Connection, an excerpt from "Sting of the Wasp," my in-progress nonfiction book on the Cuban Fiva.
Copyright 2010 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
Day in the Five: Tale of the tape (recording)
On September 10, 1997, Cuba officially announces the arrest of Raúl Cruz León, a Salvadoran mercenary, in connection with the bombing that killed Fabio Di Celmo.
But there’s more the Cubans don't announce…
The day before—at the direction of his Cuban interrogators—Cruz León telephoned Francisco Chávez Abarca, the Salvadoran who’d hired him for the bombing mission. They recorded the conversation.
And got one step closer to the man behind the bombing campaign, Luis Posada Carriles, and to the organization that was underwriting his terrorist plot, the Cuban American National Foundation.
Havana
September 9, 1997
“And why don’t you come, Fatty, to get me out of here? You know how the hell to do that!”
Raúl Cruz León
Raúl Cruz León sounded angry. And frustrated. He had been trying to reach Francisco “Gordito” Chávez—the man who sent him on his bombing mission—for three days. He had called Gordito’s father Antonio, his brother Mario, even his wife Karla. Tell Gordito I need money now, he told them.
Finally, Gordito himself had called back.
“Don’t fuck around,” Cruz León continued his tirade. “You’re the one who put me in here and I don’t know what the hell to do.”
Gordito did his best to placate his clearly off-the-rails bomber. “No, I know, I know,” he said soothingly. “I won’t leave you by the wayside.”
He would make the necessary arrangements, get some cash together, get it to him as soon as possible. “Stay put,” Gordito said, not knowing that Cruz León had no choice in the matter. “I'll talk to you tomorrow.
Adalberto Rabeiro, Cuban State Security’s lead investigator in the bombing case, listened in on the conversation, which he’d carefully arranged—and recorded—with a quiet satisfaction. Another dot had been connected. It was time to tell the world.
Copyright 2010 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
Day in the Five: Posada brags about the bomb that killed a man
Luis Posada brags about his role in the hotel bombings that killed an Italian-Canadian tourist in this telephone conversation secretly recorded by Cuban State Security.
Venezuela
September 5, 1997
“Paco,” the voice at the other end of the phone demanded, “are you up to date on all this?”
Luis Posada Carriles
Paco was Francisco Pimentel, a Cuban-born Venezuelan businessman with close connections to Venezuela’s secret police. During the early seventies, he’d become friends with Luis Posada Carriles, the man at the other end of the telephone line. They'd initially gotten to know each other when Posada worked for Venezuela's feared Directorate of Intelligence and Prevention Services (DISIP). The two men remained close.
Posada was calling today to update him on the latest success in his ongoing campaign to destabilize Cuba's fledgling tourism industry by planting bombs at hotels and resorts.
“You have no idea,” Posada gloated. “Three in a row in three hotels in Miramar, all synchronized and with no chance of them detecting the envoy.”
Posada hadn’t yet heard the news of Raúl Cruz León’s arrest.
“And this is just starting. I promise you that several more envoys are on their way to Cuba to carry out new actions.”
Paco had had his own suggestions for “actions.” During a conversation a month before, he’d offered one: “As well as the hotels and tourist places," Paco suggested, "it would be really good to do something to the interests of those businessmen linked to the construction of stores and commercial centres in Cuba. For example, that little faggot Oscar de la Renta…”
Paco made no mentoion of de la Renta today; Posada was too busy gloating.
“This is really fierce,” Posada said.
Copyright 2010 Sting of the Wasp: The Cuban Five Connection
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About
This is the site for What Lies Across the Water: The Real Story of the Cuban Five, 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 sentenced to 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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