October 6, 1976

On October 6, 1976, two bombs placed inside a washroom aboard Cubana Airlines Flight 455 from Guyana to Havana by way of Barbados exploded, killing all 73 passengers and crew, including 24 members of the Cuban national fencing team, many of them teenagers who had just won a Caribbean fencing tournament.

For the most complete account of this first act of airline terrorisim in the Americas and its impact 30 years later, read "Twilight of the Assassins" by Ann Louise Bardach in The Atlantic Magazine.

"In 1988 Cuba's economy was undermined overnight by the collapse of the USSR: GDP was reduced by 80% and the sweetness of the sugar industry, Cuba's major export to the Soviet bloc, became instead a bitter pill. Over the next decade, food rationing, lack of transport, electricity blackouts and much misery was experienced by the Cuban population. As the economy was gradually turned around, the once restricted tourist industry was encouraged and the US dollar permitted as a parallel currency. Now twenty years later, Cuba's economy - although still hindered by the US blockade - has recovered and is growing despite the 'credit crunch' and the collapsing economies of many of the world's leading financial institutions..."

— The International Journal for Cuban Studies

In 1992, a few senior officials within the right-wing Cuban American National Foundation—the largest anti-Castro lobby in the U.S.—quietly established a “parallel secret military organization named the "Cuban National Front” to organize violent attacks against Cuba’s developing tourist industry. The Front’s key principals were two Cuban-born ex-CIA operatives named Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch. Both had previously been charged in Venezuela with organizing the 1976 aircraft bombing and both were intimately involved in directing a campaign of violence against the Cuban government.

1992

U.S. Customs agents arrested a number of members of the anti-Castro militant group Alpha 66 aboard boats loaded with weapons, including handguns, automatic rifles, grenades, pipe bombs, a grenade launcher and a Baretta semi-automatic rifle. One man was charged but acquitted.

Over the course of next year and a half, members of Alpha 66 were caught on at least two other occasions. On one occasion (June 10, 1994) agents seized weapons but didn't arrest anyone; on another (July 11, 1993) "the men were not arrested, and the weapons and vessels were not seized."

During a flotilla demonstrating against the Cuban government, José Basulto of Brothers to the Rescue flew his Cessna 337 into Cuban airspace without permission from the Cuban government, crossed over Havana and dropped religious medallions and bumper stickers from the sky.

The stickers boasted the slogan ``Companeros No. Hermanos,'' or "Not Comrades. Brothers.''

The Cuban government protested the violation to American authorities.

Charles Smith of the Federal Aviation Administration testified during the trial of the Five that he warned Basulto  that Cuba might shoot his plane down or force him to land.

"'You know I always play by the rules," Smith says Basulto told him, "but you must understand I have a mission in life to perform."'

In February 1998, the Cuban government shot down two Brothers to the Rescue aircraft. The shootdown became a key element of the prosecution case against the Five.

A bomb explodes in the “Aché” discotheque at the Melia Cohiba hotel.

Explosions occur almost simultaneously in the Capri and Nacional Hotels. Four people are wounded.

August 11, 1997

The board of directors of the Cuban American National Foundation describes the bombing campaign as “incidents of internal rebellion which have been taking place in Cuba over the last few weeks.” It adds “the Cuban American National Foundation […] supports these without hesitation or reservations.”

September 4, 1997

Cruz León

Shortly after 10:30 on the morning of September 4, 1997, a 27-year-old Salvadoran named Raul Ernesto Cruz Leon ambled into the lobby bar of the Copacabana Hotel in Havana’s Miramar embassy district and asked the bartender for a Bucanero. While he waited for his beer, Cruz Leon slipped into the washroom, removed a small explosive device from his backpack, set its timer, returned to the bar and placed it inside a metal ashtray standing beside the bar. After finishing his drink, he left the Copacabana and made his way down the block to the nearby Chateau Hotel.

Fabio Di Celmo

An hour later, Fabio di Celmo came downstairs and into the lobby bar. The 32-year-old Montreal-based Italian-Canadian entrepreneur was staying in the Copacabana with his father while they attempted to negotiate some joint venture tourism deals with the Cuban government. On this day, he had arranged to meet a recently married Italian couple for lunch in the bar. At his suggestion, the couple, whom he’d known since childhood, had spent their honeymoon in Cuba and Di Celmo was anxious to hear how they’d enjoyed their stay.

Their drinks had just arrived when a sudden, violent explosion ripped through the hotel lobby, shattering bottles and glasses, destroying the furniture and blowing the hotel’s lobby windows, twisted frames and all, into the street. When the dust had settled, Fabio Di Clemo lay face down on the green-carpeted floor in a rapidly expanding pool of his own bright red blood. A metal shard from the ashtray had rocketed through the air and sliced open his throat, severing his carotid artery and killing him almost instantly.
 

 October 1, 1997

At 11 p.m. on October 1, 1997—just three weeks after the Copacabana bombing—Michael Kozak, the head of the United States Interests Section in Havana telephoned a contact in the Cuban Ministry of the Interior to pass on a warning from Washington. The United States had received information from “a third party” about the possibility of yet another bomb being set off in a tourist area, he said, and offered details of what they claimed they’d learned from their source.

Four days later, Cuban officials summoned Kozak to their offices to read him a message to send back to Washington: “We wish to let [the American government] know that the source which provided them with this information has been shown to be truthful. We have acted with utmost discretion, as we were asked to do. We are very appreciative.”

On October 27, 1997, the U.S. Coast Guard boarded a yacht call La Esperanza near Puerto Rico, discovering a cache of weapons, including two high-powered sniper rifles.

One of those on board the vessel, Angel Alfonso Aleman claimed ownership. "I placed them there myself," he said. "They are weapons for the purpose of assassinating Fidel Castro."

Police eventually charged seven Cuban exiles, including prominent members of the Miami exile community—one a board member of the Cuban American National Foundation, with a plot  "to kill, with malice aforethought, Fidel Castro." 

On December 9, 1999, a jury in Puerto Rico acquitted all the defendants. The decision seemed to have less to do with evidence than politics. Explained the jury foreman after the verdict: "This was a message to the Cuban people that we're with you, and not to lose hope."

Interestingly, the FBI officer in charge of the original investigation was Hector Pesquera. In May 1998, he would be appointed the FBI's agent in charge in Miami where he played a key role in the arrest of the Cuban Five.

November 16, 1997

In a report  published in the Miami Herald on November 16, 1997, the newspaper—citing “dozens of interviews with security officials, friends of the bombers, Cuban exiles and others in El Salvador, Miami, Guatemala and Honduras”—traced the Havana hotel attacks to a “ring of Salvadoran car thieves and armed robbers directed and financed by Cuban exiles in El Salvador and Miami... Luis Posada Carriles,” the story claimed, “was the key link between El Salvador and the South Florida exiles, who raised $15,000 for the operation.”

The FBI's new Miami boss was Hector Pesquera. Soon after his May 1998 arrival, he “began to fraternize with key members of the exile leadership,” including CANF. As one of Pesquera’s agents later told a reporter, he “quickly made a brusque turn toward the right, and all investigations related to terrorism were abandoned.” In a newspaper interview on July 29, 1998, in fact, the new head of the FBI’s Miami office declared that he “understands the animosity that Cubans feel toward the government of Fidel Castro.” He had no plans, he added, to “raise the priority” of Bureau investigations into any alleged plots against Cuba’s tourist industry by Cuban-Americans living in Miami.

Instead, he ordered his agents to figure out where Cuban State Security was getting its intelligence. By that point, of course, Pesquera already knew what the Cubans had turned over to the FBI in Havana in June concerning the airplane plot. “They informed me of what was going on,” he later told an interviewer for Radio Marti, the American government-funded, anti-Castro radio station. “We then began to stress that this investigation into the effects of intelligence should no longer remain as is, but should change direction and become a criminal investigation,” he explained, then added, “I had many problems convincing the Justice Department.” Some in the department “didn’t want to touch this,” he told another interviewer, and said that the disagreement went all the way to the top. “Everything was on the line.” Attorney General Janet Reno herself had to be “persuaded,” and it took FBI Director Freeh’s personal intervention to finally get the OK Pesquera needed to do what he wanted to do.
 

Michael Kozak from the US Interests Section in Havana met with the Cubans again on June 3, 1998, to deliver the text of a statement he said the United States was planning to circulate to all airlines flying between the U.S. and Cuba directly, or via third countries to Cuba, as well as to the governments all those third countries:

“We have received unconfirmed information about a plot to place explosive devices on civil airliners which fly between Cuba and countries in Latin America. The people involved in the plot plan to leave a small explosive device on board an aircraft with the intention of activating it sometime during the flight. The explosive device, according to reports, is small, has a fuse and a digital timer that can be programmed 99 hours before it is to go off. The specific target, place and timeframe have not been identified. We cannot dismiss the possibility that the threat may extend to international cargo flights from the United States. The US government is still looking for additional information to clarify, verify or refute this threat.”

Under American law, Kozak explained, the Federal Aviation Agency had no choice but to send out such information circulars “whenever the U.S. government has any credible information concerning a possible threat to aircraft.”

Castro was apoplectic. He personally drafted the Cuban response: “We did not ask you to issue any warning to air companies,” it said. “That is not the way to deal with this problem; different kind of measures can and must be taken to deal with it. No one could guarantee discretion. An indiscretion in this case could make the investigation more difficult and place obstacles in the way of more efficient measures. Moreover, the circulation of such a warning might create panic, thus causing considerable damage to the Cuban economy, which is exactly what the terrorists want. This damage could also extend to the airlines. Therefore, we disagree with the issuance of a warning; we are seriously opposed to that. We can make a thorough analysis with your group of experts of the most advisable steps to take.”

Castro’s protests fell on deaf ears. The Americans, the Cubans soon realized after they began to look into the intricacies of American law, really did have no choice but to notify the airlines and governments about what they knew, or face serious liability issues should the worst happen and their foreknowledge be disclosed.

 June 15-17, 1998

On June 15, 1998, a remarkable secret meeting occurred in Havana between representatives of Cuban State Security and a visiting delegation of American FBI agents.

Over the course of three unprecedented days, the Cubans handed over to the FBI a mountain of documents, photographs, audio recordings, videos and physical evidence its intelligence agents had gathered. The Cubans claimed the material proved that key players in the Miami-based Cuban American National Foundation—the largest anti-Castro exile group in the U.S., with direct links to every U.S. president since Ronald Reagan—had not only provided the money and muscle for a wave of bombings at Cuban hotels and resorts but that they were also now in the process of ratcheting up both the stakes and the consequences in their campaign against Cuba.

The evidence it had gathered, the Cubans told the FBI agents, showed that elements in the exile group had hatched a deadly plan to blow up airplanes filled with Cuba-bound tourists from Europe or Canada.

The agents thanked the Cubans, took their material and promised to get back to them as soon as they’d had a chance to analyze all the evidence.

They never did.
 

In late August 1998, Luis Posada Carrile arranged a meeting with other exilies in the Guatemala City Holiday Inn Hotel to plan how to kill Castro at a Summit of Heads of State and Government of CARIFORUM in the Dominican Republic.

On September 12, 1998, at 5 a.m., heavily armed FBI agents conducted dozens of raids in and around Miami, smashing down doors, confiscating computers, files and communications equipment and arresting 10 men.

The arrests, of course, marked only the end of the beginning of the larger story of the Cuban Five. And the legal proceedings turned out to be no less controversial—or complicated.

Of the 10 members of the Avispa network, five pleaded guilty in exchange for lighter sentences and testified against the others. The five whose cases did go forward were charged with 26, mostly technical violations of American law (failing to register as a foreign agent, living in the U.S. under a phony name, etc.). None of the charges—as the Cubans were quick to point out—involved actual acts of espionage against the United States government.

One of the Five, however, did face a much more serious charge. Prosecutors accused Gerardo Hernandez of conspiracy to commit murder in connection with the 1996 shooting down of the Brothers to the Rescue airplanes. They claimed that Hernandez had received secret instructions from Havana to warn two of his undercover agents not to board Brothers to the Rescue flights to Cuba between February 23 and February 27, 1996. Cuba shot down the planes on February 26. That meant, the prosecutors alleged, that Hernandez must have known of the plans to shoot them down and was therefore guilt of conspiracy to commit murder. In Miami, where the deaths of the four Brothers to the Rescue fliers were still an emotional issue, that conspiracy charge was—and remains—the case’s red flag, and the major stumbling block to finding a political solution.

November 25, 1999

The Thanksgiving weekend arrival of the five-year-old Cuban boy aboard an inner tube—he survived the crossing from Cuba in which his mother died—touched off a highly publicized tug-of-war between Elian's father and the Cuban government on one side, and Miami-based anti-Castro exiles, who wanted to keep him in the U.S., on the other

Publicity over Elian's fate dominated the news in the months leading up to the trial of the Cuban Five

The U.S. government, over the objections of the Miami-based exile community, seizes Elian from his American relatives and returns him to his father. Elian becomes a hero in Cuba. And the Castro government becomes even more "the bad guy" in Miami.

US Attorney General Janet Reno, a Floridian and usual friend to the exiles, was vilified for her decision. She was attacked on local talk radio, received death threats at her home. Wrote the Miami Herald, one of the few newspapers in the U.S. to support the American family: "Janet Reno, born and raised on the fringes of Miami, loves to see things dearly: the law and her hometown. Because of her rigid devotion to the former, she is threatened with losing the other. It is one of this community's uglier tendencies that, when we disagree with someone on an issue, we try also to vilify him or her as a person."

Lamented Reno: "I was born and raised in that community. I love Miami when it is hurting, it hurts me."

December 5, 2000

The prosecution's first key witness was FBI agent Vincente Rosado who testified that investigators seized more than 500 computer disks from alleged spy-ring members' apartments in North Miami Beach, Hollywood and Miami Beach. He told jurors the disks, which required a special program and password to open, contained reports about the ring's activities, but he did not provide details.

The six-month trial would generate 119 volumes of testimony and more than 20,000 pages of exhibits. 

Defence witnesses included three retired Army generals, a retired admiral, a former presidential advisor on Cuba, senior Cuban officials and even the head of Brothers to the Rescue.

 

September 11, 2001

The deadly attacks highlighted America's vulnerability to—and fear of—terrorism. But it also provided a telling counterpoint to the prosecution of the Cuban Five.

The Five had been dispatched to Florida not to attack the U.S. but to infiltrate and report back on militant exile groups that were planning from the United States to terrorist attacks on Cuba.

The irony would be lost on the jurors in the Cuban Five case, as it was when President George W. Bush declared that anyone offering safe haven to a terrorist—think Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch—was, in fact, a terrorist as well.

In “Opinion No. 19/2005,” the United Nations Working Group on Arbitrary Detention described the detention of the Cuban Five as "arbitrary," concluding “from the facts and circumstances in which the trial took place and from the nature of the charges and the harsh sentences handed down to the accused, that the trial did not take place in the climate of objectivity and impartiality.”
 

Atlanta's 11th Circuit Court of Appeals reverses the 2005 decision of the three-judge panel 10-2 overturning the panel's decision to grant a new trial in a different venue. The defence appeals.