The devil is in the details
This draft excerpt from "Sting of the Wasp" follows the announcement of the arrest of Cruz León for the bombing of the Copacabana and Cuba State Security's accusation that a group within the Cuban American National Foundation was responsible for the Havana hotel bombings.
Miami
September 10, 1997
[i]The Cuban American National Foundation quickly and categorically dismissed Havana’s claim that it—or some “subversive organization controlled” by it—was responsible for the hotel bombings. “The Foundation had absolutely nothing to do with those events,” CANF President Francisco ‘Pepe’ Hernandez declared. Such a spurious allegation, he added, was “not worthy of a serious response.” During its 17-year existence, “the Foundation has always used legal methods to get rid of Fidel Castro.”
The devil—along with the more complex, more nuanced and less categorical truth—could only be discovered in details that would never appear in any official CANF statement.
The same, of course, could be said of Jorge Mas Canosa, the heroic, larger-than-life 58-year-old Chairman of the Board of CANF, which was arguably the most powerful, important and effective anti-Castro lobbying machine in the United States. Which made Jorge Mas Canosa the most powerful, important and effective Cuban-American exile in the United States.
In its statement, Cuban State Security described Mas Canosa as CANF’s “counter-revolutionary leader.” It was meant as an insult. Mas would have taken it as a compliment. Nearly 40 years after the 1959 revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power, Mas Canosa’s overarching ambition was still to light the fire of a counter-revolution that would overthrow Castro and replace him with… well, Jorge Mas Canosa. Although Mas Canosa himself never publicly advanced such a narcissistic thought, the fact was that José Antonio Llama, a wealthy CANF board member, had recently quietly acquired a high-speed vessel called Midnight Express, whose primary purpose was to ferry a triumphant Mas Canosa home to Cuba in the happy event that Castro died or the island’s government changed. (It wasn’t the only vessel Llama had recently acquired for purposes of changing the future of Cuba, but we’ll come back to that soon enough.)
On the face of it, Jorge Mas Canosa was the living embodiment of the rags-to-riches, poor-but-ambitious refugee who had made very, very good in his adopted homeland. Not that Mas Canosa ever considered himself anything other than a visitor in that new land.
His official biography explains it this way. “Following months of intense struggle as a student leader in Cuba, first, against the Batista dictatorship and then against Castro’s communism, he was arrested and persecuted for his democratic ideals until he was given no other choice but to seek exile. In Miami, he joined the ranks of Brigade 2506 and following the failed invasion”—no need, in exilio-speak, to mention that it was the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion—“graduated as a Second Army Lieutenant at Fort Benning, Georgia.”
Which is true, as far as it goes. Officially, the 22-year-old Mas Canosa served as a squad leader, 1st Rifle Company, 3rd Squad in the invasion’s El Grupo Niño Diaz. But Diaz’s troops never made it closer to Cuba than somewhere off the coast of Oriente province. They beat a hasty retreat back to Miami as soon as they learned that the main force had been decimated. “Mas,” explained Miami writer Gaeton Fonzi in a 1993 Esquire profile, “never got his feet wet.”
But because he was classified as a Bay of Pigs veteran, Mas Canosa did qualify for officer training in the U.S. Army and went to Fort Benning where he did graduate as a second lieutenant. Conveniently missing from the official biography, however, is the fact that Fort Benning at that time also served as a base “where men in civilian suits came and gave special courses in such specialties as clandestine communications, intelligence and propaganda” and where Mas Canosa’s fellow exiles-in-training included such future CIA-backed luminaries as Felix Rodriguez, the man credited with killing Che Guevera, and—of course—Luis Posada, another El Grupo Niño alumni.
Instead, Mas Canosa’s official biography skips quickly back to Miami where “he married Irma Santos, his high school sweetheart.” Which is where the narrative of the patriotic young Cuban democrat, forced to flee his homeland with nothing but the clothes on his back and dreams of a free Cuba in his pocket, really takes shape. From lowly hotel dishwasher, to shoe salesman, to milkman, to stevedore, to… well, hugely successful self-made man, Jorge Mas Canosa shinnied up the slippery pole of the American Dream with dizzying speed.
In 1968—he wasn’t 30 yet—Mas convinced a Cuban exile banker to loan him $50,000 to buy the failing company he worked for. The small firm—called Iglesias and Torres after the surnames of its founders—was unsuccessfully attempting to win contract work from telephone companies. Mas anglicized its name to Church and Tower and, within the year, landed a multimillion contract with Bell Southern. The first of many for his emerging “engineering contracting firm specializing in telecommunications infrastructure.”
The official history again: “That company went on to become MasTec, a multinational corporation, still headquartered in Miami, once named the largest U.S.-Hispanic owned business in the country and the first Hispanic owned corporation to be featured on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE). The company today employs over 8,000 individuals around the globe.”
As for Mas Canosa himself? “He bought a sprawling, Spanish-style mansion south of Miami with high walls, towering Royal palms, a tear-drop swimming pool,” Fonzi wrote in Esquire. “He drove a Mercedes, had a box seat at the Dolphins games, took his family skiing at Vail. He had become a very successful capitalist and began to itch with the power that came with that success. In Miami,” he added, “that power had its own special twist.”
In 1981, the stars of Mas Canosa’s emergence as the most prominent Cuban-American business leader aligned neatly with the moon of a scheme by Richard Allen, U.S. President Ronald Reagan’s National Security Advisor, to promote the new president’s “pro-active foreign policy.”
If the exiles could form a high-profile lobbying organization to support Reagan’s hard-line anti-communist agenda, Allen suggested, there was—as one exile leader would later put it—“a chance of doing something” to promote their own dream of getting rid of Castro. And so the Cuban American National Foundation—modeled on the spectacularly successful American Israeli Public Affairs Committee, with separate non-profit, political action and lobbying wings—was born. CANF quickly became so successful in its own right that one former Senate foreign affairs staff member told Fonzi “the Israeli lobby could take lessons from CANF.”
In 1983, Mas Canosa convinced the Reagan administration—and Congress—to fund Radio Marti, a propaganda broadcasting operation it wanted beamed into Cuba to counter the official Castro media and “fight communism.” To make it happen, CANF successfully bulldozed over objections from the government’s own Voice of America, which argued another publicly-funded broadcaster wasn’t needed; conventional American broadcasters, who feared it would provoke the Cuban government into blocking their broadcast signals; the International Telecommunications Union, which said the station was illegal; and the U.S. State Department and the usually powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee, both of which objected on all manner of political, legal and tactical grounds. Radio Marti began broadcasting in 1985. Five years later, Mas Canosa convinced Washington to underwrite a TV Marti too.
Part of CANF’s success can be attributed to good old fashioned political schmoozing. In 1983, for example, Mas Canosa invited Reagan to speak at a Cuban Independence Day rally in Miami. Reagan, dressed in a traditional guayabera, wowed the huge crowd with shouts of “Viva Cuba Libre!” and “Cuba si, Castro no!” Soon after, Miami named a street in Little Havana after the president.
Mas Canosa, like many of the early Cuban exiles, was instinctively, viscerally anti-Democrat. He blamed President John F. Kennedy for abandoning their cause after the Bay of Pigs debacle and would still claim, decades later, that the man he hated most—after Fidel Castro, of course—was Kennedy.
But Mas Canosa was smart enough not to allow even such deeply ingrained partisan loyalties get in the way of the greater cause.
In 1988, for example, he helped engineer the defeat of a moderate Connecticut Republican, Lowell Weiker, who’d made the mistake of publicly promoting dialogue with Cuban leader Fidel Castro. CANF’s Political Action Committee put its money and its muscle behind Weiker’s right-wing Democratic opponent, Joe Lieberman. Weiker was history.
In 1992, after erstwhile ally Republican President George H. W. Bush expressed tepid reservations about a CANF-supported bill designed to tighten the failed 29-year-old embargo on Cuba by prohibiting offshore subsidiaries of U.S. companies from trading with Cuba, or claiming tax deductions for expenses related to such trade, and even blocking foreign vessels that traded with Cuba from docking at American ports, Mas Canosa quickly and pointedly invited Democratic presidential wannabe Bill Clinton to speak at the annual Independence Day celebrations. After Clinton dutifully declared his support for the CANF-supported legislation, four local Cuban-American businessmen publicly contributed $100,000 to his campaign coffers.
Mindful of that—and of the importance of Florida to his own re-election hopes—Bush almost instantly announced his own new embargo-tightening executive order, which seemed in remarkable lockstep with CANF’s wishes. That announcement, once again, came over the objections of his own State Department.
“State Department officials admit,” wrote syndicated columnist Georgie Anne Geyer, “that Mr. Mas’ Foundation... has been responsible for the fact that the United States has basically formulated no policy of its own toward Cuba because of fear of the Foundation's tactics.” Paraphrasing her frustrated sources, Geyer added that the suggestion that U.S. foreign policy toward Cuba was “being run by a bunch of nuts and ambitious egomaniacs is not too far from the truth.”
For all its undoubted success with American policymakers and politicians, however, CANF seemed to be having almost no effect where it really counted.
By 1992, the exiles’ ever hopeful next-year-in-Havana greeting had turned into a doubtful dirge. The distressing reality was that Cuba should have been ripe for the counter revolutionary plucking. Its primary benefactor, the Soviet Union, had imploded, cutting off its cash taps. One after another, countries of the former Soviet empire—Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, East Germany—had abandoned communism for the free market. But not Cuba. Not Castro.
Jorge Mas Canosa had done his best. Even before the final collapse of the empire, he’d flown to Moscow to lobby Mikhail Gorbachev to cut off all aid to Cuba, embarked on a whirlwind tour of former communist capitals—even convincing Hungary’s parliament to endorse a “statement of solidarity” with CANF’s campaign to overthrow Castro—and invited the increasingly powerful Boris Yeltsin to Miami to speak at a university seminar. And schmooze. CANF had then followed that up by announcing it was opening its own Moscow office!
None of it changed anything. Fidel Castro was still in power in Havana. And Mas Canosa was still in Miami.
Those simmering frustrations finally boiled over during the Foundation’s annual general meeting in Naples, Florida, in 1992. One of the directors suggested it was past time they did “more than lobbying in Washington” to overthrow Castro. Others agreed. Before they left the meeting, “about 20” of CANF’s “most trusted leaders” had quietly agreed among themselves to set up El Grupo Belico, the War Group, a secret paramilitary group whose goal would be “destabilizing the communist government of Castro.” They also agreed that Mas Canosa and Pepe Hernandez would be delegated to choose the members of the new secret armed group. Hernandez himself—the same Pepe Hernandez, remember, who had dismissed Cuban State Security allegations of CANF involvement in the bombings as “not worthy of a serious response”—would lead the paramilitary operations because, as one participant put it, of “his known record as a fighter in the 2506 Brigade and the Marines.”
Though it had been carefully airbrushed from his official life story, Mas Canosa was no stranger to el exilio’s violent underbelly either. In his youth, he had done much more than just “lobbying in Washington.” As one of the leaders of Representatión Cubana en El Exilio, a CIA-backed exile terror group operating out of Miami in the sixties, for example, Mas Canosa delivered $5,000 to Luis Posada to cover his expenses during a mission to blow up a Cuban ship in Mexico’s Vera Cruz harbor. Later, according to an FBI report, Mas Canosa even encouraged Posada to “travel to Spain, Mexico, and other Latin American countries at RECE’s expense and place bombs in Communist installations such as embassies and information service libraries.” The same report said Mas had boasted that another RECE agent had “placed such a device in the Soviet library in Mexico City, which later exploded, causing a furor.”
Although Mas would publicly defend violence as a legitimate means to his end through the 1970s—“Am I non-violent?” he parried one question posed by a reporter for the Miami Herald in 1978, then answered it simply:” No, I am pro-violence”—he’d long since changed his rhetorical tune. “We can defeat a communist tyranny in our sphere of influence without shooting one bullet,” the new Mas Canosa was fond of claiming. At least publicly.
The man charged with providing the financial and logistical support for CANF’s new paramilitary wing was José Antonio “Toñin” Llama, another successful self-made exile businessman who ran a business exporting automobile air conditioning systems. During the last three years, Llama had put up $1.4 million to finance the purchase—through a variety of front companies—of 10 small radio-controlled ultralight airplanes, a cargo helicopter that could serve as an “operation base for the planes, explosives (purchased through a company owned by another exile who was authorized to acquire them “to open up sewage canals for South Florida’s sugar industry) and seven satellite-radio-and-phone equipped vessels for staging attacks on Cuba by sea, as well as for other purposes.
In addition to the Midnight Express—tasked to carry Mas Canosa to Cuba at the appropriate post-revolutionary moment—Llama had also acquired La Esperanza, a 46-foot yacht currently being retrofitted for its Mission to Margarita. The purpose of that mission: to assassinate Fidel Castro during a meeting of Latin American heads of state on Margarita Island off the coast of Venezuela.
Not worthy of a serious response indeed.
[i] Sources: Jorge Mas Canosa’s official and unofficial biography was stitched together from a variety of sources including the Cuban American National Foundation website, the Jorge Mas Canosa Freedom Foundation website, a 1993 Esquire profile by Gaetan Fonzi and a 1999 Monthly Review obituary by Saul Landau in Monthly Review. José Antonio Llama himself disclosed the story of CANF's secret paramilitary offshoot in a 2006 interview with El Nuevo Herald. Llama, who had been charged and acquitted in connection with the 1997 Margarita plot to assassinate Fidel Castro, quit CANF. In the interview, he claimed CANF refused to pay his and his co-defendants’ legal costs in the assassination case, forcing him into bankruptcy. Interestingly, the Cubans knew about the paramilitary group long before Llama’s disclosure. During Cruz León’s 1999 trial, Percy Alvarado, a Cuban agent who’d infiltrated CANF, testified in detail about its existence, its members and its goals.
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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