From The Center  for International Policy Cuba Report

By Wayne S. Smith

Stephen Kimber’s forthcoming book “ What Lies Across the Water?” is perhaps the most complete account of the Cuban Five I’ve yet read – and I came away from reading it with a renewed sense of depression. No wonder! The case has long befouled the image of the United States as dedicated to justice, honor and fairplay. As Kimber notes, the trial back in 2001 was such a complete farce that it drew massive international criticism – from 10 Nobel Prize winners, from hundreds of jurists, members of parliaments and various other organizations all over the world, many of whom joined 12 amicus briefs asking the Supreme Court to review the case. And for the first time in history, the UN Human Rights Commission condemned a trial in the United States.

Kimber follows the Cubans as they are assigned to the United States as undercover agents, not to work against the U.S. but to gather information on exile terrorist activities against Cuba. The Cuban government then invited representatives of the FBI to come to Havana to receive and discuss the evidence of these terrorist activities and plans gathered by the agents. The meeting took place in June of 1998. The Cubans then waited for the United States to take action against the exile terrorists. But none was taken. The only action, rather, was the arrest of the Cuban Five, they who had provided much of the evidence turned over to the FBI.

At the time, I wrote this off as simply another example of the U.S. government’s almost chronic inability to respond rationally to Cuba – and in this case to do what in fact would have served U.S. interests. Having read Kimber’s book, however, I now see there may have been more to it than that. We knew about the Havana meeting with the FBI. But few knew – and I certainly did not – that the meeting had in effect been prompted by Fidel Castro in a message delivered in the White House by Gabriel Garcia Marquez to President Clinton’s top Latin American adviser, Thomas Mack McLarty, and three senior NSC officials. The core of the message had been to suggest a joint effort against exile terrorism – especially in light of Cuban information that the exiles were planning new plane bombings – such as those carried out earlier by Luis Posada Carriles. According to Garcia Marquez, the American reaction to the idea of a joint effort had been decidedly positive.

What then had happened? Why the exact opposite of what seems to have been intended? Kimber believes it had to do with the FBI’s assignment of a new Agent in Charge, Hector Pesquera, who was close to the hardline Cuban exiles. Kimber writes that “in an interview with a Miami radio station soon after the verdicts, Pesquera claimed he was the one who switched his agents’ focus from spying on the spies to filing charges against them.” [1]

And “after the verdict in the Cuban Five trial, Pesquera was quick to claim credit for persuading officials in Washington to OK his plan,.i.e., to go after the Cuban Five rather than the exile terrorists. He told the Miami Herald the case ‘never would have made it to court’ if he hadn’t lobbied FBI Director Louis Freeh directly.” [2]

Kimber goes on to write that “at the same time, Pesquera apparently discouraged investigations into exile terrorism. An FBI agent told journalist Annie Bardach, that they’d thought it would be a slam dunk to charge and arrest Luis Posada Carriles. But then they had a meeting with the chief [i.e. Pesquera] who’d said no, that “lots of Folks around here think Posada is a freedom fighter. We were in shock. And then they closed down the whole Posada investigation.”[3]

Kimber tried repeatedly to interview Pesquera, but without success. The latter retired from the FBI and then simply stopped responding to Kimber’s e-mails.

The outcome, Kimber concludes, was the exact opposite of what had been contemplated at that White House meeting all those years ago. Rather than efforts to halt exile terrorist acts, the United States arrested the Cuban Five – although “tried” is not the right word, for the trial was a sham. The prosecutors had no real evidence and so fell back to the old standby of trying them for “conspiracy” to commit illegal acts. No evidence, and they were tried in Miami where anti-Castro sentiment had reached such a level with the Elian Gonzalez case that there was no chance of empanelling an impartial jury. Defense lawyers requested a change of venue, but incredibly, it was denied.

Worst of all was the case of Gerardo Hernandez, who was accused of “conspiracy” to commit murder and given two consecutive life sentences, plus fifteen years – this in connection with the shoot down of the two Brothers to the Rescue planes in February of 1996. Never mind that there was no evidence that he was responsible. But there, behind bars, he remains today, mostly in solitary confinement and after all these years not allowed a single visit from his wife.

What may have begun with constructive intentions at that White House meeting all those years ago thus ends – so far – in shame.

_______
[1] Kimber, “What Lies Across the Water”, p. 286.
[2] Kimber, op. cit., p. 286.
[3] Kimber, op. cit., p. 286.

Wayne Smith
Director
LATIN AMERICA RIGHTS & SECURITY: CUBA PROJECT

On December 31, 2011, the Washington Post published an editorial demanding the return of Alan Gross, an American government contractor sentenced to 15 years in Cuban prison for illegally bringing telecommunications equipment into the country.

In the editorial, the Post claimed Cuba saw Gross as a "potential bargaining chip" to win the release of the Cuban Five, a group of Cuban intelligence agents sentenced to harsh prison terms in the U.S. for "conspiracy to commit" espionage.

"There is no equivalence, moral or otherwise, between the illegal espionage of the Cubans and the conduct of Mr. Gross. The five Cubans were sentenced to long prison terms in 2001 for, among other things, operating as undeclared foreign agents and infiltrating U.S. military installations in South Florida. All are acknowledged intelligence officers, unlike Mr. Gross, a would-be humanitarian who got himself caught up in the U.S.-Cuban dispute over U.S. efforts to promote civil society on the island."

René González, the only one of the Five to be released from prison—but who is still currently forced to serve his parole in the U.S.—has written a powerful, thoughtful response to the editorial (see below).

He's encouraging others to read the Post's editorial and write their own letters to the editor to challenge the inaccuracies in the piece and to push the American media to finally report completely and fairly on the case of the Five.

****

From: René González
mailing address: undisclosed for personal safety.
relation to the issue: I'm one of the Cuban Five mentioned in the editorial.
Telephone: undisclosed for personal safety.

Dear Editor:

Your editorial regarding the case of Alan Gross -and in passing the one of the Cuban Five- is so charged with factual inaccuracies that it can only be explained -at least in part- by the astonishing decision by the American media to not publish anything of the longest "espionage" trial in the history of the country, which ended up on such harsh sentences that would suggest a danger to the US that everybody on the planet should have been aware of. I won't burden you with all the inaccuracies and will only refer to a few of them.

It is true that it is illegal for Cuba to connect to the Internet. After all, the whole country is banned by the US government to hook up to the underwater cable that runs parallel to the Cuban coast, just north of the island. It strains credibility that the Washington Post wouldn't be able to find the truth about such a simple factual matter. That the same government that prohibits the whole island to connect to the web then devices a clandestine operation to decide which Cubans will have the privilege to circumvent the very prohibition that he imposes on the country's citizenry can hardly be considered of a humanitarian character.

That the Jewish Cuban community had anything to do with that operation has been the most often repeated lie of the last two years. The cynicism of having played the Jewish card on this case lies on somebody else other than any Cuban official, and has been the basis of the mayor disinformation on this issue. It would surely be easy for the Washington Post also to find out the truth by simply contacting the people that the editorial cites as having visited Mr Gross in prison: The Cuban Jewish leaders, whose community enjoys every benefit when it comes to communications that a country under so much limitations in that regard can give them.

Well before the arrest of Mr Gross the Group on Arbitrary Detentions of the United Nations Humans Right Commission, Amnesty International, more than a hundred Brithish MP's, ten Nobel price winners, the entire Mexican Senate, 56 Canadian MP's and thousands of personalities, political and civil organizations all over the world called for an end to the vindictive and arbitrary treatment of the Five. It would have taken any news outlet, including the Post, to just read the decision of the Appellate panel on the 11th Circuit -August 5, 2005-, where the terrorist activities against Cuba which we were watching on are listed, to explain why so many people support us.

That also explains the reasons of my incapacity to give you my mailing address or telephone number. After all, during my sentencing, the prosecutors asked the Judge
-who granted it- that "the defendant should be prohibited from associating with terrorists or to visit places where it is known that terrorists, people who promote violence or organized crime figures meet". They forgot, nevertheless, to offer me the same protection against the terrorists, who enjoy any freedom to come after me if they only new my location.

Some times bad actions have unintended consequences, and this applies now. Every one of those who decided to spill on the five of us his hatred towards the Cuban government, now has put that same government on a position when it would be impossible for him to exercise the generosity that -to take just an example- was exercised with the Bay of Pigs invaders. I have nothing personal against Mr Gross and wish him well, but it is not wise -as suggested by the editorial- to think that the recycling of the same arrogance and lies will do him any good. It doesn't make sense to mistreat somebody and at the same time demand generosity from him. That logic should come to an end, the sooner the better for our two peoples.

I respectfully suggest that there is still time for the Post to take this matter seriously. Open a real debate on all this issues and don't keep going down the same worn out path that goes nowhere.

It reads in the Bible that "the truth will set you free". That might apply to Mr Gross today.

Respectfully submitted.

René González Sehwerert

On the eve of René González’s release Friday from an American prison—but not his prison America will now become—it’s worth reminding ourselves what terrible crimes he committed.

Why was he sentenced to 15 years in jail? And why do American officials now insist he serve his post-prison parole in The United States instead of in Cuba?

In 1998, González—a member of the Cuban Five spy ring— was charged with failing to formally register as an agent of a foreign government.

Guilty as charged.

René González

In December 1990, González “stole” a small plane from a Havana airfield and “defected” to Florida. Not surprisingly, he didn’t tell authorities he was a Cuban intelligence agent whose mission was to infiltrate militant Miami exile groups.

The reason he didn’t—the reason he’d been sent to Florida in the first place—was that U.S. authorities rarely charged Cuban exiles, even those clearly violating American Neutrality Act prohibitions against launching armed attacks on another country from U.S. soil.

Cuba certainly isn’t the only country to dispatch clandestine agents to other countries in order to protect its homeland from attack. Consider… well how about post-9/11 America? How many American agents are currently operating secretly inside Pakistan because the U.S. government believes Pakistan is unable or unwilling to deal with terrorist threats there? How many of those agents registered with Pakistani authorities?

It’s also worth noting how the U.S. has dealt with other unregistered foreign agents. Last year, 10 Russians pled guilty to being long-term Moscow agents inside the United States. Instead of sending them to prison, Americans authorities sent them home in a swap for four foreign nationals the Russians had convicted of spying on them.

The Cold War was over. Except, of course, when that hot-cold war involved Cuba. Welcome to America’s war on terrorism (fighters).

In addition to feloniously failing to tell American authorities he was not an anti-Castro “freedom fighter,” René González also stood accused of… “general conspiracy”?

General what?

Despite thousands of seized documents and two years’ of pre-arrest surveillance, prosecutors couldn’t produce a shred of evidence González had ever stolen—or tried to steal, or even thought about stealing—any of America’s state secrets.

So they charged him with… general conspiracy. Which apparently means if they can’t arrest you for what you’re doing, they’ll get you for what you’re thinking… or what they think you’re thinking.

What did González really do?

While researching a book on the Five, I spent months poring over 20,000+ pages of their trial transcript and other evidence.

Here’s what the record shows René González did.

He infiltrated—and reported back to Havana on—a militant Cuban exile organization called Partido Unidad Nacional Democracia, or PUND.

PUND trained in Florida for armed attacks against Cuba. They did so openly. In 1995, the FBI questioned members of the group in connection with one plot—but released them without charges.

González also infiltrated Brothers to the Rescue, a supposedly humanitarian group that boasted of illegal incursions into Cuban air space. Thanks to González and other agents, Havana learned:
• Brothers’ founder José Basulto inquired about purchasing a used Czech fighter jet;
• Exile militants wanted to use a Brothers’ planes for a mid-air attack on an aircraft carrying Fidel Castro to the United Nations;
• Brothers to the Rescue members test-fired anti-personnel weapons for possible use in Cuba.

And González infiltrated another supposedly peaceful group— Movimiento Democracia—whose members openly violated Cuban territorial waters.

During his time as an agent in Florida, González even served briefly as an FBI informant. A PUND member had enlisted him to ferry cocaine from Puerto Rico to Florida to raise money to buy more weapons to attack Cuba. González tipped off the FBI.

Based on the evidence, that is the sum of René González’s “general conspiracy.”

U.S. prosecutors were so unsure of their conspiracy case they offered González ever sweeter—and more sour—inducements to cop a plea before his trial.

At one point, they dangled the carrot of avoiding trial by pleading guilty to a single count of being an unregistered agent. But “the last paragraph of the plea agreement draft,” González recalls, included “a not-so-veiled invitation to consider my wife’s resident status is at stake.”

González drew a middle finger in the space left for his signature.

The next day, August 16, 2000, immigration officials arrested his wife. In one final effort to change his mind, they brought her—now dressed in orange prison jumpsuit—to visit him in jail. When he didn’t relent, they deported her. He has not been allowed to see her since..

René González has now done his time. He’s been in jail since his arrest in 1998. He spent his first 17 months in solitary confinement. He has been, by all accounts, a model prisoner. He’s studied economics, taken up running, even completed a few half-marathons in his medium security prison. As required by Florida law, he will have served 85 per cent of his sentence inside prison before being paroled.

Now he wants to go home to Havana to see his family.

There’s no public benefit to forcing him to serve his parole in hostile Florida. He is not about to be “reintegrated” into American society, and he could be in physical danger from vengeful exiles. Still U.S. prosecutors opposed his application. The same judge who originally sentenced him sided with prosecutors.

The issue is that González continues to defend what he did.

“I have no reason to be remorseful,” González told his original sentencing hearing. He condemned the hypocrisy of the American justice system for charging him and his fellow defendants for the non-crime of trying to protect their country from terrorist attack while ignoring the real crimes of exile terrorists like Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch who stood accused of the 1976 mid-air bombing of a Cubana Airlines flight that killed 73 people, and a string of 1997 attacks on Cuban tourist hotels that killed a Canadian.

So on Friday René González will be released from his physical prison but only into another, psychic one.

Welcome to America’s continuing war on terrorism (fighters)…. Continued.

***

Stephen Kimber is a Canadian journalist who’s writing a book on the case of the Cuban Five.

I need the material for a book I'm writing about the Cuban Five.

Twice, the FBI responded that it had no records of any such meetings. Twice I appealed, the last time in an open letter, which explains the background to the request. The good news is that I now have a reply to my last appeal. The records exist! The bad news? Well, I'll let my latest correspondence with the FBI's FOIPA powers that be speak for itself...

David M. Hardy
Section Chief
Record/Information Dissemination Section
Federal Bureau of Investigation
Washington, DC 20535

Re: Freedom of Information Appeal Request #1150092-002

Dear Mr. Hardy:

So… the FBI records that I requested that didn’t previously exist now do exist. That’s encouraging.

But you say you still can’t let me see them because “the records responsive to your request are law enforcement records; that there is a pending or prospective law enforcement proceeding relevant to these responsive records; and that the release of the information contained in these responsive records could reasonably be expected to interfere with the enforcement proceedings.”

Let me see if I have this right.

On June 15, 1998—13 years ago today—officials of Cuban State Security met in Havana with a delegation from the FBI. Over the course of three days, the Cubans turned over to the FBI documents and evidence it had collected concerning alleged American-financed terrorist plots against Cuba. The FBI took those documents and some of the evidence back to Washington and…

Now, 13 years later—despite not having laid one single charge against one single individual or group as a direct result of the information the Cubans provided—you are telling me there is some mysterious, magical “pending or prospective law enforcement proceeding” that prevents you from spilling the beans to me.

Really?

I’m sure the Cuban government will be thrilled to hear the news that an arrest must be just around the next newscast.

During the meetings, the Cubans provided you with dossiers on 40 individuals they described as “elements linked to terrorism.” They gave your agents their physical descriptions, pseudonyms, relatives, known associates and home and work addresses and phone numbers, as well as details of their various alleged actions against Cuba. Those folks—Pepe Hernandez, Andres Nazario Sargen, Roberto Martin Perez, Guillermo Novo Sampoll, Enrique Bassas, Rolando Borges, Luis Zuñiga, etc., etc., etc.—must now be quaking in their boots at the certain knowledge your agents are on their trail. I’m sure Orlando Bosch, in exilio heaven, is thanking whatever gods that be that he slipped this mortal coil just before your agents smashed down his door—13 years after the fact.

I do realized that Luis Posada Carriles—one of those singled out by the Cubans as the mastermind of the 1997 Havana hotel bombing campaign that killed one man and wounded 12 others—was indeed charged in the United States. But it was just for lying on his immigration application rather than for the bombings themselves (or for his alleged role in the 1976 Cubana Airlines bombing that killed 73 people and for which he is still wanted by Venezuelan authorities).

We all know, of course, what happened with that particular prosecution. Posada was acquitted on all counts. Last night, they even held a ceremony in Hialeah, Florida, to present him with the keys to the city. I’m guessing there are no more “pending or prospective” Posada court appearances.

But perhaps there are others I don’t know about. Far be it from me to want to interfere with a “pending or prospective law enforcement proceeding”—no matter how belated.

That said, I’m sure if you rummage through the material I requested—the material that now exists that didn’t previously exist—you’ll discover at least a few scraps of paper that won’t compromise any ongoing investigations or pending prosecutions. Perhaps there’s an email outlining the background to the decision to send the FBI delegation to Havana in the first place. Or maybe a report—potential indictees’ names redacted—on whether the trip was worth it. How about a few receipts for meals, or a night on the town at the Tropicana? Given that the Cubans claimed one of the exile plots involved setting off explosives at the nightclub, that would certainly have been a legitimate expense.

Perhaps the best starting point would be for you to provide me with an itemized list of everything that’s in the file—the one that now exists that didn’t previously exist—along with an explanation of what specifically makes each item exempt from disclosure “pursuant to 5 U.S.C. § 552(b)(7)(A).” And we can go from there.

Thank you for your prompt attention to this matter.

Yours truly,

Stephen Kimber
 

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.
 

Luis Posada Carriles

After a 13-week trial filled with conflicting testimony from 33 witnesses, a jury in El Paso, Texas, took just two hours and 57 minutes to conclude that Posada—the alleged mass-murdering mastermind of a 1976 Cubana Airlines bombing that killed all 73 people aboard; the confessed orchestrator of a 1997 Havana hotel bombing campaign that killed an Italian-Canadian businessman; and an already convicted felon as the result of a botched 2000 attempt to assassinate Cuban President Fidel Castro in Panama—was not guilty.

The jury had, in fact, found Posada not guilty on 11 counts of lying to immigration authorities during his 2005 application for asylum in the United States. Incredibly, they even found him not guilty of three counts of lying about his role in those Havana hotel bombings—which he was heard on tape in court during the trial boasting about!

“The verdict,” under-stated Alfonso Chardy in the Miami Herald, “was a surprise to many observers who had expected the jurors to deliberate for a few days before reaching a decision. The observers also expected the jurors to find Posada guilty on at least some counts. No one had predicted an acquittal across the board on all perjury and fraud charges.”

But perhaps careful observers shouldn’t have been surprised at all.

For all sorts of reasons—including the political influence of the powerful Miami exile lobby and the hypocrisy inherent in the U.S. war on terror—the American government was never really keen to bring Posada to justice.

When Posada snuck into the U.S. in 2005, the Bush administration did its best to pretend it didn’t know he was in Miami until Posada himself called a press conference, almost forcing immigration authorities to charge him with having entered the country illegally.

For the next six years, the case raveled and unraveled its way through the U.S. justice system (see timeline).

Finally, in April 2009, the new Obama administration tagged three additional counts onto the piddling initial indictment. Those charged him with lying about his role in the Havana bombing campaign.

The new charges were a backdoor way of placating an international community that had been asking increasingly sharp questions about America’s real commitment to fighting terrorism. Although Posada was not charged with the bombings themselves, the case at least made it seem as if the United States finally wanted to deal with—and get past—its penchant for winking at Cuban exile terrorism.

The case should have been a slam dunk. Prosecutors had a string of witnesses and documents that thick-black-ink-connected the dots among Posada, his American financiers and the mercenaries who carried out the bombings at his behest. Even more compelling was the “testimony” of Posada himself. There were tapes from a 1998 interview with the New York Times and a Miami TV interview, in both of which Posada had claimed credit for the bombings.

So what happened?

It would be easy to blame the prosecution. Watching the opening days of Posada’s trial in El Paso, I remember being struck by the seemingly bumbling ineptness of the prosecution's examination of its first witnesses.

But eventually the trial settled down—as trials usually do—into good days and bad days, the prosecution scoring a point one day, the defence countering another, the judge’s decisions seeming to favour one side but then the other. (An aside: José Petrierria’s “El Paso Diaries” offers by far the best day-by-day narrative of Posada’s trial. A Cuban-born, Washington-based lawyer, Pertierra was in El Paso to keep a watching brief on the case for his client, the Venezuelan government, which still wants to extradite Posada to face justice in the Cubana Airlines bombing case. His nuanced, contextualized account of the unfolding trial offers a revealing window into the case, as well as the broader issue of how American justice actually works.)

Given the number of witnesses, the conflicting testimony and the sheer volume of the evidence presented during more than three months of on-again, off-again courtroom theatrics, how was it possible for the jury to have reached its unanimous conclusion before lunch on its first and only day of deliberation?

As I tried to make sense of that in the Friday afternoon aftermath of the case’s fly-in-the-face-of-all-the-facts verdict, I couldn’t help but think back to a conversation I’d had in Havana in February with Roberto González.

Roberto Gonzalez

González is a Cuban criminal lawyer but he’s also the brother of René González, one of the Cuban Five. During preparation for the Five’s 2000 trial, González worked with their Miami-based lawyers, helping them line up evidence and witnesses in Cuba. He then spent the entire five months of the trial in the courtroom in Miami, observing American justice up close.

What did he see as the main differences between the American and Cuban systems of justice, I asked him?

“The objective in each system is the same,” González explained, “but the procedures are very different.”

In Cuba, he said, most of the real action happens outside the court room during the “preparation” phase. Lawyers for the accused and the prosecution spend their time discovering each other’s witnesses, sorting out evidentiary truth from lies away from the glare of publicity—and then submit their reports and responses for the judge to consider. That’s why the public phase of the process—actual trials—happen late in the day and don’t usually last long in Cuba.

While we in North America often question what we consider speedy “show trials” in countries like Cuba—witness the American reporting of Allan Gross’s recent conviction in Havana—González makes a compelling argument that our own system offers no greater guarantee of justice.

One of the first things he had to do in the case of the Five, he recalled, was to convince their lawyers that the Five really didn’t want to strike a deal with prosecutors by pleading guilty in exchange for lesser sentences. “Ninety per cent of American cases result in deals,” González said, “so they assumed the Five would want to do that too.”

The trial itself was also an eye-opener. “In the U.S.,” he marveled, “the ‘discovery’ happens during the trial, which makes trials go on for so long. And what is important in that sort of trial is not truth or facts, but theatre. The outcome has to do with the acting capacity of the lawyers, the personality of the witnesses—more sympathetic witnesses, less sympathetic witnesses, a very attractive woman witness, a less attractive woman witness…”

While we in North America like to think our jury system is a guarantee we will be fairly judged by our peers, González sees its actual workings differently.

Juries aren’t selected for their expertise or their wisdom, he points out, but often because they don’t know anything about anything that matters in the case before them. “I call it “trial by ignorance.”

González, of course, was talking about the trial of the Cuban Five in Miami, but he could just as easily have been discussing the Posada case in El Paso.

That trial was definitely theatrical. Posada’s Miami lawyer, Arturo—“call me Art”—Hernandez filled the courtroom with his strutting ego and his histrionics. He filed 13 separate motions for mistrials. He badgered witnesses, launching personal and often specious attacks. He insinuated—without ever having to prove—that one witness who connected Posada to the bombings had once been the lover of a Castro relative. He unfairly and with impunity sliced and diced the journalistic reputation of author Ann Louise Bardach. He even attacked the credibility and credentials of an Havana coroner who simply came to El Paso to testify that Fabio DiCelmo, the Italian-Canadian businessman killed in one of the hotel bombings, had died instantly of a shrapnel wound.

As for the jury, it was—as González notes—chosen more for what it didn’t know about Posada and the history exile terrorism than for what it did. To be fair, jury members spent so much time being bounced in and out of the courtroom while the lawyers argued interminably over what they could be allowed to hear, or whether the trial should continue, or… it would have been impossible for even the wisest among them to find the narrative thread in the lanbryinth of conflicting, confusing witnesses.

All of which is to say that we do finally have a verdict in El Paso but that doesn’t mean we have justice.

Related:

• Livio Di Celmo remembers his brother's 1997 death in Havana
• Luis Posada caught on a Cuban intelligence wiretap bragging about the bombing campaign
• Journalist Ann Louise Bardach's reports  for the New York Times in which Luis Posada Carriles admits his role in the 1997 bombing campaign against Havana hotels.

Dear David M. Hardy,

Thanks for your letter of January 25, 2011, in which you inform me that “a new search of the indices of our Central records System was conducted for records concerning the subject of your request. Through this search we determined there are no records responsive to your request.”

No records? You’re kidding, right? Seriously? No records?

I know you must get a lot of Freedom of Information/Privacy Acts (FOIPA) requests (which is probably why it seems to take so long for you to tell me you have nothing to tell me), so let me remind you of the “subject” of my request.

On May 5, 2010, I submitted a request for:

“all reports, correspondence, memos, notes, emails and other records concerning a meeting between a delegation from the FBI and Cuban State Security in Havana in June 1998. My understanding is that the meeting itself took place from June 15-17, but I am also seeking any material relating to preparations for this meeting as well as follow-up from it for the period from May 1, 1998 to September 15, 1998.”

You responded a few months later to say that you had given my request a bureaucratic identification number (see, you do keep records)—FOI/PA #1150092—but that you had scoured the entire dead file room on my behalf and come up with nothing. Nada. Sorry.

You didn’t say you wouldn’t give me the documents. You said there were no documents.

But if I was so inclined, you kindly added, I could ask again.

So I did. Nicely.

On October 5, 2010, I wrote you again, repeating my original request and adding some additional information I hoped would provide bread-crumb clues on your path past the departmental dust bunnies to the files I sought.

I wrote:

• The records I am seeking relate to meetings in Havana in connection with an FBI investigation into a series of bombings that had occurred at hotels and resorts in Cuba during the mid-1990s. My understanding is that Cuban authorities claimed they had evidence of American involvement in the bomb plots and that the purpose of the meetings was for the Cubans to share information they had gathered.
• According to evidence presented at the trial of the Cuban Five (Transcript 10925-6), in the year prior to the meeting in Havana, “the United States sent five separate diplomatic notes to the Government of Cuba requesting a meeting concerning the evidence that the government of Cuba had regarding those bombings” and that the FBI “had requested such a meeting for over a year” prior to June 1998.
• Also according to evidence presented at the trial of the Cuban Five (Transcript P10871), two of the Americans involved in the meetings in Havana in June 1998 were described as FBI agents Agustin Rodriguez and Luis Rodriguez.
• The transcript (P10871) also indicates that there was at least one follow-up meeting in Washington in 1999 to discuss the FBI’s analysis of material presented to them during the June 1998 meeting in Havana.

I had hoped that this finder’s aid might assist you in locating the documents but, alas, your letter of January 25 dashed my hopes once again.

Your new search had come up with the old result. Nothing.

What am I to make of this?

Are your telling me the meeting didn’t happen? Or that the meeting happened but no one wrote a single word about it before, during or after?

Let’s start with the first possibility. There was no meeting.

So far as I can tell, the first official mention of the meeting occurred in March 1999 when Cuban State Security Col. Adalberto Rabiero testified about it during the Havana trial of a Salvadoran mercenary accused of planting some of the bombs.

Rabeiro testified that information linking the hotel bombings to Luis Posada and the Cuban American National Foundation had been turned over to ”a team of specialists”—that, I believe, would be you folks in the FBI—who had been “sent by important U.S. officials” to Havana.

Commie propaganda? Disinformation?

Apparently not. On March 24, 1999, the Miami Herald followed up with a news story that began: “FBI agents have been examining evidence provided by Cuba officials linking exiles to terror attacks, but Havana has been avoiding a follow-up meeting with the investigators since December, U.S. officials say.”

A follow-up meeting. Meaning there must have been a meeting.

And there’s more. I’m attaching this title page from a 65-page document—INFORME SOBRE LAS ACTIVIADES TERRORISTAS CONTRA CUBA—that Cuba’s Ministry of the Interior says it prepared and gave to your officials at those meetings. Look at the bottom of the page. June 1998...

Ring any bells?

I also have a copy of another 52-page document—ANEXOS OPERATIVOS—Cuban authorities say they handed over at the same time. It includes names, then-current addresses, alternate addresses, phone numbers, car licence plate numbers, etc., etc., for various and sundry alleged anti-Castro terrorists, most of whom were living in the United States… just in case you ever wanted to find them.

Am I getting warmer?

I also have an actual FBI document—see, you do have documents!—filed in the ongoing, never-ending Luis Posada immigration fraud case in El Paso, Texas. It’s from a report prepared by one Thomas J. Mohnal (I believe he was another member of the FBI delegation in Havana, so you might ask him if he made other notes as well) concerning what he says was “a field examination of four (4) electric detonators… conducted in Havana, Cuba… on June 17, 1998.” On the third page, there's another reference to a "communication received June 18, 1998."

I’d tell you the Case ID# but it’s blacked out on the copy I have. I’m sure you can find it—and see what other documents might be in attached.

So… I think it’s fair to say there was a meeting between Cuban State Security officials and a delegation from the FBI in Havana in June 1998.

Which brings us to the second possibility: for whatever reasons, no one committed to paper anything, anywhere, anytime about these meetings. Before, during, or after.

I don’t know about the internal workings of the FBI, of course, but I can’t imagine any government agency anywhere that doesn’t run on paper.

If FBI officials went to Havana in June 1998—and I think we’ve established they did—then they must have left a trail, at the very least, of requisitions and receipts.

If they didn’t swim from the Florida Keys to Havana, then there should be a written record somewhere of how they got there.

If they were in Havana for three days, they must have stayed somewhere. My money’s on the Hotel Nacional. It’s near the United States Interests Section and is known to be popular with visiting American officials. I’ve stayed there myself, so I know it’s easy to get a receipt.

Plus… even FBI agents have to eat. Even in Cuba. Did anyone collect a restaurant receipt over the course of three days that they wanted to be reimbursed for?

Maybe they spent a night out at the famous Tropicana nightclub—for research purposes, of course, and kept the receipt. (According to the Cubans, the Tropicana, and its tourist patrons, were among the targets of the bombing campaign.)

More substantively, I’m guessing that—given that the U.S. “sent five separate diplomatic notes to the Government of Cuba requesting a meeting concerning the evidence that the government of Cuba had regarding those bombings” before the June 1998 meetings—there must have been some interest among higher ups in the FBI and Justice Department, perhaps even the White House, about the progress of negotiations for the get-together.

Are you trying to tell me there wasn’t some quickly dashed-off note (“Hey, the Cubans said yes! We’re packing!") to let someone in authority know the meeting would actually take place? And then, of course, a post-it note or two on how the discussions had gone, plans for follow-up, etc., etc..

As I said in my initial letter way back when, I’m interested in this information because I’m working on a book on the Cuban Five, a group of Cuban intelligence agents known as the Wasp Network who were arrested in Miami less than three months after those FBI officials returned from Havana.

Some commentators have suggested those unprecedented June 1998 meetings in Havana could have signaled the beginning of a new era of cooperation the United States and Cuba. But any hopes that that could happen were dashed by the arrest of the Five.

What happened in the three months between the Havana meetings and the Miami arrests?

Why did the FBI suddenly choose to arrest the Cubans, whom they’d surreptitiously been following for close to three years?

Hector Pesquera—the Special Agent in charge of your Miami office at the time of both the meetings in Havana and the subsequent arrests—has said that when he took up his duties in Miami in the spring of 1998, he was briefed on all the Bureau’s ongoing investigations. He decided, he said, that the FBI’s priority to develop additional intelligence about Cuba’s spy networks “shouldn’t be there any more. [The investigation] should change course and become a criminal investigation.”

According to author Anne Louise Bardach in her 2003 book, Cuba Confidential, Pesquera’s decision caused consternation in the Miami field office where he was considered too friendly with some in the anti-Castro exile community (including, it should be noted, at least one prominent exile singled out in the Anexos Operativos). According to Bardach, one agent told her that Pesquera “abandon[ed] all investigations into exile terrorism. Instead he decided to make his name with the Wasp network.”

Pesquera acknowledged to the Miami Herald (July 10, 2001) that there had been disagreements about whether to arrest the Five, and that the case “never would have made it to court" if Pesquera himself had not directly lobbied then FBI Director Leonard Freeh.

I’m guessing there must be a paper trail there too, even just a few for-the-record notes of telephone or face-to-face conversations. I’d love to read those… assuming, as I do, that they exist.

Which is why I am asking you to take one more look for the information I’ve requested and—just in case the information got “somehow… attached to another folder,” as another piece of FBI correspondence to me delicately phrased it—let me expand the date range of my request to begin on September 4, 1997—the date of the Copacabana Hotel bombing—and end on December 31, 2000, at the beginning of the trial of the Cuban Five.

Thanks in advance for your assistance in this matter.

Sincerely,

Stephen Kimber

Spanish version at Cubadebate.

Ricardo Alarcon

In an interview in Havana last week, Cuban President Ricardo Alarcon told me his government is “considering suing” one of four American government agencies he says have refused to release satellite images of the incident. Alarcon believes those images will prove his country’s contention the shootdown took place inside Cuban territory.

On February 24, 1996—after protesting to no avail to U.S. authorities for more than seven months about Brothers’ persistent incursions into its airspace, and even after explicitly warning American officials on several occasions that it would not tolerate any more violations—Cuban MiGs shot down two of three aircraft belonging to the Florida-based anti-Castro group, killing four people.

At the time, Cuba says its radar data showed the Brothers’ aircraft were flying inside its territory; American radar placed the planes over international waters.

In the end, the International Civil Aviation Organization—the United Nations agency that investigated the accident—concluded the information the two countries provided “could not be reconciled.” So it based its own findings on the “recorded position and track” of a cruise ship that had been sailing near Cuba at the time of the incident.

Based on that information, the ICAO decided the shootdown took place in international waters.

But the accuracy of the cruise ship’s log became yet another issue of contention during the 2001 trial of the Cuban Five. One of the Five, Gerardo Hernandez, was accused of conspiracy to commit murder for his supposed role in the incident.

During the trial, a defence expert witnesses—retired American Air Force Colonel George Buchner—questioned the ICAO findings and suggested the only way to definitively determine exactly where the planes went down would be to examine photographs of the area that he claimed would have been taken that day by American satellites.

“It is my expert opinion,” Buchner testified, “that the government has satellite photos that would resolve this whole issue.”

Over defence objections, the judge ordered Buchner’s remarks stricken from the record.

The Cubans have been trying to get their hands on those photos ever since.

“Several American agencies operate satellites that are constantly monitoring and photographing Cuba and the rest of the world,” Alarcon points out. “We don’t have satellites; they have satellites. But they refuse to provide the images. Why?”

On December 29, 2009, American lawyers working on Hernandez’ last-ditch habeas corpus appeal of his murder conviction filed Freedom of Information requests with five U.S. government agencies—the CIA, the Department of Defence’s National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, the National Ocean and Atmospheric Administration, NASA and the US. Geological Survey—for copies of satellite images from the day of the shootdown.

All the agencies turned down the Cuban request, though only one—the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration—claimed not to have what the Cubans were seeking.

On May 5 last year, Hernandez’s lawyers filed a “complaint for declaratory and injunctive relief” against NASA and the Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.

Though the question of exactly where the shootdown took place isn’t central to Hernandez’s appeal—Hernandez insists he had no advance knowledge the shootdown would take place and no role in organizing or ordering it—the location continues to be a matter of significance to Cuban authorities.

The ICAO report claiming the incident took place in international waters sparked international condemnation of Cuba’s actions.

And the shootdown—which prompted outrage in the U.S. that was only exacerbated by the ICAO conclusions—had a dramatic impact on relations between Washington and Havana.

In the months leading up to the incident, there had been a noticeable thaw in the usually icy relations between Havana and Washington. There was even optimistic, if muted talk in Washington that U.S. President Bill Clinton might finally end the then-35-year-old trade embargo against Cuba.

Instead, in the aftermath of the incident, Clinton not only condemned Cuba for being “repressive, violent [and] scornful of international law,” but he also signed a bill he’d previous opposed—the notorious Helms-Burton Act that gave Americans the right to sue foreign companies that did business with Cuba.

To make matters worse, that law—still on the books—prevents any future president from lifting the embargo against Cuba without prior Congressional approval.

Proving the 1996 incident took place over Cuban waters would not, of course, eliminate all criticism of the decision to shoot down the planes. Many observers, even those friendly to Cuba, argue Havana had other options besides shooting down what turned out to be unarmed civilian aircraft.

Still demonstrating that the Brothers to the Rescue aircraft were inside Cuban airspace—again—would help bolster Havana's case that it was justified in taking action to protect its territory.

Related Stories:

• January 1996: Cuba protests another Brothers incursion
• July 1995: Brothers to the Rescue flies over Havana

José Basulto

Brothers to the Rescue, a Miami-based anti-Castro exile group, had been racheting up its provocative flights since July 13, 1995 when founder José Basulto first buzzed Havana in his Cessna 337 aircraft, dropping medallions and bumper stickers from the aircraft to encourage “civil disobedience” among the locals. To publicize his illegal actions, Basulto even brought along a Miami-based TV crew. He’d flown over Havana twice more, including just a few days earlier, on January 13.

Though the Cuban diplomatic note acknowledged Washington had been trying to stop the flights—the Federal Aviation Administration even launched an investigation into the Brothers group—Havana called on the American government to do more.

According to the Miami Herald, a State Department spokesman did acknowledge the over-flights were "definitely a violation of both international and Cuban domestic law" and insisted "we take this [violation] very seriously."

Despite American government pressure—and Havana’s public declaration that it had the right to “interrupt” future flights—Basulto remained not only unrepentant but also publicly announced plans for more such flights.

Cuba Florida map 270x300

On February 24, 1996, the Cuban government made good on its threat—shooting down two Brothers to the Rescue planes off the Cuban coast and killing all four aboard. (The International Civil Aviation Organization would later determine that, on this occasion, the planes were actually in international waters when they were shot down.)

The shooting down of the Brothers aircraft would later become a central issue in the trial of the Cuban Five. The prosecution claimed Gerardo Hernandez, the leader of the spy group, not only knew about the plan to shoot down the plane but was also involved in the decision to do so. Despite the fact that the prosecution offered no evidence to back up that claim, a Miami jury convicted him of conspiracy to commit murder as a result.

“The crazy idea the prosecution invented,” Hernandez would later tell American journalist Saul Landau, “is that not only did I know they [Cuba] were going to shoot the planes down—I did not know that—but I knew would do so over international waters; that Cuba was conspiring, not just to shoot down these planes invading Cuban air space, but over international waters. That’s the most absurd idea that anyone could ever invent. But the trial was held in Miami, and therefore I would be found guilty of any charge at all.”