Luis Posada Carriles

Cuban anti-communist activist Born: February 15, 1928;

Died: May 23, 2018

LUIS Posada Carriles, who has died aged 90, was a fierce critic and opponent of the late Cuban leader Fidel Castro and dedicated much of his life to trying to overthrow the dictator’s government. To some he was a terrorist; to others a freedom fighter who did what was necessary.

Carriles was among a core group of Cuban exiles the CIA trained in the early-1960s in a failed effort to overthrow Castro’s fledgling communist government. Posada never renounced violence as a way to bring about change on the island and was accused of organising a 1976 Cuban airline bombing that killed 73 people as well as a series of a series of Havana hotel bombings in 1997

Acquitted in 2011 by a federal jury in El Paso, Texas, of lying to officials about his role in these bombings to win asylum, he made no secret of his opposition to Castro. “If Castro came through the door, I’d kill him,” he said in 2009, “not because I hate him but because I’d kill a cockroach too.”

However, Posada always publicly denied involvement in the bombing of the Cuban airliner that had taken off from Barbados, the deadliest in-flight explosion until the 1988 Pan Am flight bombing over Lockerbie. In a 1998 New York Times interview, he took credit for the Havana bombings, before later recanting.

Born in Cienfuegos, Cuba, in 1928, Posada studied chemistry at the University of Havana, and briefly worked for the Firestone Tyre and Rubber Company.

Following the Castro forces’ final triumph in the Cuban Revolution on New Year’s Day 1959, he joined the political opposition and was imprisoned briefly. He fled to Mexico and eventually the US in 1961.

While in prison, Posada became a prolific painter. His subjects ranged from Cuban revolutionary leader and poet Jose Marti to Mother Teresa and then-panamanian president Mireya Moscoso, who pardoned him in 2005 at the behest of several Cubanamerican politicians from Florida.

Several years after arriving in the US, he divorced his first wife and married Elina Nieves, with whom he had a son and a daughter.

He trained for but never participated in the disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba organised by the CIA.

Through that experience, he became lifelong friends with the late Cuban exile and political kingmaker Jorge Mas Canosa, with whom he graduated from the US army’s officer training school at Fort Benning, Georgia.

Early on, Posada’s CIA handlers described him as reliable and even a reasonable voice among the exiles, whom he was willing to inform on, according to declassified agency documents. In 2004, he was convicted in Panama in connection with a failed assassination attempt against Castro.

A year later he resurfaced in Miami in where he was soon arrested following international pressure on the George W Bush administration to hold him to the same standard as other accused terrorists. The US refused to turn him over to Venezuela or Cuba, citing fears he might face torture, nor did it ever try him directly on any terrorist charges, just the immigration charges.

Ater the 2011 Posada returned to a hero’s welcome in Miami’s Cuban community but the verdict was controversial. While some believed the trial was too little too late, others thought it was a politically motivated case against an ageing patriot.

He is survived by his wife and two adult children.