Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Militant Cuban exile accused of organizing bombings
Former CIA operative and militant Cuban exile Luis Posada Carriles, who was accused of organizing a string of 1997 Havana hotel bombings and a 1976 Cuban airline bombing that killed 73 people, has died. He was 90.
Posada, who had been diagnosed with throat cancer about five years ago, died May 23 at a care home for elderly veterans in Broward County, according to Arturo Hernandez, a lawyer for the hardline exile.
“An extraordinary life has ended,” Hernandez said. “It’s a very sad morning for me, to say farewell to such a great man.”
Posada had been acquitted in 2011 by a federal jury in El Paso, Texas, of lying to U.S. officials about his role in the Havana bombings to win political asylum.
He was among a core group of Cuban exiles the CIA trained in the early 1960s in a failed effort to overthrow Fidel Castro’s fledgling communist government. Unlike many others, he never renounced violence as a way to bring about change on the island.
“If Castro came through the door, I’d kill him, not because I hate him but because I’d kill a cockroach too,” Posada said at one point during a series of interviews between 2009 and 2010.
To many older exiles, Posada was a freedom fighter who did what was necessary to attempt to overthrow a dictatorship. Many other people, like Peter Kornbluh, head of the independent National Security Archive’s Cuba project that fought years to declassify documents relating to Posada, viewed him as an unrepentant terrorist.
“The CIA created and unleashed a Frankenstein,” he said of Posada.
Posada always publicly denied involvement in the bombing of a Cuban airliner that had taken off from Barbados, the deadliest inflight explosion until the 1988 Pan Am flight bombing over Lockerbie, Scotland.
But in a 1998 New York Times interview, he took credit for the Havana bombings, which killed an Italian tourist, before later recanting.
When asked about that interview and the bombings in 2009, Posada initially said he didn’t hear or understand the Times’ questions, then mentioned his lawyer, then stopped, laughed and shrugged.
Born in Cienfuegos, Cuba, in 1928, Posada studied chemistry at the University of Havana. After 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 U.S. in 1961.
Other members of his family, including his brother and sister, remained in Cuba and he continued to send them money throughout his life through friends and other emissaries.
Several years after arriving in the U.S., he divorced his first wife and married Elina Nieves, with whom he had a son and a daughter.
Posada trained for but never participated in the disastrous 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba organized by the CIA. Through that experience, he became lifelong friends with the late Cuban exile and political kingmaker Jorge Mas Canosa, a reported benefactor and with whom he graduated from the U.S. Army’s officer training school at Fort Benning, Ga.
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 released at the request of the National Security Archives.
“A15 is not a typical kind of ‘boom and bang’ individual,” CIA handler Grover Lythcott wrote in 1966, using a code name for Posada. “He is acutely aware of the international implications of ill-planned or overly enthusiastic activities against Cuba.”
The agency has refused to declassify many documents related to Posada, but official summaries of those documents released to the Archives show U.S. officials were particularly concerned about Posada’s relationship with the mafialinked casino operator Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal.
He was running his own security firm in Venezuela by the time he was accused of coordinating the 1976 bombing of the Cuban airliner that exploded over the Caribbean shortly after taking off from Barbados. Posada was arrested when two men who worked for his small firm confessed to planting the bombs.
Posada — who still had strong ties to the then-Venezuelan government — was acquitted by a military court. He later escaped from jail dressed as a priest while awaiting a second trial in a civilian court.
He made his way to El Salvador, where he helped the Reagan administration and U.S. Army Col. Oliver North resupply neighboring Nicaragua’s rightist Contra rebels against the left-leaning Sandinista government.
Then in 2004, he was convicted in Panama in connection with a failed assassination attempt against Castro.
Posada resurfaced in Miami in 2005. Two months later, he was arrested, following international pressure on the George W. Bush administration to hold him to the same standard as other accused terrorists.
The U.S. 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.