Copyright © 2013 Stephen Kimber
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review.
Editing: Brenda Conroy
Cover design: John van der Woude
Print on Paper edition published by
Fernwood Publishing
32 Oceanvista Lane, Black Point, Nova Scotia, B0J 1B0
and 748 Broadway Avenue, Winnipeg, Manitoba, R3G 0X3
www.fernwoodpublishing.ca
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Kimber, Stephen
What lies across the water : the real story of the Cuban Five / Stephen Kimber.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Political prisoners--United States. 2. Prisoners, Foreign--
United States. 3. Cubans--United States. 4. Terrorism--Cuba--
Prevention. 5. Espionage, Cuban--United States. I. Title.
Is the man who blows up an airplane and kills dozens of civilians a murderous terrorist… or a valiant freedom fighter? Is the man who tries to stop the bomber a threat to national security… or a hero of the people?
It depends.
What Lies Across the Water is a narrative nonfiction thriller. About terrorists who blow up airplanes and try to overthrow governments. About intelligence agents who try to stop them.
The twist is that these terrorists are not Muslim. They’re Cuban exiles. And the men trying to stop them? Cuban intelligence agents.
What Lies Across the Water examines the post-9/11 Bush doctrine — “Any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime”—by focusing on what happened in Miami and Havana in the 1990s when the American government—and Miami’s Cuban violent exile community—ratcheted up their attacks against Cuba.
Cuba responded by sending intelligence agents to South Florida to penetrate the plotters.
What Lies Across the Water uses an in-the-moment narrative to tell the parallel, converging, diverging stories of the exile militants, Cuban intelligence officers and FBI agents as they clash in Havana, Miami and the Straits of Florida. The story moves from the streets of Little Havana to real Havana’s Tropicana nightclub, from the hotel bar at the Copacabana Hotel to the inner sanctum of the White House—and back.
Percy Alvarado Godoy: Born 1949. Guatemalan-Cuban. Intelligence agent who infiltrated the Cuban American National Foundation. State Security code name: Monk; CANF code name: Agent 44.
José Basulto: Born 1940. Cuban-American. Contractor. Bay of Pigs, CIA veteran. Founder, Brothers to the Rescue.
Orlando Bosch Avíla: Born 1926. Pediatrician. CIA veteran. Co-founder of terrorist umbrella organization CORU. Acquitted alleged mastermind of 1976 bombing of Cubana Airlines Flight 455.
Francisco Antonio “Gordito” Chávez Abarca: Salvadoran gangster with links to Luis Posada. Hired mercenaries to plant bombs in Cuban hotels.
Raúl Ernesto Cruz León: Salvadoran mercenary hired to plant bombs in Cuban hotels.
Rodolfo Frómeta: Cuban exile, claims Castro killed members of his family. Key player in Alpha 66, founder of Comandos F-4.
Fernando González: Born 1963. Cuban illegal intelligence officer assigned to Fayetteville, North Carolina. Filled in as a vacation replacement in Miami for both Gerardo Hernández and Ramón Labañino. Operated in the United States as Ruben Campa. Code names Oscar and Vicky.
René González: Born 1956. Pilot, “defector.” Cuban intelligence agent who infiltrated Brothers to the Rescue, PUND and the Democracy Movement. Code names Iselin and Castor. Married to Olga Salanueva.
Antonio Guerrero: Born 1958. Cuban intelligence agent assigned to penetrate the Boca Chica Naval Station. Code names Lorient, Tony. American girlfriend, Maggie Becker.
Francisco “Pepe” Hernandez: Cuban-American. Bay of Pigs veteran. Co-founder of the Cuban American National Foundation.
Gerardo Hernández: Born 1965. Illegal intelligence officer, head of La Red Avispa. Supervised, among others, René González, Tony Guerrero, Nilo and Linda Hernández and Alejandro Alonso. Operating in the United States as Manuel Viramóntez. Code names Giro, Giraldo. Married to Adriana Perez.
Ramón Labañino: Born 1963. Cuban illegal intelligence officer originally stationed in Tampa, Florida, but reassigned to Miami in 1997 to focus on the new U.S. Southern Headquarters and supervise, among others, agents Guerrero, Joseph Santos and Amarylis Silverio. Operating in the United States as Luis Medina. Code names Allan and Oso.
Jorge Mas Canosa: Born 1931. Cuban-American. Bay of Pigs, CIA veteran. Founder of the Cuban American National Foundation, the most powerful anti-Castro lobbying organization in the United States.
Luis Posada Carriles: Born 1928. Chemist. Bay of Pigs, CIA veteran, explosives expert. Co-founder of terrorist umbrella organization CORU. Alleged escaped co-mastermind of 1976 bombing of Cubana Airlines Flight 455; confessed mastermind of 1997 Havana hotel bombing campaign.
Juan Pablo Roque: Born 1955. Cuban Air Force pilot, “defector.” Cuban intelligence agent who penetrated Brothers to the Rescue. Code names German and Vedette. American wife, Ana Margarita.
Ramón Saúl Sánchez: Born 1955. Cuban-born exile. Member of Alpha 66. Founder of the Democracy Movement.
This is not the book I intended to write. That book was to be a novel, a love story set partly in Cuba. In the spring of 2009, I travelled to Havana to do some preliminary research for it, and got sideswiped by the truth-is-stranger-but-way-more-interesting story of the Cuban Five.
I’d vaguely heard of them. Back in 2004, my wife and I spent a week at Breezes Jibacoa, a beach resort halfway between Havana and Varadero. It was there, in fact, that I conceived the idea for the novel, perhaps for no better reason than to ensure I would have to return. Like most Cuban resorts at the time, communication with the outside world from Jibacoa was primitive: two painfully slow Internet-connected computers tucked away in a second-floor lounge. Since you invariably had to line up to use them, I filled up my waiting time one day literally reading the writing on the wall — a collection of Sovietstyle government posters about the plight of a group of men known as the “Cuban Five.” They were, the posters declared, “political prisoners” in the United States. The English translation was awful — “Prisoners of the Impire” was the heading on one — and the information about their case was confusing and frustratingly incomplete. As if I should already know the details. I hadn’t a clue.
When I returned to Canada, I did a Google News search for “Cuban Five” but found only one mainstream American news story from the previous month — in spite of the fact lawyers for the Five were in the midst of appealing their controversial convictions up the ladder of the U.S. court system. Most of the rest of what I discovered about them on the Internet consisted of polemics, which painted the Five either as heroic young patriots worthy of veneration or as murderous villains for whom even the death penalty wasn’t punishment enough.
Reading between the bombast and broadsides, the short version seemed to be that the Five were members of a Cuban intelligence network who’d surreptitiously entered the United States, infiltrated several militant anti-Castro groups, got caught by the FBI, were tried and sentenced to lengthy prison terms. I wrote a brief newspaper column about what I’d learned — and the fact no one except the Cuban government seemed to care — filed it and forgot it.
Until five years later, that is, when I met Alejandro Trelles Shaw. Alex was an energetic 70-year-old Cuban who could still vividly remember what it had been like to be an idealistic 20-year-old banker caught up in the headiest days of the life-altering Cuban revolution. Unlike the rest of his well-to-do family, who all fled to Miami or ended up in jail after Castro took power, Alex stayed. “I was the red sheep of the family,” he jokes. “I looked around, saw what the revolution was trying to do. I thought, ‘if this is communism, then I’m a communist.’”
He eventually became a counter-intelligence officer in Cuba’s Ministry of the Interior (MININT), the all-powerful ministry responsible for foreign and domestic intelligence, among many other duties. Alex can — and will if you ask — regale you with fascinating tales of how he infiltrated CIA-backed student groups at the University of Havana, and later served as a government “minder” for Cuban delegations and sports teams when they visited other countries. Without seeming to brag, he would explain he’d also occasionally translated for the “Commander” when Castro travelled abroad. Not that he ever totally swallowed the Kool-Aid. “Part of the problem in Cuba,” he told me, “is that Fidel was involved in everything. I call it the Law of the Jeep. Fidel would arrive in his Jeep, he would talk and then he would leave, and suddenly we had a new law.”
When he was in his late fifties — for reasons I’m not sure I understood or that mattered all that much — Alex had a falling out with his bosses, and retired. In the mid-1990s, he got kicked out of the Communist Party but somehow managed to hold onto his prized party ID card. Like plenty of others in that distressed, depressed, post-Soviet, “Special-Period-in-Time-of-Peace” Cuba, Alex re-invented himself. He became an off-the-books entrepreneur, employing his language skills, guile and charm to survive in impossibly difficult circumstances. One of the many services he offered was as a guide and raconteur for tourists who wanted a “no-guff introduction to the real Havana.”
Alex Trellis
__
I did. I’d read about him in a newspaper travel story before I left home, and I gave him a call soon after I arrived in Havana in May 2009. He picked me up at my hotel the next morning in his battered, Russian-made Lada. He’d been allowed to buy the car back in 1979, he told me, as a reward for being a good communist. The price: 2,200 pesos, paid off at 35 pesos a month for five years, interest-free. The engine now had over 400,000 km on it but was running “just fine.”
We spent the day tooling around parts of the city I’d never have experienced on my own. But far more interesting than what I got to see — as interesting as that was — was getting the chance to listen to Alex’s stories: in the car, over cigars after lunch at an outdoor restaurant where everyone knew his name, over drinks back on the terrace at the Hotel Nacional, where the security guards kept an especially watchful, wary eye on a smooth-talking Cuban in relaxed English conversation with a foreigner.
He’d been married three times, he told me, had four children and four grandchildren. These days, he lived in a one-bedroom apartment with his 18-year-old daughter, a university student. She slept in a second bedroom he’d carved out of the balcony. To save money, he never turned on the air conditioning. But he had an antenna on the roof of his building so he could watch television. And he had an Internet connection, in the name of a friend.
Alex was interested in, and thoughtful about, the world beyond Cuba. Because many of his customers came from Canada, he told me, he read the Toronto Globe and Mail online every day. He mentioned a recent report in that paper about a speech Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega had given at the Summit of the Americas. “When you only get one side of the story,” he noted, referring more to me than himself, “how can you be informed?” He even followed Canadian politics. “What do you think of Stephen Harper?” he asked at one point.
I was curious too. Barack Obama had just won the American presidency, and there was much wishful hoping among my liberal friends in the United States that his ascendancy might finally signal not only an overdue end to the counterproductive U.S. trade embargo but also fresh water in the poisoned well of personal relations between the two old enemies. What did Alex think Obama’s victory might mean, I asked, assuming the best?
He paused, took a contemplative puff on his cigar, exhaled. “Nothing,” he said simply. “It doesn’t matter who is the president of the United States or who is in charge in Cuba. Nothing will change between Cuba and the United States until they resolve the issue of the Five.”
The Five?
Suddenly, I was back to the Cuban Five. In Cuba — as I was about to discover — all conversations about the future of Cuba-U.S. relations invariably wind their way back to Los Cinco. In Cuba, their real-life story has long since transcended mere fact to become myth. Hundreds of thousands of Cubans have marched past the United States Interest Section in Havana shouting demands for their release. Their images are ubiquitous. They stare back at you from highway billboards beneath a starkly confident: “Volverán.” They Will Return. Much younger versions of their faces are painted on fences, the sides of apartment buildings, office waiting-room walls, postage stamps, even on stickers glued to the dashboards in Old Havana Coco cabs.
Though they still rank below Fidel and Ché in the revolutionary pantheon, they have become certified, certifiable, first-name Heroes of the Revolution. Ask any Cuban school child and they can rhyme off those first names: Gerardo, René, Antonio, Ramón and Fernando. The children will inform you that los muchachos — though all are now well into middle age, they are usually still described in Cuban propaganda as “the young men” — are Cuban heroes unjustly imprisoned in the United States for trying to protect their homeland from terrorist attack.
The Cuban version of their story is straightforward: During the nineties, Miamibased counter-revolutionary terrorist groups were plotting — and sometimes succeeding in carrying out — violent attacks against Cuba. Since the American government seemed unable or unwilling (or both) to stop them, Cuba dispatched intelligence agents to Miami to infiltrate these violent anti-Castro organizations, find out what they were planning and, if possible, stop them before they could wreak their havoc.
Sometimes they succeeded, sometimes they didn’t. An Italian-Canadian businessman was killed in one 1997 explosion at a Havana hotel. To prevent an even worse tragedy, Cuba reluctantly agreed to share the fruits of their agents’ work at an unprecedented meeting between Cuban State Security and the FBI in Havana in June of 1998. But the FBI, instead of charging the terrorists the Cubans had fingered, arrested Cuba’s agents instead. The Five were thrown into solitary confinement for close to a year and a half to break their will, then tried in a rabidly anti-Castro Miami, convicted and sentenced to unconscionable prison terms ranging from 15 years to something obscenely described as double life plus 15 years.
For what? For trying to prevent terrorists from attacking their homeland. Surely, in the wake of 9/11, Americans could understand the necessity of the kind of heroic work the Five had been doing. If only the American media would tell the truth… That’s the Cuban version.
The American version? Actually, there are two. In most of the United States beyond South Florida, the Cuban Five are still more likely to be the Cuban Who? Or the Cuban What? As stories about their arrest, trial, conviction and sentencing played out daily on the front pages in Miami newspapers, the Five registered barely a blip on the national media radar screen. During much of that period, of course, the media’s Florida antennae were jammed by another, very different, and more emotionally appealing tug of war between Miami and Havana: the crisis/circus over Elián González, and whether his Cuban father or Miami relatives should get custody of the six-year-old miracle survivor of a 1999 rafting disaster that killed his mother. That story had barely faded from public consciousness when the national media became obsessed by the might-have-been-laughable-if-it-hadn’t-been-so-consequential tale of the “hanging chads” and Florida’s (particularly Cuban-American Floridians) even more than usually decisive voice in determining the outcome of the 2000 U.S. presidential election. After that came 9/11 and the stunning revelation that several of the hijackers who attacked New York and Washington had learned how to fly jets on simulators at training schools in — where else? — Florida. If the Cubans hoped terrorism-terrified Americans might finally understand their rationale for sending agents to Florida, they were thinking wishfully. The media’s fixed lens moved quickly from Florida, to Afghanistan, then Iraq. Three months after 9/11, while American forces were gearing up to chase the evil Taliban out of Afghanistan, the Cuban Five were being sentenced and disappeared into the abyss of the U.S. prison system.
In Miami, on the other hand, everyone knew about the Five. Most believed they got what they deserved. Or, more likely, that they got off lightly, considering… Considering that the Five were responsible for the deaths of four civilian fliers from Brothers to the Rescue. The Floridians are quick to point out that that story — the one about how the Brothers fliers, who were only trying to save the lives of innocent Cubans, were blown out of the sky by Cuban MiGs, and how the Five had helped murder them — is somehow left out of the Cuban narrative. (That’s not quite true, I was to discover. It’s just that the Cubans see the shootdown as a separate, different issue, one more example in which the exact same facts can unfurl polar opposite narratives.)
Castro’s version, the Floridians added, made it seem as if his agents had somehow been sent to Florida because a few bombs — probably planted by his own agents for his own purposes — had exploded in Havana. Castro has been sending his army of infiltrators, double agents, dupes and agent provocateurs to Florida since the day he seized power in 1959. Don’t believe it? Look at the Five. One of them “defected” to the United States in 1990, seven years before any bombs exploded in the hotels. And, despite what the Cubans claim, their agents were not just spying on legitimate, peaceful exile organizations like Brothers to the Rescue and the Cuban American National Foundation. These Cuban spies were also trying to burrow inside the United States military in order to steal secrets Cuba could use to launch a military attack on America, or peddle to fellow-traveling, terrorist rogue states like Iran or Libya.
I will confess that — on the hot spring afternoon when Alex Trelles and I were sitting on the terrace at the Hotel Nacional contemplating the view of the sparkling waters of la Bahia de la Habana, sipping mojitos, puffing cigars and discussing the future of Cuban-American relations in the Obama era — I understood almost nothing about the unfathomable pit of this abyss between the American and Cuban versions of reality. But I was intrigued. Was any of this documented, I asked?
“Fidel gave a speech,” he said. “It’s all there. Names, dates, places. They put it on the Internet. In English. Look it up.”
Eventually, I did. The speech, which was delivered on May 20, 2005, at the José Marti Anti-imperialist Square in Havana, opens with a kind of breathless urgency. “My fellow countrymen,” Fidel Castro begins, “what I will immediately read to you has been elaborated on the basis of numerous documents from our archives. I have had very little time, but many comrades have cooperated…” It was hardly a speech in the way I understood speeches, even speeches by a legendary speechmaker like Fidel Castro. It was, essentially, a remarkable 10,286-word j’accuse in which the Cuban leader read into the public record details of every one of the significant events of the 1997 Havana hotel bombing campaign: from April 12, 1997 (“a bomb explodes in the ‘Ache’ discotheque at the Melia Cohiba hotel”) to September 12, 1998 (“the five comrades, now heroes of the Republic of Cuba, are arrested”).
“It’s all there,” Alex repeated, “even the part about García Márquez.”
Gabriel García Márquez? The Nobel prize-winning Colombian novelist? In the middle of the bombing campaign, it turned out, Castro had asked his good friend García Márquez to carry a top secret message about the Miami exiles’ latest, even-worse-than-bombing-hotels terrorist plot to Washington. As Castro explained in his speech: “Knowing that writer Gabriel García Márquez would be traveling to the United States soon where he would be meeting with William Clinton, a reader and admirer of his books (as so many other people in the world)… I decided to send a message to the U.S. president, which I personally drafted.”
After returning from his secret mission in May 1998, García Márquez wrote a chatty, finely detailed, 4,000-word report on his adventures, which Castro also proceeded to read into the record — “an exact copy without removing a word.” He even included the text of a message he’d sent García Márquez the day before his speech, asking permission to publish the novelist’s report: “It is indispensable that I discuss the subject of the message I sent with you about terrorist activities against our country,” Castro wrote. “It is basically the message that I sent and the wonderful report you sent back to me, which is written in your unmistakable style… This will in no way,” he added, perhaps unnecessarily, “damage the addressee and much less will it affect your literary glory.”
According to Castro’s speech, Gabriel García Márquez’s visit to the White House opened a back channel that eventually led to an unprecedented meeting between Cuban State Security and the FBI in Havana in June 1998. At the conclusion of three days of face-to-face gatherings, Castro claimed, “the U.S. side acknowledged the value of the information they had been given and made a commitment to give a reply with an analysis of these materials as soon as possible. It is strange that almost three months went by without the serious response promised… On September 12 — mark my words, hardly three months had passed — the Five comrades, now heroes of the Republic of Cuba, are arrested.”
“After you read that speech,” Alex told me that afternoon, “you’ll begin to understand why the Five matter so much here and why nothing can really be resolved between Havana and Washington until they are returned to Cuba.” He paused, smiled. “But you’ll only begin to understand… It’s complicated.” It is. After I returned from Havana, I began to burrow deeper into that labyrinthian netherworld. I started with the Castro speech, then moved on — novel? what novel? — to the Miami Herald archive, where I read hundreds of news stories about the arrest, trial, conviction and appeals of the Cuban Five. Eventually, I tracked down an electronic copy of the 20,000-plus-page transcript1 of United States of America versus Gerardo Hernández, et al., Case Number 98-721, and read it from opening gavel to final sentencing. And then began an ongoing correspondence with the Five in prison. The more I read, the more I realized I didn’t know.
I began to read books about Cuba, about Cuban-American relations, about Fidel, about the exile experience, about Havana, about Miami, about migration accords and foreign policy, even novels about Cuba’s Special Period and its effect on Cubans. I tried to make sense of the Alpha-66 to Omega-7 Greek alphabet soup of militant Miami exile groups who’ve been doing their best to topple Fidel Castro since the day he took power. I tried — and gave up trying — to add up the dozens, probably hundreds, maybe even thousands of Cuban government agents who’ve infiltrated, disrupted, undermined, exposed and even led those same groups. (So many prominent anti-Castro exiles have ultimately unmasked themselves, or been unmasked, or at least been accused of being Cuban intelligence agents, that even exile groups can never be certain who among them is working for Cuban State Security. Which, of course, is the goal.2)
Nothing, it seems, is ever as it seems. Consider the Cuban American National Foundation, ostensibly the single most powerful American lobby group working for peaceful, democratic regime change in Cuba. CANF has helped elect — and influenced the Cuba policy of — every American president since Ronald Reagan. CANF’s leaders hang out at the White House and in the best offices on Capitol Hill, posing for photos and peddling their stridently anti-Castro, tighten-the-embargo-screws-and-we’ll-win message. Privately, however, some among them were also organizing and financing their own secret paramilitary wing whose purpose was to overthrow the Cuban government by force and, if possible, murder Fidel Castro. The fingerprints of upstanding CANF board members are smudged over more than a few of the 638 — and counting — failed plots to assassinate Castro.
All of which led me back — and forward — to Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch Ávila, the founding fathers of anti-Castro terrorism. And, of course, to those many and various turning-point moments in the history of Cuba-American relations, such as the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, and the 1976 terrorist bombing of Cubana Airlines Flight 455, which killed 73 people. But every single incident, event, deception, plot, individual, group or policy has its own 180-degree different reality, depending on which side of the Florida Straits you happen to be.
The more I investigated, the more I realized I couldn’t take anything for granted. Consider the Five themselves. Although the group that would become known as the Cuban Five consists of the five men — Gerardo Hernández, René González, Fernando González, Ramón Labañino and Antonio Guerrero — who stood in the prisoners’ dock in Miami when their trial finally began in 2000, there were, initially, many more than five of them.
According to U.S. prosecutors, the Five were members of a Cuban intelligence network called La Red Avispa, or the Wasp Network, a name they discovered buried in decoded computer disks.3 When FBI agents initially swooped in on September 12, 1998, they arrested 10 people. Five of them quickly struck deals, pleading guilty in exchange for lesser sentences and a promise to testify against their compatriots. At the same time, the FBI publicly identified four other Avispa agents it claimed had left the country before they could be arrested.
So that adds up to 14.
But reading between the lines of the thousands of pages of decoded documents and testimony presented during the Five’s trial, it’s clear there were other officers and agents associated with La Red Avispa, people with code names like Sol, Ariel, Laura, José, Tania, Horacio and Manny. Some of them probably returned to Cuba before the arrests. A few were likely among a scattering of Cubans arrested on other charges over the next few years and linked, at least tangentially, to the Wasp Network. And then, of course, one or two might have been FBI double agents all along.4
Adding up all those names and code names, I arrived at a total of 22 members of La Red Avispa. But I’ve seen estimates as high as 27. Not that those numbers really tell you much, other than to affirm that nothing is as it seems. During the time it operated, La Red Avispa was only one aspect of a much larger Cuban intelligence-gathering picture. Percy Alvarado, for example, wasn’t a member of La Red Avispa, but his penetration of the Cuban American National Foundation as a Cuban counter-intelligence agent during the same period provided Cuba with a critical link from Luis Posada to CANF to the 1997 hotel bombing campaign. And, on a broader canvas, La Red Avispa represents just a few brush strokes in the picture of Havana-Miami spying — and terrorism — that’s been painted since 1959 and is still being tinkered with today.
So, the story of the Cuban Five isn’t really the story of the Five at all. Or, at least, it’s not just their story. And it isn’t a simple linear narrative. It’s a cascading accumulation of incident and irritant, of connivance and consequence, a parallel, converging, diverging narrative featuring an ensemble cast of eclectic characters on both sides of the Straits of Florida — spies, terrorists, revolutionaries, counter-revolutionaries, cops, mercenaries, politicians, heroes, villains, journalists, innocents — whose personal ambitions, actions, loyalties, vanities, secrets, strengths and foibles collectively weave larger narratives: about Cuban-American relations, about the war on terror, about hypocrisy, about truth and fiction, about right and wrong.
Perhaps it was the quicksand complexity of it all that ultimately convinced me this story needed to be told, and needed to be told by someone who didn’t already know which versions of which stories were true.
______________________________
1It was the first time I’d ever opened a Microsoft Word document that was so long the Pages count read: ****of****.
2Exile groups aren’t the only ones who’ve found themselves fooled and/or confused by Cuban double agents. Consider the case of Florentino Azpillaga, the head of Cuban intelligence in Czechoslovakia, who sought asylum in the United States in 1987. Azpillaga told his CIA interrogators that many of the Cubans the Americans believed they were “running” in various intelligence operations were actually double agents working for Cuban State Security and feeding the CIA “misleading or useless” information. “We certainly underestimated the Cubans,” one official told the Los Angeles Times in an August 12, 1987, story. “We never realized that the operations we thought were so good were theirs all along.” Assuming, of course, that Azpillaga wasn’t himself a plant… Which many believed he was.
3Hernández, the intelligence officer identified in court as Avispa’s senior agent, told me he doesn’t know how or why Avispa got its name, or what, if anything, the name was supposed to signify. He didn’t even appear to think of it as a network, perhaps because most of the people in the so-called network didn’t connect at all. René González and Antonio Guerrero, for example, who were both described as Avispa field agents, didn’t meet — or even know of each other’s existence — until after their arrest. Fernando González told me he’d known Hernández when they were students together at Havana’s elite International Relations Institute but hadn’t known he’d also become an intelligence officer until he was dispatched to Miami to fill in for Hernández when he returned home on vacation.
4During the trial of the Five, prosecutors — for national security reasons — were never required to say when or why they began surveillance of La Red Avispa. In 2010, however, an exile named Edgerton Ivor Levy told an anti-Castro Miami television station he and his wife were agents Ariel and Laura, and that they’d told American authorities “what the intentions of the Castrista intelligence were… as soon as we got here.” The two arrived in the Florida Keys, ostensibly as rafters, in 1993. Although Levy claimed he’d come forward because “it bothers me to see so much propaganda based on a basic lie that [the Five] were fighting against terrorism,” it is worth noting the Miami Hispanic television station paid Ivor Levy for exclusive rights to his story, so other reporters didn’t have chance to question his account.
Only in Miami! Watching his triumphal, hero-home-from-the-wars televised press conference, a casual viewer might have puzzled over how to square the image of this smiling, rubbery-faced old man in the charcoal-grey suit and opencollared shirt — blinking through thick, over-sized spectacles into the 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 who this man had once been. And who he might still be.
Orlando Bosch
__
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 previous 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 labelled “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 a legend and hero in much of Miami’s el exilio community.
To the rest of the world, Orlando Bosch was a terrorist. But in Miami, the world’s worst terrorist could be a beloved freedom fighter, provided he waged his terror on behalf of 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. This had been Orlando Bosch’s guiding, sole mission in life for 30 years.
One of the more 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 traveller 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. He eventually found a job as an assistant director at a small Coral Gables hospital, bought a fixer-upper house in Little Havana and a “beatup blue Cadillac,” and even watched enough TV to claim that a quirky spy drama called Mission: Impossible was his favourite 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 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.5
On the side, Bosch also ran an organization 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 as a way 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 Trail “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 re-election-seeking Governor Claude Kirk boasted to a Latin American 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 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 set aside to assassinate the Cuban leader. The bonds, in fact, were only redeemable upon the death of Fidel Castro. Though Bosch disappeared 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 the Americans wanted him back on U.S. soil. Between 1974 and 1976, U.S. authorities turned down offers from both 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 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.6
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.7 “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 was responsible for more than 50 terrorist operations during the next few years, including the September 1976 car-bomb assassination of Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier in Washington.8 CORU’s most 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 medals they’d won at the Central American and Caribbean Fencing Championships. For the next 25 years — until 9/11, in fact — that 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 the bombing’s 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 travelling on a false passport, had done work for Posada’s Caracas-based private investigation company and served as Bosch’s driver. Ricardo 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 noted American writer Joan Didion put it in her 1987 nonfiction book, had become “our most graphic lesson in consequences.”9 Most of those consequences were a direct result of the presence in the city of close to half a million 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 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, nearly 250,000 Cubans had landed in the United States, most settling 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 had 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 to 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 Rodríguez, who would gain fame as the CIA operative responsible for killing Ché Guevara 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.10
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 that 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 a hundred bombings and an average of an assassination a week in Miami. In a report, the FBI described Miami as 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 promising 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.”11 Whoever his killers were, they’d been as good as their word, murdering four more exile leaders and blowing the legs off a fifth. The FBIMiami New Times