Cubans Protest Double Standard Re Terrorism

On May 17, 2005, CNN reported live from Havana, Cuba, showing thousands of Cubans marching by the United States Interests Section to protest the presence of Luis Posada Carriles in the United States and his request there for political asylum. According to www.cuba-solidarity.org, a British web site, which has collected a series of news reports from the New York Times, MSNBC, the Associated Press, and other media, Posada Carriles is considered to be an international terrorist by many Americans, Cuban-Americans, Cubans, Venezuelans, and other Latin Americans. Cubans consider him the Osama bin Laden of Latin America, in fact. The Cuban protesters are upset that he has been allowed to hide out in Florida and that the Bush administration denies knowing his whereabouts. They think Bush should have him picked up like 34,000 others who have entered the United States illegally and been incarcerated, and they feel Bush is intentionally turning a blind eye to appease anti-Castro Cubans. Here are some of the things Posada Carriles has done, according to www.cuba-solidarity.org:

• He was a CIA agent for years. Documents recently declassified show that in the 1960’s the CIA paid him to work with Dominican-based groups to overthrow the Cuban government.
• FBI documents recently declassified show that he was paid in 1965 by a prominent Cuban exile in Miami to finance attempts to attach powerful explosive mines to Cuban or Soviet ships docked at a port in Mexico.
• He was involved in the assassination of former Chilean foreign minister Orlando Letelier. This happened in downtown Washington DC on September 21, 1976, and an aide, Ronni Moffit, was also killed.
• He is considered responsible for blowing up a Cuban commercial airplane in the sky off the coast of Barbados in 1976. Seventy-three persons died in this explosion. A newly declassified FBI document placed him at two meetings where the bombing was planned when he was working as a Venezuelan intelligence officer. He was in prison in Venezuela waiting retrial for this. He is considered a fugitive of Venezuelan justice, because he escaped from prison there, and Venezuela requests his extradition.
• He worked for the Nicaraguan contras out of El Salvador then went to Guatemala to continue his terrorist activity.
• He has admitted to plotting several bomb attacks on tourist resorts in Havana in 1996 and 1997 in which an Italian tourist was killed. He bragged about this to the New York Times seven years ago.
• He was convicted in Panama in 2000 of attempting to kill Fidel Castro during his visit there. He and his colleagues were arrested with 33 pounds of C-4 plastic explosive. In 2004, he received an eight-year sentence for this. Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso pardoned him on her way out of office.
• He plotted to enter the United States illegally upon his release in Panama. According to the President of Honduras, he entered that country with a fake US passport. According to Fidel Castro, he then went to Mexico and took a boat to Florida, where he succeeded in entering the US illegally.
• Last but not least, www.cuba-solidarity.org claims that Posada Carriles has never renounced the use of violence, even when it claims innocent lives.

Later, on May 17, MSNBC reported that US authorities had taken Posada Carriles into custody. Bush will be pressured by right-wing Cuban supporters to grant him asylum. However, granting him asylum, according to www.cuba-solidarity-org would violate UN Security Council Resolution 1373, adopted September 28, 2001, which "makes it mandatory for every government in the world to oppose any form of cooperation with all terrorists—no matter what they did or where. No protection. No refuge. Nothing."