The elderly man in the dark green tinted glasses looked intently into his cup, took a small sip of the treacle-like coffee, glanced around the room and then began to whisper in his rich Latino accent: ”Luis Posada Carriles. He is a very good guy. Super guy. He is a good friend. The CIA and the government, maybe they will do the right thing and help him out.”
With that he raised his hand and declared: ”I have said too much already,” before turning his ample frame away to contemplate the dregs of coffee in his cup.
It truly is a rum day for Luis Posada when even in the Versailles restaurant on Calle Ocho Street, the beating heart of the Cuban exile community in downtown Miami, the men he would once have counted as his friends — and in some cases brothers in arms — are reluctant to declare their support out loud.
The 77-year-old former CIA operative and one-time leader of the armed struggle against Fidel Castro, who was arrested in the city last month on charges that he had illegally entered the country, is due to appear in court in Texas on Monday in a bid to remain in the United States and avoid trial in Venezuela on charges that he orchestrated the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner.
There was a time when the arrest of such a high profile figure from the exile community — even one accused of killing 73 people, including a young Cuban athletics team — would have led to mass demonstrations on the streets of Little Havana.
But since he was picked up by immigration officials following a bizarre cloak-and-dagger press conference in a warehouse near Miami, there has been a strange public silence from those who would have been expected to come out in his defence.
Some say his supporters are merely biding their time, waiting to see if the CIA, an organisation with which Posada has been intimately associated for decades, really does come through and bail out the man it trained in terrorism techniques. But others argue that the muted reaction signals a changing of guard within the exile community and an acceptance that the armed struggle Posada and his ilk mounted against Castro has finally had its day.
Little Havana is only a short drive across the Macarthur Causeway from the ice cream colours and art deco splendour of Miami’s South Beach, but it might as well be a million miles away. On Calle Ocho car repair shops compete for space with discount furniture stores and pawnbrokers. Above a launderette in one of the area’s small shopping centres sit the offices of the Movimiento Democracia.
The group’s leader, Ramón Saul Sánchez (50) has been fighting Castro since he was 15. As a young man he joined Alpha 66, a paramilitary group that trained in the Florida Everglades for the dreamed of day when exiles would mount an armed invasion of their homeland.
In the 1980s he spent four and a half years in prison for refusing to testify to a grand jury over an alleged plot to assassinate Castro during one of his visits to the UN in New York.
It was while in jail that Sánchez underwent a conversion of Damascene proportions when he ”fell in love with non-violence”.
His former paramilitary colleagues were shocked and angry at first, but now he says most of them have joined him in supporting democracy groups in Cuba, consigning to the history books the era of men like Posada.
”The community realise the violent approach, the terrorism, belongs to past times,” he said. ”People realise these are times in which we must all help to get rid of these terrorism acts that are sometimes inspired by noble causes but have terrible consequences.”
Jose Basulto, leader of Brothers to the Rescue, an organisation that has mounted daring airlifts from Cuba, said exiles were wary of playing into Castro’s hands by mounting large scale demonstrations for Posada. ”The community has matured,” he said.
The Cuban American National Foundation, once a keen supporter of armed intervention on the island, has also moderated its stance in the last decade. ”Posada is not about freeing Cuba, he is about killing Castro,” said Omar Lopez Montenegro, a former Cuban dissident who is now an executive director of the group.
”Most of the younger generation of Cuban exiles believe the change should be made by Cubans, not outside forces, but most of all that it should be peaceful.”
Posada’s alleged involvement in an airline bombing has also muted support in the US. Since September 11, any crime involving aircraft and explosions results in a collective shudder across America, and the Cuban exile’s hearing comes as newly released intelligence documents indicate his complicity in the 1976 attack.
Last week the National Security Archive in Washington posted declassified intelligence documents from 1976 which indicated that Posada had spoken about plans to ”hit” a Cuban airliner only days before the Cubana flight 455 exploded.
Peter Kornbluh of the NSA described the new documents as a ”treasure trove … on major acts of terrorism committed by violent anti-Castro groups.”
”Leaders are reticent to embrace or condone anyone who has committed alleged terrorist acts,” Damian Fernandez, director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University, told the Miami Herald.
”We also learned from Elian,” Fernandez said, referring to Elian Gonzalez, the young boy whose forced deportation back to Cuba sparked the last big demonstrations by the exile community. ”That left a bitter taste. We are more in tune to national and public opinion. We are more reserved in making a judgement on a case that’s much more dicey.”
But while Posada’s detention might not be making the waves it once would in Little Havana, it has caused a stormy diplomatic row across central America. Venezuela is seeking his extradition to stand trial. Venezuela’s President, Hugo Chávez, has threatened to sever diplomatic ties with the US if he is not handed over after the US state department indicated that the initial Venezuelan extradition application was ”incomplete.”
Cuba is also demanding that the US authorities hand him over in connection with hotel bombings in Havana in 1997 in which an Italian tourist died.
A number of American politicians and lawyers are insistent that he should be handed over to Venezuela, where the airline bomb plot was allegedly hatched. He escaped from jail there in 1985 while awaiting a prosecution appeal against his acquittal on two charges relating to the bombing.
The president of the National Lawyers Guild, Michael Avery, said the United States government had a ”moral and legal” obligation to extradite him. Ten congress members, including Dennis Kucinich, who sought the Democratic party’s presidential nomination in 2004, have signed a letter which states that ”as a sovereign nation Venezuela has the right to pursue justice in this case.”
The Bush administration — for whom Posada presents a problem in that he has admitted in the past to involvement in terrorist acts — has so far tried to distance itself from the controversy.
The White House spokesperson, Scott McClellan, told reporters: ”There are laws and procedures that are in place, and they are being followed at this point.”
But the politicians know that while many in the politically sensitive Cuban-American community will accept his detention in an El Paso prison, they will not countenance his extradition.
There remains a small, but hard core of support for Posada, a fact that was illustrated inside a Little Havana shop selling Cuban bric-a-brac and memorabilia — from posters of pre-revolution Havana to Fidel Castro toilet paper (”Make your wish come true,” the sign reads).
”This is a virtual Cuba, a place that does not exist any more,” said the owner, Maria Vazquez (55) sweeping her arm across the shop. ”But the people who come in here still dream of going back.
”You must understand, to us Posada is a hero, a freedom fighter. He was never convicted of the airline bombing.
”You must not think people don’t support him. We are just waiting to see what happens. If they try to extradite him, then you will see.”
The life of Luis Posada
The most committed would-be assassin of Fidel Castro, Luis Posada was born in 1928 into a wealthy family in Cienfuegos in Cuba. He studied medicine and chemistry at the University of Havana at the same time as Castro was studying law.
Although his family supported the revolution and his sister became a colonel in the Cuban army, Posada opposed Castro from the start and was sent to a military jail. He escaped, fled to Mexico and then joined the CIA Bay of Pigs invasion project. He has spent much of his adult life in unsuccessful plots to kill Castro.
A naturalised Venezuelan, he was accused of plotting a Cuban airliner bombing, but was acquitted twice. He is also accused of the bombings of Cuban hotels and many other terrorist acts.
He told the journalist Ann Louise Bardach for her book Cuba Confidential that ”the CIA taught us explosives, how to kill, bomb”. – Guardian Unlimited Â