Cuba Demands Answers on Fugitive

June 6, 2005 — -- A few months before the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, three heavily armed men were captured entering a different country. The arrest was kept secret as the suspects were interrogated. The leader of the group agreed to place a call to his boss. He pretended to have safely arrived at his destination and asked if the plan to blow up a famous night club was still on.

"If you want to do that, all the better," the man at the other end of the line replied. "It doesn't matter to me. There you have the advantage that with a couple of little cans [of plastic explosives], it's over with, and it's less risky."

The country was the communist nation of Cuba, and the nightclub in question was the Tropicana. The captured terror suspect was a Cuban-American man named Ihosvani Suris de la Torre; the man he talked with was Miami developer Santiago Álvarez Fernández Magriña.

Cuba offered the tape to the FBI to confirm it was indeed the developer giving those chilling instructions. Yet Álvarez, a well-known figure in Florida's elite circles, has never been questioned nor charged with a crime.

The incident is just one of dozens Cuba has denounced over the years to no effect. But that might change in the coming weeks as legal wrangling over the fate of Cuban exile Luis Posada Carriles unfolds.

Posada, a former paid CIA informant and longtime anti-Castro militant, was convicted in Panama five years ago on charges related to a bombing plot against Castro, but then pardoned last year.

He surfaced in Miami, where, on May 20, he was arrested on immigration charges. Venezuela is seeking Posada's extradition, so he can stand trial for orchestrating the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner. He is being held in Texas and faces a preliminary deportation hearing June 13, though he is claiming U.S. residency status as well as political asylum.

Posada told The Miami Herald recently that he wants to live a "normal life" and has taken up painting.

Fidel Castro and his close ally Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez have repeatedly expressed their indignation over the Posada case. They have launched an international campaign, asserting that the Bush administration is turning a blind eye to what they call anti-Castro terrorism.