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.
Alvarez frequently visited Posada in Panama, and also organized his defense, flew him out of the country after the pardon, and acted as his spokesman in Miami before his arrest. The Cuban government claims Alvarez smuggled Posada into Miami in the first place -- a charge he denies.
"We have to demand, demand and demand not just that Posada be brought to justice, but to know how he entered the United States, who helped him," Castro told an international conference against terrorism on Saturday in Havana, organized to spread the campaign throughout the region.
"The Posada issue is all about ending impunity," Castro said.
The Cuban leader, approaching his 79th birthday in August, and Chavez charge the Bush administration is coddling Posada, 77, and protecting his Miami-based associates, including Alvarez. They are demanding Posada be extradited to Venezuela and what they describe as a U.S.-based terrorist network be dismantled -- requests Washington appears unlikely to meet.
Posada is suspected of involvement in the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed all 73 aboard and a series of 1987 bombings of Cuban tourist spots that left an Italian dead. He has denied involvement in the incidents.
Posada, a naturalized Venezuelan, escaped from a Venezuelan prison in 1985 as prosecutors were preparing to appeal his acquittal on the aircraft bombing. The South American country is taking its extradition request to regional bodies such as the Organization of American States meeting this week in Florida.
The foreign ministers of the 15-member Caribbean Economic Community last week called Posada "the primary suspect" in the plane bombing, describing it as "the most horrific act of terrorism ever experienced by the countries" of the Caribbean.
"All the perpetrators of this despicable crime" must face justice, they said, adding the United States "should take appropriate action in respect of the accused terrorist in its custody."
The other perpetrator Caribbean foreign ministers were referring to most likely was Orlando Bosch, another Miami resident linked to the plane bombing by recently declassified U.S. government and Venezuelan documents.
President George H. W. Bush in 1990 authorized Bosch's entry into the United States as Jeb Bush was running for Florida governor.
"President Bush is facing the same issues his father faced when Orlando Bosch, a convicted terrorist, arrived on U.S. soil in 1989," says Cuba expert Philip Peters, vice president of the Washington-based Lexington Institute.
"But the stakes are higher today. Making Posada face justice is easier said than done. But for President Bush the stakes are larger than Posada's case, and certainly larger than Florida politics."