The Cuban government broke diplomatic relations with Panama August 26 following the action by the outgoing president.

The four men, Posada Carriles, Gaspar Jiménez, Pedro Remón, and Guillermo Novo, who had been convicted by a Panamanian court in April, have a long record of murderous attacks against the Cuban Revolution.

On their release Jiménez, Remón, and Novo, who are U.S. citizens, flew to Miami. Posada Carriles was flown to an undisclosed country on a separate flight, the Miami Herald reported August 27.

In November 2000, on the eve of a meeting of Latin American heads of state, Cuban officials publicly denounced the presence in Panama of Cuban ultrarightists who have been involved in numerous attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro. They announced that they had given Panamanian authorities the names of the main instigators, their addresses and telephone numbers, and other detailed information. Only after this public disclosure did the Panamanian police arrest Posada and the others, who were found with 33 pounds of explosives in their possession.

For years the Cuban government had sought the extradition of the four men. Finally, in April of this year, a Panamanian court convicted the four on charges of “endangering public safety,” claiming they could not be charged with attempted murder because no detonators were found in the area where the attack was supposed to be carried out. Cuban officials said the rightists had planned to set off the explosives at a public meeting at the University of Panama where Castro had been invited to speak. The court handed down sentences ranging from seven to eight years. Havana protested the light sentences.

Moscoso granted the pardon just days before her term of office ended. A close ally of the U.S. government, Moscoso denied that Washington had influenced her government’s decision to pardon the four rightists. She argued that she had done so to prevent a future administration from extraditing them to Cuba and Venezuela. “I knew that if these men stayed here, they would be extradited to Cuba and Venezuela and there they were surely going to kill them,” Moscoso claimed.

The Venezuelan government recalled its ambassador from Panama, Flavio Granados, to protest these remarks, which it called a “serious and false accusation.” Granados noted that there is no death penalty in Venezuela, even “for terrorists who have been pardoned.”

Cuba had threatened to break relations if Moscoso pardoned the convicted rightists. In response, the Panamanian government withdrew its ambassador from Havana August 24 and ordered the Cuban ambassador to leave Panama; the pardons were announced days later.

President-elect Martín Torrijos, of the social-democratic Revolutionary Democratic Party (PRD), expressed his disagreement with the pardons and said he would work to repair relations with Cuba, the Reuters news agency reported.

U.S. State Department spokesman Adam Ereli denied charges in the Panamanian media that Washington played any role in the pardons.

Posada Carriles has had a long association with the CIA and was part of the U.S.-backed mercenary invasion of Cuba in 1961 at the Bay of Pigs, which was crushed by Cuban working people. Subsequently the CIA recruited him to carry out assassination attempts against Cuban leaders.

Cuban and Venezuelan authorities have sought his extradition on charges of involvement in the 1976 mid-air bombing of a Cuban passenger plane over Barbados that killed 73 people. He was acquitted in a trial in Venezuela on those charges and was allowed to escaped from a Venezuelan jail in 1985 while awaiting re-trial. Posada Carriles then turned up in El Salvador working with a group with tied to U.S. Marine Col. Oliver North, which supplied weapons to Nicaraguan counterrevolutionaries fighting to overthrow the Sandinista government. He later bragged about his involvement in a string of bombings in Havana in 1997 that targeted hotels and other vacation facilities in Havana, including one that killed an Italian tourist and wounded more than a dozen others.

Jiménez served six years in a Mexican prison after being convicted of attempting to kidnap a Cuban diplomat in 1976. After escaping from prison Jiménez was allowed to reenter the United States. He was also indicted, although the charges were dismissed, for a 1976 bombing that blew off the legs of Miami news reporter Emilio Milián.

In 1986 Remón was sentenced to 10 years in a U.S. prison after pleading guilty to attempting to murder a Cuban diplomat at the United Nations. He is also suspected of involvement in an attempted bombing of Cuba’s UN mission in 1979.

Novo was convicted in 1976 for involvement in the car-bombing of Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C. He was acquitted on appeal. He was also arrested in 1964 for an attack on the UN headquarters with a bazooka during a speech by Cuban revolutionary leader Ernesto Che Guevara.  
 
 
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