A participant in the CIA-organized Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961, Posada Carriles has a decades-long history of violent attacks on the Cuban revolution. He was involved in a mid-air bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed 73 people in 1976. Most recently he led a failed assassination attempt in Panama on Cuban president Fidel Castro in November 2000. He and three others were convicted of charges related to the failed assassination, but were later pardoned by the Panamanian government.

Rodriguez said that as early as April 1 Cuba’s foreign ministry and the Interests Section asked Washington whether it could confirm press reports that Posada Carriles had entered the United States. Castro repeated Havana’s demand on April 11. “Up to now, no U.S. government authority has issued a word on this matter,” said Rodriguez.

On April 13, Posada Carriles’s attorney, Eduardo Soto, confirmed that his client had entered the United States and planned to apply for political asylum. He said that the Cuban rightist would also claim status under a 1966 law that grants Cubans permanent legal residency status one year and a day after arriving in the United States.

Both the Cuban and Venezuelan governments have demanded he be extradited to be tried for his crimes. “We believe that he is in danger anywhere but the United States,” his lawyer said at the press conference.

According to the Cuban newspaper Periodico26, Castro said that Kevin Whitaker, coordinator of the U.S. State Department's Office of Cuban Affairs, denied the credibility of information published by the Miami Herald, including statements made by the Cuban rightist’s lawyer. Diplomats at the Cuban Interests Section confirmed the paper’s account.

Last August Posada Carriles and four other Cuban counterrevolutionaries were released from a Panamanian prison after receiving a pardon from Panama’s outgoing president and White House ally Mireya Moscoso. The four were serving seven to eight year terms resulting from charges of attempting to assassinate Castro during the Cuban leader’s visit to Panama to attend the Ibero-American Summit in 2000. A Panamanian court convicted them on the lesser charge of “endangering public safety,” claiming no detonators were found in the area in which the attack was to occur.

Three of the Cuban ultrarightists, Gasper Jiménez, Pedro Remón, and Guillermo Novo, who are also U.S. citizens, were flown to the United States. Posada Carriles went to an undisclosed country. According to press reports, he recently entered the United States through Mexico. Castro has called on the Mexican government to explain how he could have traveled through the country without detection.

In 1985 Posada was allowed to escape from a Venezuelan prison where he was being held pending a Venezuelan prosecutor’s appeal of his acquittal on charges of bombing the Cuban airliner. He later turned up in El Salvador, helping to supply arms to U.S.-backed Nicaraguan counterrevolutionaries.  
 
 
Front page (for this issue) | Home | Text-version home