Vol. 72/No. 23      June 9, 2008

Josefina Vidal, head of the North American department of Cuba’s foreign ministry, revealed e-mails, letters, videos, and tapes documenting how U.S. Interests Section chief Michael Parmly transported funds from Miami-based exile Santiago Alvarez to counterrevolutionaries living in Cuba. Alvarez is currently in prison in the United States for illegal possession of weapons intended for armed attacks against Cuba’s revolutionary government.

Havana has repeatedly denounced Washington’s efforts to organize, promote, and sponsor counterrevolutionary activities in Cuba. The U.S. government’s only response to the latest accusations has been to say that it provides “humanitarian aid” in Cuba.

“These facts violate Cuban laws, violate U.S. laws, and violate the norms of international law,” said Cuba’s foreign minister Felipe Pérez Roque at a May 22 press conference.

Pérez Roque said that, in addition to transporting money from U.S.-based counterrevolutionaries to their Cuban counterparts, Parmly also loaned money to Alvarez, a wealthy real estate developer who fled to the United States shortly after the Jan. 1, 1959, victory of the Cuban Revolution.

For nearly five decades, backed and shielded by Washington, Alvarez has taken part in and organized actions aimed at the overthrow of Cuba’s socialist revolution. He participated in mercenary attacks in the 1960s and ’70s and was linked to an attempt to assassinate then-president Fidel Castro in Panama in 2000.

In 2001 he sent a group of mercenaries to invade Cuba’s Villa Clara province in an effort to spark an armed counterrevolution, according to the Cuban newspaper Granma. The invasion was quickly defeated by Cuban border guards. At the time the Cuban government released tapes of Alvarez giving orders to bomb the Tropicana nightclub in Havana.

Alvarez is closely associated with CIA-trained exile Luis Posada Carriles, who was responsible for the 1976 bombing of a Cubana airplane that killed 73 people and the bombing of several hotels in Havana between 1997 and 1998.
 
 
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