[NYTr] The History of a Terrorist: Pt 2/3

[nytr at olm.blythe-systems.com]

Continued from PART ONE

[This is a huge collection of mainstream press reports on the
career of the pardoned terrorist fugitive, Luis Posada Carriles,
going back to 1976.  We have divided the file into several
parts.-NY Transfer]
                                                                                
HISTORY LESSON: The Story of Posada Carriles According to US Media
                                                                                
PART TWO: 1990s: Posada the Fugitive; Bombs in Havana
                                                                                
sent by Nelson Valdes (Cuba-L) via Cubanews - Sept 5, 2004


MIAMI HERALD

April 29, 1992, Wednesday

SECTION: Section A; Page 4, Column 1

LENGTH: 41 words

HEADLINE: IN THE AMERICAS

JOURNAL-CODE: MH

ABSTRACT:

Cuba asks United Nations Security Council to demand extradition of
Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles, Cuban exiles it accused of
blowing up Cuban airliner in 1976; says Bosch and Posada are currently
under the protection of US; photo (S)

GRAPHIC: Photograph 
--------------------

MIAMI HERALD

May 20, 1992, Wednesday

SECTION: Section A; Page 10, Column 1

LENGTH: 46 words

HEADLINE: UNITED NATIONS

JOURNAL-CODE: MH

ABSTRACT:

Security Council agrees to consider the Cuban government's call for
condemnation of the US for allegedly harboring Cuban exiles Orlando
Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles, accused by Havana of masterminding the
bombing of a Cuban airliner in 1986 (S) 

-------------------
MIAMI HERALD

July 7, 1994, Thursday

SECTION: Section A; Page 12, Column 2

LENGTH: 28 words

HEADLINE: HONDURAS

JOURNAL-CODE: MH

ABSTRACT:

Honduran government reportedly is investigating report that Luis
Posada Carriles, Cuban exile accused in bombing of Cuban airliner in
1976, is living in Honduras (S)

LOAD-DATE: July 7, 1994 


-------------------

Tampa Tribune (Florida)

September 13, 1997, Saturday, FINAL EDITION

SECTION: NATION/WORLD, Pg. 6

LENGTH: 863 words

HEADLINE: CIA vet linked to blasts

BYLINE: JUAN O. TAMAYO; of Knight-Ridder Newspapers

BODY:
SUMMARY: Luis Posada Carriles, nicknamed "Bambi," is a former Bay of
Pigs vet with CIA ties friends say may be linked to Cuba blasts.

MIAMI - Former colleagues of a notorious Cuban exile bomber known as
"Bambi," who now lives in El Salvador, are pointing to possible links
between him and a Salvadoran man arrested by the Cubans for six terror
explosions in Havana .

Cuba's Interior Ministry, which announced the arrest of Raul Ernesto
Cruz Leon, 26, of El Salvador with much fanfare late Wednesday,
provided no additional details surrounding the case.

But the tightening of security around Havana hotels and the lack of
accounting for five blasts left Havana residents feeling security
officials have yet to tell the full story. 

"This is only the tip of the iceberg," said one Havana physician. "We
don't know if this Salvadoran was the only person involved, if he was
the leader of a ring or just a mule carrying explosives, or even if he
knew who was paying his salary."

Security sources in Havana said Cruz had made a full videotaped
confession and revealed he had been hired abroad.

Cuba's official announcement said he was paid $ 4,500 per bomb by a
Miami "subversive group" controlled by Cuban exiles.

Relatives of Cruz said he told them he was going to Havana on vacation
and said his trips there were arranged by a Cuban-born travel agent
living in San Salvador, Orlando Ramos Blanco, who runs the San
Cristobal Travel Agency.

Salvadoran Immigration Department reports showed Cruz had left El
Salvador for Costa Rica July 9 and returned July 14 from Los Angeles.

Cuba's communique said he had confessed to two bombings on July 12 as
well as the four blasts Sept. 4, including one in which an
Italian-Canadian businessman was killed.

His mother, Esther, in San Salvador and Salvadoran military officials
denied Cuba's report that Cruz had served in the army and received
military training in the United States.

He spent six months in a military high school but dropped out because
he broke an arm and never received any training in the United States,
both sides said.

Cruz went to work for a Salvadoran man in the entertainment business,
the mother said, arranging logistics and security for visiting music
groups.

"He is totally innocent," said Cruz's sister Yanira. "What they are
saying about Raul is false. He had nothing to do with the army, and
it's all a big lie."

But the arrest of the Salvadoran man lent added credence to
long-circulating reports the bombs could be the work of a CIA and Bay
of Pigs veteran, Luis Posada Carriles, nicknamed "Bambi" and last
reported to be living in El Salvador.

Neither Cubans nor U.S. officials have linked Posada to the bombings.

But two of Posada's friends in Miami said Thursday it was their
"educated guess" he was somehow involved in the Cuba bombings, and a
top U.S. official in Washington said, "That name is being heard a lot
around here today."

Posada, who told a Miami television station in an interview last year
a bombing campaign against tourist targets in Cuba would shrivel up
Cuban President Fidel Castro's main source of hard currency, could not
be reached for comment.

Friends said he moved to El Salvador last year or early this year
after he was forced to leave neighboring Honduras amid allegations he
set off 41 bombs there in 1995 as part of a military-backed campaign
to scare President Carlos Roberto Reina into abandoning plans to trim
back the military.

Those bombs were much like the ones in Cuba - small in power but
brilliantly placed and often detonated in bunches of three and four to
achieve the maximum propaganda impact.

"We have solid evidence Posada Carriles was behind those bombs," said
Ramon Custodio, head of the Honduran Human Rights Committee, which
issued a lengthy report on the Honduras bombings last year.

Posada, who has been known since childhood as "Bambi" for his
excitable ways and doe eyes, trained as a demolitions expert for the
Bay of Pigs invasion and later went into the U.S. Army as a second
lieutenant.

He left in 1965 to join a CIA-backed paramilitary group then training
in Nicaragua under the command of Cuban exile leader Manuel Artime for
attacks on Cuba.

CIA officials began withdrawing funding for the Artime operation after
the exiles shot up a Spanish freighter leaving Cuba, and Posada wound
up in Venezuela working for the Venezuelan secret police while still
reporting to the CIA.

He rose rapidly in the Venezuelan security bureaucracy but was
dismissed in a political scandal and was later arrested, along with
Orlando Bosch, on charges of being the intellectual authors of the
bombing of a Cuban airliner in 1976.

Never convicted, he escaped from jail in 1985 and headed to El
Salvador to work in a program to airdrop supplies to Nicaraguan
guerrillas then fighting the leftist Sandinista government - what
eventually became the Iran-Contra scandal.

His colleague in that operation, Felix Rodriguez, also a CIA and Bay
of Pigs veteran now living in Miami, said he had not talked to Posada
in years and added that he did not know whether Posada could still be
engaged in anti-Castro actions.

GRAPHIC: PHOTO 2,
Security in Havana has been tightened since a series of bombings of
tourist hotels. AP photo

NOTES: NATION WORLD WATCH

LOAD-DATE: September 14, 1997 
------------------
MIAMI HERALD

November 16, 1997, Sunday

SECTION: Section A; Page 1, Column 1

LENGTH: 176 words

HEADLINE: CUBAN HOTELS WERE BOMBED BY MIAMI-PAID SALVADORANS

BYLINE: BY JUAN O TAMAYO

JOURNAL-CODE: MH

ABSTRACT:

Special Report on Miami Herald investigation showing that spate of
summer bombings in Cuba was work of ring of Salvadoran criminals
directed and financed by Cuban exiles in El Salvador and Miami;
Salvadoran ring leader reportedly is Francisco Chavez, son of arms
dealer with close ties to Cuban exiles; Cuban exile Luis Posada
Carriles, veteran of secret war against Pres Fidel Castro and
explosives expert, reportedly is key link between Salvadorans and
south Florida exiles who raised $15,000 for operation; photos; charts;
chronology (L)

GRAPHIC: Combination

LOAD-DATE: January 16, 1998 
----------------
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Pennsylvania)

 View Related Topics 

November 17, 1997, Monday, SOONER EDITION

SECTION: WORLD, Pg. A-4

LENGTH: 729 words

HEADLINE: HAVANA BOMBS TIED TO EXILES;
MIAMI CUBANS PAID SALVADORANS IN PLOT

BYLINE: JUAN O. TAMAYO, MIAMI HERALD

DATELINE: SAN SALVADOR

BODY:
A spate of bombings in Cuba this summer was the work of a ring of
Salvadoran car thieves and armed robbers directed and financed by
Cuban exiles in El Salvador and Miami, a two-month investigation by
The Miami Herald shows.

The ring's leader is Francisco Chavez, son of an arms dealer with
close ties to Cuban exiles and a pistol-packing ruffian who may have
been in Havana just hours before the first bomb exploded at the luxury
Melia Cohiba Hotel.

But the Salvadorans were only delivery boys for the bombs, paid and
taught to assemble the explosives by a Cuban exile - a tight-lipped,
superbly disciplined man in his 30s who has participated in several
other anti-Castro operations in Central and South America.

And it was Luis Posada Carriles, a veteran of the Cuban exiles' secret
war against President Fidel Castro and an explosives expert in his
60s, who was the key link between El Salvador and the Florida exiles
who raised $ 15,000 for the operation. 

The Herald inquiry involved dozens of interviews with security
officials, friends of the bombers, Cuban exiles and others in El
Salvador, Miami, Guatemala and Honduras.

The 11 bombing attempts against Cuban tourist hotels and a restaurant
from April 12 to Sept. 4, which killed one Italian tourist and wounded
six other people, unleashed a huge upheaval on an island that had not
seen political violence like it since the early 1960s.

Cuban police arrested one Salvadoran man, Raul Cruz Leon, 26, and
charged him with six of the bombings. Yet Salvadoran police have made
little headway investigating the case, perhaps because of the close
ties between the theft ring and senior military officials.

Salvadoran officials admit the Cruz Leon case has not been
investigated vigorously, partly because no bombs exploded there and
partly because they like many Cuban exiles in Miami - doubt Cuba's
allegations against Cruz Leon.

But The Herald's findings largely support the Cuban police version
that the bombs were the work of Salvadorans and Cubans abroad and not,
as rumored in Havana, the work of opponents inside the island.

How the Chavez ring made contact with Cuban exiles remains unclear,
although Salvadoran intelligence officials and Cuban exiles say the
elder Chavez sold weapons to exiles - among them Posada - who came to
El Salvador in the 1980s to battle pro-Castro groups.

Many Salvadorans still abhor Castro for training and arming leftist
guerrillas during a decade-long civil war that killed 80,000 people,
and blame Cuba for some of the worst rebel atrocities.

Cuban exiles began arriving in El Salvador in the mid-1980s to fight
communism, first helping the armed forces combat leftist guerrillas
and supporting the CIA-backed Nicaraguan Contras who battled the
leftist Sandinista government.

Half a dozen witnesses said Chavez arranged the two trips that Cruz
Leon made to Havana on July 9-14 and Aug. 31, reserving his flight
tickets and hotel vouchers and driving with him both times to El
Salvador's international airport.

An airport parking lot guard recalled seeing Cruz Leon and Chavez
carrying a boxed television set when they parked in his lot Aug. 31.
Cuban police say Cruz Leon arrived in Havana with a boxed television
set, which he used to smuggle C-4 plastic explosives into the island.

Two Cuban exiles who fought alongside the Contras say that's how
Chavez's father, Francisco Chavez Diaz, 58, met Posada, who was then
helping to run a secret Contra weapons warehouse and supply route at a
Salvadoran air force base established by Col. Oliver North, of
Iran-Contra fame.

Posada was charged, and twice found innocent, in the 1976 terror
bombing of a Cuban jetliner in which 73 people died.

Friendly with several air force commanders, he took a key role in
North's secret Contra supply line, handling the housing and pay of the
pilots and crew members who used Salvador-based cargo planes to
air-drop weapons and supplies to Nicaraguan Contras.

Cuban exiles who support armed attacks on Castro say Posada used his
renown in South Florida as a tireless battler against Castro to raise
about $ 15,000 among wealthy Cuban-American businessmen in Miami for
the bombing plot.

The exile sources declined to identify the donors, saying the cash
probably violated U.S. neutrality laws that prohibit plotting armed
operations against another nation.

LOAD-DATE: November 18, 1997 
-----------------
The Atlanta Journal and Constitution

November 17, 1997, Monday, ALL EDITIONS

SECTION: FOREIGN NEWS; Pg. 05A

LENGTH: 799 words

HEADLINE: Exiles blamed in Cuban blasts;
Salvadoran criminals allegedly set off bombs in Cuba at the behest of
anti-Castro activists.

BYLINE: FROM OUR NEWS SERVICES

BODY:
A spate of bombings in Cuba this summer was the work of a ring of
Salvadoran car thieves and armed robbers directed and financed by
Cuban exiles in El Salvador and Miami, according to Miami Herald
report Sunday on the results of a two-month investigation by the
newspaper.

The Herald said the ring's leader is Francisco Chavez, son of an arms
dealer with close ties to Cuban exiles and a pistol-packing ruffian
who may have been in Havana just hours before the first bomb exploded
at the luxury Melia Cohiba Hotel.

The Salvadorans allegedly were only delivery boys, paid and taught to
assemble the explosives by a Cuban exile --a tight-lipped, superbly
disciplined man in his 30s who has participated in several other
anti-Castro operations in Central and South America.

And it was Luis Posada Carriles, a veteran of the Cuban exiles' secret
war against President Fidel Castro and an explosives expert in his
60s, who was the key link between El Salvador and the South Florida
exiles who raised $ 15,000 for the operation, according to the newspaper. 

The Herald said its inquiry involved dozens of interviews with
security officials, friends of the bombers, Cuban exiles and others in
El Salvador, Miami, Guatemala and Honduras. The Salvadoran interviews
were in cooperation with the newspaper Diario de Hoy.

The 11 bombing attempts against Cuban tourist hotels and a restaurant
from April 12 to Sept. 4, which killed one Italian tourist and wounded
six other people, unleashed a huge upheaval on an island that had not
seen political violence like it since the early 1960s.

Cuban police arrested one Salvadoran man, Raul Ernesto Cruz Leon, 26,
and charged him with six of the bombings. Yet Salvadoran police have
made little headway investigating the case, perhaps because of the
close ties between the theft ring and senior military officials.

The Herald said its findings largely supported the Cuban police
version that the bombs were the work of Salvadorans and Cubans abroad
and not, as rumored in Havana, the work of opponents on the island.

The friendships and other contacts that ultimately took Cruz Leon from
San Salvador to Havana began in El Salvador's version of West Point,
the Gen. Gerardo Barrios Military Academy, a three-year school that
turns out 2nd lieutenants. Cruz Leon and Jose Eduardo Ramirez enrolled
there in January 1991, when they were both 21, part of a class of
about 45 cadets. And there they met Victor M. Palma, an academy
employee, then 30 years old, who worked with computers.

Palma denied all in a telephone conversation, repeating, "Everything
is false." Ramirez, jailed awaiting trial in an unrelated slaying,
refused to be interviewed.

How the Chavez ring allegedly made contact with Cuban exiles remains
unclear, but Salvadoran intelligence officials and Cuban exiles say
the elder Chavez sold weapons to exiles --among them Posada Carriles
--who came to El Salvador in the 1980s to battle pro-Castro groups.

When the government and rebels made peace in 1992, the country found
itself with a surplus of weapons, soldiers and military and police
officers, some of whom turned to crime after the war ended.

One day late last year, Cruz Leon gushed about how a Cuban exile
pistol expert he had met at the gun range taught him how to quick-draw
and shoot in combat situations, acquaintances said.

By December of last year, acquaintances were regularly spotting the
four Salvadorans at the gun range practice-shooting with a Cuban exile
described only as a marksman in his mid-30s.

"Palma and some of the others smirked and talked about their 'little
jobs' in Cuba, and went from having no money to having money," one
gun-range acquaintance said. "Certainly, when Raul (Cruz Leon) was
grabbed, I was not surprised he was in Cuba."

Salvadoran immigration and airline records show that Chavez had
tickets to visit Havana last Dec. 3-7 and April 4-11 of this year.

The tickets were for flights to Havana from San Jose, Costa Rica, and
Panama City and returning both times through Managua, Nicaragua.

On his last recorded trip, Chavez's ticket had him leaving Havana
about 12 hours before the first of the 11 Cuba bombs exploded --a
blast in a bathroom of Havana's Melia Cohiba Hotel. The Herald said it
could not confirm whether Chavez followed his ticketed schedule.

Half a dozen witnesses said Chavez also arranged the two trips that
Cruz Leon made to Havana on July 9-14 and Aug. 31, reserving his
flight tickets and hotel vouchers and driving with him both times to
El Salvador's international airport.

An airport employee recalled seeing Cruz Leon and Chavez carrying a
boxed television set Aug. 31. Cuban police say Cruz Leon arrived in
Havana with a boxed television set, which he used to smuggle explosives.

LOAD-DATE: November 18, 1997 

--------------
MIAMI HERALD

June 7, 1998, Sunday

SECTION: Section A; Page 1, Column 5

LENGTH: 56 words

HEADLINE: AN EXILE'S RELENTLESS AIM: OUST CASTRO

BYLINE: BY JUAN O TAMAYO and GERARDO REYES

JOURNAL-CODE: MH

ABSTRACT:

Luis Posada Carriles, Bay of Pigs veteran and former CIA operative
accused of masterminding 1997 bombings in Cuba, reportedly has been
involved in string of other recent conspiracies; Posada reportedly led
team in assassination attempt against Pres Fidel Castro in 1994;
biographical sketch; photo (M)

LOAD-DATE: June 18, 1998 

---------------
MIAMI HERALD

June 10, 1998, Wednesday

SECTION: Section A; Page 15, Column 2

LENGTH: 22 words

HEADLINE: HONDURAS

JOURNAL-CODE: MH

ABSTRACT:

Honduran military denies involvement in Cuban exile Luis Posada
Carriles' alleged plan to lead commando raids on Cuba (S)

LOAD-DATE: June 23, 1998 

-----------------
Times-Picayune (New Orleans, LA)

June 21, 1998 Sunday, FIRST

SECTION: NATIONAL; Pg. A30

LENGTH: 1985 words

HEADLINE: CUBAN CONCOCTS SLEW OF PLOTS TO TOPPLE CASTRO

BYLINE: By JUAN O. TAMAYO and GERARDO REYES Knight Ridder Newspapers

DATELINE: SAN SALVADOR

BODY:
The idealized Cuban landscapes that Luis Posada Carriles paints are
nothing like the world he inhabits - a world of conspiracies to murder
Fidel Castro, bomb his hotels and blow up his freighters.

Posada, 68, already is known as a Bay of Pigs veteran, former CIA
operative, accused bomber of a jetliner in which 73 people died and
alleged mastermind of a streak of bombings in Cuba last summer. 

Now a long Miami Herald investigation has uncovered a string of other
recent conspiracies. Among them:

He led a team of six exiles that tried to assassinate Castro in
Colombia four years ago.

He plotted to smuggle plastic explosives from Guatemala to Cuba last
fall, hiding them in diapers, shampoo bottles and the shoes of
Guatemalans posing as tourists.

He planned to blow up a Cuban freighter in Honduras in 1993 and to
establish a secret base in Honduras the next year from which Cuban
exiles could launch commando raids against the island.

*** 'A full-time patriot' ***

None of those plots succeeded. Yet their number and daring confirm
Posada's reputation as the one exile most active in attempts to
overthrow Castro, almost 40 years after he seized power.

"He's a full-time patriot," said Ramon Font, 76, a friend since both
belonged to Comandos L, a Miami paramilitary group, in the 1960s. "He
works anywhere . . . because he has no ideology, only a goal: to
finish Castro."

And he's not about to retire, either.

"What choice do I have but to continue doing what I have been doing
for so long?" one acquaintance quoted him as saying last month. "The
airplane took off a long time ago, and now it's flown beyond the point
of no return."

Posada declined attempts to interview him in El Salvador, where he has
lived most of the time since escaping from a Venezuelan jail in 1985.
A court had found him innocent in the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner
that killed 73 people, yet Caracas officials refused to free him.

But dozens of other interviews in El Salvador, Miami, Guatemala,
Honduras and Costa Rica turned up a trail of conspiracies that
intensified after Posada recovered from a 1990 murder attempt in
Guatemala that he blames on Castro's agents.

The best known of the plots was the summer bombing spree by Salvadoran
mercenaries hired by Posada to smuggle bombs into Cuba and detonate
them in tourism centers such as hotels and restaurants, according to
several people involved.

*** Explosives plan fizzles ***

But even as Cuban police were arresting one of the Salvadorans, Raul
Ernesto Cruz Leon, last September, Posada and two other conspirators
in Guatemala were trying to smuggle more explosives into Havana,
according to two people with firsthand knowledge of the plot.

Posada first offered Guatemalans money to fly to Cuba as tourists with
C-4 explosives hidden in their shoes, sources said. That's the same
method Cruz Leon allegedly used to smuggle C-4 explosives into Havana.

Posada later tried to hide a water-based explosive in shampoo bottles
and within layers of diaper tissues that were to be smuggled into
Cuba, the two sources said.

The explosive, which is white and has the consistency of mayonnaise,
was originally packaged in plastic tubes eight inches long and one
inch thick, marked "Mexican Military Industries. Highly Explosive."

But the plan was a bust. The explosive was apparently old and failed
to explode in tests. And the Guatemalans hired to go to Cuba as
tourists either failed to set off any bombs or refused to fly to Cuba
after Cruz Leon was arrested, one plotter said.

Cuban police charged Cruz Leon with setting off six of the 12 to 15
bombs that rocked tourist centers; no suspects were named in the
others. Police found two unexploded bombs several weeks after Cruz
Leon was arrested, Havana sources have reported.

*** Co-conspirators are mum ***

Posada's co-conspirators in Guatemala were identified by the two
sources as Jose Alvarez, 70, a Cuban exile, and Jose Burgos, 50, a
Guatemalan army veteran turned businessman.

Alvarez and Burgos were officers of three Guatemala City subsidiaries
of WRB Enterprises, a Tampa firm engaged in 1997 in a failed project
to lay electrical lines to the eastern town of Chiquimulas.

Both denied involvement in any plot against Cuba.

"I don't agree with the attacks on the Cuban hotels because it's bad
to destroy something," Burgos said. "This, the accusation, . . . makes
me laugh."

The man who headed WRB operations in Guatemala until last fall,
Antonio Alvarez, 62, a Cuban exile from Greenville, S.C., who is no
relation to Jose Alvarez, also denied knowledge of a plot. He and Jose
Alvarez only confirmed that they knew Posada.

The Herald obtained a copy of a fax from Posada to Jose Alvarez and
Burgos detailing part of the plot's finances. And telephone records of
the WRB offices in Guatemala show several calls to offices Posada is
known to use in El Salvador and Honduras.

One person with knowledge of the plot later wrote a detailed report on
the conspiracy and sent it to Guatemala's version of the CIA, the
Presidential Strategic Analysis Agency, saying he wanted to prevent
"some barbaric act."

The Herald obtained a copy of the report and spoke at length to its
author.

Officials of the Guatemalan agency declined to talk to The Herald, but
a diplomat said the agency had investigated some of the report's
allegations, found them "credible" and alerted U.S. officials. The
FBI, which is known to have a copy of the report, declined to comment.

*** Assassination plan ***

Posada went into virtual hiding after his name began appearing on the
list of suspects in the Havana bombings. A Herald story Nov. 16
reported his connections to the Salvadorans and sparked many tips to
the newspaper regarding his other plots.

One of the most ambitious appears to have been a plot to assassinate
Castro at a 1994 summit of Ibero-American heads of government in the
Colombian port city of Cartagena.

Posada and five other exiles managed to smuggle guns into Cartagena,
but Colombian security cordons kept them too far away to take a good
shot at Castro, said three people knowledgeable about the attempt.

"I stood behind some journalists . . . and saw Colombian writer and
Castro friend Gabriel Garcia Marquez, but I only got to see Castro
from a long distance," one of the would-be assassins said.

Posada also staged several operations out of Honduras, where he lived
on and off for four years as he recuperated from the attempt to kill
him in Guatemala. One bullet shattered his jaw, and another barely
missed his heart.

In 1993, he found a port captain in Honduras who promised to tip him
on the next docking of a Cuban freighter that was making monthly runs
from the southern port of Cienfuegos to Central America's Caribbean coast.

The plan was to attack the ship with a small mine that would not sink
it but "make a lot of noise," said one exile involved in the plot. But
word of the conspiracy got out in Miami, said one of the exiles who
tried to line up financing for the plot, and "we started getting so
many people volunteering that we had to call it off."

*** Honduran attack scenario ***

Perhaps the most quixotic of Posada's plots was a deal that a
half-dozen exiles in Miami, Costa Rica and Honduras said he tried to
arrange in 1994 with Col. Guillermo Pinel Calix, then head of Honduran
military intelligence.

Pinel Calix was to provide a secret base in Honduras where groups of
six to eight exiles would learn commando tactics under Honduran
experts and then launch attacks on Cuba, exiles said.

The cost: a $100,000 payoff to Honduran military officers, plus upward
of $250,000 for operational costs including weapons, explosives, fast
attack boats and even small airplanes, one exile involved in the talks
said.

Pinel Calix met in Miami with four exiles to discuss the base, but the
deal fell through, all the sources said. The Cubans felt they could
not trust the notoriously corrupt Honduran military, and Pinel Calix
was said to be unimpressed with the exiles he met.

Pinel Calix, now inspector general of the Honduran armed forces, would
not be interviewed.

Perhaps the biggest mystery surrounding Posada is how he makes a
living and manages to finance his conspiracies.

*** U.S. shield rumors afloat ***

One version circulating in Central America is that he is protected by
the CIA, a rumor fueled by his role as a coordinator in Col. Oliver
North's Iran-contra scheme to supply CIA-backed Nicaraguan rebels from
El Salvador in the late 1980s.

Knowledgeable U.S. officials deny that Posada enjoys CIA protection
and say they, in fact, warned the Honduran government when he was
first spotted there in 1990.

"We were worried the Hondurans would think he was one of our people,
that he would do something bad or stupid and then we'd get the blame,"
said a U.S. official involved in notifying the Hondurans.

Instead, Posada manages to carry on because his unvarnished brand of
anti-communism has won him powerful friends and protectors among
Central American conservatives - especially in the security forces.

Neither the Salvadoran nor Guatemalan police moved against him after
they learned of his role in the Havana bombing campaign. He has
boasted to acquaintances that he counts senior Honduran and Salvadoran
military officers among his friends.

In El Salvador, he is known to be friends with former Air Force Gen.
Juan Rafael Bustillo, several right-wing politicians and Guillermo
Sol, one of the country's richest men. In Honduras, he is close to
Mario Delamico, a Cuban-born arms dealer, and several ranking members
of the conservative National Party.

Oddly, Venezuela never issued an international warrant for his arrest.
So Posada lives in semi-hiding, using his real identity among friends
but carrying a half-dozen false passports to avoid detection by
Castro's agents.

"He and Billy Sol go hunting all the time. If he's a fugitive, he
certainly doesn't hide much," said Lillian Diaz Sol, a Salvadoran
businesswoman who has known Posada for more than a decade.

*** The means of the warrior ***

How does Posada earn a living?

An expert on kidnapping investigations since his work with the
Venezuelan police in the 1960s, he has worked as a consultant to
Central American businessmen and occasionally trains bodyguards,
friends say.

He has also joined Delamico in some weapons deals with Latin American
governments, the friends add, and once sold 5,000 boxes of fake Cohiba
cigars, Cuba's most famous brand.

Posada also has painted landscapes of Cuba and sold them to fellow
exiles for $200 to $300 - what friends call "patriotic prices" that
are determined more by the political resoluteness of the author than
the quality of the art.

But in times of need, he has received direct help from wealthy Miami
exiles, as he recalled in an autobiography he published in Honduras in
1994, "The Ways of the Warrior." His $22,000 hospital bill from the
assassination attempt, he wrote, was paid by friends who included two
officials of the Cuban American National Foundation: Alberto
Hernandez, who succeeded the late Jorge Mas Canosa as chairman last
year; and treasurer Feliciano Foyo. Hernandez and Foyo declined to
comment on their relationship with Posada.

More intriguing is how Posada finances paramilitary operations that
can be tremendously expensive, about $50,000 just to get the six-man
hit team to Cartagena, said one of the gunmen involved.

*** Dollars flow to his mission ***

Posada prefers to rely on a single trusted friend in Miami to collect
donations from exiles, then uses a courier to get the cash, several
knowledgeable sources said. They declined to identify the friend.

"That way the donors can deny any involvement in the operation, Posada
can claim he doesn't know who gave the money, and there's no paper
trail on the cash," said one person with firsthand knowledge of the
system.

LOAD-DATE: June 22, 1998 
------------------
St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri)

July 12, 1998, Sunday, FIVE STAR LIFT EDITION

SECTION: NEWS, Pg. A13

LENGTH: 504 words

HEADLINE: EXILE CITES U.S. GROUP IN ANTI-CASTRO VIOLENCE;
FOUNDATION DENIES LINK TO BOMBINGS, MURDER TRIES

BYLINE: New York Times News Service

DATELINE: MIAMI

BODY:
A Cuban exile who has waged a campaign of bombings and assassination
attempts aimed at toppling Fidel Castro says that his efforts were
supported financially for more than a decade by the Cuban-American
leaders of one of America's most influential lobbying groups.

The exile, Luis Posada Carriles, said he organized a wave of bombings
in Cuba last year at hotels, restaurants and discotheques. In a series
of tape-recorded interviews, Posada said the hotel bombings and other
operations had been supported by leaders of the Cuban-American
National Foundation. Its founder and head, Jorge Mas Canosa, who died
last year, was embraced at the White House by Presidents Ronald
Reagan, George Bush and Bill Clinton. 

The foundation, established in 1981, has sought to portray itself as
the responsible voice of the Cuban exile community, dedicated to
weakening the Castro regime through politics rather than force. Thanks
to that approach and millions in campaign donations, the foundation
became one of Washington's most effective lobbying organizations and a
principal architect of U.S. policy toward Cuba.

Foundation leaders did not respond to telephone calls and letters
requesting an interview to discuss their relationship with Posada. But
in a brief statement faxed to The New York Times, the group denied a
role in his operations. "Any allegation, implication or suggestion
that members of the Cuban American National Foundation have financed
any alleged 'acts of violence' against the Castro regime are totally
and patently false," the statement said.

Within militant Cuban exile circles, Posada is a legendary figure,
celebrated for his tenacity and dedication to the anti-Castro cause.

Some of what Posada said about his past can be verified through
recently declassified government documents, as well as interviews with
former foundation members and U.S. officials.

But he made several claims that rest solely on his word, including an
assertion that he has agents inside the Cuban military and that U.S.
law enforcement authorities maintained an attitude of benign neglect
toward him for most of his career, allowing him to remain free and active.

Posada, 70, has long refused to talk to journalists. But in two days
of interviews with The New York Times, he talked openly for the first
time about his relationship with the foundation's leaders. He also
described his role in some of the great Cold War events in which Cuban
exiles were key players.

Jailed for one of the most infamous anti-Cuban attacks, the 1976
bombing of a civilian Cubana airliner, he eventually escaped from a
Venezuelan prison to join the centerpiece of the Reagan White House's
anti-communist crusade in the Western Hemisphere: Lt. Col. Oliver
North's clandestine effort to supply arms to Nicaraguan Contras.

Posada said he was angered by recent newspaper accounts of his
activities and eager near the end of his life to put his version of
events on record, perhaps reinvigorating the anti-Castro movement.    

LOAD-DATE: July 13, 1998 

--------------------
MIAMI HERALD

July 12, 1998, Sunday

SECTION: Section A; Page 1, Column 4

LENGTH: 61 words

HEADLINE: CUBA ATTACKS FUNDED WITH MAS' MONEY, EXILE CLAIMS

BYLINE: BY ANN LOUISE BARDACH and LARRY ROHTER

JOURNAL-CODE: MH

ABSTRACT:

Cuban exile Luis Posada Carriles, organizer of campaign of bombings
and assassination attempts aimed at toppling Cuban Pres Fidel Castro,
says efforts were financed for more than decade by leaders of Cuban
American National Foundation; foundation denies acts of violence
against Cuban government; photo (M)

GRAPHIC: Photograph

LOAD-DATE: August 5, 1998 
---------------
The New York Times

 View Related Topics 

July 12, 1998, Sunday, Late Edition - Final

SECTION: Section 1; Page 10; Column 1; Foreign Desk 

LENGTH: 2411 words

HEADLINE: A BOMBER'S TALE;
A Cuban Exile Details the 'Horrendous Matter' of a Bombing Campaign

SERIES: A Bomber's Tale

BYLINE:  By ANN LOUISE BARDACH and LARRY ROHTER 

DATELINE: GUATEMALA

BODY:
During the summer of 1997, bomb explosions ripped through some of
Havana's most fashionable hotels, restaurants and discotheques,
killing a foreign tourist and sowing confusion and nervousness
throughout Cuba. It was something shocking and inexplicable in a
police state notorious for its tight security, and from one end of the
island to the other, people speculated about who might be responsible.

At his office here in the mountains of Central America, a
Cuban-American businessman named Antonio Jorge (Tony) Alvarez was
certain he knew the answer. For nearly a year, he had watched with
growing concern as two of his partners -- working with a mysterious
gray-haired man who had a Cuban accent and multiple passports --
acquired explosives and detonators, congratulating each other on a job
well done every time a bomb went off in Cuba. 

What is more, Mr. Alvarez overheard the men talk of assassinating
Fidel Castro at a conference of Latin American heads of state to be
held in Margarita Island, Venezuela. Alarmed, he went to Guatemalan
security officials. When they did not respond, he wrote a letter that
eventually found its way into the hands of Venezuelan intelligence
agents and officials of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Venezuelan authorities reacted energetically to the information,
searching for explosives on the island where the meeting was to be
held. But in the United States the letter elicited what Mr. Alvarez
described as a surprisingly indifferent response.

An agent in the Miami office reached him by phone, Mr. Alvarez
recalled in recent interviews, and said a colleague would call soon to
arrange to speak with him. In the meantime, he urged Mr. Alvarez to
leave Guatemala immediately.

"He told me my life was in danger, that these were dangerous people,
and urged me to get out of Guatemala," said Mr. Alvarez, a 62-year-old
engineer. "But I never heard from him again."

Had the F.B.I. met with Mr. Alvarez, agents would have heard a
remarkable tale about the anti-Castro underworld.

They would have learned that the gray-haired man was Luis Posada
Carriles, an anti-Castro exile who has devoted his life to
overthrowing the Cuban Government.

They would also have heard about possible links between the plotters
in Guatemala and Cuban exiles living in Union City, N.J., who Mr.
Alvarez said were wiring money to the plotters. That allegation raises
questions about whether American laws were broken in the Cuban hotel
bombings, in which an Italian tourist was killed and three people were
wounded.

John F. Lewis Jr., an F.B.I. assistant director in charge of national
security issues, declined to comment on Mr. Alvarez's letter or
whether any agent had spoken with Mr. Alvarez. F.B.I. officials would
say only that as a matter of policy they respond to reports of
possible acts of violence anywhere.

But Mr. Alvarez says the F.B.I. showed a studious lack of curiosity
about the bombings. And Mr. Posada, who acknowledged in an interview
that he had directed the operation, said he had no indication that the
F.B.I. was investigating him.

In the interview, Mr. Posada described the F.B.I. agent who had phoned
Mr. Alvarez in Guatemala, Jorge Kiszinski, as "a very good friend"
whom he had known a long time. "He's going to retire this year," said
Mr. Posada.

Mr. Lewis of the F.B.I. said such a friendship between the two men was
implausible. "Agent Kiszinski has had two contacts with him in his
entire life, the last of which was a number of years ago," he said.

Mr. Posada expressed confidence that the F.B.I. was not examining his
operations in Guatemala, because "the first person they would want to
talk to is me, and nobody called." In addition, he said, no one from
the bureau has tried to interview his collaborators. "I would know,"
he said.

Mr. Alvarez, in contrast, has been embittered by his experiences as a
whistle-blower and believes that Mr. Posada has long provided
information to American authorities. "I think they are all in cahoots,
Posada and the F.B.I.," he said. "I risked my life and my business,
and they did nothing."

In his letter alerting Guatemalan authorities to the plot, Mr. Alvarez
wrote that while he opposed the Castro Government and Communism, "I
believe that terrorism is not the way to resolve the Cuban (or any
other) situation."

Mr. Alvarez said Cuban exile politics and plotting were the last thing
on his mind when he first came here in 1996 with hopes of building
electric power plants in rural areas. On the advice of friends, he
hired a fellow Cuban exile who has lived here since 1970, Jose
Francisco (Pepe) Alvarez, to manage a company he had set up. To run
another, he recruited Jose Burgos, a recently retired veteran of the
Guatemalan Army Corps of Engineers who had worked, Mr. Alvarez and Mr.
Posada said, as a bodyguard for the family of a former Guatemalan
president.

In interviews here, both Mr. Burgos and Pepe Alvarez denied any
connection to the hotel bombings, although Pepe Alvarez said he had
known Mr. Posada for 30 years.

"He and I are old now, too old for that sort of thing," Pepe Alvarez
said. "Hell, I'm the same age as Fidel Castro."
 
A Strange Visitor Shakes Things Up


At first, Tony Alvarez said, things seemed to be running smoothly. But
he soon noticed that his partners were spending much of their time
with a strange visitor, a Cuban with a shattered jaw and a strangled
voice "like that of a deaf-mute," giving their guest free rein to make
phone calls from the office to El Salvador, Venezuela, Honduras, Spain
and the United States.

Eventually, Mr. Alvarez said, his partners confided to him that the
visitor was the infamous Luis Posada Carriles, known to his friends by
the ironic nickname Bambi. His other noms de guerre include Solo, in
honor of the dashing spy character in the 1960's television series
"The Man from Uncle," and Lupo, an acronym meaning wolf in Italian. As
events rapidly made clear, Mr. Posada's main interest was not in
making money or helping Guatemala rebuild, but in waging his own
private war on Cuba and Fidel Castro.

At the office one day early last year, Mr. Alvarez recalled, Mr.
Posada came by and handed out "a thick wad of hundred-dollar bills" to
his partners. They, in turn, "were going to an electronics store and
buying detonators and small calculators with timers" of the type that
could be used with bombs, he said.

That was suspicious enough, Mr. Alvarez said. But his biggest surprise
came when he found explosives in an office closet.

"In a plastic bag," he recalled, "they had 23 tubes of stuff made by
the Mexican military industry, supposed to be the latest in explosive
materials in the world. I saw it." In addition to Mr. Posada, two
Guatemalans, whom Mr. Alvarez identified as Marlon Gonzalez and Jorge
Rodriguez, began to frequent the office. Both men were introduced to
him as friends and former army buddies of Mr. Burgos. During a recent
interview, Mr. Posada said they were his bomb makers who joined his
cause because "that was how to make the big bucks."

Efforts to contact the two men here were unsuccessful. Mr. Posada said
he had learned in May that Mr. Gonzalez had been murdered. Asked why
and by whom, he replied: "Who knows? He talked too much."

Mr. Burgos denied that he had ever met either of the two men Mr.
Posada identified as bomb makers; he acknowledged that a previous job
on military road projects had given him access to Guatemalan Army
explosives warehouses.

In April 1997, the first reports of an explosion in the discotheque of
Havana's most fashionable hotel, the Melia Cohiba, were published in
Miami. Those accounts were promptly denied by the Cuban Government,
which relies on tourism as its principal source of hard currency.

Over the next five months, however, nearly a dozen explosions occurred
at hotels, restaurants and discotheques in Havana and the chic beach
resort of Varadero. Cuba was forced to acknowledge the attacks.

All told, Mr. Posada said, it took "maybe a month or two" to organize
the bombings.

Asked how the explosives had been smuggled in, Mr. Posada laughed and
replied: "You know what a circus is? Inside an elephant."

It was a cryptic remark, but perhaps a true one. A Salvadoran arrested
by Cubans and charged in several of the bombings had worked for a
private security agency in El Salvador. According to his mother, one
of his assignments was protecting a Mexican circus that toured Central
America and later traveled to Cuba.

Tony Alvarez said he had overheard talk about another possible
smuggling route. "Posada, Pepe and Jose talked about the success of
the bombs they sent to Cuba," he said. "They also talked about a
senior mechanic who works for Aviateca who travels frequently to Cuba
and who has been helping them." Aviateca, the Guatemalan airline,
flies to Havana.

At another point, he added, his partners offered his secretary "an
all-expenses-paid trip to Cuba in a five-star hotel, in return for
which all she had to do was deliver a package to a certain person who
would come to the hotel to meet her." According to Mr. Alvarez, the
secretary declined, "because she didn't want to be involved in
anything that appeared dishonest or illegal."
 
Intercepting a Fax, And Seeking Help


Then, in August, at the height of the bombing campaign in Cuba, Tony
Alvarez said, he intercepted the fax that Mr. Posada had sent from El
Salvador and signed Solo.

Mr. Posada acknowledged that he had written the document, a copy of
which was obtained by The New York Times from a Venezuelan official.
The fax refers to a problem Mr. Posada had at the time: the reluctance
of American news organizations to take seriously the claims of Miami
exile groups that bombs were going off in Cuba.

"If there is no publicity, the job is useless," the message read. "The
American newspapers publish nothing that has not been confirmed. I
need all the data from the discotheque in order to try to confirm it.
If there is no publicity, there is no payment."

The message also discussed payments for bombings, saying that money
would be "sent by Western Union from New Jersey" to "liquidate the
account for the hotel." The document instructed Pepe Alvarez to
collect electronic transfers of $800 each from four Cuban exiles there.

One, identified in the fax as Abel Hernandez, appears to be the owner
of Mi Bandera (My Flag), a supermarket and restaurant in Union City, a
heavily Cuban-American town just across the Hudson River from
Manhattan. At the restaurant's entrance, one of Mr. Posada's paintings
faces a photograph of Mr. Hernandez arm in arm with Jorge Mas Canosa,
the late founder of the Cuban-American National Foundation.

Mr. Hernandez denied knowing or sending money to Mr. Posada. The other
three men named in the message also live in Union City and belong to
the Union of Former Political Prisoners, an exile group whose members
have served long terms in Mr. Castro's jails and are committed to his
overthrow by any means.

It is not clear whether the money was actually transferred or whether
those named as sending it knew of its purpose. In the interview, Mr.
Posada asked a reporter whether the four men in Union City "could get
in trouble for this."

Mr. Alvarez said the fax so alarmed him that he wrote a letter about
"this horrendous matter" and gave it Guatemalan intelligence.

Mr. Alvarez also recalls overhearing plans for an attack on Mr. Castro
when he was scheduled to visit Guatemala in December 1996 and again at
the meeting in Margarita Island in November 1997.

Venezuela responded to the information with alarm: Mr. Posada had
served as chief of operations for Venezuelan intelligence for seven
years, and in 1976 had been arrested in Caracas on charges of blowing
up a Cuban airliner and killing all 73 persons on board. He spent
nearly nine years in prison there, so he had both the knowledge and
the motive needed to carry out an attack on Mr. Castro on Venezuelan soil.

Mr. Castro attended the meeting without incident in early November,
flying in with a protective convoy of three airplanes. But before his
arrival, more than 250 Venezuelan and Cuban agents combed the luxury
Isla Bonita Hotel, where the gathering was to be held, and the
Government expelled of the Cuban exiles who had flocked to the island
ahead of Mr. Castro.

There was, however, a curious arrest shortly before the summit
meeting: Four men in a boat were stopped by the American Coast Guard
off Puerto Rico. Almost immediately, the leader of the group, Angel
Alfonso Aleman, of Union City, blurted out that he was on a mission to
kill Mr. Castro, according to court testimony by Federal officers.

American law enforcement officials quickly determined that the boat
was registered to a member of the executive board of the
Cuban-American National Foundation. In addition, one of the guns
aboard was traced back to the group's president, according to court
documents.

The trail also led to Union City.

Mr. Alfonso, who spent 18 years in Mr. Castro's prisons, is a past
president of the Union of Former Political Prisoners and a friend of
the four men listed on the fax, group members said.

A group member said Mr. Alfonso told him that "Pepe Alvarez is one of
the names we use to get money to Posada."

For his part, Mr. Posada acknowledged a warm friendship with Mr.
Alfonso, whom he referred to by his nom de guerre, La Cota, which
means the parrot. He said that Mr. Alfonso was a "very good and
dedicated person" and that he had first met him in Miami in 1991. Mr.
Posada denied knowing the four men whose names were on the fax he had
written, saying only that "somebody told me" to expect the money.

Mr. Posada said he had had nothing to do with the Puerto Rico plot,
which he described as amateurish. He expressed surprise that the men
had used weapons registered to a leader of the foundation.

"It doesn't look too professional to do that," he said. "I was
surprised that he talked, that he said, 'I want to kill Castro.' "

Holding an imaginary rifle aloft, he said that if he had been aboard
the boat, he would have told American officials that "those guns were
for shooting birds."
 
A Bomber's Tale
 
Next: Decades of Intrigue. Luis Posada Carriles, the Cuban exile who
talked in a series of interviews about his violent efforts to
overthrow Fidel Castro, tells of a long career as a commando and his
links with the Central Intelligence Agency.


GRAPHIC: Photos: PICKING UP THE PIECES -- Raul Ernesto Cruz Leon,
above, a Salvadoran arrested in several hotel attacks, showing where
he hid explosives in one instance. Workers hauled debris from a Havana
hotel last summer. (Reuters); (Canadian Press)(pg. 10); PROVIDING
EVIDENCE -- An excerpt from the fax that Luis Posada Carriles
acknowledges sending to associates in Guatemala after the hotel
bombing campaign started in Cuba. Mr. Posada was frustrated by
American news organizations' reluctance to report the attacks without
official Cuban acknowledgment that they took place. The excerpt reads
as follows: "If there is no publicity, the job is useless. The
American newspapers don't publish anything that hasn't been confirmed.
I need all the data on the discotheque so I can try to confirm it. If
there is no publicity, there is no payment. I await news today,
tomorrow I will be away for two days. Greetings, Solo"(pg. 11)

LOAD-DATE: July 12, 1998 
----------------------
The Independent (London)

July 13, 1998, Monday

SECTION: NEWS; Page 13

LENGTH: 66 words

HEADLINE: Exile organised bombings in Cuba

BODY:
A CUBAN exile admitted to a series of bombings and assassination
attempts aimed at deposing President Fidel Castro and said his
activities were financed by influential Cuban-American leaders, the
New York Times reported yesterday. Luis Posada Carriles said he
organised a series of bombings in Cuba last year at hotels, discos and
restaurants, killing an Italian tourist in September.



LOAD-DATE: July 13, 1998 
-----------------
Tampa Tribune (Florida)

July 14, 1998, Tuesday, FINAL EDITION

SECTION: NATION/WORLD, Pg. 1

LENGTH: 508 words

HEADLINE: U.S. downplays past ties to rebellious Cuban exile;


BYLINE: A Tribune wire report;

BODY:
WASHINGTON - The State Department distanced itself Monday from a Cuban
exile who contended his  efforts to depose President Fidel Castro's
government by violent means were financed by a  Miami-based group.

Luis Posada Carriles, who once had ties to the Central Intelligence
Agency, told his story in a  series of interviews with The New York Times.

But in a Miami television interview Monday, Posada denied the
newspaper reports, saying he had  never received money from leaders of
the influential Cuban American National Foundation in Miami. 

"I am an independent man. I don't represent the armed wing of any
organization. ... I accept any  and all responsibility for my acts as
a man and as a Cuban," Posada said in the Univision interview  taped
at an undisclosed location.

And Jorge Mas Santos, the son of the foundation's late leader, said at
a news conference Monday  that The Times' reports were untrue.

"My father did not sustain any relationship with Luis Posada. These
attacks are extremely painful  on our family," the younger Mas told a
crowded room of reporters at foundation headquarters in  northwest
Miami-Dade County.

Earlier, U.S. officials also sought to distance Washington from Posada.

"We have not had a relationship with this person in decades," State
Department spokesman James P.  Rubin said. "In general the United
States has repeatedly and strongly condemned violent activities 
carried out against Cuba, allegedly supported by persons or groups
based in the United States."  "The U.S. government has investigated
and will continue to investigate allegations and prosecute  violations
of U.S. law."

Posada told the Times he organized a series of bombings in Cuba last
year at hotels, discos and  restaurants, killing an Italian tourist in
September.

Posada, 70, who was trained in demolition and guerrilla warfare by the
CIA, told the newspaper  the bombings were supported by the
anti-Castro CANF in Miami.

He told The Times that foundation leaders discreetly financed his
operations and that Jorge Mas  Canosa supervised the flow of money and
logistical support.

"Whenever I needed money, (Mas) said to give me $ 5,000, give me $
10,000, give me $ 15,000, and  they sent it to me," Posada was quoted
in The Times.

Mas, the group's founder and leader who died in November, had visited
Presidents Reagan, Bush  and Clinton at the White House and was
involved in Florida and national elections.

In a statement sent to The Associated Press, the foundation called the
allegations "malicious" and  said they echo those made by Castro.

Posada said he left Cuba in 1961, spent six years in the United States
and has lived in a  variety of Caribbean countries since. Asked if Mas
had supervised the delivery of money and the  logistic support for
violent actions in Cuba, he responded: "Never, that is a lie."

Nancy Nielsen, a spokeswoman for The Times, said the articles written
by Ann Louise Bardach and  Larry Rohter speak for themselves. "We
stand by our story."

GRAPHIC: PHOTO(C),
(C) Jorge Mas Santos, son of the Cuban American National Foundation's
late leader, denied the group aided Luis Posada Carriles, who admitted
to the New York Times he organized a series of bombings in Cuba last
year at hotels, discos and restaurants, killing an Italian tourist in
September. AP Photo

LOAD-DATE: July 15, 1998 
----------------

The New York Times

 View Related Topics 

July 14, 1998, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final

SECTION: Section A; Page 7; Column 1; Foreign Desk 

LENGTH: 271 words

HEADLINE: Cuban Exiles Say Times Articles Are Baseless

BYLINE:  By The New York Times 

DATELINE: MIAMI, July 13

BODY:
The Cuban-American National Foundation today dismissed as "baseless" a
series of articles that have appeared in The New York Times in recent
days about ties between leaders of the group and a Cuban exile who has
acknowledged carrying out a series of bombings in Cuba last year. The
foundation said there was "no truth to any of the allegations made in
the story."

At a news conference here this afternoon at which he was flanked by
leaders of the organization, Jorge Mas Jr., a son of the late founder
of the group, described the articles as part of an effort to weaken
the foundation in order to end the American economic embargo against
Cuba. He also questioned whether an interview with the exile commando
leader, Luis Posada Carriles, had taken place at all. 

In an interview with a Spanish-language television station in Miami
today that was later broadcast at the news conference, Mr. Posada
confirmed that he had talked with The Times about his relationship
with the foundation and its leaders. But he denied that foundation
leaders had ever supported him financially or that he served as the
armed wing of the movement.

The Times article said that Mr. Posada agreed to about six hours of
tape-recorded interviews in which he said his efforts were supported
financially for more than a decade by leaders of the foundation.

"I don't represent the armed wing of any exile organization and I
don't belong to the foundation," he said in the television interview.
"I am an independent man, which is why I call myself Solo." He added,
"I make a living from my work, from the sale of my paintings and my
books."

LOAD-DATE: July 14, 1998 
----------------------

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel (Wisconsin)

July 14, 1998 Tuesday Final

SECTION: News Pg. 12

LENGTH: 99 words

HEADLINE: U.S. downplays ties to Cuban exile

SOURCE: Journal Sentinel wire reports

DATELINE: Washington

BODY:
The State Department distanced itself Monday from a Cuban exile who
contended his efforts to depose President Fidel Castro's government by
violent means were financed by a Miami-based group. 

Luis Posada Carriles, who once had ties to the CIA, told his story in
a series of interviews with The New York Times.

"We have not had a relationship with this person in decades," State
Department spokesman James P. Rubin said.

Posada told the Times he organized a series of bombings in Cuba last
year at hotels, discos and restaurants, killing an Italian tourist in
September.





LOAD-DATE: July 15, 1998 

------------------

MIAMI HERALD

July 14, 1998, Tuesday

SECTION: Section A; Page 1, Column 1

LENGTH: 73 words

HEADLINE: EXILE DENIES CANF LEADERS FINANCED ATTACKS ON CUBA

BYLINE: BY ANDRES VIGLUCCI and CHRISTOPHER MARQUIS

JOURNAL-CODE: MH

ABSTRACT:

Cuban exile Luis Posada Carriles denies New York Times report by Larry
Rohter and Ann Louise Bardach that he accepted funds from late Cuban
American National Foundation head Jorge Mas Canosa for anti-Castro
terrorist attacks; Mas's son, Jorge Mas Santos, denies report and
rejects ties between father and Posada; Rohter is ejected from CANF
headquarters in Miami; photo (M)

GRAPHIC: Photograph

LOAD-DATE: August 6, 1998 
------------------
The Boston Globe

July 15, 1998, Wednesday, City Edition

SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE; Pg. A22

LENGTH: 344 words

HEADLINE: US terrorism in Cuba?

BODY:
Dramatic interviews given to The New York Times by the longtime
anti-Castro operative Luis Posada Carriles offered not only a rare
insider's view of the violent twilight struggle of some Cuban exiles
against Fidel Castro but also a glimpse of the contradictions embedded
in Washington's antiterrorism policies.

Posada recounted how he was given financial support by his old friend,
Jorge Mas Canosa, the recently deceased leader of the Cuban-American
National Foundation. Trying to place his version of certain crucial
events on the record, Posada admitted to acts that can only be defined
as terrorist. He affirmed proudly that he was behind last year's bomb
explosions in Cuban hotels, restaurants, and discotheques - operations
intended to frighten tourists away from Cuba. 

Posada's story is important because, like terrorists elsewhere, he did
not operate alone. At different times he was supported by the CIA,
Oliver North's anti-Sandinista operation in the Reagan White House,
the governments of Venezuela, El Salvador, and Guatemala, and Mas
Canosa's influential Miami-based lobbying group.

What Posada has to say about his surreptitious funding from friends in
the Cuban-American National Foundation raises serious questions about
the political role of that group. If their clandestine financing of
Posada were known, would Mas Canosa and his colleagues have had the
clout they exhibited with the administrations of Ronald Reagan, George
Bush, and Bill Clinton?

The links from Posada to Miami to Washington suggest that there is
more than a touch of hypocrisy, or confusion, in the Clinton stance on
terrorism. While a figure like Mas Canosa was able to walk in the
front door of the White House and influence Cuba policy, opposition
movements from Iran, Iraq, Sri Lanka, and elsewhere have been
rejected, defamed, or placed on the State Department's terrorist watch
list. Posada's claims of backing from US shores should be investigated
officially. Americans do not want their government to be complicit
with terrorists of any stripe.

LOAD-DATE: July 15, 1998 

--------------

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Pennsylvania)

 View Related Topics 

July 16, 1998, Thursday, SOONER EDITION

SECTION: EDITORIAL, Pg. A-19

LENGTH: 718 words

HEADLINE: OUR MAN IN CUBA;
THE FBI AND CIA TACITLY APPROVED A TERRORIST

BYLINE: ROBERT SCHEER

BODY:
When is it all right to blow up restaurants and kill tourists?
Anytime, according to Luis Posada Carriles, who masterminded last
year's attacks on Cuba's booming tourist industry, terrorizing disco
dancers and diners alike.

In a startling revelation this week, the 70-year-old Posada revealed
that key Cuban American lobbyists in this country financed his
activities, in apparent violation of U.S. law, while the FBI and CIA
looked the other way.

Once again, history won't keep its mouth shut. Little by little, the
truth comes out, and our policy in Cuba gets exposed for the sham it
is. For almost 40 years, we have isolated Cuba on the assumption that
the tiny island is a center of terrorism in the hemisphere, and year
after year we gain new evidence that it is the United States. that has
terrorized Cuba and not the other way around. 

It's obvious from the Posada interview that terrorism is morally
acceptable not only to Posada, who confessed to many of the bloody
details of his 35 years of sabotage of civilian targets inside Cuba in
a New York Times interview, but also to high U.S. government officials
who trained this international killer and employed him in many
nefarious operations.

The FBI and CIA also suppressed evidence of Posada's connection to the
late Jorge Mas Canosa, the powerful Miami-based anti-Castro lobbyist
whose campaign contributions and political clout with U.S. presidents
has shaped U.S.-Cuba policy for decades.

Mas Canosa died last year, but his organization, the tax-exempt Cuban
American National Foundation, begun in 1981 at the suggestion of the
Reagan administration, continues to be one of the nation's most
powerful lobbying organizations. At a news conference on Monday, Mas
Conosa's son, also named Jorge, denied that the foundation had any
connection with Posada.

Posada first met Mas Canosa when the two men spent seven months being
trained by the CIA in guerrilla warfare and explosives back in the
1960s. While Mas Canosa later concentrated on business activities and
political organizing in Miami, Posada became a full-time terrorist. He
has admitted to many acts of sabotage in Cuba and was arrested by the
Venezuelan government in connection with the 1976 bombing of a Cubana
Airlines civilian flight in which 73 people, including teen-age
members of the Cuban fencing team, were killed.

He protested that he did not order the attack and blamed it on a Cuban
colleague but was held for nine years until a spectacular escape in
1985 in which prison officials admitted being bribed. Posada told the
Times that Mas Canosa and other leaders of the Cuban American National
Foundation paid to get him out of Venezuela.

In any case, soon after the jailbreak, Posada was hired to work on the
illegal Nicaraguan Contra supply operation run out of the White House
by Oliver North.

The plot, in violation of a congressional ban on such activities, was
exposed when one of the planes carrying arms was shot down over
Nicaragua and the pilot ended up identifying Posada as a key link with
the Reagan White House.

Posada alleged in the interview that the FBI agent contacted by
Alvarez was "a very good friend." He added that the FBI never
investigated his operation and added, "As you can see, the FBI and the
CIA don't bother me, and I am neutral with them. Whenever I can help
them I do."

When Posada was asked why he is talking so freely for the first time,
the terrorist reflected on his advanced age and his desire, after the
death of Mas Canosa, to revitalize what he views as a flagging movement.

Whatever his motives, his story, a key piece in this most unsavory
chapter of U.S. history, is too well documented by supporting evidence
- released under the Freedom of Information Act from the files of the
FBI and the CIA to be ignored.

Ironically, the point of Posada's attacks on tourist targets was to
prevent Western businesses from opening Cuba to foreign investment.

Despite the visit of the pope last year and increasing presence of
joint venture capitalism, we continue to treat Cuba as a pariah state
because embittered exiles in Miami have a death hold on U.S. foreign
policy toward the island.

Robert Scheer, a contributing editor at the L.A. Times and The Nation,
is a syndicated columnist (rscheer at a...).

LOAD-DATE: July 24, 1998 
--------------------

MIAMI HERALD

July 16, 1998, Thursday

SECTION: Section A; Page 1, Column 4

LENGTH: 55 words

HEADLINE: PAPER DEFENDS REPORTS ON TERRORIST, FOUNDATION

BYLINE: BY ALFONSO CHARDY and MARTIN MERZER

JOURNAL-CODE: MH

ABSTRACT:

New York Times mounts strong defense of stories linking Cuban American
National Foundation to admitted anti-Castro terrorist Luis Posada
Carriles; Posada held summer 1997 rash of bombings and other
operations targeting Cuban Pres Fidel Castro were financed, in part,
by late Jorge Mas Canosa and other foundation leaders (M)

LOAD-DATE: August 20, 1998 

----------------

St. Petersburg Times (Florida)

 View Related Topics 

July 17, 1998, Friday, 0 South Pinellas Edition

SECTION: NATIONAL; Pg. 2A

LENGTH: 944 words

HEADLINE: Cuban exiles, newspaper battle over bombing articles

BYLINE: DAVID ADAMS

DATELINE: MIAMI

BODY:
 Were prominent Cuban exiles behind a wave of bomb attacks on tourist
hotels  in Havana last year?

Or is the New York Times in the pay of Fidel Castro?

Wild as these allegations may seem, they are the likely subject of a 
monumental lawsuit pitting two of the most powerful institutions in
New York  and Miami.

In one corner, the venerable New York Times, currently in its 147th
year as  America's leading daily newspaper. In the other, the Cuban
American National  Foundation, the powerful Miami-based exile group. 

It was the New York Times that earlier this week published three long
 articles alleging that the plot to plant bombs in Havana was financed
by  leaders of the foundation.

The foundation hit back this week, threatening a lawsuit and accusing
the  paper of mounting a politically motivated campaign to undermine
its  reputation.

The foundation appears embarked on a high-stakes political and legal 
crusade with more than just the truth at stake.

If true, the allegations would add to the lengthening catalog of
scandal  that has deeply embarrassed and discredited some of Miami's
leading  Cuban-American politicians. Ever since the death last year of
its founder,  Jorge Mas Canosa, the foundation has been losing ground
politically in Miami,  as well as in Washington, where it is no longer
held in the political regard  it once enjoyed.

The stories also would provide further evidence of Cuban exile
involvement  in terrorism, and the apparent turning of a blind eye by
U.S. law enforcement  to their activities. According to the New York
Times, FBI officials were  informed of the bomb plot but failed to
take any action to foil the  conspirators.

At a Washington news conference Thursday, CANF leaders announced plans
to  sue the New York Times for libel and slander if it did not retract
allegations  that its members financed the bombing campaign.

"The New York Times slandered, and the New York Times lied," said
Jorge  Mas Jr., who took over as CANF director after the death of his
father.

The New York Times, which is standing by its stories, issued a
four-page  statement Wednesday to correct what it called
"misinformation distributed by  critics."

The allegations stem from a lengthy investigation by the paper of the
 involvement of Luis Posada Carriles, a Cuban exile living
clandestinely in  Guatemala, in acts of terrorism directed against Cuba.

In an interview with two New York Times reporters, Posada said he
organized  last year's wave of a dozen bombings at hotels, restaurants
and discos in  Havana, one of which killed an Italian tourist.

According to that interview, the bombing campaign was supported and 
financed by CANF members, in particular its late founder, Mas Canosa.
Cuban  exiles in New Jersey also contributed directly to the costs of
the bombings,  Posada said.

But in a mysterious twist, Posada has since recanted almost everything
he  told the New York Times, putting his credibility seriously in doubt.

Foundation leaders have blasted the stories as "a piece of garbage," 
questioning both the sources of information and the political motives
of the  reporters, Larry Rohter and Ann Louise Bardach. Rohter is a
24-year veteran  reporter with 14 years at the New York Times; Bardach
is an award-winning  journalist and contributing editor at Vanity Fair.

Domingo Moreira, a senior foundation member, described both reporters
as  having "a political agenda." Rohter, he said, was "a friend of
every  (left-wing) guerrilla" in Central America. "I don't have to
tell you who his  friends are and who he hangs out with." Rohter
actually is viewed unfavorably  by officials in Cuba, but Moreira
said: "He only writes good things about the  Cuban government."

As for Bardach, "Cuba is almost her home and she writes glowing
reports on  Castro," he said. Moreira suggested that Bardach might
have paid Posada to  make allegations against the foundation. "Who
knows what went on there," he  said.

During a news conference Monday, CANF leaders played a videotape of an
 interview with Posada conducted earlier that day by a reporter for
Miami's Ch.  23, the affiliate of Spanish-language Univision. In it
Posada said the New  York Times reporters distorted his words and
"magnified" his comments.

Making matters murkier, the videotape itself is now a source of 
controversy. Neither the foundation nor Univision have been able to 
satisfactorily explain the oddly unprofessional manner in which the
tape was  aired first at a foundation news conference. It later was
shown on Ch. 23.

Some reports have since alleged that Posada's recantation was
manipulated  by the foundation, which may have arranged and
participated in the Ch. 23  interview. One version even suggested that
the Ch. 23 reporter was whisked to  the interview - somewhere in
Central America - aboard a foundation airplane.

"That's impossible," said CANF's Moreira. "There isn't such a thing as
a  foundation airplane." Moreira added that the Mas family does own a
plane but  said it is being refurbished and is for sale.

Foundation officials also have difficulty explaining Posada's motives
for  making the original allegations to the New York Times. On the one
hand, he is  branded as an unreliable source, while on the other
foundation members argue  his recanted version is entirely credible.

In this murky picture one thing is clear: The gloves are off.

"Both Jorge Mas Jr. and his mother are adamant they will not allow his
 memory to be debased," said Moreira. As for the legal costs in
fighting the  case, he said, "Money is no object."

LOAD-DATE: July 17, 1998 

------------------

MIAMI HERALD

July 18, 1998, Saturday

SECTION: Section A; Page 19, Column 1

LENGTH: 35 words

HEADLINE: CUBA

JOURNAL-CODE: MH

ABSTRACT:

Cuban Communist Party paper Granma dedicates front page to controversy
surrounding New York Times interview with Cuban exile Luis Posada
Carriles in connection with terrorist activities (S)

LOAD-DATE: August 24, 1998 

------------------

The Houston Chronicle

 View Related Topics 

July 18, 1998, Saturday 3 STAR EDITION

SECTION: A; Pg. 4

LENGTH: 606 words

HEADLINE: Cuba bomb reports spur wild accusations;
Exiles' group threatens to sue N.Y. Times

BYLINE: DAVID ADAMS

DATELINE: MIAMI

BODY:
MIAMI - Were prominent Cuban exiles behind a wave of bomb attacks on
tourist hotels in Havana last year?

Or is The New York Times in the pay of Fidel Castro?

Wild as these allegations may seem, they are the likely subject of a
lawsuit pitting two powerful institutions in New York and Miami. 

In one corner, the New York Times, in its 147th year as one of the
leading daily newspapers in the United States. In the other, the Cuban
American National Foundation, a powerful Miami-based exile group.

Earlier this week, the Times published three reports alleging a plot
to plant bombs in Havana was financed by foundation leaders.

The exiles hit back this week, threatening a lawsuit and accusing the
paper of mounting a campaign to undermine its reputation.

If true, the allegations would add to scandal that has embarrassed and
discredited some of Miami's Cuban-American politicians. Since last
year's death of its founder, Jorge Mas Canosa, the foundation has lost
ground politically in Miami, as well as in Washington.

The reports also would provide further evidence of Cuban exile
involvement in terrorism, and the apparent turning of a blind eye by
U.S. law enforcement officers. According to The New York Times, FBI
officials were informed of the bomb plot but failed to take action to
foil it.

In Washington on Thursday, CANF leaders announced plans to sue the
Times for libel and slander if it did not retract allegations that its
members financed the plot.

"The New York Times slandered, and The New York Times lied," said
Jorge Mas Jr., who took over as CANF director after his father's death.

The Times, which is standing by its stories, has issued a statement to
correct what it called "misinformation distributed by critics."

The allegations stem from the paper's investigation of involvement of
Luis Posada Carriles, a Cuban exile living clandestinely in Guatemala,
in terrorist acts against Cuba.

Posada told two New York Times reporters that he organized last year's
wave of a dozen bombings at hotels, restaurants and discos in Havana,
one of which killed an Italian tourist.

The bomb plot was supported and financed by CANF members, in
particular its late founder, Mas Canosa, the report said. Cuban exiles
in New Jersey also contributed to the bombings' costs, Posada said.

Posada has since recanted most of what he told the Times, putting his
credibility in doubt.

Foundation leaders have criticized the reports as "a piece of
garbage," questioning the sources and political motives of the
reporters, Larry Rohter and Ann Louise Bardach. Rohter is a 24-year
reporter, with 14 years at the Times; Bardach is an award-winning
journalist and contributing editor at Vanity Fair.

Domingo Moreira, a senior foundation member, said both reporters have
"a political agenda."

CANF leaders have played a videotape of an interview with Posada on
Monday by a reporter for a Miami television station, the affiliate of
Spanish-language Univision. In it, Posada said the Times reporters
distorted and "magnified" his words.

Neither the foundation nor Univision has been able to satisfactorily
explain the unprofessional manner in which the videotape was aired
first at a foundation news conference. It later was shown on television.

Reports have since alleged that Posada's recantation was manipulated
by the foundation, which may have arranged and participated in the TV
interview. A version suggested that the TV reporter was sent to the
interview - at a location in Central America - on a foundation plane.

Moreira said the Mas family owns a plane but said it is being
refurbished and is for sale.



LOAD-DATE: September 8, 1998 
----------------

The Observer

July 19, 1998

SECTION: The Observer News Page; Pg. 27

LENGTH: 1098 words

HEADLINE: 'I'll kill Castro if it's the last thing I do';
America has never given up trying to assassinate the Cuban leader,
says veteran dissident who claims links with the CIA and the FBI

BYLINE: EDWARD HELMORE IN MIAMI

BODY:
THEY TRIED BOMBS, they tried poison, they even tried exploding cigars.
For more than 30 years, Cuba's President Fidel Castro has been a
nagging thorn in America's side, a Communist leader who has outwitted
successive US administrations and the efforts of the powerful Cuban
exile community to topple him.

But, according to an elderly Cuban dissident in hiding in South
America, US -backed attempts to overthrow Castro have never ceased,
despite Washington's protestations to the contrary.

Luis Posada Carriles, 70, a legend among militant Cuban exiles, still
aims to kill Castro. His greatest dread is that his Communist
adversary might survive him. If his story is true, it is an indictment
of both the Cuban American National Foundation, the lobbying group
that has steered America's stated policy to end Cuba's Communist rule
by peaceful means, and of the US government, whose active support of
efforts to overthrow Castro were thought to have ended in the early
Sixties after the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion and five
subsequent CIA-sponsored attempts on Castro's life. 

It appears that the passionately anti-Communist civic leaders of Cuban
America have been pursuing a clandestine foreign policy which has been
overlooked by Washington either wilfully in the interests of political
expediency or due to incompetence.

Posada, from his hideaway thought to be in El Salvador, has led a
shadowy life of armed subversion working for the CIA and the FBI - as
well as for Venezuelan, Salvadorean and Guatemalan intelligence - 'to
fight against the Communists, the people who helped Cuba'.

He is a veteran of the Bay of Pigs, the 1976 bombing of a Cuban
airliner, Oliver North's Iran-Contra operation, numerous assassination
attempts on Castro and a concerted campaign to destabilise the country.

In a series of interviews with the New York Times, he claimed
responsibility for a series of bombings at hotels and nightclubs in
Cuba last summer in which an Italian tourist died and scores more were
injured. He said his activities were directly supported by Jorge Mas
Canosa, founder of the Cuban-American National Foundation, who died
last year. Mas Canosa, a powerful force in Florida and US national
politics by virtue of prodigious donations to parties, maintained
personal friendships with presidents Reagan, Bush and Clinton.

Mas Canosa and the foundation, says Posada, donated more than $
200,000 ( pounds 126,000) to his subversive campaign. 'Jorge
controlled everything. Whenever I needed money, he said to give me $
5,000, give me $ 10,000, give me $ 15,000 - and they sent it to me.'

Posada intimated that the foundation's public policy of non-violent
opposition to Castro was a fiction. When asked if he acted in much the
same way as the IRA does for Sinn Fein, he said, laughing: 'It looks
like that.'

Reports have linked Posada to last summer's bombings. He says US
authorities knew of the plot, but made no effort to question him, a
convenience he attributes to his longstanding relationship with the
intelligence services. 'The FBI and the CIA don't bother me, and I am
neutral with them,' he said. 'Whenever I can help them, I do.'

The CIA denies any relationship with Posada 'in decades'. An FBI
official said the agency 'does not now have, nor have we ever had, a
longstanding relationship with Posada'. But declassified files support
Posada's assertion that both agencies had detailed knowledge of his
operations against Cuba from the early Sixties to mid-Seventies.

Moreover, Antonio Alvarez, a Cuban-American businessman in Guatemala,
says he tipped off Venezuelan security forces and the FBI about a plan
to assassinate Castro at a conference of Latin heads of state in
Venezuela last year. He told them that two of his partners and a man
fitting Posada's description had acquired Mexican military explosives
and detonators. The Venezuelans expelled anti-Castro demonstrators.

Shortly before the meeting, the captain of a boat boarded by the US
Coast Guard off Puerto Rico said he was on a mission to kill Castro.
US agents found the boat was registered to an executive of the
Cuban-American National Foundation, and one of the guns on board was
registered to its current chairman, Abel Hernandez.

But the FBI in Miami showed no interest in Alvarez's information. They
told him his life was in danger and that he should leave Guatemala.
Posada says the agent who called Alvarez was 'a very good friend', a
claim the agency denies. 'I think they are all in cahoots - Posada and
the FBI,' Alvarez said. 'I risked my life and my business and they did
nothing.'

The Cuban government regards Posada as a terrorist and a 'monstrous
criminal' and has often called on the US to rein in his activities. In
Guatemala in 1990, Posada was hit by a dozen bullets, fired, he says,
by Cuban hitmen. The shots shattered his jaw and tore through his
tongue, requiring reconstructive surgery which was paid for by Hernandez.

Yet the New York Times' claim that Mas Canosa and other foundation
leaders funded Posada's terrorist acts has brought threats of legal
action from the organisation. The paper has stood by its story, saying
its account was based on more than 100 different sources in North and
Latin America and FBI files on Posada and Mas Canosa.

'The article is full of lies and we consider it to be false and
defamatory information,' Ninoska Perez Castellon, director at the
foundation's headquarters in Miami said yesterday. 'Posada is not a
credible source, he has contradicted himself on many occasions and he
is a fugitive from justice.'

Posada did contradict himself almost immediately, telling a
Spanish-language television reporter that the Times report was
'completely false' and that neither Mas Canosa nor the foundation
leaders had ever sent money. 'I am an independent man. I don't
represent the armed wing of any organisation,' he said.

But such is the murky world of Cuban-American affairs that when the
foundation produced the tape of the interview on the same day it was
conducted it aroused suspicions of a relationship between the
foundation and Posada, or between the foundation and the Miami
television reporter. Moreover, a spokesman for the station initially
confirmed that a foundation member was present at the interview.

Castellon said: 'Where is the proof? (Posada) could be financed by
friends or the Cuban government because it suits their purpose to
blame the Cuban exile community. He could even have been paid by the
New York Times which has a marked agenda on Cuba.'



LOAD-DATE: July 20, 1998 

---------------
The Washington Post

 View Related Topics 

August 02, 1998, Sunday, Final Edition

SECTION: A SECTION; Pg. A30; WORLD IN BRIEF

LENGTH: 986 words

HEADLINE: WORLD In Brief

BODY:
THE AMERICAS

Castro Dedicates Barbados Memorial

PAYNE'S BAY, Barbados -- Cuban President Fidel Castro honored victims
of the 1976 Cubana Airline bombing yesterday and said one of those
responsible is still organizing terrorist acts against Cuba.

Castro and Barbadian dignitaries gathered in the quiet ocean community
of Payne's Bay, about six miles north of the capital, Bridgetown, to
dedicate a new monument to the 73 victims of Cubana Flight 455. The
DC-8 crashed Oct. 6, 1976 during takeoff from Barbados.

The memorial, an 11-foot granite pyramid, is on a narrow strip of land
on the Caribbean Sea where plane wreckage and victims' bodies washed
ashore 22 years ago. 

Castro said the bombing victims were "cruelly murdered." They were 57
Cubans -- 24 of them members of the national fencing team -- 11
Guyanese students and five North Koreans. Gesturing sharply, Castro
repeated past accusations that four Cuban exiles trained by the CIA
were behind the bombing.

He said one, Luis Posada Carriles, was the architect of last year's
bomb attacks on Havana hotels and "systematic plans of attempts
against the lives of the leaders of the Cuban revolution. And all
these financed by the Cuban American National Foundation [a Miami
exile group] with the unquestionable support and complicity of the
American authorities," he said.

Posada Carriles, along with Cuban exile Orlando Bosch and two others,
were charged in Venezuela with the Cubana bombing. Bosch was tried but
never convicted, while Posada Carriles escaped from jail. The other
two were convicted.
---------------
St. Petersburg Times (Florida)

August 3, 1998, Monday, 0 South Pinellas Edition

SECTION: NATIONAL; Pg. 4A

LENGTH: 698 words

HEADLINE: Castro is cheered in once-hostile Grenada

SOURCE: Compiled from Times Wires

DATELINE: POINT SALINES, Grenada; MIAMI; KIGALI, Rwanda; BEIJING;
DHAKA, Bangladesh; SEOUL, South Korea; DUBAI, United Arab Emirates

BODY:
 Weapons blazing, U.S. troops landed here nearly 15 years ago and
expelled a  militarized Cuban construction brigade that was building
an airport at the tip  of this tiny Caribbean island. On Sunday, Fidel
Castro returned to the site of  that bitter defeat, but as the
recipient of a 21-gun salute and the cheers of  Grenadians.

The visit to Grenada signals Castro's renewed acceptance among former
foes  in the Caribbean and their frustration with Washington's
economic policies.

At the airport, Prime Minister Keith Mitchell, once outspoken against
 Castro, said, "We felt that we owe the Cuban people, especially Fidel
Castro,  a special sense of gratitude for what he did for Grenada in
the building of  this extremely important facility."  
 
Cuban exile says he lied 
 
to protect his backers 
 
   MIAMI - Casting fresh shadows over an already cloudy tale, Cuban
exile Luis  Posada Carriles has claimed he lied to the New York Times
about his ties to  Jorge Mas Canosa to protect the real bankrollers of
his terror attacks.

"I disinformed the New York Times," Posada told journalist Maria
Elvira  Salazar in an interview broadcast Sunday by CBS Telenoticias.
He called the  newspaper "naive" for publishing his words.

The 70-year-old CIA veteran did claim responsibility for a string of 
bombings in Havana last summer that killed an Italian tourist.

Asked by Salazar whom he was protecting, Posada replied, "Do you want
me  to disinform you too?" 
 

LOAD-DATE: August 4, 1998 
----------------

Pittsburgh Post-Gazette (Pennsylvania)

 View Related Topics 

August 3, 1998, Monday, SOONER EDITION

SECTION: WORLD, Pg. A-4

LENGTH: 545 words

HEADLINE: HAVANA BOMBER NOW DENIES CLAIM OF EXILE'S FUNDING

BYLINE: JUAN O. TAMAYO, MIAMI HERALD

DATELINE: MIAMI

BODY:
Casting fresh shadows over an already cloudy tale, Cuban exile Luis
Posada Carriles has claimed he lied to The New York Times about his
ties to Jorge Mas Canosa to protect the real bankrollers of his terror
attacks.

''I disinformed The New York Times,'' Posada told journalist Maria
Elvira Salazar in an interview broadcast yesterday by CBS
Telenoticias. He called the newspaper ''naive'' for publishing his words. 

The 70-year-old CIA veteran did claim responsibility for a string of
bombings in Havana last summer that killed an Italian tourist. The
Miami Herald first linked Posada to those bombings.

New York Times Foreign Editor Andrew Rosenthal said he was satisfied
his newspaper's story quoted Posada correctly, and added that the
story noted that some of his claims could not be independently confirmed.

''He said what he said,'' Rosenthal said. ''And the article . . .
talked in some detail about the limitations of our interview and
pointed out that some of his comments were confirmable and some were
not.''

Posada sparked an uproar last month when The Times quoted him as
saying Mas Canosa, the late chairman of the Cuban American National
Foundation, had ''personally supervised'' the money and logistical
support he received for terror attacks on Cuba.

Posada first disavowed his comments one day after the Times story in a
brief interview with a reporter from the Miami Spanish-language TV
station Channel 23 that raised more questions than it answered.

He was much more expansive in his three-hour interview with Salazar,
who hosts a public affairs program called ''Opposite Poles.'' She will
broadcast other parts of the interview in coming days.

Posada told Salazar he had lied to The Times because its reporters
seemed to be on the trail of the real sources of the financing for his
terror attacks on President Fidel Castro's regime.

''If you're working on intelligence or clandestine things, when you
see that the blame or the weight of the information is about to hurt
someone, you divert that information toward a person who cannot be
hurt,'' he said.

''Jorge Mas was dead, and he could not be hurt by any legal action . .
. for having helped the Cuban cause,'' he said. The Times, he added,
should not have published his comments on Mas Canosa based on his
words alone.

Asked by Salazar whom he was protecting, Posada replied, ''Do you want
me to disinform you too?''

Posada also claimed the newspaper misquoted him ''either because of
errors or malice,'' in reporting that he had claimed to have received
money for terror operations from other foundation officials.

''Never have they given me money for subversive actions. Only for my
personal expenses,'' he said. Posada's autobiography thanks two
foundation officials for helping to pay his medical bills after he
survived an assassination attempt in Guatemala in 1990.

Posada also claimed that Ann Louise Bardach, who interviewed him for
The Times, had promised to write a ''favorable'' story about him and
the armed anti-Castro struggle.
 
Concluding the interview, Posada claimed that he is in contact with
dissatisfied military officers inside Cuba, mostly colonels, and is
planning ''sabotage'' attacks against Castro's regime in the near future.

LOAD-DATE: August 4, 1998 
------------
MIAMI HERALD

August 3, 1998, Monday

SECTION: Section A; Page 13, Column 1

LENGTH: 57 words

HEADLINE: INVESTIGATE POSADA'S STATEMENTS

BYLINE: BY SAUL LAUDAU

JOURNAL-CODE: MH

ABSTRACT:

Viewpoints article by California State Polytechnic University Hugh O
La Bounty chair Saul Landau urges investigation of statements by Cuban
exile Luis Posada Carilles, which he has since said he exaggerated,
that Cuban American National Foundation helped finance his terrorist
activities (M)

LOAD-DATE: September 3, 1998 
--------------
MIAMI HERALD

August 3, 1998, Monday

SECTION: Section A; Page 1, Column 2

LENGTH: 63 words

HEADLINE: EXILE: I LIED ABOUT ATTACK BACKERS

BYLINE: BY JUAN O TAMAYO

JOURNAL-CODE: MH

ABSTRACT:

Cuban exile Luis Posada Carriles claims he lied to New York Times
about his ties to late Cuban American National Foundation founder
Jorge Mas Canosa to protect those funding his terror attacks; claims
responsibility for string of bombings in Havana; Times Foreign Editor
Andrew Rosenthal says paper quoted Posada correctly (M)

LOAD-DATE: September 3, 1998 
----------------
Buffalo News (New York)

August 3, 1998, Monday, CITY EDITION

SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE, Pg. 2B

LENGTH: 404 words

HEADLINE: U.S. SHOULD PROBE ANTI-CASTRO TERRORISM

BODY:
Lengthy reports about a Miami-based anti-Castro group's backing of
efforts to oust the Cuban leader at all costs -- including the use of
terrorist bombings -- are as murky as the U.S.-Cuba relationship itself.

That's why federal officials need to get to the bottom of whether --
and to what degree -- both the controversial Cuban-American National
Foundation and U.S. operatives may have been involved in efforts to
topple Castro and sabotage Cuba's tourism industry with a series of
explosions.

The bombings last year at popular Cuban hotels, restaurants and
discotheques killed an Italian tourist and alarmed the
tourism-dependent Cuban government. 

Now Louis Posada Carriles, a shadowy Castro-hater schooled in
terrorism by the CIA in the 1960s, has told the New York Times that he
orchestrated the bombings and is plotting other efforts to oust Castro.

More alarmingly, Posada claimed he has carried out his campaign of
terror with financial help -- and a wink and a nod -- from current and
past leaders of the CANF.

Foundation leaders refused to be interviewed for the Times story but
later vigorously denied the allegations. And Pasada himself has
backtracked since his story hit print.

But the account, based on lengthy tape-recorded interviews, interviews
with other principals and reviews of recently-declassified government
documents, raises serious new questions about both the foundation and
Washington's relationship with the anti-Castro movement.

The CANF -- a powerful Florida political force in a key electoral
state -has long had the ear of both Republican and Democratic
presidents when it comes to U.S. policy toward Cuba. Its intransigence
is one factor behind the foolish Helms-Burton Cuba sanctions law.

The foundation has portrayed itself as committed only to peaceful
means of removing Castro. But if its leaders have been secretly
funding terrorist activities, it would violate American laws. The
foundation also might have violated IRS law pertaining to its
tax-exempt status. And if CIA and FBI agents have been giving
operatives like Posada free rein to organize such activities, it
violates U.S. principles -- at the very least.

Given U.S. history with Cuba -- from the disastrous Bay of Pigs
initiative right up to Washington's lonely but obsessive quest to
punish Havana today -Posada's accounts have to be taken seriously by
the Justice Department as well as Congress.

LOAD-DATE: August 5, 1998 

---------------------
The Ottawa Citizen

August 4, 1998, Tuesday, FINAL EDITION

SECTION: NEWS; Pg. A7

LENGTH: 251 words

HEADLINE: Cuban exile lied about funding of anti-Castro bomb campaign

BYLINE: THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

DATELINE: MIAMI

BODY:
A militant Cuban exile said he lied to The New York Times when he told
the newspaper that an influential exile group financed a bombing
campaign against Fidel Castro.

"I disinformed The New York Times," Luis Posada Carriles said in an
interview broadcast Sunday by CBS Telenoticias, a Spanish language
news station owned by CBS. The Miami Herald reported details of the
broadcast yesterday.

Mr. Posada said the Times should not have printed his comments about
the Cuban American National Foundation and its late chairman Jorge Mas
Canosa.

Mr. Posada said he was trying to protect the identities of those who
actually helped him pay for and plan the terrorist attacks because
Times reporters seemed close to discovering them.

He wanted to divert attention "toward a person who cannot be hurt," he
said, namely Mr. Mas, who had died.

Times Foreign Editor Andrew Rosenthal said he was satisfied the
newspaper quoted Mr. Posada correctly. Mr. Rosenthal added the report
noted that some of Mr. Posada's claims could not be independently
confirmed.

In the television interview, Mr. Posada said he lied to the Times
about who financed last year's bombings at Cuban luxury hotels,
restaurants and discos.

One of the blasts killed an Italian tourist in September.

Foundation spokeswoman Ninoska Perez said the foundation and Mr. Mas,
who died in November, have been "vindicated" by Mr. Posada's comments.

"We said all along that this man was not a credible source," Ms. Perez
said.





LOAD-DATE: August 5, 1998 
--------------

The New York Times

 View Related Topics 

August 4, 1998, Tuesday, Late Edition - Final

SECTION: Section A; Page 7; Column 1; Foreign Desk 

LENGTH: 930 words

HEADLINE: Cuban Exile Says He Lied to Times About Financial Support

BODY:
A Cuban exile who conducted violent operations against the Cuban
Government has asserted that he deliberately misinformed The New York
Times when he said in a series of interviews that leaders of the most
influential exile organization in the United States had provided him
with financial support.

On Sunday night, a cable news network with headquarters in Miami
broadcast excerpts from an interview in which the Cuban exile, Luis
Posada Carriles, said he had lied because The Times had information
about financial backers in the United States whom he wished to
protect. He said he had misdirected the newspaper by asserting that he
had received money from Jorge Mas Canosa, who until his death in
November was the chairman of the Cuban-American National Foundation. 

"The newspaper had a lot of information about people that could be
adversely affected, people that were alive, that could get into
Federal problems," Mr. Posada said in the interview with CBS
Telenoticias, a Spanish-language station. The interview was conducted
in Spanish and translated by The Times.

Bill Keller, the managing editor of The Times. said: "We can't say
what pressures Mr. Posada may have felt to change his story, or what
second thoughts he may have had after seeing the furious reaction
among anti-Castro Cubans, or even what motivated him to give us the
interview in the first place. As we made clear in the original
articles, he is a tricky character who lives in a shadowy world. We
presented him as an interesting figure from history, not a paragon of
truth and virtue."

"What we can say with confidence is that he said the things we
quoted," Mr. Keller added. "We can say that some of what he said --
including the fact that he had a longstanding relationship with Mr.
Mas -- was corroborated by other interviews and documents. And where
we could not corroborate his claims, we said so."

The Sunday night broadcast was the second interview with Mr. Posada
that has been aired in Miami since The Times published three articles
about his activities and his ties with Mr. Mas. Immediately after The
Times articles were published last month, the Cuban-American National
Foundation called a news conference to condemn the articles and showed
a videotaped interview with Mr. Posada in which he said the articles
were lies. In that interview, conducted by a Spanish-language
television station in Miami, Mr. Posada asserted that The Times had
misquoted him.

The Times quoted Mr. Posada as saying that over the years, Mr. Mas and
other leaders of the National Foundation had sent him more than
$200,000. Mr. Posada admitted he had been responsible for a number of
violent acts, including several attempts on the life of Fidel Castro
and the bombing of hotels last year in Cuba.

Mr. Posada was quoted in The Times as saying that all payments were
made in cash and that he did not know whether the money came from
personal, business or foundation accounts. He said the money was used
for his living and operating expenses. He said that Mr. Mas did not
want to know the details of Mr. Posada's activities and that he did
not tell him.

In tracing the relationship between Mr. Mas and Mr. Posada, The Times
drew on recently declassified Government documents, including a 1965
Central Intelligence Agency cablegram asserting that Mr. Mas paid Mr.
Posada $5,000 to place mines in a Cuban or Soviet vessel in a Mexican
harbor. The articles also included a deposition by Mr. Mas's brother,
Ricardo Mas, who said his brother had used the money to pay for Mr.
Posada's escape from jail and his transportation from Venezuela to
Central America.

In his most recent interview, Mr. Posada said all of his comments
about the foundation and Mr. Mas were deliberate pieces of
disinformation intended to lead The Times away from his true sources
of financing in the United States.

The Times asked Mr. Posada several times in the interviews about a
document that indicated he was receiving money for the hotel bombings
from four Cuban-Americans in Union City, N.J., one of them a member of
the foundation with close ties to its leaders in Miami. He confirmed
the authenticity of the document but declined to explain it.

In the television interview on Sunday, Mr. Posada said it had been "15
years, 12 years since I last had contact with Jorge Mas."

A week earlier, Mr. Posada said it had been 8 to 10 years since he had
contact with Mr. Mas. He told The Times that they had last spoken
about a month before Mr. Mas's death in 1997.

In the most recent interview, Mr. Posada was asked if the foundation
had sent him money to finance subversive actions. "They have never
sent me any to finance subversive acts, never given me money to pay my
expenses, not for any other type of activities," he replied.

The Times article did not say the foundation itself had given money to
Mr. Posada.

In his autobiography, published in 1994, however, Mr. Posada wrote
that foundation leaders had helped pay his medical and living expenses
and transportation from Venezuela to Central America after he escaped
from jail in 1985. Mr. Posada told The Times that Mr. Mas had
coordinated the flow of money to him.

Ricardo Mas said in the deposition that his brother had paid for Mr.
Posada's escape from jail after he was arrested for bombing a Cubana
airliner in 1976, killing 73 people. Mr. Mas testified that his
brother had said "he needed me to go down and bring back $50,000, that
it would be used to get Luis Posada Carriles out of jail, that
Carriles wanted out, that he might start talking."
      

LOAD-DATE: August 4, 1998 
---------------
MIAMI HERALD

August 4, 1998, Tuesday

SECTION: Section B; Page 1, Column 1

LENGTH: 52 words

HEADLINE: PRESS STUMBLES ON CREDIBILITY

BYLINE: BY ROBERT L STEINBACK

JOURNAL-CODE: MH

ABSTRACT:

Robert Steinback column on recent instances in which the press
mishandled information says it is partly vindicated by Cuban exile
Luis Posada Carriles' assertion that he deliberately misled New York
Times reporters about link to Cuban American National Foundation (M)

LOAD-DATE: September 4, 1998 

------------------
MIAMI HERALD

August 4, 1998, Tuesday

SECTION: Section A; Page 8, Column 1

LENGTH: 31 words

HEADLINE: PLOTS AND DISINFORMATION

JOURNAL-CODE: MH

ABSTRACT:

Editorial on question of whether Cuban exile Luis Posada Carrile told
truth in claiming that Jorge Mas Canosa helped finance his terrorist
bombings of Cuban hotels

LOAD-DATE: September 4, 1998 
-------------
St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri)

August 9, 1998, Sunday, FIVE STAR LIFT EDITION

SECTION: NEWS, Pg. A8

LENGTH: 219 words

HEADLINE: CUBAN EXILE HAD PLANNED TO KILL CASTRO, PAPER SAYS

BYLINE: Knight Ridder Newspapers

DATELINE: MIAMI

BODY:
A Cuban exile implicated in several terror attacks was plotting to
assassinate Fidel Castro during the Cuban president's visit to the
Dominican Republic next week, the Miami Herald said in its Saturday
edition.

The newspaper, quoting three Miami exiles and two U.S. law enforcement
officials, said Luis Posada Carriles, a lifelong anti-Castro militant,
and three Miami exiles met at the Holiday Inn in Guatemala City last
month to discuss the alleged assassination plot. 

It said the group discussed how to smuggle guns and explosives into
Santo Domingo for the assassination during Castro's visit there Aug.
20-25 for a summit of Caribbean leaders.

The paper said the plot was scrapped following an FBI investigation.
It said FBI agents conducted a search last month of a shipping complex
owned by Enrique Bassas. He reportedly is one of those who met with
Posada.

It said the FBI had been told by an informer that guns and explosives
for anti-Castro activities were hidden aboard a boat at the complex.
The H erald said no weapons were found during the search and no
arrests were made.

Dominican security officials immediately went on alert and "urged" two
Cuban exiles living there, both close friends of Posada, to leave the
country during Castro's visit, two Miami exiles told the newspaper.

LOAD-DATE: August 9, 1998 


-------------

MIAMI HERALD

August 9, 1998, Sunday

SECTION: Section A; Page 1, Column 4

LENGTH: 56 words

HEADLINE: PLOT TO KILL CASTRO IN DOMINICAN IS EXPOSED

BYLINE: BY JUAN O TAMAYO

JOURNAL-CODE: MH

ABSTRACT:

FBI agents searching shipping complex reveal that Luis Posada
Carriles, Cuban exile and lifelong anti-Castro militant already
implicated in several terror attacks, was plotting, with three Miami
exiles, to assassinate Pres Fidel Castro during upcoming visit to
Dominican Republic; photos (M)

GRAPHIC: Photograph

LOAD-DATE: September 11, 1998 

----------------

The New York Times

 View Related Topics 

August 16, 1998, Sunday, Late Edition - Final

SECTION: Section 1; Page 2; Column 5; Metropolitan Desk 

LENGTH: 185 words

HEADLINE: Editors' Note

BODY:
A front-page article on July 12 reported a series of interviews with
Luis Posada Carriles, a Cuban exile who told of having waged a
campaign of violence aimed at toppling Fidel Castro. Mr. Posada was
quoted as saying his operations had been financed for years by Jorge
Mas Canosa and other leaders of an influential American lobbying
group, the Cuban-American National Foundation.

Because of an editing oversight, one sentence reported that Mr. Posada
said the Cuban-American leaders had "supported" a series of hotel
bombings in Cuba. The wording was not intended to mean that Mr. Posada
said the foundation leaders had paid specifically for the hotel bombings.

In the interviews, Mr. Posada acknowledged having organized the
bombing campaign. He also noted that leaders of the foundation had
publicly expressed support for the bombings, which they characterized
as an act of internal rebellion. But, as was made clear elsewhere in
the article, Mr. Posada said Mr. Mas and other leaders of the
foundation did not earmark money for specific operations, and asked
not to be told how he used their funds.

LOAD-DATE: August 16, 1998 


--------------

MIAMI HERALD

August 17, 1998, Monday

SECTION: Section A; Page 6, Column 2

LENGTH: 38 words

HEADLINE: N.Y. TIMES ADMITS ERROR IN EXILE STORY

JOURNAL-CODE: MH

ABSTRACT:

New York Times admits it erred in reporting that Cuban exile Luis
Posada Carriles claimed that Jorge Mas Canosa and other exile leaders
supported his 1997 terrorist bombings of Havana hotels; photo (M)

GRAPHIC: Photograph

LOAD-DATE: September 23, 1998 
------------
MIAMI HERALD

August 18, 1998, Tuesday

SECTION: Section A; Page 10, Column 3

LENGTH: 41 words

HEADLINE: NO ERROR, JUST CLARIFICATION, TIMES SAYS

BYLINE: BY BILL KELLER

JOURNAL-CODE: MH

ABSTRACT:

Letter from New York Times managing editor Bill Keller disputes Miami
Herald's and other newspapers' version of its stories about Cuban
exile Luis Posada Carriles' links to Cuban American National Foundation

LOAD-DATE: September 24, 1998 
------------
The Times

August 20, 1998, Thursday

SECTION: Features

LENGTH: 1703 words

HEADLINE: Will Cuba cry for Castro?

BYLINE: Barry Wigmore

BODY:
A nation is bracing itself for Castro's death. Barry Wigmore reports
from Havana

1The FBI has foiled a plot by Cuban exiles in Miami to assassinate
72-year-old Fidel Castro. The plan - masterminded by a Cuban exile,
Luis Posada Carriles, and three Miami exiles - was to smuggle guns and
explosives into Santa Domingo and then bring in a "hit team". They
intended to kill Castro during a five-day Caribbean summit in the
Dominican Republic which begins today.

But last month FBI agents searched a shipping complex after a tip that
guns and explosives for anti-Castro acts were hidden there. A week
earlier, the US Embassy in the Dominican Republic warned about threats
against aircraft flying between Santo Domingo and Cuba. Dominican
security officials "urged" two Cubans living there to leave. 

The US seems content to let nature take its course, fearing a
bloodbath if Castro is killed. Everyone agrees the US has plans when
he does die. Some observers fear war in the Caribbean. What do Cubans
think? And how do they survive eight years after the Soviet Union's
collapse?

The man looked hot, old and exhausted as he stumbled behind the single
blade of the ox plough. He had cut the heavy soil once, now he was
going back to try to break up the lumps. The plough bucked as he
fought to hold it straight. It was 6.30pm but the sun was still hot.
The man had toiled in the field for nearly eight hours. He wore heavy
leather boots, thick blue cotton trousers and a shirt stained almost
black by his sweat. A red baseball cap was twisted down the side of
his face to protect him from sunburn. When he stopped and removed it
to talk, he was young and handsome with a quick smile, strong white
teeth, and a Clark Gable moustache. In Hollywood, he could be in the
movies.

Guillermo Perejiago, 30, is an electrical engineer. In Cuba he earns
more as a farm labourer. Both are state jobs paying the same 200 pesos
(Pounds 6.25) a month, but on the farm he can save a little milk to
make cheese, which he sells for dollars in one of the new free markets.

Today Cuba, the once affluent and sophisticated island of Ernest
Hemingway, Al Capone, cigars and casinos, is famed for 40-year-old
American cars with chrome and big fins and its air of decaying
mystery. Beautiful Spanish architecture and worn-out roads crumble
away. Ox ploughs till the fields because there is no fuel for
tractors. Three-hour queues wait for the low-loader lorries which have
been converted into buses and nicknamed camels. They belch black smoke
and carry 300 passengers at a time.

Before Castro and Che Guevara it was a land of haves and have-nots.
Now it has levelled out; everyone has a little. For some, especially
the young, that is not enough.

"Castro is sick. Castro is dead" - black propaganda flies from
thousands of Cuban exiles 200 miles away in Miami's Little Havana. No
man has more people on his doorstep plotting his death. In Cuba, too,
they moan. "I had a friend who named his oxen Castro and Liar," says
another farm worker, chuckling. "As he ploughed he called to them,
Castro-Liar! Castro-Liar'!" But that is only half the story.

Fidel Castro Ruz took power in February 1959, after leading a two-year
guerrilla war with Che Guevara against the dictator General Fulgencio
Batista. Castro immediately seized all property and businesses, mostly
US-owned, and moved his country towards hardline communism. He was
mischievously - and terrifyingly - supported by the Soviet Union,
notably during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis when the world was
brought to the brink of nuclear war.

"Cuba will never bow to the Yankee dollar," the young rebel leader
ranted. Today, 60 miles east of Havana, on the long white sands of the
tourist resort of Varadero, the dollar has arrived. Not straight from
America, but via Spain, Canada and Mexico. When the Berlin Wall
tumbled, Cuba's false economy collapsed. It had been based on buying
Russian oil at one-tenth the world price, and selling Moscow Cuban
sugar at three times the market value.

Four years ago Castro was forced to embrace the dollar and open his
country to tourism, with a "parallel economy", allowing Cubans to own
dollars and sell food at market price. Until then anyone caught with a
greenback went to jail for two years.

America turned the screw on its economic blockade. US tourists and
companies had been banned for years. Now foreign companies were
threatened: trade with Cuba or America, not both. Led by Canada, they
gave President Clinton the finger.

Soon Varadero will be like the Costa del Sol. New hotels are springing
up. Tourists - "walking dollars" - are pouring in: one million this
year; two million by 2000, mostly Spanish, Mexicans and Canadians.
Cut-price Cuba is enormously attractive. Castro still gives his famous
five-hour speeches, castigating imperialist America and the Yankee
dollar. On the streets everyone is chasing it.

"Until four weeks ago I was teaching doctors English at the university
so they could read the latest medical literature on Aids," says our
taxi driver. "I quit to drive a Turistaxi because my tips in one day
are more than I was earning in a month."

Cuban salaries are paid by the Government in pesos. Manual workers,
electricians, police and the like get 200 pesos (Pounds 9.40) a month;
brain surgeons 350 pesos (Pounds 12.50). Almost everyone lives
rent-free, and under the old, subsidised system it was not as bad as
it sounds. But there is a widening rift between those in and out of
the dollar economy. A Cuban joke goes: "I thought he was a hotel
porter - but he's only a doctor."

A big queue had formed at the ration shop in Camilo Cienfuegos, a
suburb six miles from Havana. Every community has one to eke out
supplies from inefficient state farms. Here a rare delivery of chicken
had arrived. The clean but shabby shop was on the ground floor of an
ugly Russian apartment block. Sacks of flour and rice were piled
waist-high. A small wire-shelf display showed one pack of cigarettes
for 10 centavos, or one third of a penny (there are 32 pesos to the
pound and the Cuban cent is about one-thirtieth of a penny). Salt was
10 centavos for a pound. Crude sugar 8 centavos a pound. In a land of
fried food, a litre of cooking oil costs one-fifth of a month's
salary. Some people, especially the elderly, keep pigs or chickens in
pens on apartment balconies for occasional fresh meat. Women queued at
the door to have the week's allocation ticked off in their ration
books. Inside they queued again. There was an angry commotion from
elderly communists as the photographer's flash went off. "Make sure
you say healthy children play happily in the street," said the local
Ena Sharples.

Rogelio Serrano, 44, waited in the queue. Before the revolution he
lived in London where his father was a diplomat. Now Rogelio has a
small three-room apartment. What of Cuba after Castro? "You have to
remember," he says, "that this was a popular revolution - 97 per cent
of the population backed Castro. Many still do, especially the old.
Poor as they are, they are better off now than before.

"Castro has prepared a lot of people to maintain this if something
happens to him. But they are a committee. When the strong-man goes,
they will disintegrate. There will be big change. In which way? No one
agrees. But the people will suffer. There is fear in the air. Fear of
change. Fear of Miami. Everything here is equal now. If the Miami
Cubans return demanding their property back, there will be a very big
civil war." Apart from the war bit, most Western diplomats agree.

While people want to cling to what they have, many, especially the
young, want freedom as well. Castro's drive for free healthcare and
high-quality education have created a restless generation looking over
the horizon. Theirs is the new view.

"I want to travel," says Maria Junco, an attractive 25-year-old
working in tourism. "I want to go to America. But to get a passport
and the right papers you need dollars." Graciella Gonzales has a
fistful of dollars. She sits on a doorstep near a small, battered bar
near the Havana Cathedral. La Bodeguita del Medio is on the tourists'
"Hemingway trail". Here he drank mojitas - rum cocktails. Graciella is
75, a riot of colour in orange blouse, yellow, pink and green tights,
with hair to match. She chews a huge cigar and charges tourists a
dollar to take her photo.

In Cathedral Square, at night, a shabby, graceful cobblestoned plaza
with a museum and bustling pavement restaurant, attractive young women
in miniskirts work as "horsewomen". Prostitution is another new
tourist industry, a quick way to dollars for university graduates.

Seven miles west of Havana in the fishing village of Cojimar, an old
man sits in a rocking chair. Nearly 50 years ago, Hemingway wrote:
"Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same
colour as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated." Hemingway's
friend and fishing companion, Capitan Gregorio Fuentes, was the model
for The Old Man and the Sea. He is 101 now and lives with his daughter
in a little white bungalow close to the bar where the writer drank rum
daiquiris. The Capitan supplements his $ 3-a-month pension with $
200-an-hour interviews for Japanese TV.

The face is scarred by the sun and he leans on a crutch, but those
eyes are still bright and so is his mind. Sitting beneath a painting
of him with Hemingway and the fishing boat, Pilar, in which they
patrolled the Caribbean for U-boats, he fills a battered pipe with
great chunks of tobacco from a large cigar box.

His is the old view. "I have known four Presidents," he says. "Fidel!
Haaa! He is the only good President we have had here. Because even in
the wars he has taken care of the children and the old."

His alarmed daughter rushes in: "Please. No politics," she says. The
old man ignores her. "In the beginning a lot of people won. But now a
lot of people are losing because of the American blockade," he says
angrily. "The only thing I know is that we will have a war against the
US. Everybody will be against the US. After this war the US will
become Little Havana!" The eyes gleam triumphantly.



LOAD-DATE: August 20, 1998 
------------

The Independent (London)

August 26, 1998, Wednesday

SECTION: NEWS; Page 14

LENGTH: 652 words

HEADLINE: Castro tricks ever-present death squads

BYLINE: Phil Davison Latin America Correspondent

BODY:
WHEN FIDEL CASTRO arrived in the Dominican Republic for a Caribbean
summit last weekend he flew in, as always, on one of two identical
Tupolev airliners. That way, anyone trying to blow him up would have
only a 50- 50 chance of doing so. Two Dominican fighter planes
escorted the Tupolevs.

The Cuban leader drove into Santo Domingo in one of three identical
black limousines, for the same reason. A helicopter followed and a
patrol boat steamed alongside the coastal road. As Mr Castro put it in
a speech on Monday, he probably holds the world record for
assassination attempts against him. But he has survived to celebrate
his 72nd birthday this month and looks likely to celebrate 40 years in
power on New Year's Day. It used to be the CIA that tried to eliminate
him, with everything from an exploding cigar to a spiked milkshake.
More recently, he has been targeted by Miami-based Cuban exiles. 

The Jaragua hotel in Santo Domingo, where Mr Castro stayed, surrounded
by 100 of his security men on one floor, reported receiving dozens of
calls or faxes threatening to kill its most famous guest. Most
appeared to come from Miami.

The Dominican Republic took the calls with a pinch of salt, but there
were other reports that it took more seriously. Visitors of Cuban
origin were screened before Mr Castro arrived. A Cuban-born man with a
Spanish passport was arrested after being found with a notebook
containing details of Mr Castro's travel plans. Police said they did
not have enough evidence to suggest he was plotting to kill Mr Castro,
but the man would be deported.

This month The Miami Herald said a well-known Cuban exile, Luis Posada
Carriles, was planning to kill Mr Castro during his visit to the
Dominican Republic. Mr Posada, 68, was accused of being behind the
explosion of a Cuban airliner near Barbados in 1976 in which 73 people
died. He spent 10 years in jail. He also led a team of Cuban exiles
who planned to kill Mr Castro on a visit to Colombia four years ago,
and tried to blow up a Cuban freighter in Honduras in 1993.

Mr Posada said he had masterminded bombings around Havana last year
aimed at scaring off tourists. He said he used Guatemalan tourists to
smuggle in plastic explosives in nappies, shampoo bottles and shoes.
Initially, Mr Posada told The New York Times, the most influential
Cuban exile lobby group, the Miami-based Cuban American National
Foundation (CANF) had financed the Havana bombings. Later, however, he
said he had deliberately "disinformed" the newspaper to protect the
identities of his real backers.

Two CANF leaders are expected to be indicted this week in connection
with another alleged plot to kill Mr Castro, while the Cuban leader
attended a summit on the Venezuelan island of Margarita last November.
Before the summit, a US Coast Guard vessel stopped a cabin cruiser off
Puerto Rico and found two sniper rifles, ammunition, uniforms and
military equipment. One of the four Miami-based Cuban exiles on board
said they were planning to kill Mr Castro on Margarita.

Investigations disclosed that one of the rifles belonged to Francisco
"Pepe" Hernandez, the CANF president, and that the cruiser was
registered to another CANF executive, Jose Antonio Llama. Their
lawyers say they are likely to be indicted this week in Puerto Rico,
that they acknowledge ownership of the rifle and boat but were not
involved in any plot to kill Mr Castro.

As for the bearded leader himself, he proved he was very much alive in
the speech on Monday to students in Santo Domingo that lasted almost
as long as four football matches. Joking, to applause, about the
assassination plots, he said: "Men die but people are immortal. There
are often reports that Castro's time is running out. But the fools and
idiots don't realise that's not what's important. What value would the
revolution have if it depended only on a Castro?"



LOAD-DATE: August 26, 1998 

-----------------
MIAMI HERALD

September 30, 1998, Wednesday

SECTION: Section A; Page 1, Column 2

LENGTH: 52 words

HEADLINE: US URGES CLAMPDOWN ON CUBAN EXILE'S TERRORIST ACTIONS

BYLINE: BY JUAN O TAMAYO and GLENN GARVIN

JOURNAL-CODE: MH

ABSTRACT:

Washington has ordered its diplomats and CIA officials in Central
America to prod their host countries to clamp down on Cuban exile Luis
Posada Carriles, who is accused of terrorist attacks on Havana;
Posada, accused in the 1976 bombing of a Cuban jetliner, has lived
openly in Central America for 13 years (M)

GRAPHIC: Photograph

LOAD-DATE: March 10, 1999 
---------------

MIAMI HERALD

October 27, 1998, Tuesday

SECTION: Section A; Page 5, Column 1

LENGTH: 35 words

HEADLINE: CUBA BOMBING SUSPECT NOT POLITICAL, SALVADORANS SAY

BYLINE: BY JUAN O TAMAYO

JOURNAL-CODE: MH

ABSTRACT:

Salvadoran officials say Otto Rene Rodriguez Llereno, arrested in
Havana in string of bombings allegedly masterminded by Cuban exile
Luis Posada Carriles, had no known political leanings (M)

LOAD-DATE: January 7, 1999 
-----------------

The New York Times

 View Related Topics 

October 30, 1998, Friday, Late Edition - Final

SECTION: Section A; Page 3; Column 4; Foreign Desk 

LENGTH: 84 words

HEADLINE: Cuba Charges 4 in Attacks

BYLINE:  By The New York Times 

DATELINE: MIAMI, Oct. 29

BODY:
Four Central Americans held in Cuba have been charged in a bombing
campaign that began last year, the Cuban Government announced today.
It contended that a Cuban exile had recruited the suspects. The
Interior Ministry said in Havana that a Salvadoran and three
Guatemalans were intercepted trying to smuggle explosives into the
island. All four, the note maintained, were deployed by Luis Posada
Carriles, an exile whom the Communist Government of Fidel Castro
regards as its most relentless enemy.

LOAD-DATE: October 30, 1998 


------------------
The New York Times

 View Related Topics 

January 15, 1999, Friday, Late Edition - Final
Correction Appended

SECTION: Section A;Page 8;Column 1;Foreign Desk

LENGTH: 2297 words

HEADLINE: Plot to Oust Castro, Run on a Shoestring, Lands 5 Underpaid
Amateurs in Jail

BYLINE:   By TIM GOLDEN

DATELINE: GUATEMALA

BODY:
When terrorist bombs began exploding in Cuba two years ago,
speculation about the bombers' identity was rampant. Coup-minded
military officers, some Cuban exiles insisted. Or right-wing
infiltrators from Miami. A nascent rebel underground, perhaps,
supplied from abroad.

But none of those theories help much to explain the role of Jazid Ivan
Fernandez, a 28-year-old data processor from Guatemala City who is one
of five Central Americans now in a Cuban prison on charges stemming
from the attacks. 

Mr. Fernandez, people who knew him in Guatemala said, was a punctual
if undistinguished bureaucrat, a pleasant young man who compiled bus
statistics for a Government transport office. He devoted most of his
free time not to politics, they said, but to whatever happened to be
on television.

The story of the accused saboteurs, assembled from interviews with the
five in the Havana prison and accounts of their relatives, associates
and others, suggests that even as radical Cuban exiles mounted their
most intense campaign of violence in years against the Communist
Government, their operations were less cloak-and-dagger than cut-rate
and lucky.

"These do not appear to be militants or activists or doctrinaire
fanatics," said the Guatemalan Foreign Minister, Eduardo Stein. "They
seem to be something like what, in the drug-trafficking world, one
would call mules."
 
The Recruits
Gang Couldn't Shoot, Straight or Otherwise


The accused bombers were anything but professional.

Two had had brief experiences as soldiers; a couple, at least, thought
vaguely ill of the Cuban Government. But most important to the cause
was that all of them were short of cash, struggling with debts on
everything from cellular telephones to children's schools.

The most successful of the group, a 28-year-old Salvadoran who needed
money for car payments, got $2,500. Another, an executive at El
Salvador's biggest car dealership who was struggling to support two
children he had fathered out of wedlock, agreed to make the trip to
Cuba for $1,000.

Exactly who paid the bills is unclear.

Luis Posada Carriles, an aging Cuban veteran of Central Intelligence
Agency crusades against Fidel Castro, acknowledged organizing the
attacks, suggesting that he did so with money provided by Cuban exiles
in the United States. But he declined to identify them.

United States officials said Federal prosecutors in Puerto Rico were
also looking at the bombings as part of a grand jury investigation
into what they say was a plot to kill Mr. Castro during a regional
summit meeting in the Caribbean last May.

The prosecutors have filed conspiracy charges against seven men,
including three with ties to the most prominent exile political group
in the United States, the Cuban American National Foundation. A
Federal judge recently decided to transfer these proceedings to Miami
from Puerto Rico.

Cuban officials have repeatedly accused the foundation and its late
chairman, Jorge Mas Canosa, of orchestrating the attacks, a charge it
vigorously denies.

But recently Cuba made the charges more specific: In late October, the
Government said that Mr. Posada's chief financier was Arnaldo Monzon,
a wealthy businessman from Fort Lee, N.J., who is a director of the
foundation.

In an interview at his office above a clothing store in Union City,
just across the Hudson River from Manhattan, Mr. Monzon dismissed the
accusations as ridiculous.

"That was the first I had heard of it," he said of the plot described
by the Cuban Interior Ministry. "I don't think that is a way to
overthrow a government."

Cuban security officials, speaking in interviews in which they
discussed many details of their investigations for the first time,
said they had already found traces of Mr. Monzon and other well-known
Cuban-Americans as the pattern of anti-Castro attacks began to shift
in 1994 and 1995.

Until then, said Col. Adalberto Rabeiro, a senior official of the
Interior Ministry's counterintelligence directorate, such actions had
typically been pirate raids on beachfront hotels, with attackers
firing automatic weapons from speedboats. Then the attackers grew
bolder, aiming at the tourist industry, a key source of foreign exchange.

Cuban officials allowed a reporter to interview the five suspects
awaiting trial in Havana after Mr. Posada described his role in the
attacks in articles published last summer in The New York Times.

The interviews were conducted at the Villa Marista prison, in a room
that appeared to be monitored by security agents.

All five prisoners admitted the crimes of which they have been
accused, and denied having been mistreated or coerced to do so. But
several were held incommunicado for months, and though much of their
accounts was corroborated by friends, relatives, employers and
associates, it is impossible to tell whether parts of their stories
might have been rehearsed.

Cuban officials said the five were only the last in a recent series of
attackers trained abroad. Two of the first, they said, were young
Cuban emigres trained in Miami and dropped back on the island in 1995,
with 51 pounds of plastic explosives. They and two other exiles, who
entered Cuba with a small quantity of explosives in 1996, were
arrested before they could blow up anything, the officials said.

On April 12, 1997, however, a bomb exploded at the discotheque in
Havana's newest five-star hotel, the Melia Cohiba, and another was
found unexploded weeks later. Cuban officials said this marked the
start of Mr. Posada's more direct management of the sabotage, a wave
of 13 bombings that rattled Cuba for months.
 
The Lures
Jobless Salvadorans And Visions of Cash


As his first mercenary, Cuban officials said, Mr. Posada hired
Francisco Chavez Abarca, 29, a Salvadoran. Mr. Posada had met Mr.
Chavez's father, a well-connected arms dealer, after arriving in El
Salvador in 1985 to work for the United States National Security
Council when it was supplying Nicaraguan contra rebels.

That year Mr. Posada escaped from a Venezuelan prison where he had
been held on charges of plotting the bombing of a Cuban airliner in
1976 in which 73 people were killed.

How the younger Mr. Chavez made his living is unclear. But to the
young men who hung out with him, the Fat Man, as they called him, had
the trappings of small-time underworld success: a used BMW, spending
money, a semiautomatic handgun.

"I told him at one point, 'Look Francisco, I'm sure you're mixed up in
the drug business,' " said one of those young men, Raul Cruz Leon. "
'When you've got a job, remember me.' "

Such activities were out of character for Mr. Cruz Leon, but his
finances were getting desperate. His main job, driving Latin pop
singers as the "security chief" for a Salvadoran promoter, rarely paid
more than $500 a month. Between car payments, credit-card bills and
his cellular phone, he owed nearly $6,000, and relatives said his
mother finally mortgaged her small jewelry store to help him pay off
the debt.

"I was drowning in the interest payments," he recalled.

Mr. Cruz Leon was clearly something less than the hardened military
veteran that Cuban officials suggested and that many news accounts
have described.

The son and grandson of army veterans, he had dreamed of entering the
Salvadoran military academy, a well-traveled social escalator for boys
from the working class.

But he had also studied at the Jesuits' Central American University,
and said he was troubled by the military's killing of six priests
there in 1989. Within a year of entering the academy, he rose almost
to the top rank of his class -- then dropped out.

When Mr. Chavez approached him about "a little job" in late 1996, he
said, he agreed immediately. When Mr. Chavez told him later that he
wanted to set off small bombs at Havana hotels, Mr. Cruz Leon said he
suspected some dispute with a hotel owner.

"I thought of that movie 'The Specialist,' with Sylvester Stallone and
Sharon Stone," Mr. Cruz Leon recalled, looking pale and tired in a
blue-polyester prison uniform. "That guy planted a bomb, and he ended
up a hero."

Mr. Cruz Leon became the most able of the accused mercenaries,
learning to assemble his bombs -- a small wad of plastic explosive, a
detonator, a thin Casio alarm clock and a nine-volt battery -- in
little more than a minute.

Mr. Chavez, who is said by associates to still be living in San
Salvador, appears from travel and telephone records obtained from the
Cuban authorities to have been in Cuba when the Melia Cohiba hotel was
bombed on April 12. Mr. Cruz Leon followed him in July, he said,
getting past a strip search at the Havana airport to bomb two hotels
for $2,500. He was arrested during a second trip in September, after
another of his bombs killed a 32-year-old Italian businessman.

Mr. Posada said he was unperturbed. "He's not Cuban," he said in the
interview, referring to Mr. Cruz Leon. "He did this for money."

But as attention focused on El Salvador after those attacks, Mr.
Posada turned to Guatemala, where he recruited a pair of young men to
plant two more bombs in August 1997. Guatemalan newspapers reported
that one of those men, Marlon Gonzalez, 31, and another man were found
in a dump truck last May, badly beaten and shot to death.

Mr. Chavez apparently found his most unlikely recruits in late 1997,
at the Guatemala City guest house of Maria Elena Gonzalez, a
54-year-old former school teacher who read tarot cards on the side.

In a prison interview in Havana, Mrs. Gonzalez said Mr. Chavez had
come to her because she knew a woman he wanted to kill, apparently on
contract, to retaliate for the murder of a wealthy Salvadoran
businessman. He spent days having his cards read and hanging about at
her pink-plaster home where, coincidentally, the Cuban patriot Jose
Marti had once lived.

Cuban security officials suggested that some of their main evidence
against Mr. Monzon came from his chatter during card readings by Mrs.
Gonzalez. In two interviews, she said Mr. Chavez told her he was owed
money by three men, two of whom he named as Arnaldo Monzon and Ramon
Medina, an alias used in El Salvador by Mr. Posada.

Mrs. Gonzalez said she also took a telephone message for Mr. Chavez
from a caller who identified himself as "the man from New Jersey."

Eventually Mr. Chavez recruited another of Mrs. Gonzalez's sometime
guests, Nader Musalam, a 28-year-old Guatemalan who had previously
owned a small store where, he said, he had done a modest business in
stolen clothing. He had gone to Cuba on vacation years earlier,
looking for girls; although the bombs seemed like "not such a good
idea," he was eager to get back.

"I liked it a lot," he said. "It wasn't like they made it sound in
Guatemala."

According to a deal he said he made with Mr. Chavez early last year,
Mr. Musalam was to receive $1,300 for each bomb he planted, enough for
a down payment on a Hyundai sedan that he could drive as a taxi. For
$800, Mrs. Gonzalez said, she agreed to carry two toothpaste tubes
filled with plastic explosives and two small alarm clocks. But she
also had to pay for her own plane ticket, which she bought on credit.

"It was the end of the month," she said. "I had to pay the water bill,
the electricity bill. I thought this would be some quick money."

Mr. Musalam was arrested at the airport, and Mrs. Gonzalez was picked
up as she waited for him at his hotel. Mrs. Gonzalez's husband, Jazid
Ivan Fernandez, 28, the data processor, said he had opposed the trip
but helped pack the explosives. He was detained three weeks later when
he traveled to Cuba to try to locate her.
 
The Organizer
Moving In, in Vain, To Keep Plot Going


When his sabotage network started to fray with the arrests in 1997,
Mr. Posada -- who acknowledged before the Cuban Government's
announcement that three of his bombers had been captured -- became
more directly involved.

A retired Salvadoran Air Force captain, Alberto Barraza, whom Mr.
Posada had known from the contra operation, said in an interview that
he introduced Mr. Posada to Otto Rene Rodriguez, supposedly to buy
inexpensive ammunition.

Mr. Barraza denied any knowledge of the Cuba plot. He said Mr.
Rodriguez bought lots of ammunition because of his job as the security
supervisor for the Salvadoran company that owns the car dealership, a
position in which he supervised more than 200 guards and other
employees. Mr. Rodriguez had also spent time at the Gerardo Barrios
military academy, leaving early to attend architecture school. And he
too was in financial trouble.

The son of a prosperous businessman and the nephew of one of El
Salvador's most respected centrist politicians, Otto Rodriguez earned
just under $1,000 a month at the car dealership. But in addition to
supporting his two children by his estranged wife, he said, he was
trying to help two children by other women with whom he had become
involved.

"With $1,000 I could solve my problem," he said. "And I thought I
could keep some of the expense money they gave me."

He arrived at the Havana airport in August 1997, carrying the
explosives in a back pocket, the transistor batteries in a front
pocket. He said he planted a bomb at the Melia Cohiba, had a brief
affair with a young Cuban woman and returned home to pay off his elder
children's school tuition.

After agreeing to try again, he was arrested at the Havana airport
last June. This time he was supposed to meet a Cuban conspirator,
identified to him only as Juan. Instead he has spent the last months
wondering why he ever agreed to join Mr. Posada's campaign.

"This really doesn't have anything to do with us," he said of the plot
to bring down the Cuban Government. "Sometimes, it takes a long time
to figure out how lost you are."
 

http://www.nytimes.com

CORRECTION-DATE: January 19, 1999, Tuesday

CORRECTION:
An article on Friday about five Central Americans accused of having
carried out a bombing campaign in Cuba two years ago misstated the
time of a regional summit meeting in Venezuela where United States
prosecutors say a group of Cuban exiles planned to assassinate Fidel
Castro. It was in November 1997, not May 1998.



GRAPHIC: Photos: SCENES NEAR A JAIL IN HAVANA -- Four Central
Americans accused of roles in bombings, clockwise from top left: Raul
Cruz Leon, limousine driver; Maria Elena Gonzalez, reader of tarot
cards; Otto Rene Rodriguez, security supervisor for a car dealership,
and Nader Musalam, dealer in stolen clothing. (Photographs by Laura
Kleinhenz for The New York Times)
 
Chart/Photos: "A Terrorist Triangle: From Guatemala and El Salvador to
Cuba"
 
NAME: Luis Posada Carriles, 70
BACKGROUND: C.I.A. exile long involved in anti-Castro plots.
WHAT HE DID: Has admitted organizing bombing from Guatemala and El
Salvador.
 
NAME: Francisco Chavez Abarca, 29
BACKGROUND: Unemployed son of a well-connected former arms dealer in
El Salvador.
WHAT HE DID: Accused of hotel bombings. Said to have recruited other
saboteurs in Guatemala and El Salvador, where he lives.
 
NAME: Raul Cruz Leon, 28
BACKGROUND: Former security chief for Salvadoran events promoter.
WHAT HE DID: Confessed to bombings at five hotels and one restaurant
in which a businessman was killed.
 
NAME: Nader Musalam, 28
BACKGROUND: Unemployed. Former shopkeeper from Guatemala City.
WHAT HE DID: Admitted bringing explosives into Cuba to bomb hotels.
 
NAME: Maria Elena Gonzalez, 54
BACKGROUND: Proprietor of a guest house and fortuneteller. Wife of Mr.
Fernandez.
WHAT SHE DID: Confessed to carrying explosives into Cuba. Was to be
paid $800.
 
NAME: Jazid Ivan Fernandez, 28
BACKGROUND: Former data processor for a Guatemalan transportation office.
WHAT HE DID: Arrested in Cuba while searching for his wife. Ad-mitted
to packing explo-sives used by Mr. Musalam.
 
NAME: Otto Rene Rodriguez, 40
BACKGROUND: Former security executive for a large Salvadoran company.
WHAT HE DID: Confessed to bombing the Melia Cohiba hotel in Cuba and
returning last June to plant more bombs.
 
      

LOAD-DATE: January 15, 1999 
----------------
MIAMI HERALD

March 9, 1999, Tuesday

SECTION: Section A; Page 1, Column 4

LENGTH: 39 words

HEADLINE: SALVADORAN ADMITS GUILT IN '97 CUBA BOMBINGS

BYLINE: BY JUAN O TAMAYO

JOURNAL-CODE: MH

ABSTRACT:

Salvadoran Raul Ernesto Cruz Leon confesses at start of trial in
Havana to planting bombs in 1997 but denies any links to Cuban
American National Foundation or exile bomber Luis Posada Carriles;
photos (M)

GRAPHIC: Photograph

LOAD-DATE: March 19, 1999 
--------------------

The Atlanta Journal and Constitution

March 12, 1999, Friday, JOURNAL EDITION

SECTION: NEWS; Pg. 02b

LENGTH: 401 words

SERIES: Today's News

HEADLINE: Death penalty sought in Cuba terrorism case as trial wraps up

BYLINE: Anita Snow

DATELINE: Havana

BODY:
Wrapping up courtroom proceedings in the trial of a Salvadoran man
accused of a string of bombings, Cuban prosecutors argued the man was
paid by Miami-based exiles and recommended he be put to death. The
five-member tribunal said after closing arguments Thursday that it
would reach a verdict in two to three weeks. Prosecutors sought to
show that leaders of the Miami-based Cuban-American National
Foundation recruited and paid Salvadoran Raul Ernesto Cruz Leon to
plant bombs at six tourist locales. The blasts killed an Italian man
and injured 11 people, including seven foreigners. Before closing
arguments, prosecutors showed a video from a television interview in
which a member of the Cuban group, Luis Posada Carriles, admitted Cruz
Leon was contracted by members of the exile organization. Though
Posada Carriles originally told journalists the group backed Cruz
Leon, he later said he had lied about the involvement of the
foundation. He did not deny his own alleged role, however. The
foundation repeatedly has denied it funded the bombings, a charge the
Cuban government has made since it arrested Cruz Leon 18 months ago. A
Guatemalan man, Percy Francisco Alvarado Godoy, also testified
Thursday that Cuban exile leaders in Miami recruited him to carry out
attacks in Cuba several years before the string of bombings allegedly
committed by Cruz Leon. Alvarado, who has lived in Cuba since 1960,
told the tribunal that he worked as ''Agent 44'' for a secret military
wing of the foundation while also working as an agent for Cuban state
security. Alvarado's testimony failed to show a link, however, between
the foundation and Cruz Leon, a man Cuban authorities describe as a
U.S.-trained Salvadoran army veteran. Cruz Leon is accused of --- and
has admitted to --- planting bombs in five hotels and a restaurant in
a plot to scare away tourists and hurt a prime source of income for
the Communist island. The prosecution showed a videotape made by the
Interior Ministry shortly after Cruz Leon's arrest, with the defendant
touring all the sites he bombed, showing exactly how he armed and
planted the explosives. Cruz Leon told the tribunal Monday that his
motivation had been financial, not political. He allegedly was paid $
4,500 for each bombing. If convicted, he faces execution by firing
squad. All death penalty cases in Cuba are automatically appealed to
the Supreme Court.


LOAD-DATE: March 13, 1999 
----------------
St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri)

March 16, 1999, Tuesday, FIVE STAR LIFT EDITION

SECTION: NEWS, Pg. A7

LENGTH: 367 words

HEADLINE: SALVADORAN SEEKS CUBA'S MERCY FOR HOTEL BOMBING; PROSECUTORS
LINK HIM TO;
CUBAN-AMERICAN GROUP

BYLINE: Anita Snow; The Associated Press

DATELINE: HAVANA

BODY:
Weeping and trembling, a Salvadoran man asked the Cuban people's
forgiveness Monday for bombing a hotel.

Prosecutors say they can prove a definitive link between the
defendant, Otto Rene Rodriguez Llerena, and the Miami-based Cuban
American National Foundation.

"I confess that I am guilty," Rodriguez Llerena told a five-member
tribunal as his father and mother-in-law watched from the front row.
"I beg the pardon of the Cuban people." 

Rodriguez Llerena was arrested July 10, 1998, at Havana's airport when
he tried to bring more than three pounds of explosives into Cuba.

He is charged with terrorism for that act and for planting a bomb in
the lobby of the luxury Melia-Cohiba Hotel on Aug. 3, 1997. The
morning explosion caused minor damage and no injuries.
 
The prosecution has recommended 30 years in prison.

During questioning by prosecutor Enrique Nunez Grillo, Llerena
Rodriguez described being trained in El Salvador by a man he knew as
Ignacio Medina. The Cuban government maintains the man was a Cuban
exile, Luis Posada Carriles. The man gave Llerena Rodriguez the
instructions and material needed to place the bombs, the defendant said.

During this trial and the trial last week of Salvadoran Raul Ernesto
Cruz Leon, also on a bombing charge, the government has tried to show
that Posada organized the bombings and that they were paid for by a
secret military organization of the Cuban American National Foundation.
 
The foundation has denied financing the bombings.

During closing arguments in last week's trial, prosecutors showed a
television interview in which Posada said Cruz Leon was hired by
members of the exile organization.

Though Posada originally told journalists the group backed Cruz Leon,
he later said he had lied about the foundation's involvement.
 
He did not deny his own alleged role.

Cruz Leon admitted planting bombs in six tourist locales, killing an
Italian man and wounding 11, including seven foreigners. If convicted,
he could face execution by firing squad.
 
The verdict is pending.

Posada has been accused of responsibility for the bombing of a Cuban
Airlines passenger jet in 1976 that killed 73 people.  

GRAPHIC: PHOTO Photo by the Associated Press - Otto Rene Rodriguez
Llerena slumps in a courtroom in Havana, Cuba, on Monday during his
trial. He could be sentenced to 30 years in prison.  

LOAD-DATE: July 8, 1999 

-----------------

MIAMI HERALD

March 23, 1999, Tuesday

SECTION: Section A; Page 4, Column 1

LENGTH: 32 words

HEADLINE: EL SALVADOR

JOURNAL-CODE: MH

ABSTRACT:

Salvadoran police confirm that Cuban exile Luis Posada Carriles,
suspected of paying two men to carry out bombings in Havana, used
false credentials to enter country (S)

LOAD-DATE: April 6, 1999 
---------------
The Boston Globe

March 24, 1999, Wednesday ,City Edition

SECTION: NATIONAL/FOREIGN; Pg. A12PHOTO

LENGTH: 346 words

HEADLINE: Bomber sentenced to death in Cuba

BYLINE: Associated Press

BODY:

   HAVANA - A Salvadoran man has been sentenced to death for a string
of hotel bombings, the government announced yesterday.

Under Cuban law, the death sentence of the convicted man, Raul Ernesto
Cruz Leon will be appealed immediately to the Supreme Court, the
Communist Party daily Granma said in a three-paragraph article yesterday.

The death sentence followed a general toughening by the Cuban
government, which in recent months has said it feels under growing
attack by the US government, violent Cuban exiles in Miami, and
domestic political dissidents. 

The verdict in the trial of a second Salvadoran charged with
terrorism, Otto Rene Rodriguez Llerena, is pending. The prosecution
has recommended the death penalty in his case as well.

"I cannot talk because I feel so bad. I have lost all hope," said Cruz
Leon's mother, Ester Leon Hernandez. She was leaving Mass at a church
in Havana, where she has been staying during her son's trial.

Trabajadores, the Communist Party's workers weekly newspaper, on
Monday defended the government's tough prosecution of the two Salvadorans.

During Cruz Leon's trial, prosecutors sought to show that leaders of
the Miami-based Cuban-American National Foundation recruited and paid
Cruz Leon to plant bombs at six tourist locales. The blasts killed an
Italian man and wounded 11 people, including seven foreigners.

Before closing arguments, prosecutors showed a video from a television
interview in which Luis Posada Carriles, of the Cuban exile group,
said Cruz Leon was contracted by members of the exile organization.

Although Posada Carriles originally told journalists the group backed
Cruz Leon, he later denied involvement by the foundation. He did not
deny his own role, however.

The foundation repeatedly has denied that it funded the bombings, a
charge the Cuban government has made since it arrested Cruz Leon 18
months ago.

Cruz Leon was accused of - and admitted - planting bombs in five
hotels and a restaurant to deter tourists and hurt a prime source of
income for the communist island.

GRAPHIC: ,Raul Ernesto Cruz Leon (left), who was sentenced to death
yesterday, was photographed on March 8 at his trial in Havana.
AP FILE PHOTO

LOAD-DATE: March 24, 1999 

CONTINUED IN PART THREE