Luis Posada Carriles, R.I.P.

He certainly was one of “a group of fighters who dedicated their best years to fighting the Fidel Castro regime,” as a Miami television station put it when he was featured on its recent “Legends of Exile” series. He was also someone willing to put his life on the line, and to use violence in service of his ideals, and to direct his violence against civilians – tourists in a hotel at the wrong place at the wrong time, or young Cuban athletes on a plane returning from an international competition – which made him a terrorist too. While many scoffed at the Bush Administration’s failed attempt to nail him on immigration charges, this was more than any U.S. Administration attempted to do. He lived out his retirement in Miami, finding social acceptance in a segment of the community consisting largely of lifelong sedentary revolutionaries who admired a man of action and had no moral qualms about his tactics. He died last Wednesday.

Coverage here from the New York Times, Granma here and here, the Herald, and 14yMedio.

Odds and ends

• AFP: The Havana archdiocese spokesman says the Church’s dialogue with the Cuban government, begun a year ago, has been positive, should take on other issues, and should produce more results.

• Greenwire: Former EPA chief William Reilly, co-chair of a U.S. panel promoting safer offshore drilling, says he has had his “wrist slapped” by the State Department when pushing his next step, which is to go to Cuba to discuss safety and environmental protection before drilling begins.

• Bloomberg: Oil guru Jorge Pinon puts very high odds on Cuba’s offshore oil prospects.

• Cuba and Norway signed agreements on economic cooperation, including in the energy sector. It sounds like training and technical assistance; if there’s money involved there are no figures cited in Prensa Latina’s story or in this one in English from Xinhua.

• A Washington conference on Hugo Chavez and 21^st century socialism gets some coverage in Granma.

• “Manufacturing pretexts,” a Granma editorial on the death of Juan Wilfredo Soto in Santa Clara, notes wryly that President Obama is a busy man but was able “to retain in his memory the case of a person detained in a Cuban park who was able to return a short while later.” The President’s remarks were in an interview with Miami’s Univision affiliate (short excerpt here) for which there seems to be no transcript. Additional quotes in this Reuters story.

• At Babalu they say it would have been nice to see news coverage of a May 15 ceremony where Luis Posada Carriles received an award presented, as the photo seems to show, by Congressman David Rivera and former U.S. Interests Section chief Jim Cason. I agree.

WIkileaks: Colombia's Ecuador raid, and Posada

Cuba maintained a studied neutrality in 2008 in the dispute between Colombia and Ecuador that when stemmed from Colombia’s successful military attack on a FARC guerrilla camp in Ecuadorean territory, according to a Wikileaked cable published by El Comercio of Quito. This is a little surprising considering that Ecuador’s government is friendly to Havana, the raid’s victims were communist guerrillas, it involved a cross-border incursion, and Colombia’s president at the time was a big buddy of President Bush. The cable comes from the U.S. Interests Section in Havana and is based on an account from Colombia’s ambassador there. El Comercio’s story is here.

Then there’s this 2005 cable from the U.S. Embassy in New Zealand reporting that instructions to deliver a message about Luis Posada Carriles were carried out. We already know from court proceedings that the Bush Administration had asked a number of foreign governments to take him off our hands; maybe this message refers to one more such effort. To my knowledge it has never been reported whether the idea was to find a place where he could retire in peace, or a place where Venezuelan or Cuban extradition requests would be executable. If Wikileaks would dig up the “reftel,” 05 State 99854, we would know.

Orlando Bosch, R.I.P.

“He was a freedom fighter for Cuba and passed away without seeing his beloved homeland free of the Castro dictatorship.”

– House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairwoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (AP)

“Orlando has been a patriot who dedicated his life and sacrificed his profession to try to return liberty to the Cuban people”

– Francisco Hernandez, President, Cuban American National Foundation (El Nuevo Herald)

“A few days following the fund-raising dinner, Posada was overheard to say that, ‘We’re going to hit a Cuban airplane,’ and that ‘Orlando has the details.’”

“Following the 6 October Cubana airline crash off the coast of Barbados, Bosch, Garcia, and Posada agreed that it would be best for Bosch to leave Venezuela.”

– From an October 14, 1976 CIA cable on Bosch’s activities in Venezuela

“According to Morales Navarrete, arrested suspect Hernan Ricardo Lozano telephoned Bosch from Trinidad stating ‘a bus with 73 dogs went off a cliff and all got killed.’”

– From a November 5, 1976 FBI memo to Secretary of State Kissinger “in connection with the loss of Cubana Airlines Flight Number 455 in the Caribbean Sea on October 6, 1976,” relaying information from FBI confidential sources. Morales Navarrete was a Venezuelan intelligence official.

“We must look on terrorism as a universal evil, even if it is directed toward those with who we have no political sympathy.”

– Bush Administration Justice Department official Joe D. Whitley, defending the indefinite detention of Bosch in 1989 (NY Times)

This 1990 article from the New York Times presents Bosch’s history and the story of President George H.W. Bush’s action that allowed Bosch to live freely in the United States.

Here are stories and obits from AP, the Herald, Miami New Times.

Quotable

“There is a question I’ve formulated on more than one occasion, and that I have recently revived. It goes more or less like this: ‘If I, who detests with every particle of my being the North Korean dynasty, for example, suddenly gathered my intentions and provoked an attack that killed dozens of North Korean civilians, would this effort be enough to call myself, from now on and proudly, an anti-Kim fighter?’

“And if, for example, my firecracker in Pyongyang causes collateral damage and sacrifices a European tourist, then can I call myself anti-dynastic, a fighter against Kim-the-father or Kim-the-son, and be treated like a hero, even though I haven’t touched a single petal on the iron dictatorship, which continues on its course without the least disturbance?”

– “El Pequeno Hermano” blogger Ernesto Morales Licea; his blog is in Spanish and English