World News Cuba frees man who participated in 1997 attacks on hotels in Havana, orchestrated by Cuban exiles

[Judi Lynn]

2. NY Times journalist Ann Bardach's large interview with CIA Cuban exile Luis Posada Carriles:

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

By Ann Louise Bardach and Larry Rohter
July 12, 1998

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.

More:
https://www.nytimes.com/1998/07/12/world/bomber-s-tale-cuban-exile-details-horrendous-matter-bombing-campaign.html

Or, free access, if the 1st link doesn't allow:
https://web.archive.org/web/20190727094741/https://www.nytimes.com/1998/07/12/world/bomber-s-tale-cuban-exile-details-horrendous-matter-bombing-campaign.html




Young bomber Luis Posada Carriles, before being shot in the jaw.



Luis Posada Carriles, US Cuban exile C.I.A. man at one of his trials.









Surrounded by friends, always popular in Miami



Standing with co-author, Orlando Bosch, of the in-flight bombing of the Cubana airliner, no survivors, including the Cuban national fencing team, some of them teenagers.