By José Luis Méndez Méndez on May 27, 2026
After the US defeat in the Bay of Pigs invasion Jose Basulto was one of the 1156 prisoners exchanged for powder milk, medicine and medical equipment. He also returned to Florida as a well sought out terrorist.
On his return Basulto joined the so-called Cuban Units within the U.S. Army, formed by the Kennedy administration following the failure of Operation Mongoose, for a new revenge-driven invasion, this time involving Cuban mercenaries and regular U.S. forces. It is known that 2,700 Cubans were trained at the camps of Fort Jackson, Fort Eglin, and Fort Benning. In March 1963, he was selected from a group of 210 mercenaries to undergo a year of counterinsurgency training at Fort Benning, from which he graduated in March 1964 with the rank of second lieutenant in the Army. He was assigned to Brazil and Honduras. He trained alongside Félix Rodríguez Mendigutia, William Schuss Álvarez, Jorge Lincoln Mas Canosa, and Luis Posada Carriles, all of whom had a long history of violence.
From Brigade 2506, he moved through the Revolutionary Student Directorate (DRE) and the Anti-Communist Liberation Army (ELA), always characterized by his quest for prominence. If he wasn’t part of a group, he would immediately leave for another in search of recognition and financial gain. At times, he dipped into the pockets of his own people; for example, he was expelled from the ELA in 1969 for misappropriation of the group’s funds. He later joined the so-called Catholic University Group and the Cuban Patriotic Junta.
In 1982, he planned to smuggle explosives into Cuba to carry out an attack against Fidel Castro Ruz. Every time he traveled abroad for work commitments, a manhunt ensued; suffice it to say that between 1991 and 2001, 14 highly sophisticated and dangerous plots were hatched to eliminate him. During the protocol preparations in each of the countries he visited, the organizers provided a list of international terrorists of Cuban origin whom Cuba considered a threat; the name and details of the criminal Jose Basulto León were, of course, included.
The CIA deployed him to Central America during that agency’s dirty war against the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua; he became implicated in the Iran-Contra scandal and the Coca-Contras affair. Once that aggression ended and as a result of the collapse of the Socialist Camp and the disintegration of the Soviet Union—processes that had a colossal impact on the Cuban economy—it was predicted that Cuba would not be able to sustain itself and would collapse.
The so-called “Special Period” in peacetime on the island prompted the mass emigration of Cubans forced to use the illegal, dangerous, and chaotic maritime route in the most rudimentary means available, and a thriving human trafficking business began in Miami, which required air and maritime support to make the trafficking viable and safe. The issuance of immigrant visas had been suspended since the George W. Bush administration and remained suspended under his successor, Bill Clinton. With no legal alternatives, Cubans took the risk, enticed by messages assuring them that twelve miles out, at the edge of international waters, a fleet of boats awaited to take them to a safe harbor in Florida.
Then, with the sponsorship of the Cuban-American National Foundation (CANF), led by Mas Canosa, they conceived a project designed to maximize the benefits of this migratory phenomenon. Thus, in 1991, Brothers to the Rescue (B2R) was founded with Basulto, Arnaldo Iglesias, and William Schuss as founders—all of whom had extensive files with the CIA and other agencies—assisted by a legion of pilots of various nationalities, hired to participate in this plan. Under the guise of assisting the so-called Cuba “rafters” the initiative concealed other objectives, including overt espionage against the Cuban archipelago.
A secondary objective was to carry out operations against Cuba; thus, Brothers to the Rescue provided cover for an infiltration in 1993 to sabotage high-voltage towers in San Nicolás de Bari, in Havana.
With the results achieved, Basulto ventured into more complex attacks; to this end, he arranged the purchase of a Delfín L-29 aircraft to attack Cuban military installations in October 1994 and to use a remote-controlled weapon to strike targets in Cuba. That same year, he attempted to attack the “Carlos Manuel de Céspedes” refinery in the city of Cienfuegos.
For Jose Basulto, provoking a military confrontation between Cuba and the United States was the solution to overthrow the Revolution; he remains obsessed with achieving this and plots a provocations that would lead to that outcome.
He was certain that the disorganized counterrevolution cannot overthrow the system on the island and concluded that its collapse is only possible if the United States intervenes. To achieve this, he used his so-called humanitarian organization and devoted himself to orchestrating continuous provocations aimed at achieving his goal.
So on May 15, 1991, he launched the operations of Brothers to the Rescue, requesting that the then-U.S. president provide him with three O-2 aircraft—the military version of the well-known Cessna 336—which at that time were owned by the U.S. Air Force (USAF), for the supposed task of rescuing Cuban rafters at sea. His efforts were bolstered by the influence of Cuban-born Representative Ileana Ross Lehtinen, who also secured funding to cover the $60,000 monthly rent for the hangar where the planes were based.
This type of Cessna Skymaster 337 aircraft, used for military purposes and equipped for visual intelligence, was employed by the U.S. military from 1967 through 2010 for observation missions. Southern Command provided assistance to the Brothers to the Rescue; several of its pilots participated in operations in the Caribbean, trained personnel, and supplied surplus military supplies, such as food rations and other equipment.
From that date on, using aircraft that still bore the USAF insignia, Basulto repeatedly violated Cuban airspace to test the authorities; in open provocation, he scattered leaflets with destabilizing messages and disrupted the island’s airspace. Unfinished studies document that between 1991 and March 1996, there were 19 violations of sovereign airspace involving 46 aircraft. After the shoot down on February 24, 1996, HAR once again violated Cuban sovereignty on March 24.
Not only did it violate sovereignty, but it also provided logistical support with advance information regarding the attacks and drug trafficking activities of the so-called United National Democratic Party (PUND), led by Jesús Canoura and linked to international drug traffickers, for whom they protected drug caches at intermediate points before they were smuggled into the United States. They deposited the bales of drugs on small islands in the Bahamas, where they remained under the protection of the PUND. Providing information on Cuban defenses to U.S. agencies; protecting terrorist gangs’ attacks against Cuban territory; and ensuring drug trafficking and human trafficking operations were sources of income for Brothers to the Rescue, led by Basulto León—and let anyone who doesn’t believe it prove otherwise.
Basulto felt so insulated by the US government and the anti-Cuba mafia in Florida that more than once he publicly bragged, “So I am a terrorist so what?”
Source: Cuba en Resumen