By Raúl Antonio Capote on May 22, 2023
Cubans carry the images of the 73 victims of the Posada planned bombing of a Cubana airliner. photo: Bill Hackwell
On May 23, 2018, in the early hours of the morning, Luis Clemente Faustino Posada Carriles passed away at Memorial Regional Hospital, Hollywood, Florida, United States. He was a CIA agent, confessed assassin and dedicated counterrevolutionary considered one of the masters of terrorism against his own country of origin; Cuba.
He died unmolested by the US authorities, without being tried or punished for his many crimes, atrocities he committed with absolute impunity, among them the bombing of a civilian airliner in mid-flight on October 6, 1976, which cost the lives of 73 people on board, considered one of the most brutal attacks ever committed in the Western Hemisphere.
The US policy to try to defeat the Revolution has always been based on the strategy of provoking a crisis of the first order or state of shock in the population, through the use of terror in all its extension. From that country, one of the largest and most dangerous terrorist networks in the world was formed resulting in a six decade war that has caused 3,478 Cuban deaths and 2,099 disabled.
Trained at the School of the Americas, in Fort Benning, Georgia, Posada Carriles received training in explosives, interrogation and assassinations in the 1960s, and later became a militant in the most violent counterrevolutionary organizations created in the United States.
Under the pseudonyms of Ramón Medina, Ignacio Medina, Juan José Rivas, Julio César Dumas, Bambi and Franco Rodríguez Mena, among others, he traveled much of the continent as an efficient CIA “operative”.
As a police officer in Venezuela, in the now defunct Directorate of Intelligence and Prevention Services, he directed torture and assassinations in that country.
When the Iran-Contra scandal was revealed, Posada’s presence in El Salvador became visible. Under the command of his friend, Felix Rodriguez, a CIA colleague, both were dedicated, at that time, to supplying arms to the Nicaraguan counterrevolution.
His extensive criminal record includes his participation in the Washington DC assassination of Orlando Letelier, Chilean Foreign Minister during the government of Salvador Allende.
On November 16, 2000, during an act of solidarity with Cuba, a group of terrorists led by Posada Carriles tried to blow up the Paraninfo of the University of Panama, with the aim of killing Fidel Castro, during the Ibero-American Summit that took place in that country.
He was also responsible for the organization of a series of bombings against hotels in Havana in 1997.
Posada ended his days quietly, in Miami, dedicated, as did his partner in crime, Orlando Bosh, to “painting” and “selling his paintings”, full of hatred and frustrations, waiting for the longed-for day of revenge, when he longed to “collect his accounts” from the Revolution.
He always found refuge, together with his co-religionists, under the cloak of the government that, hypocritically, includes Cuba in a unilateral list of countries sponsoring terrorism. Posada’s victims still cry out for justice.
Source: Granma, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English