Cuba asks worldwide protests over terrorist Posada

Demonstrations were held throughout Cuba after a U.S. court released terrorist Luis Posada Carriles from a Texas jail. Posada is to go to trial May 11 on charges of entering the U.S. “illegally.” But the people of Cuba want him to be tried for blowing up a commercial Cuban airliner in 1976.

In the most moving demonstration, the families of the 73 people killed on the

Cuban jet held a vigil outside the U.S. mission in Havana on April 20, holding aloft large photographs of those killed by Posada.

The Women’s International Democratic Federation of Cuba is asking organizations around the world to hold protests on May 11 to demand that Posada be extradited to Venezuela to be prosecuted. He was convicted in Venezuela in 1976 for masterminding the bombing but escaped from prison in 1985 and went to El Salvador. In 2005 he secretly entered the U.S. to seek asylum and three months later was arrested in Miami.

The federal court in El Paso, Texas, had announced April 4 that it would not grant Posada bail, but U.S. District Judge Kathleen Cardone reversed the decision the following day. Posada was released on $350,000 bail on April 19. In her order Cardone said the federal charges against the “frail” 79-year-old Posada concerned only his entry into the United States, not his actions outside the country.

In an interview in Juventud Rebelde, the newspaper of Cuban youth, José Pertierra, a lawyer representing the Venezuelan government, said, “The U.S. government should have deemed Posada as a terrorist or as a person whose release from prison could pose a harm to the country’s foreign relations.

“Instead of doing this, the government opted, on Jan. 11, 2007, to move him from the custody of the Homeland Security Department to the custody of federal marshals, and to try him for committing migratory fraud,” Pertierra said. “Therefore, the judge gave her verdict based on the lightness of the charges, the old age of Posada and his delicate health.”

The Bush administration has refused repeated requests by the Venezuelan government to extradite Posada. For decades it has backed his terrorist activities.

Posada was recruited by the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1960s and trained for the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion. After escaping from prison in Venezuela he was involved in Washington’s war against the Nicaraguan Sandinistas in the 1980s. He also waged other terrorist campaigns in Cuba. In a 1998 interview in the New York Times he claimed responsibility for a string of hotel bombings in Havana in which 11 people were injured and an Italian businessman killed. He also plotted to assassinate Fidel Castro during an Ibero-American summit meeting in 2000. He was imprisoned in Panama for the conspiracy but pardoned by the president of Panama in 2004.

Cuban President Fidel Castro denounced Judge Cardone’s release of Posada in a message in Granma. The verdict “could only have come from the White House,” he wrote. “The government of the Untied States and its most representative institutions had already decided to release the monster.”

“The people who trained him and ordered him to destroy a Cuban passenger plane in midair with 73 athletes, students and other Cuban and foreign travelers on board, together with its dedicated crew ... could not possibly act any different,” he said.

Castro noted that added to this injustice, the Cuban Five, who were imprisoned in the U.S. for supplying information on terrorist conspiracies against Cuba, “were condemned in a fraudulent manner to sentences that include two life sentences and they stoically withstand cruel mistreatment.”

In its call for protests for the extradition of Posada, the Cuban Women’s Federation also demands freedom for the five Cuban heroes, “the true anti-terrorist fighters.”