BY
JEAN-GUY ALLARD—Special for Granma International—
ON Friday, May 20 at the White House Oval Office, US President George Bush
received a small Cuban-American delegation headed by terrorist Luis Zúñiga
Rey, founder of the Cuban-American National Foundation’s paramilitary
committee in Miami, which for years assured the financing and logistics of
Luis Posada Carriles’ terrorist activities.
Zúñiga created and led the CANF paramilitary committee with
Horacio García, Roberto Martin Pérez, Alberto Hernández
and Feliciano Foyo. The international terrorist Luis Posada Carriles publically
designated that committee and those individuals as his primary financial and
logistical support.
That individual previously had been captured on August 1, 1974, near Boca
Ciega, in Havana, when he was caught red-handed with a load of explosives
and weapons, together with two other members of a terrorist commando who had
infiltrated with the objective of carrying out attacks.
"DO IT AND YOU WILL BE WELL-COMPENSATED!"
Percy Alvarado, the famous Agent Frayle of Cuban state security, met Luis
Zúñiga in Miami, during a mission.
"Zúñiga told me, face to face, that it was necessary to
be violent and cold-blooded, calculating and merciless, to overthrow Fidel
and the Revolution," the Guatemalan recently recalled in a memoir.
"I can still see him that November night in 1993, when he proposed sinister
plans by the CANF to set off powerful bombs in Havana’s Hotel Nacional
and in a famous restaurant in that city."
"He had no shame or concern for the consequences of the proposal he had
just laid out for me: ‘Do it,’ he said, ‘and you will be
well-compensated!’ A supply of weapons and explosives had to be organized
so that my supposed cell would place the bombs in the hotels and tourist sites
in Havana."
"They also would give me eight capsules of live phosphorus to burn down
cinemas and theaters full of innocent Cubans," he recalled. "During
those nights of November and December of 1993, he had no pity, just irrational
hate and a thirst for vengeance," Percy Alvarado commented, adding that
Zúñiga demanded that he study the vulnerability of Cuban hotels,
thermoelectric plants and refineries for future attacks.
Former Agent Frayle specified that Zúñiga systematically recruited
Cubans or visitors to the island to carry out acts of terrorism. In 1993,
he charged him with blowing up the Tropicana nightclub in exchange for $20,000,
making that proposal from his position as director of CANF.
Zúñiga is now executive director of the Cuban Liberty Council,
an organization that brings together the most fanatical elements of the Miami
mafia – several of them with pasts as CIA "collaborators"
– who supported, financed and supplied Posada’s criminal operations
for decades.
A COWARDLY ATTACK ON FISHERMEN
The group received by the US president also included Eleno Oviedo Alvarez,
arrested in Cuba on February 21, 1963, together with other members of a terrorist
commando (Eumelio Viera Mollinedo, Domingo Martínez Cárdenas,
Rafael Santana Alvarez, Juan Reyes Morales, Juan and Armando Morales Pascual
and Agustín Viscaíno Pino) as they were unloading weapons and
munitions on the Cuban coast.
Some of the prisoners admitted to having participated in an attack on Cuban
fishing boats that belonged to a cooperative in Cárdenas, Matanzas,
a week earlier, injuring two fishermen, Armando and Ramón López
Ruiz. The attackers took both boats to Elbow Key, in the Bahamas, where the
injured men were left to their fate.
Another of Bush’s guests was music businessman Emilio Estefan, a stockholder
in Bacardí, which financed terrorist actions in Nicaragua, Angola and
Cuba. Along with singer Gloria Estefan, he has generously sponsored organizations
such as Brothers to the Rescue, led by terrorist José Basulto, who
was a member of the CIA’s Operation 40, along with Luis Posada Carriles.
"The meeting took place at about 11:30 a.m. and lasted for some 45 minutes,"
El Nuevo Herald reported, specifying that "the subject of anti-Castro
activist Luis Posada Carriles, who is being held in a detention center in
El Paso, Texas, was not brought up."