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Witness: top anti-Cuban leader wired money to ex-CIA agent Posada at time of bombings.

EL PASO, Texas, March 3rd, 2011.- The bookkeeper for a New Jersey business entrepreneur who was once a director of the Cuban American National Foundation testified Thursday that he wired as much as $9,600 in 1997 to Ramon Medina, one of the aliases used by the ex-CIA operative Luis Posada Carriles, on the anti-Cuban terrorist’s perjury trial.

Oscar De Rojas told the jury in federal court in El Paso that he sent 10 to 12 payments of $800 each to the pseudonym for Luis Posada Carriles and at least one other associate in Guatemala and El Salvador. De Rojas said he did it on the orders of the late counterrevolutionary leader Arnoldo Monzon, who owned a chain of women's clothing stores.

De Rojas said he transferred the funds between March and September 1997, when a series of bombings rocked hotels in Cuba, killing an Italian tourist and wounding about a dozen others.

FBI Special Agent Omar Vega, who headed the investigation against Posada, testified that 21 wire transfers from New Jersey were sent to Ramon Medina in El Salvador between 1996 and 1997 and were worth a total of $18,900. Vega did not say whether those payments — some made under Monzon's own name — were in addition to those De Rojas said he sent using his name.

Posada, spent decades crisscrossing Latin America, working to destabilize progressive governments — with Washington's support, but now faces only U.S. charges of perjury, obstruction and immigration fraud.

Prosecutors say Posada sneaked into the U.S. in March 2005 and lied while undergoing citizenship hearings in El Paso. He is accused of making false statements about how he made it into the country and about having a Guatemalan passport bearing his picture but another name. Posada is also charged with failing to acknowledge masterminding the 1997 Havana bombings.

In a 1998 interview with The New York Times, Posada said he planned the attacks, hoping to cripple tourism on the island. He also admitted that Ramon Medina was an alias he often used.

De Rojas said he did not know if any of the money he sent was used to plant the bombs, which exploded at luxury hotels and an iconic tourist restaurant in Havana, and the picturesque beach resort of Varadero east of the capital between April and September of 1997. He also said he had never met Posada and didn't know who ultimately received the money he sent.

Still, Ann Louise Bardach, the New York Times reporter who interviewed Posada, has been subpoenaed to testify, and what De Rojas said is important since Bardach quoted Posada as saying the bombings were financed by leaders of the Cuban American National Foundation. At the time her story was published, that revelation was among its most explosive because it corroborated what Cuba's government had been claiming for years — that top Cuban-American organizations were funding acts of terrorism on the island.

Also Thursday, U.S. District Judge Kathleen Cardone ruled that a prosecution witness named Tony Alvarez, a Cuban living in Guatemala, would be allowed to testify despite defence objections.

Alvarez had a Guatemala City office in 1997 that he shared with two associates who made contact with Posada. He plans to testify that Posada and the others brought components to the office that were later used to assemble the Cuban bombs. Alvarez also should detail a fax signed by "Solo," another Posada alias, which recounts receiving $3,200 from associates in New Jersey.

Posada was arrested in Panama in 2000 and linked to a plot to kill Fidel Castro during a summit there. He later received presidential pardon in 2004, and turned up in the U.S. — prompting the current charges against him.

He was held in Texas and New Mexico immigration detention centres for about two years, but released in 2007 and has been living in Miami.(Cubaminrex-RHC)