User:BernardL/Sandbox4
Sources for claims of US Terrorism Against Cuba
[edit]1. Jorge I. Dominguez is Professor at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs
In reviewing the relations between Cuba and the Kennedy administration following the release of recently declassified materials, Jorge I. Dominguez, Professor at Harvard’s Center for International Affairs, has argued that when Castro came to power the Kennedy administration was “obsessed with Cuba and the hoped-for overthrow of the Castro government.” To this end “Operation Mongoose, the codename for a U.S. Policy of sabotage and covert operations at Cuba” was implemented. As the Cuban Missile Crisis mounted, Kennedy put a hold on such actions. Dominguez subsequently notes that the “Kennedy administration returned to its policy of sponsoring terrorism against Cuba as the confrontation with the Soviet Union lessened.” Accordingly, “the Executive Committee of the National Security Council recommended various courses of action, “including ‘using selected Cuban exiles to sabotage key Cuban installations in such a manner that the auction can plausibly be attributed to Cubans in Cuba’ as well as ‘sabotage Cuban cargo and shipping, and [Soviet] Bloc cargo and shipping to Cuba.” Dominguez further notes that on April 9 “sabotage actions were approved against a railway bridge, some petroleum storage facilities and a molasses storage vessel. Actions were subsequently carried out against a petroleum refinery, a power plant, a sawmill, and a floating crane in a Cuban harbour.” Dominguez observed that “only once in these nearly thousand pages of documentation did a U.S. official raise something that resembled a faint moral objection to U.S. government sponsored terrorism.” That unique moral objection was raised by a staff member, Gordon Chase, who worried about a possible Soviet reaction, and that the possible killing of innocents could elicit bad press. (Domínguez, Jorge I. “The @#$%& Missile Crisis (Or, What was ‘Cuban’ about U.S. Decisions during the Cuban Missile Crisis).” Diplomatic History: The Journal of the Society for Historians of Foreign Relations, Vol. 24, No. 2, (Spring 2000): 305-15.)
2. Morris Morley is Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.
“During the first half of 1983, the rhetoric of U.S. policymakers was laced with threats of a readiness to bomb communications centers airports, and oil refineries inside Cuba, reflecting the extent to which international state terrorism had become an established American foreign policy option under Reagan.” (Morley, Morris H. Imperial State and Revolution: The United States and Cuba, 1952-1986. Cambridge University Press, 328)
3. Patrice McSherry is Associate Professor of Political Science at Long Island University and author of Incomplete Transition: Military Power and Democracy in Argentina as well as numerous articles on the military and politics.
“In recent years we have learned much about U.S. sponsorship of terrorism during the Cold War, including assassination attempts against Fidel Castro and campaigns of terror such as Operation Mongoose in Cuban territory; [9] the CIA-led Phoenix Program in Vietnam, a computerized counterinsurgency program that used assassination, terrorism, and psychological warfare against civilians; [10] and the financing of right-wing paramilitary and terrorist groups like Patina y Libertad in Chile and the Nicaraguan contras. [11] The infamous School of the Americas and CIA training manuals released in the mid-1990s proved that army and CIA instructors taught Latin American officers methods of torture, including use of electroshock against prisoners, the use of drugs and other means to induce psychological regression, assassination, and coercion against family members to compel compliance. [12] The CIA trained Honduran intelligence unit Battalion 3-16-- which carried out torture—in interrogation, surveillance, and psycho logical manipulation in the 1980s. [13] In 1997, General Eladio Moll of Uruguay testified before parliament that during the 1970s U.S. national security officers urged their Uruguayan counterparts to execute prisoners after interrogation, something the Uruguayans generally did not do. [14] Another Uruguayan intelligence officer said in 1981 that U.S. training manuals listed 35 nerve points where electrodes could be applied during torture. [15] Retired Army Major Joseph Blair, who participated in the Phoenix Program, has criticized the School of the Americas repeatedly for teaching torture, assassination, and extortion. [16] The historical record is clear, if unnerving, that use of surrogate terrorism was U.S. policy during much of the Cold War. This record must be faced squarely, not only for its ethical and moral implications, but also because it meant that Condor intelligence units and military states knew they had the “green light” for their operations. [17].”
(J. Patrice Mcsherry, “Operation Condor: Clandestine Inter-American System,” Social Justice 26.4 (1999): 144)
“Bosch was the leader of a coalition of violent anti-Castro organizations named CORU, Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations. CORU was formed during a 1976 meeting in Bonan, Dominican Republic that brought together all the paramilitary and terrorist anti-Castro organizations. There, leaders decided to unify their forces under one umbrella. Interestingly, that meeting took place in June, at the same time the Condor meetings in Santiago. According to several sources, the CIA had actively approved of the Bonan meeting- and perhaps even instigated it- and encouraged CORU to “punish” Castro for Cuban intervention in Angola. The FBI was fully aware of CORU’s terrorist acts. CORU carried out dozens of bombings in the Western hemisphere (including the United States) in 1976. All five of the Cuban terrorists involved in the Letelier-Moffin assassinations were CORU members.” (McSherry, Patrice J. “Predatory States: Operation Condor and Covert War in Latin America, Rowman & Littlefield 2005, 158)
4. Stephen G. Rabe is professor of history at The University of Texas at Dallas. He has served on the Executive Council of The Society of Historians of American Foreign Relations (SHAFR), and has been on the editorial board of Diplomatic History.
“Thereafter, the administration conducted “Operation Mongoose,” a $40 million campaign of arson, sabotage, and terrorism carried out against the island by CIA agents and Cuban exiles. Operation Mongoose contributed to the onset of the Cuban missile crisis, the most ominous Soviet-American confrontation of the Cold War (Giglio and Rabe 2003, 29-45). In the aftermath of the missile crisis, President Kennedy publicly pledged not to invade the island. But he continued to authorize violent attacks against Castro and Cuba. Both in June and November 1963, Kennedy, using the cover of “higher authority,” personally approved sabotage operations, such as blowing up power plants, against Cuba. The president and his brother, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, probably also were aware of the various CIA efforts between 1961 and 1963 to assassinate Fidel Castro (Rabe 2000, 714-26). Stephen G. Rabe, “The Johnson Doctrine,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 36.1 (2006).
5. Maria De Los Angles Torres is Director, Latin American and Latino Studies Program, University of Illinois at Chicago
"The Johnson Administration seemed less committed to toppling the revolution than President Kennedy had been. Aid for a full-fledged military expedition was not forthcoming from Congress, and such grandiose plans were abandoned along with overt military roles for Cuban exiles. In its place, the United States launched a diplomatic and ideological offensive to isolate Cuba economically and politically, while simultaneously conducting deep undercover acts of terrorism and sabotage." (Maria De Los Angles Torres, and John Spicer Nichols, “Will Miami Fall Next?,” NACLA Report on the Americas24.3 (1990))
6. John Spicer Nichols is associate professor of journalism at The Pennsylvania State University
"To this date, the U.S. government continues to turn a blind eye to Cuban-American terrorism. On July 17 the Justice Department released anti-Castro activist Orlando Bosch from prison. Bosch is the archetypal Cuban-American “terrorist,” a good representative of that small fraction of the community that has gained such prominence in the media’s pantheon of minority stereotypes." (Maria De Los Angles Torres, and John Spicer Nichols, “Will Miami Fall Next?,” NACLA Report on the Americas24.3 (1990))
7. Wayne Smith is a Senior Fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor at the John Hopkins University.
“Under the preponderance of evidence, the Justice Department denied Bosch’s petition to remain in the United States. The associate attorney general, Joe D. Whitley stated in the decision that, “For 30 years Bosch has been resolute and unwavering in his advocacy of terrorist violence . . .He has repeatedly expressed and demonstrated a willingness to cause indiscriminate injury and death.”28 Nevertheless, former Florida senator Connie Mack, Florida Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a strident anti-Castroite, and Jeb Bush (who was her campaign manager), all lobbied for Bosch’s release from INS custody. State senators, city commissioners, mayors and many other civic leaders in the Miami area vehemently protested the decision. The first Bush administration overruled its own Justice Department by having Bosch released from prison and allowing him to remain in the country.” (Landau, Anya K. and Smith, Wayne S. “Keeping things in perspective: Cuba and the question of international terrorism, Center for International Policy, November 20, 2001)
“In 1985, Luis Posada Carriles, a CIA-trained Bay of Pigs veteran and explosives expert, “escaped” from prison in Venezuela by offering prison officials $28,600. The Miami Herald reported that, “Posada’s friends broke him out of jail in a carefully planned plot, secretly spirited him across the Caribbean and took advantage of the clandestine contra world to stash him in Central America.”33 The Miami Herald later confirmed that Posada had surfaced in Oliver North’s secret contra operation at the Ilopango airbase in El Salvador, with the assistance of CIA operative Felix Rodriguez (a.k.a. Max Gomez)—another Bay of Pigs veteran—who was “a key figure in the Iran-contra scandal with close ties to then Vice-President Bush.”34 …Rodriguez admitted that he harbored Posada at the request of a wealthy Miami resident—“an old friend”—who he said had also financed Posada’s escape from prison.35 Rodriguez refused to answer questions before the Senate about notations in Oliver North’s notebooks that indicated a transfer of $50,000 to Rodriguez from Jorge Mas Canosa (the late chairman and founder of the Cuban American National Foundation), also a Bay of Pigs veteran.36 In his autobiography, Rodriguez calls Mas—who once offered to pay for an attorney for Rodriguez during the congressional inquiry into the contra operation—a “longtime friend.” (Landau, Anya K. and Smith, Wayne S. “Keeping things in perspective: Cuba and the question of international terrorism, Center for International Policy, November 20, 2001)
8. John B. Wolf was Professor and Chairman of the Department of Criminal Justice at Union College.
“Membership in the various terrorist groups, composed largely of Cuban exiles, is restricted to 300 or fewer activists, who are committed to carry out acts of terror against the Castro regime and anyone or anything that they identify with it. In addition, the Cuban terrorists, who were involved in a wave of bombings and ambushes in seven countries between 1974 and 1976, were led, almost invariably, by persons who were associated with the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), recruited during the period 1960-61. 56 Orlando Bosch, head of an exile umbrella organization called the Commandos of United Revolutionary Organization (CORU), and Luis Posada Carrilles were two of the significant leaders of the 1974-76 terrorist campaign. Bosch, presently held by Venezuelan authorities for complicity in the bombing of a Cuban airliner on October 6, 1976 (which crashed with the loss of all 73 persons aboard), received extensive training by the CIA and once served four years of a ten-year sentence in the United States for firing a bazooka at a Polish ship in Miami in 1968. Posada served in Battalion Number 7 of Brigade 2506, the CIA’s exile army, and received intelligence training in the U.S. Army." 57 (John B. Wolf, “2 Domestic Terrorist Movements,” Political Terrorism and Business: The Threat and Response, ed. Yonah Alexander and Robert A. Kilmarx (New York: Praeger, 1979)
Morris Morley is Associate Professor of Politics and International Relations, Macquarie University, Sydney, Australia.
9. Chris McGillion is a senior lecturer in the School of Communication, and currently directs journalism studies, at Charles Sturt University, Bathurst, Australia.
"terrorist Orlando Bosch, who had specialized in attacks on Cuban embassies and consulates through Latin America and was believed responsible for the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner over Venezuela, in which seventy-three people died. Lobbying by CANF and its Florida republican allies, including the president’s son Jeb Bush, was an instrumental factor in Bosch’s release." (Morley, Morris and McGillon, Chris. Unfinished Business: America and Cuba After the Cold War, 1989-2001,37)
"CANF was a perfect candidate for the kind of Faustian deal the ‘public diplomacy program demanded. In return for funds, legitimacy, and access to senior policymakers, it would publicly back the White House covert wars against real and imagined communists and target individual members of Congress to support administration policies using a mixture of rigorous lobbying and inducements in the form of Free Cuba Political Action Committee (PAC) financial contributions to election campaigns." (Morley, Morris and McGillion, Chris. Unfinished Business: America and Cuba After the Cold War, 1989-2001,12)
10. Salim Lamrani is a French researcher at the Sorbonne University and is specialized in U.S.-Cuban relations since 1959.
"During an interview, published in the New York Times of July 12, 1998, Posada Carriles acknowledged that he was financed by CANF. After praising himself as being the person who has made the greatest number of attacks against Cuba, he announced that he was paid by the former president of CANF, Jorge Mas Canosa. “Jorge controlled everything” he declared “each time that I needed money, he asked someone to send me 5 000 dollars 10 000 dollars 15 000 dollars”. At the time of each financial transaction, the following message was attached. “This is for the church.” “All in all, Mas Canosa, CANF, and more particularly Feliciano Foyo, the treasurer of the Foundation, provided more than 200,000 dollars to one of the worst terrorists in the world.” Posada Carrilles boasted about being the paramilitary wing of CANF and added, “As you can see, the FBI and the CIA do not bother me, and I am neutral with them. Each time I can give them a hand I do so." He also revealed that he knew “a very high placed person” in the government who protected him.” (Lamrani, Salim. Superpower Principles: U.S. Terrorism Against Cuba, 104)
"In March 1999, Percy Francisco Alvarado, a Guatemalan agent of Cuban National Security, having infiltrated the Cuban american National Foundation, made a statement at the time of the court case against the assassin of Mr. DiCelmo. He confirmed that he had received 20 000 dollars on behalf of Francisco “Pepe” Hernandez, the president of CANF, in order to explode two bombs in tourist areas of Havana. At the time of the hearing, it was declared that "the CANF played an active and hegemonic part in the financing and organization of the terrorist acts," by means of the creation of a secret paramilitary group bearing the name of Cuban National Front (CNF)." (Lamrani, Salim. Superpower Principles: U.S. Terrorism Against Cuba, 105)
11. Warren Hinckle is a journalist who has written regularly for the San Francisco Examiner and San Franciso Chronicle. He has also authored or co-authored more than five books concerned with U.S. politics.
12. William Turner is a former agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigations.
“The monstrous legacy of the secret war has evolved during the 1970’s into a hemisphere-wide network of right-wing terrorists- a sort of Cuban exile PLO operating with apparent impunity in the United States- composed of veterans of CIA training who continue to function using their former agency’s assets on behalf of CIA-axis clients among police and intelligence organizations in Latin American nations. The enlistment of the lethal services of the agency’s former paramilitarists is not inconsistent with what Thomas Powers, Richard Helms’s biographer, has called the CIA’s history of “the funding and technical guidance of police organizations that tortured and killed local opponents.”
“Cuban-exile terrorism began with assassinations and bombings in the United States, picked up tempo during the 1970’s, and by the end of the decade had spun a murderous web linking Cuban exiles with elements of the American CIA, the Chilean Gestapo known as DINA, the Venezuelan secret police, the Korea CIA, and European paramilitary fascist groups. This pattern began in 1968, when the CIA mothballed its remaining Caribbean paramilitary bases that had been running at half steam since LBJ’s ascension to the White House. The MIRR of Orlando Bosch, the berserk former baby doctor, melted into the alphabet soup of the past as a new terrorist coalition called Cuban Power began to make its presence felt.”
“On the eve of May Day Emilio Milian, news director of radio station WQBA, who had editorialized against terrorism, lost both legs when his car exploded in the station parking lot. The Miami police sent an urgent request to CIA headquarters for a list of all exiles trained in bomb making, as well as, if possible, an accounting of C-3 and C-4 plastic explosives left behind when the agency closed shop. The CIA did not respond. “
“Inside a six-week span the Cuban United Nations Mission in New York was bombed; a bomb exploded in a van carrying luggage to a Cubana airliner in Kingston, Jamaica; the office of British West Indies Airlines in Barbados was bombed; the Air Panama office and Cuban Embassy in Bogota, Columbia, were attacked; a Soviet ship off Cuba was shelled; two Cuban officials in Argentina were kidnapped and never seen again; the Cubana office in Panama was bombed; and a Cuban fisheries technician in Merida, Mexico, was killed during an attempt to kidnap the Cuban consul there. Later, on a CBS documentary, Brigade 2506 member A.L. Estrada blandly assured an interviewer that CORU [Commando of United Revolutionary Organizations, founded by Orlando Bosch] was only “trying to eliminate a communist in Mexico. We learned from them [CIA].”
“Terrorism was cloaked in legitimacy, a fact brought home over Labour Day 1976, when Brigade 2506 held its first congress. At the time the brigade monthly Giron had just published CORU “war communiqués” boasting of recent terrorist attacks and announcing that its commandos would soon attack airplanes in flight. The keynote speaker was Anastasio Somoza, who had recently hosted the fugitive Bosch in Nicaragua as CORU was being assembled, U.S. Congressman Claude Pepper spoke. A featured guest was Miami Mayor Maurice Perez, who had helped secure Bosch’s release from prison.” (Hinckle, Warren and Turner, William W. The Fish is Red: The Story of the Secret War Against Castro. Harper & Row, New York.)
13. Robert M. Levine was Gabelli Senior Scholar in the Arts and Sciences, Director of Latin American Studies, and professor of history at the University of Miami.
“The Orlando Bosch matter made the extent of the CANF’s influence clear. In February 1988, Orlando Bosch Avila, one of the two suspected bombers of the Cubana airline plane over Barbados in 1976 who had been sentenced in Venezuela for the crime, escaped from prison and traveled to Miami, where INS officials arrested him as a fugitive from justice. Through the efforts of right-wing Cuban Miamians and others, Bosch gained his freedom on July 17, 1990. In reaction, the New York Times editorialized that the Justice Department had released him not for legal reasons but rather due to visible political pressure. It also observed that “while the United States had sent the air force to bomb Libya and the army to invade Panama in the name of combating terrorism, the Bush administration was now pampering one of the most notorious terrorists in the hemisphere.” (Levine, Robert M. Secret Missions to Cuba: Fidel Castro, Bernardo Benes, and Cuban Miami, 227)
“Luis Posada Carrilles was the second suspect in the airline bombing. He escaped from a Venezuelan prison in 1985 while awaiting trial, and, disguised as a priest, made his way back to Miami. In his memoirs, The Paths of the Warrior, published in the late 1990’s, Posada Carrilles praised Jorge Mas Canosa for capably leading the anti-Castro fight and for sending Posada Carrilles “a sufficient amount of money, which arrived regularly every month.” (Levine, Robert M. Secret Missions to Cuba: Fidel Castro, Bernardo Benes, and Cuban Miami, 227)
14. Brett Heindl is Assistant Professor of Political Science, Syracuse University.
“During the 1980 election cycle, hardliners in the exile community made their first foray into national politics. Led by businessman and Bay of Pigs veteran Jorge Mas Canosa, they backed Florida Republican Paula Hawkins in her successful bid to unseat incumbent U.S. senator Richard B. Stone and parleyed their connection to the freshman senator to gain access to the administration in March 1981, at the suggestion of Richard Allen, Reagan’s first national security adviser, Mas Canosa formed the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF). The partnership quickly established CANF as the main actor in exile politics and flooded it with federal aid money.” (Heindl, Brett. From Miami With Love in Foreign Policy toward Cuba: Isolation or Engagement, Michele Zebrich-Knos and Heather N. Nicol editors, Lexington Books, 169)
“CANF and other hard-line groups thrived during the Reagan years. By the mid-1980‘s, exile militants had reopened several secret military training camps in the everglades. Among the most prominent was the camp opened in 1980 by an offshoot of the Brigade 2506 Veterans Association. Alpha 66 also opened a training camp in Dale County; Alpha 66 commander Andres Nazario Sargen claimed that by 1992 over twenty-seven thousand people had passed through its gates for training in urban warfare. In the meantime, exile moderates floundered during the Reagan years, CANF‘s sophisticated political and propaganda machine and its ambiguous relationship to political violence smothered moderate perspectives.“ (Heindl, Brett. From Miami With Love in Foreign Policy toward Cuba: Isolation or Engagement, Michele Zebrich-Knos and Heather N. Nicol editors, Lexington Books, 170)
"CANF was also implicated in a thwarted attempt to assassinate Castro at the November 1997 Ibero-American Summit on Margarita Island in Venezuela. This time, the evidence was more damning. On October 27, U.S. Coast Guard personnel received a distress call from a ship off the coast of Puerto Rico. They boarded the boat and, after a routine search, found two .50 caliber sniper rifles, ammunition, and other military equipment stashed in a hidden storage space. When they went to arrest the boat’s four occupants, one of the men allegedly blurted out that he was on a mission to kill Castro. A Subsequent investigation revealed that Jose Antonio Llama, a member of CANF’s board of directors, owned the boat and that one of the high-powered rifles was registered under the name of foundation president Francisco Hernandez. If the foundation’s relationship to political violence had previously been ambiguous, these new revelations struck the organization’s critics as distinctly unambiguous. Llama and five others were indicted for the incident, but not Hernandez. All six men were later acquitted.” ((Heindl, Brett. From Miami With Love in Foreign Policy toward Cuba: Isolation or Engagement, Michele Zebrich-Knos and Heather N. Nicol editors, Lexington Books, 179-80)
15. Clara Nieto was a career diplomat who served in the Colombian mission to the United Nations from 1960-1967; was head of the Colombian Delegation at UNESCO, Paris, from 1967-1970; was Colombian Chargé d'Affairs in Yugoslavia form 1970 to 1976; was Colombian Ambassador to Cuba from 1977-1980; and from 1984-1986 was Director of UNESCO's regional office for Latin America and the Caribbean in Havana. Her writing has appeared in many Colombian newspapers including El Tiempo,El Espectador, El Mundo, and NACLA in the United States.
“The CIA installed an enormous espionage apparatus at the University of Miami, “the biggest base ever created on United States territory,” code-named JMWAVE. It had an annual budget of $100 million, 600 employees, and more than 3,000 agents. It was equipped with small boats, mother ships disguised as merchant ships, planes (from the CIA front, Southern Air Transport), a huge arsenal, and safe houses and buildings. Between January and August 1961 it carried out 5,780 acts of sabotage and terrorism against Cuba, including attempts on Fidel’s life with the cooperation of the Mafia.” (Nieto, Clara Masters of War: Latin America and United States Aggression from the Cuban Revolution Through the Clinton Years, Seven Stories Press, 79)
“Under the Reagan and Bush administrations terrorists and anti-Castro (and anti-Sandinista) paramilitaries had free rein. Their activities, supposedly clandestine, were publicly known, but the authorities did nothing to stop them. They trained at clandestine camps in Florida, and the terrorists, before and after their “secret” missions, announced to the media their plans to assassinate Castro.” (Nieto, Clara Masters of War: Latin America and United States Aggression from the Cuban Revolution Through the Clinton Years, Seven Stories Press, 511)
16. William Blum is a former employee for State Department, now independent political writer and journalist, author of numerous books on U.S. foreign policy.
“The single most violent act of this period was the blowing up of a Cubana Airlines plane shortly after it took off from Barbados on 6 October 1976, which took the lives of 73 people including the entire Cuban championship fencing team. CIA documents later revealed that on 22 June, a CIA officer abroad had cabled a report to Agency headquarters that he had learned from a source that a Cuban exile group planned to bomb a Cubana airliner flying between Panama and Havana. The group’s leader was a baby doctor named Orlando Bosch. After the plane crashed in the sea in October, it was Bosch’s network of exiles that claimed responsibility. The cable showed that the CIA had the means to penetrate the Bosch organization, but there’s no indication in any of the documents that the Agency undertook any special monitoring of Bosch and his group because of their plans, or that the CIA warned Havana.” (Blum, William. The Unforgivable Revolution, in Superpower Principles: U.S. Terrorism Against Cuba, editor Salim Lamrani, Common Courage Press, 52)
17. Saul Landau is the Hugh O. La Bounty Chair of Interdisciplinary Applied Knowledge at the California State Polytechnic University. He is also a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies.
“In 1963, the CIA offered a select group of Bay of Pigs veterans a chance to enroll in an intelligence training course at Fort Benning, Georgia. Mas met two Cuban exiles there, Felix Rodriguez and Luis Posada Carrilles, who became his lifetime buddies after undergoing this special training with him. Like other Bay of Pigs veterans selected as "special cases," Mas received a commission as second lieutenant, but - like many of his compatriots - quit the army when he discovered that the U.S. government had no immediate plans to invade Cuba.(2)” (Saul Landau, "No Mas Canosa," Monthly Review Mar. 1999)
“Following his 1963 Fort Benning experience, Mas met Jose "Pepin" Bosch, kingpin of the Bacardi rum family, and abandoned his shoe-salesman career in Little Havana. How does a former shoe salesman with little record of accomplishment get into millionaire Bosch's league? Did the CIA suggest that Bosch back Mas, yet another among many Cuban exiles plotting terrorist raids against Cuba, as a leader of RECE (Representacion Cubana en el Exilio)? Former House Assassinations Committee investigator Gaeton Fonzi says that the CIA, not Bosch, financed RECE. Fonzi cites an FBI document that has Mas delivering $5,000 to Luis Posada, then a CIA contract agent, to blow up a Soviet or Cuban ship docked in Veracruz, Mexico.(3)” Saul Landau, "No Mas Canosa," Monthly Review Mar. 1999: 22
“During the late 1960s, Mas claimed participation in several terrorist operations, including a machine-gun strafing of a Havana residential area. Mas also tried to retrofit some Second World War vintage B-26s to bomb Cuban oil refineries. He even got involved with plans to send missile-carrying speed boats near the Cuban coast to fire at "strategic" targets. These missions didn't materialize - or failed to meet their objectives.” Saul Landau, "No Mas Canosa," Monthly Review Mar. 1999: 22
18. Louis A. Perez is professor of history at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill.
"Covert action played an important role in support of US objectives, principally by laying siege to the Cuban economy and thereby making the island all the more susceptible to economic sanctions. For more than a decade, the United States engaged in acts that today would be understood as state-sponsored terrorism, including scores of assassination attempts at Fidel Castro, the infiltration of sabotage teams, and the disruption of Cuban agricultural and industrial production capacities. The CIA was specifically enjoined to stress economic sabotage." (Perez, Louis A. Fear and Loathing of Fidel Castro: Sources of U.S. Policy Toward Cuba, The Journal of Latin American Studies, Volume 54, May 2002) (Perez goes into considerable more detail concerning the methods,targets and impacts of the terrorist activities.)