This concise guide is intended as an initial resource. The questions presented are not central to the debates in this course, but rather serve as basic points of departure. I seek to present the material with fairness, while recognizing that the method is, and cannot be, neutral. Prof. Jorge Majfud.
“Fundamental to Jacksonville University’s mission is support for an environment where divergent ideas, theories, and philosophies can be openly exchanged and critically evaluated. Consistent with these principles and the concept of Academic Freedom, this course may involve the discussion of ideas that you find uncomfortable, disagreeable, or even offensive. These ideas are intended to be presented in an objective manner, they are not intended to persuade and are not an endorsement of what you should personally believe.”
Table of Contents
Questions
- What was Operation Condor?
- Who were José Miguel Battle, Luis Posada Carriles, Orlando Bosh, Ricardo Morales Navarrete, the brothers Guillermo e Ignacio Novo Sampol, Virgilio Paz Romero, and Ronaldo Masferrer?
- Why and who committed the terrorist attack against Orlando Lettelier in Washington?
- Why and how did the CIA plot false flag attacks against Cuba?
- What was the bombing of the Cuban airliner 455? Why?
- Why did CIA agents spread biological agents on the island during the 70s and 80s?
- Why did the FBI call Miami «The capital of terrorism»?
Militant Latin American Secret Groups in the United States
“At that time, 1976, everything seemed reasonable, even murder.”
Mariana Callejas
“There are no civilians in this war. They are all combatants.”
Luis Posada Carriles
“This is a global war. There are no civilians or innocents. They are all combatants and should be treated as such.”
Orlando Bosch
“There is no better way to get rid of an undesirable than with a drop of Staphylococcus aureus.”
Eugenio Berríos
“I don’t regret anything. If I had to kill 273 instead of 73, I would do it again. Let them suffer as we suffer.”
Ricardo Morales
“The only thing they have not accused us of is having killed Jesus”
Ignacio Novo Sampol
“The leaders of the major Cuban exile organizations that the Agency was trying to organize were basically selfish and ego-maniacs; they were more concerned about what their positions would be in Cuba once Castro was overthrown than for working for the common cause”.
Internal CIA investigation in Bay of Pigs
“If they are really so anti-communist and really have balls, they should be in Cuba fighting like men. Cubans live here for the money, but they play the patriots. If they really hate Castro so much, what the fuck are they doing here? They are all like dogs barking on the other side of the fence”.
Mariana Callejas
“If Posada Carriles were a member of the National Union of Cuban Writers and Artists instead of a terrorist, he could not aspire to enter the United States. The Department of Homeland Security denies visas to Cuban poets and artists but grants free entry to the country to terrorists.”
José Pertierra
“No one is interested in free speech here in Miami. Only in Havana.”
Bernardo Benes
“Modern wars are, above all, psychological warfare; the objective is to twist public opinion… We must never leave traces of our actions; if this is not possible, we must always and under any circumstances deny any participation in the facts. Always. Even when the opposite is the most obvious… If the interests of others align with ours, then they are allies; if they have no interest, they are instruments; if they oppose our interests, they are enemies.”
Antonio Veciana
“I hate America. They have betrayed us. Every day that passes I want to grab a rifle and shoot at this country.”
José Alfredo Pérez San Román, commander of the failed CIA invasion to Cuba.
Introduction
In the official memory of the United States, terrorism arrived on a pristine September morning in 2001. Before that, there were only freedom fighters. Some had been policemen of Fulgencio Batista, guards of the Havana casinos or errand boys for Meyer Lansky; after 1959, by the miracle of exile, they became patriots on the CIA payroll. Rolando Masferrer, «El Tigre,» senator of the dictatorship and owner of a private army, distilled the doctrine: «The only idiom communists comprehend is dynamite.» In 1975, a bomb beneath his car in Miami proved him correct, though not in the way he anticipated. José Miguel Battle, former operative of Batista’s secret police and Bay of Pigs veteran, transformed his anticommunism into La Corporación, a gambling and narcotics empire generating 45 million dollars a year. Freedom, like any good venture, required capital.
The rest of the ensemble needed no introduction in Miami, where they were prominent in Florida’s newspapers and courts, where they were seldom seen. Orlando Bosch, a pediatrician who preferred detonators to stethoscopes, participated in 30 terrorist operations between 1961 and 1968 alone, according to the Department of Justice. Luis Posada Carriles, trained by the CIA, officer of Venezuela’s political police and later a logistics operative of Iran-Contra, declared that «there are no civilians in this conflict.» Ricardo «El Mono» Morales Navarrete, simultaneously an asset of the CIA, the FBI and Venezuelan intelligence, admitted: «If I had to kill 273 instead of 73, I would do it again.» Guillermo and Ignacio Novo Sampol, who fired a bazooka at the United Nations while Che Guevara spoke in 1964, and their comrade Virgilio Paz Romero received, in 1976, the most delicate assignment of their careers.
It originated from Operation Condor, the accord endorsed in Santiago in November 1975 by the dictatorships of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil to pursue, torture and disappear their dissidents beyond any border. Washington knew. On September 16, 1976, Henry Kissinger instructed his ambassadors to take no further action on the warning against Condor’s assassinations. Five days later, a bomb constructed by the American Michael Townley, agent of Pinochet’s DINA, and planted by Paz and Dionisio Suárez, shattered the car of Orlando Letelier, Allende’s former foreign minister, a few blocks from the White House. Ronni Moffitt, twenty-five, American, died with him. Letelier’s transgression was to be influential in Washington.
Fifteen days later, Cubana flight 455 exploded off Barbados. Seventy-three dead, among them the young Cuban fencing team. The bombers worked for Posada; months earlier, a CIA informant had reported the plan. In 1990, the administration of George H. W. Bush, director of the CIA in 1976, freed Bosch against the advice of its own Justice Department. Posada died unpunished in Miami in 2018.
None of this was improvised. In 1962, the Joint Chiefs proposed Operation Northwoods: blowing up planes, staging attacks in Miami, blaming Havana. Kennedy refused. The method survived the man. Then came the African swine fever of 1971 and the hemorrhagic dengue of 1981, which killed 158 Cubans, mostly children. By then, the FBI was labeling Miami «the capital of terrorism.» Of course. The terrorists were ours.
From Dynamite to Ballots: How the Exiles Learned to Lobby
In the 1970s, some self-perceived patriots in Miami and Union City, NJ, had a simple mantra, the same one people like Rolando Masferrer had taught them: C4 and dynamite. They used it liberally. In two years, 200 explosives detonated in Miami alone, some at the entrances of the FBI and the police, the same institutions that were supposed to safeguard the Free World from terrorism. Most of the victims were not communists. They were other Cubans, ones who believed that speaking to Havana was not treason. Luciano Nieves, slain in 1975. Emilio Milián, who lost his legs to a car bomb in 1976 for voicing on the radio what he thought. Eulalio Negrín, gunned down in Union City in 1979 in front of his little son, for having taken part in the dialogue of the Committee of 75. Freedom of expression was a right that applied in Havana, not in Miami.
But Plastic C4 and dynamite have a drawback: they leave evidence. After Letelier and Flight 455, the FBI could no longer look the other way. The informants began talking, the trials commenced, and in 1983 Eduardo Arocena, leader of Omega 7, went to prison. Washington no longer required its old mercenaries. The CIA had abandoned most of them, as one drops a broken umbrella. The heroes of the exile had become uncomfortable figures.
Then arrived Ronald Reagan, and with him a shrewder concept. In 1981, with the approval of the National Security Council, Jorge Mas Canosa established the Cuban American National Foundation, modeled openly on AIPAC. Millionaire businessman Mas Canosa was a Bay of Pigs veteran, a former announcer on the CIA’s pirate radio, and a friend of Posada Carriles and Oliver North since his years at Fort Benning. Now he was also an entrepreneur, and an entrepreneur understands what a terrorist sometimes forgets: one check signed in Washington is worth more than a hundred bombs in Little Havana.
The method shifted; the aim did not. In 1985, Radio Martí commenced broadcasting to the island with federal sponsorship, and Mas Canosa chaired its advisory council. The Free Cuba PAC donated money to Democrats and Republicans alike, because liberty has no party, only patrons. Since 1980, the refugees of Mariel became citizens, and the citizens became ballots. Miami-Dade became a bloc that influenced Florida elections, and Florida began to decide presidents.
In 1989, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen became the first Cuban-American in Congress. Her campaign manager was Jeb Bush. A year later, the administration of his father, the same George H. W. Bush who had directed the CIA in 1976, released Orlando Bosch against the counsel of its own Justice Department, which had labeled him “a terrorist who never repented.” In 1993, Lincoln Díaz-Balart entered Congress, and so did Bob Menendez, once mayor of Union City, the former capital of Omega 7. The town had ceased exporting bombs and begun exporting congressmen. In 1992, New Jersey’s Robert Torricelli introduced the Cuban Democracy Act. In 1996, the Helms-Burton Act rendered the embargo a law that only Congress could overturn. What the bomb on flight 455 could not achieve, Congress did with a show of hands.
The old methods were not abandoned, only shifted to the back room. In 1989 alone, 18 explosives detonated in Miami, almost all unpunished, almost all forgotten. In 1997, bombs went off in Havana hotels, and an Italian tourist named Fabio Di Celmo died. In 1998, Posada Carriles told The New York Times that Mas Canosa and the Foundation’s leaders had financed his operations for years. The Foundation denied it. Posada later withdrew it. As in every good family, nobody recalled anything.
Most Cuban-American leaders interpret this same history differently. To them, the move into politics was a genuine rejection of violence by people whose property and families the revolution had confiscated. In their perception, the militants were a minority the community abandoned, and lobbying was a legitimate use of democratic rights. Historians still debate over how far the lobby and the violent wing were linked, beyond the documented cases.
Of course the terrorists were a minority. Nobody questions it. They always are. Sects are minorities, and so are lobbies. Nobody needs a majority when they have organization, money and a monopoly on the storyline. A few hundred men with explosives, a few dozen with checkbooks and a radio station were enough to define, for half a century, what it meant to be Cuban in Miami, who was a patriot and who was a traitor, who could speak and who had better remain quiet. The majority of exiles, who worked, paid taxes and only wanted to see their mothers again, never drafted the script. They only had to echo it, or keep silent. Silence, in Miami, was also a form of endurance.
“There are two Cubas,” said Gaeton Fonzi, the congressional investigator. “One is Cuba, and the other is the Cuba that Mas Canosa created in the minds of the exiles.” That second Cuba never possessed an army. It had something more potent: a seat in US Congress and the final word on what everyone else was permitted to remember.
Fidel Castro, Ronald Reagan, and Bill Clinton: Intelligence Beyond the Cold War
In September 2007, Fidel Castro revealed an episode that, if fully confirmed, would illustrate one of the lesser-known ironies of the Cold War: Cuban intelligence may have helped save the life of Ronald Reagan, the American president whose administration maintained an openly hostile policy toward Cuba.
According to Castro, in 1984, a Cuban security official stationed at the United Nations received information about an extreme-right-wing group planning to assassinate Reagan during a visit to North Carolina. Cuban intelligence reportedly transmitted the information directly to Robert C. Muller, the security chief of the US mission at the UN. The information allegedly included the conspirators’ identities, the location and timing of the planned attack, and details about their weapons. The FBI subsequently arrested several people in North Carolina. Castro also claimed that Muller personally thanked the Cuban official on behalf of the American government.
The account was reported by the Associated Press on September 12, 2007. Wayne Smith, former head of the US Interests Section in Havana, confirmed that Cuba had condemned the 1981 assassination attempt against Reagan but said he had no knowledge of the alleged 1984 conspiracy. His lack of knowledge, however, does not constitute evidence that the episode never happened.
There was another remarkable episode involving Fidel Castro and Bill Clinton, although the circumstances were different. In 1998, Castro sent Clinton a confidential warning about a terrorist conspiracy uncovered by Cuban intelligence. The message was transmitted through an unusual intermediary: Colombian writer and Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez, who had personal access to both leaders.
According to García Márquez’s written account of his May 7, 1998, meeting with Clinton at the White House, Castro had decided to convey information concerning a terrorist scheme that could impact Cuba, the United States, and other countries. García Márquez personally delivered the message and raised two additional questions suggested by the Cuban leader. The incident is detailed in a Cuban government dossier submitted to the United Nations in 2005, which reproduces the correspondence and the writer’s narrative. This was not a warning that Clinton himself was about to be assassinated, but rather intelligence concerning terrorist attacks against Cuba and potentially international commercial aviation.
Documents
Operation Mongoose, Operation Northwoods.
(Declassified:)
Militant Latin American secret groups in the US. Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations, Omega 9, Alpha 66, Luis Posada Carriles, Orlando Bosch, Orlando Letelier, a Car bomb in Washington DC., Operation Condor, Cubana Flight 455 bomb, Contras in Nicaragua, Tourist bombings of 1997, etc.
60-90s Florida Terrorsim.pdf
SOLON: The coddled «terrorists» of South Florida
SOLON: The coddled «terrorists» of South Florida
«Anti-Castro Cuban exiles who have been linked to bombings and assassinations are living free in Miami. Does the U.S. government have a double standard when it comes to terror?»
US Militants.pdf
Bosch, Paulino Sierra Martínez, etc. https://www.jfk-assassination.net/russ/jfkinfo4/jfk10/hscv10b.htm
https://www.maryferrell.org/php/showlist.php?docset=1498
Terrorism in the Miami area 1976(1).pdf
Terroristic Activity. Terrorism in Miami Area. Hearings before the Subcommittee to investigate the Administration of the Internal Security Act. Committee on the Judiciary United States Senate Ninety-Fourth Congress. Second Session.May 6, de 1976. www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/39243NCJRS.pdf.
Panama.pdf
“At his trial in 1984 in the United States, Eduardo Arocena, ringleader of the terrorist organization Omega 7, publicly confessed to having introduced germs into Cuba and admitted that haemorrhagic dengue fever had been introduced into the island via groups of family relatives of Cuban origin, based in the United States. “In order to determine whether or not this confession by the head of the notorious Omega 7 terrorist organization is true, regarding the groups used to introduce the haemorrhagic dengue epidemic into Cuba, we have provided below an exhaustive explanation and description of who these groups are, who organized them and in whose service they were operating».
United Nations : https://docs-library.unoda.org/Biological_Weapons_Convention_-_Ad_Hoc_Group_Twentieth_session_(2000)/BWC_AHG_wp.417.pdf
——
U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit – 778 F.2d 943 (2d Cir. 1985)
Law https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/778/943/253092/
«The jury found Arocena guilty on twenty-five counts, including first-degree murder of a diplomat; two conspiracies to murder diplomats; malicious damage by explosives to property used in commerce, with personal injury resulting; six counts of possession of unregistered bombs; two counts of conspiracy; and perjury before the Grand Jury.1 Judge Robert J. Ward sentenced Arocena on November 9, 1984
Latin American dictators love South Florida
A Reminder That Marco Rubio’s Brother-in-Law Was a Prolific Cocaine Trafficker
While Trump deports immigrants for old drug charges, Rubio’s brother-in-law was the frontman of a drug trafficking operation.
September 17, 2025
https://www.justice.gov/archive/ndic/pubs40/40400/40400p.pdf?utm_source=
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