Cuba Confidential by Ann Louise Bardach

Author:Ann Louise Bardach
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141935546
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2008-11-19T00:00:00+00:00

III

WHEN BOMBS BEGAN TO RIP through some of Havana’s most fashionable hotels, restaurants and discotheques in 1997, they sowed fear and speculation throughout Cuba, a police state notorious for its tight security. From one end of the island to the other, folks gossiped and speculated as to who could have been responsible. At his office in Guatemala City, a Cuban-American businessman named Tony Alvarez was certain he knew the answer. For nearly a year, he had watched with growing alarm as two of his partners—working with a mysterious gray-haired man with a Cuban accent and multiple passports—acquired explosives and detonators, congratulating one another on a job well done every time a bomb went off in Cuba.

Alvarez overheard the men talk of assassinating Fidel Castro at an upcoming conference of Latin American heads of state on Margarita Island, off the north coast of Venezuela. Alarmed, he went to Guatemalan security officials and wrote a letter that eventually found its way into the hands of Venezuelan intelligence agents and the FBI. Venezuelan authorities reacted energetically to the information, searching for explosives on the island where the meeting was to be held. But in the States, the letter elicited what Alvarez described as a surprising indifference. An FBI agent in the Miami office, Jorge Kiszinski, phoned Alvarez back and said a colleague would call soon to arrange to speak with him. In the meantime, Kiszinski urged Alvarez to leave Guatemala immediately. “He told me my life was in danger, that these were dangerous people, and urged me to get out of Guatemala,” said Alvarez, then a sixty-two-year-old engineer. “But I never heard from him again.” In fact, Alvarez never heard again from anyone in the FBI.

Indeed, the FBI showed a striking lack of curiosity about the bombings, a fact that did not surprise Luis Posada. “They know where I am and how to reach me,” he said with a shrug. He described FBI agent Kiszinski as “a good friend” of long standing. “He’s going to retire this year,” Posada said with palpable feeling. “He’s a very good guy. Please don’t write about him. He has done not only good things for me but for many others.”

Plainly embarrassed, a spokesman for the FBI explained that a friendship between the two men was implausible. “Agent Kiszinski has had two contacts with him in his entire life, the last of which was a number of years ago.” Posada told a different story. He expressed confidence that the FBI was not examining his operations in Guatemala, because “the first person they would want to talk to is me, and nobody called.” Nor, he said, did anyone try to interview his collaborators. “I would know,” he said smoothly, adding that it was Kiszinski who interrogated him in Honduras about his role in the Iran-Contra affair for the Office of Independent Counsel in 1992. He said that the agent had confirmed to him a year earlier that an informant in Guatemala had notified the FBI about the bombing plots. Posada added that he had a second contact in the FBI.

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