Published Monday, November 20, 2000, in the
Miami Herald
Cuba seeks custody of anti-Castro plotter
Exile would face a death sentence
By Glenn Garvin. ggarvin@herald.com
PANAMA -- Fidel Castro's government has formally asked Panama to extradite
veteran anti-Castro warrior Luis Posada Carriles to Cuba, where he faces a death
sentence after being convicted in absentia for the bombing of a Cuban airliner
that killed 73 people.
The request, accusing Posada Carriles of 16 specific terrorist acts,
including the 1976 airliner bombing, was made Saturday night in a diplomatic
note from Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez Roque.
Meanwhile, Venezuelan officials said they would make a formal extradition
request for Posada Carriles today. Posada Carriles escaped from a Venezuelan
prison in 1985 while awaiting a third trial on charges of bombing the airliner,
after he had been acquitted twice.
"He's a fugitive from justice,'' Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez
said.
Castro, though, said Cuba "has the first claim'' on Posada Carriles. "We'll
defend that right up to the end,'' the Cuban president said at a press
conference late Saturday night. A few hours later, addressing a gathering of
university students, Castro shouted: "Viva Panama, the land where the most
famous criminal in all the hemisphere has been captured!''
ARRESTED FRIDAY
Posada Carriles, who has been battling Castro with bombs and bullets for
more than 40 years, was arrested here Friday after Cuban intelligence tipped
Panamanian authorities to his presence and accused him of plotting to
assassinate Castro during the Ibero-American summit held here over the weekend.
Three other men, two of them Cuban Americans who live in Miami, were
arrested along with Posada Carriles. None of them have been charged with
anything yet, though police say Posada Carriles entered Panama under a false
name.
The three others -- Miami residents Pedro Remón and Guillermo Novo,
both members of the defunct anti-Castro terrorist group Omega 7, and another man
whose possibly fake U.S. passport identifies him as Manuel Díaz -- were
apparently not included in the Cuban extradition request.
POTENTIAL PROBLEMS
The Cuban extradition request could well pose knotty political and legal
problems for Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso, who has been trying to shed
her country's reputation as a safe haven for political rogues.
Last month, Peru's shadowy former spy master Vladimiro Montesinos gave up on
his request for political asylum here and went into hiding in his own country
after learning that the Panamanian government was on the verge of deporting him.
"Terrorists have to be brought to justice,'' said Teresita Arias, the
Cuban-born vice president of the Panamanian Congress. "But if Posada
Carriles is a fugitive from a Venezuelan prison, it sounds like he belongs
there.''
It was difficult to get a clear picture of Posada Carriles' legal situation
on Sunday, with most Panamanian officials away from their offices. Several
contacted by The Herald said they did not believe Panama has extradition
treaties with either Cuba or Venezuela, but added that extradition might be
possible anyway under some circumstances.
Other officials noted that countries like Panama without the death penalty
rarely extradite anyone to another nation where they might face execution. "I
just can't comment until I see the specifics of it,'' one senior official said.
Other countries have frequently had trouble getting fugitives extradited
from Panama. Guatemala for nearly a decade has been trying to get its hands on
Jorge Serrano, who fled to Panama after his attempt to dissolve Guatemala's
courts and Congress failed. Former Haitian strongman Gen. Raoul Cedras has also
managed to thwart Port-au-Prince's efforts to have him returned for trial.
SENTENCED TO DEATH
Cuban courts convicted Posada Carriles and sentenced him to death within
weeks of the October 1976 bombing of the Cubana Airlines plane. Posada Carriles
at the time was running a private detective agency in Venezuela, and one of his
employees -- who confessed to placing the bomb on the plane but later recanted
-- said the attack was planned by Posada Carriles and his friend Orlando Bosch,
a Miami pediatrician and anti-Castro crusader.
But Posada Carriles was already in Venezuelan custody, and he stayed there
until he escaped from prison in 1985, disguised as a priest.
STARTED YOUNG
Posada Carriles has always denied involvement in the airliner bombing --
though in a 1991 interview with The Herald, he praised the attack for giving
Castro "a taste of his own medicine.''
But he has frequently boasted of involvement in any number of other
anti-Castro plots.
He began bombing Cuban government targets as a teenager, barely six months
after Castro seized power in 1959. Later, he trained for the Bay of Pigs
invasion, though his unit never made it to the beach, and ran guns to the island
for the CIA.
He has confessed to masterminding about a dozen bombings of Havana tourist
spots in 1997, including one that killed an Italian tourist. His associates say
he also led a team of six Cuban exiles who tried to assassinate Castro in
Colombia in 1994.
4 held in plot against Castro
By Frances Robles And Glenn Garvin, ggarvin@herald.com
PANAMA -- Three Cuban Americans, all veterans of the long undeclared war
between Fidel Castro and the island's exiles, were taken into custody Friday
after Castro warned Panamanian authorities that the men planned to assassinate
him during the Ibero-American summit here.
Luis Posada Carriles, the admitted mastermind of a bombing campaign that
killed an Italian tourist in Havana three years ago, was detained along with
Miami residents Pedro Remón and Guillermo Novo, both of them members of
the defunct anti-Castro terrorist group Omega 7.
A fourth man, identified as Manuel Díaz on his U.S. passport, was
also held. But little was known of him, and Panamanian authorities said they
suspect he is using a false identity.
No charges have been filed against any of the men, said Pablo Quintero, the
chief of Panamanian intelligence. "President Castro said they were going to
kill him, so we have to check them out and see what they were doing here,''
Quintero said.
No weapons or explosives were discovered when the men were picked up Friday
afternoon at a small Panama City hotel. But the fact that two of the men had
irregularities in their travel documents -- Posada Carriles was traveling with a
Salvadoran passport identifying him as "Franco Rodríguez'' -- tends
to support Castro's claim that they were plotting against him, Panamanian
security officials said.
"Why else would you sneak into the country under a false name?'' asked
one.
Even if no charges wind up being filed here, Panamanian officials said
Saturday night they expected an extradition request for Posada Carriles from
Venezuela, where he escaped from prison in 1985. He was awaiting the outcome of
a prosecution appeal of his acquittal on charges that he was involved in the
1976 bombing of a Cubana airliner that killed 73 people.
CUBAN COURT
Given the friendly relations between Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez
and Castro, that would likely mean Posada Carriles would end up in a Cuban
courtroom.
Posada Carriles, Remón and Novo all have a long history of
involvement with violent anti-communist organizations:
Posada Carriles, besides being accused of blowing up the Cubana airliner
(which he has always denied) and a dozen blasts that rocked Havana tourist spots
during 1997, was a key figure in an operation directed by former White House
aide Oliver North that supplied Nicaragua's anti-communist contra army. Posada
Carriles has also served in the security police of anti-communist governments in
Guatemala and Venezuela.
Remón, a 56-year-old former truck salesman, was sentenced to 10
years in federal prison in 1986 after pleading guilty to the March 1980
attempted murder of Raúl Roa Kouri, Cuba's former delegate to the United
Nations, and to an attempted bombing of the Cuban U.N. Mission in December 1979.
And in testimony in a 1984 murder trial of another Omega 7 member, Remón
was identified as the triggerman in the machine-gun murder of a Cuban U.N.
diplomat, Felix García Rodríguez.
Novo, 61, a former radio advertising salesman, was convicted in the 1976
bombing murder of former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C.
But the verdict was overturned on appeal, and he was acquitted in a second
trial. "I was acquitted of murdering Orlando Letelier,'' Novo wrote in a
1992 letter to The Herald. "Therefore I did not 'get away' with a judicial
technicality, as others have tried to make it look.'' He was also arrested in a
1964 bazooka attack on the United Nations during a speech by Castro lieutenant
Che Guevara, but the charges were later dropped.
OMEGA 7
The FBI considered both Remón and Novo as principal figures in Omega
7, an anti-Castro group that a federal prosecutor once called "one of the
most dangerous, most vicious and most feared terrorist groups in U.S. history.''
Remón, who lives in Kendall, is director of sales and marketing for
the Gaunaurd Group, a Hialeah housewares distributor. Novo, a former chemist, in
recent years owned Aly-Mar Furniture in Allapattah, but it has since been sold.
Friends of the two men said the idea of their plotting against Castro was
absurd. "That's the craziest thing I've ever heard,'' said Manny Gaunaurd,
Remón's boss. "Castro has negative feelings toward Cubans in Miami.
Anybody who's anti-Castro is out to kill him -- that's anybody from the Cuban
American National Foundation on down. And probably Elián, too.''
The three men, along with Manuel Díaz (whose age is listed as 66 on
the passport he was carrying), were picked up Friday after Castro held a press
conference to complain that Posada Carriles was in Panama planning to
assassinate him.
Panamanian police say all four men entered Panama at Paso Canóa, a
town on the border with Costa Rica. Their passports, police say, show that
Posada Carriles reached Panama on Nov. 3, while Novo arrived Tuesday, Remón
Wednesday, and Díaz Thursday . The four flew on a commuter plane from the
northern Panama city of David to the capital on Thursday.
"We've been checking on their activities,'' said a Panamanian
investigator. "We know they had some meetings, talked to some people, but
that's all we've got so far.''
LIST OF NAMES
The names of Posada Carriles, Novo and Remón all appeared on a list
of about 150 potential anti-Castro terrorists that Cuban intelligence supplied
to Panamanian authorities about four months ago, when planning for Castro's
visit began.
"But we never heard anything more about it until Friday afternoon, when
Castro told us Posada Carriles was here,'' said a Panamanian official.
He said Díaz was picked up because he was sharing a hotel room with
one of the other three men, and because his passport shows he came to Panama
from Costa Rica but bears no entry stamp for Costa Rica.
The arrests eclipsed the rest of the summit here and touched off a series of
angry exchanges between Castro and several of the other 20 heads of state who
are attending.
When Castro accused Salvadoran President Francisco Flores of "protecting
terrorists'' by permitting Posada Carriles to live in El Salvador, Flores
snapped: "It is intolerable that you, involved in the murder of thousands
of Salvadorans, would accuse me of being involved in the case of Luis Posada
Carriles.''
Man arrested for Vietnam leaflet drop
Former South Vietnamese pilot pulled off similar stunt in Havana
From Herald Staff and Wire Reports. Published Monday,
November 20, 2000, in the Miami Herald
BANGKOK, Thailand -- The former South Vietnamese fighter pilot who scattered
leaflets over Havana on New Year's Day is being held in Thailand after carrying
out a similar mission over Ho Chi Minh City ahead of President Clinton's visit.
Ly Tong forced a Thai charter plane to fly him to Vietnam, on a mission to
drop anti-communist leaflets on the former South Vietnamese capital, police said
Sunday. Ly Tong was charged with taking an aircraft out of Thailand without
permission and inflicting physical harm on the pilot.
"According to our initial questioning, he considers himself a patriot
who wants all the Vietnamese to fight against communism,'' a senior police
spokesman said.
"We are investigating whether anybody else is involved with this
matter.''
A Thai foreign ministry spokesman said Ly Tong, who was granted U.S.
citizenship after fleeing his homeland at the end of the war, booked the plane
and pilot on the pretext of taking some flying lessons.
Once aboard, he told the pilot he was carrying a grenade and would detonate
it unless the aircraft diverted across the Gulf of Thailand and toward the
former Saigon, flying low to evade radar detection.
He forced the pilot to buzz the city so he could dump the leaflets, which
exhorted the Vietnamese people to rise up against their communist leaders.
Ly Tong was arrested on his return to Thailand aboard the light plane Friday
night, as Clinton prepared to arrive in the Vietnamese capital Hanoi.
"Initial investigations found the man worked alone, with no help from
any group in the U.S. or Thailand,'' said foreign ministry spokesman Don
Pramudhvinai.
Thai authorities were keeping their Vietnamese counterparts informed on the
progress of the investigation, and will confer with U.S. officials today, he
said.
"Whether or not there will be a question of extradition remains to be
seen,'' he said.
The leaflet-dropping incident was the latest in a series of stunts Ly Tong
has carried out over the past decade, including the 1992 hijacking of a Vietnam
Airlines jet that put him in jail for six years.
On the first day of this year, he flew a rented plane from Key West to Cuba,
circled Havana and dropped leaflets advocating rebellion and calling Fidel
Castro "an old dinosaur.'' As Cuban and U.S. authorities cooperated to
avoid an international incident, Cuban MiGs scrambled and an F-16 responded from
Homestead Air Reserve Base.
Tong was detained and questioned when he returned to Kendall-Tamiami
Executive Airport; he surrendered his pilot's license.
Cuban beer aims sales at U.S., Florida Lottery at Hispanics
By Mimi Whitefield. mwhitefield@herald.com. Published
Friday, November 17, 2000, in the Miami Herald.
Miami's La Tropical Brewing Co. started by selling nostalgia, a Pilsener
with the taste of old Cuba, and its target market was Cuban-Americans who
remembered the beer from their youth.
It was the "José and Pepe strategy,'' said Manny Portuondo,
president and founder of the company. The next step was marketing the beer to
second-generation Cuban-Americans.
Now, two years after the beer was relaunched in South Florida, Tropical is
going after the national Hispanic market with an eye toward eventually selling
to all consumers.
A challenge for the Florida Lottery, on the other hand, was to take its
games, which were already well-known in the general market, and sell them to
Florida Hispanics, who make up 15 percent of the state's population.
Those two different approaches for reaching one increasingly important
market were among the case studies presented at the Greater Miami Chamber of
Commerce's 11th Annual Hispanic Market Seminar Thursday at the Wyndham
Miami-Biscayne Bay.
The annual seminar explores ways to reach America's fastest-growing market
and recognizes companies that have distinguished themselves in marketing to
Hispanics. BellSouth Mobility won the Hispanic Marketer of the Year Award.
Today, Florida's top 100 Hispanic businesses will be recognized at a chamber
awards luncheon.
The U.S. Hispanic population stands at 32.5 million -- making Hispanic
U.S.A. the fifth largest Spanish-speaking population in the world after Mexico,
Spain, Colombia, and Argentina -- and their annual purchasing power will exceed
$440 billion this year.
"We're now the pretty girls at the dance, from a marketing
standpoint,'' said Alex Lopez Negrete, chief executive and president of Lopez
Negrete Communications, a Hispanic advertising agency with offices in Houston
and Miami and annual billings of more than $30 million.
But as the Hispanic market becomes increasingly diverse, Lopez Negrete
cautioned against using the one-size-fits-all approach. "Hispanics are
everywhere and we come from everywhere,'' he said.
Yesterday's idea that Hispanics were part of the great American melting pot
has given way to today's concept that they're really part of a big tossed salad
and more likely to acculturate than assimilate, Lopez Negrete said.
That means corporations and government agencies like the Florida Lottery are
creating distinctive marketing campaigns designed to appeal to Hispanics.
To sell Lotto, the state's big jackpot game, for example, the character El
Billetero, dressed in a straw boater and white guayabera, was created.
Comedian Ruben Rabasa, El Astronauta (The Astronaut), speaks for the Mega
Money game, and Sanchez & Levitan, the Miami ad agency responsible for the
Lottery's Hispanic campaign, has created new ads for the scratch-off game.
The La Pausa (The Pause) ads feature Hispanics taking a pause from busy,
stressful lives to play scratch-off. The television spots begin with a solid
green, blue or pink screen. The colors are scratched off to reveal the players
beneath.
The Lottery also participates at Hispanic community events like the Three
Kings Parade in Miami, Viva Broward, and the Hialeah Springfest.
The strategy appears to be working. Lottery sales to Hispanics are
increasing, said Waymond King, assistant secretary of marketing for the Florida
Lottery.
La Tropical's approach also appears to be paying off. Although the beer is
brewed in the United States, the old Cuban formula is used and La Tropical is
positioned as an imported beer. In a Nielsen supermarket rating of imported
beers in October, Tropical ranked ninth in the Miami Hispanic market, beating
out other, more established brands.
"For us to be successful we needed to get Cubans to drink it first,''
said Portuondo. "Our strategy was very simple. We know José and Pepe
will drink La Tropical before Bill and Billy Bob will.''
Now the company's horizons are expanding. The company has developed a
general market campaign that conjures up old Cuban icons -- the mambo, Babalu,
the hot tropics -- that non-Cubans relate to, and recently signed a national
distribution deal with Heineken that will make the beer more widely available
beginning next year.
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