Assata Shakur - FBI Most Wanted Terrorist

Shakur was a former member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army (BLA) when the FBI illegally persecuted black activists with its infamous program, COINTELPRO. She was arrested several times for various charges without convictions. That changed in 1973 when she was convicted in a highly contentious murder case.

Shakur, and two other BLA members, were pulled over by New Jersey State Troopers, supposedly for a broken taillight. The police searched the driver, Sundiata Acoli, and found a gun in his pocket. Both men grappled for the weapon which led to a shootout that led to bullet wounds for everyone on the scene and the deaths of New Jersey Trooper, Werner Forester, and Assata Shakur’s companion, Zayd Shakur (rapper Tupac Shakur’s father).

Werner Forester was shot with two bullets from Acoli’s gun and two bullets from his gun. The prosecution contended that Assata Shakur murdered Forester execution-style with his weapon at point-blank range. However, forensic evidence proved that she didn’t shoot a gun. Her fingerprints weren’t on the weapon, nor was any gunpowder residue on her hands. The evidence shows that she was shot in the back while her hands were in the air.

Despite the evidence, an all-white jury convicted her on two counts of murder (including her fellow BLA member, Zayd Shakur) and six counts of assault. That was in large part due to the heavy media coverage of her arrest and her trial’s venue being moved to a different jurisdiction where 80% of residents believed that she was guilty. She was sentenced to 33 years in prison.

Shakur later escaped prison and eventually fled to Cuba where she was granted political asylum. That’s where she remains today. In a symbolic move, the FBI added Assata Shakur to the Most Wanted Terrorists list on the 40^th anniversary of these murders. Shakur was the first female on the list. She remains on the list today with a $1 million reward; whereas Sundiata Acoli was released on parole in 2022.

It must be noted that Cuba’s government is currently harboring a few fugitives of terrorism-related crimes and it refuses to extradite them to the U.S. But there’s much more context needed to evaluate this issue.

There should be a high bar for labeling a country as a state-sponsor of terrorism. For America to give another country this label, it should have a moral high ground to stand on. And that’s not the case. America is exponentially more guilty of this crime.

For decades, several Cuban-American exiles, who were trained/financed by the CIA, committed hundreds, possibly thousands, of terrorist acts against the Cuban government, Cuban civilians/infrastructure, the civilians/infrastructure of countries that have relations with Cuba, and Cuban-Americans who simply didn’t agree with their hardline stance against Castro.

Cuba has faced an unfathomable level of terrorism over the decades. It’s difficult to track the exact scale, but according to the government of Cuba, terrorism against its citizens has resulted in 3,478 deaths and 2,099 disabled persons. The U.S. government has protected so many of these terrorists from prosecution/incarceration. You could argue that America belongs on its own list of state sponsors of terrorism.

Terrorists Live Freely on U.S. Soil

The majority of Americans oppose our country’s hardline policies against the Cuban government. But keep in mind, Florida is a swing state and politicians from both major parties have routinely placated a large voting bloc of Cuban-Americans who want maximum pressure applied to the island. Albeit, there’s been a shift as the younger generation of Cuban Americans have more moderate goals.

In 2017, then-President Trump made an appearance in the Little Havana section of Miami to announce a reversal of some of Obama’s steps toward relations with Cuba. (Cuba was removed from the state sponsor of terrorism list in 2015.) Trump made this announcement at the Manuel Artime Theater in Miami. The city of Miami ironically gave that name to the theatre in 1982, the same year the State Department first designated Cuba as a state sponsor of terror.

The Cuban-American exile leader in Miami, Manuel Artime, was a long-time CIA asset who supported the Contras and helped finance the Watergate burglars' defense fund. Artime led Brigade 2506 in its infamous attack at the Bay of Pigs. Castro released the Bay of Pigs captives in 1962 in exchange for $53 million in economic aid. Upon return to the U.S., Artime and many other Bay of Pigs veterans promptly returned to continue committing acts of sabotage and terrorism against Cuba.

Manuel Artime - Wikimedia Commons

CIA operatives began planning assassination attempts within the first year, 1959, of Castro’s revolutionary government. President Eisenhower formally authorized the CIA’s program in March 1960, signing “A PROGRAM OF COVERT ACTION AGAINST THE CASTRO REGIME.” These attempts began with a plot to poison Castro with his favorite brand of cigar.

Having a common enemy can make strange bedfellows. The CIA partnered in assassination plots with multiple members of the mafia who were motivated because Castro had shut down Cuba’s casinos and ruined their cash cows.

This anti-Castro aggression increased under JFK. The CIA established a covert station, JM/WAVE, on the University of Miami campus. The U.S. government was so dedicated to overthrowing Castro that up to 400 CIA agents worked there making it the second largest station in the world, behind only Langley. A few thousand Cuban exiles were financed/trained through hundreds of South Florida front companies.

JM Wave - Wikimedia Commons

You can see just how far the mission creep expanded by examining “Operation Northwoods.” It was a proposal sent to the Secretary of Defense for different ways to provoke Cuba and justify a U.S. military invasion. Operation Northwoods included suggestions to commit acts of terrorism on American soil and blame it on Castro. The plan wasn’t accepted, but the fact that such outrageous tactics were considerable is eye-opening.

Numerous declassified documents illustrate the true nature of America’s extreme support of radical Cuban exiles. In March 1964, Desmond Fitzgerald, chief of the Western Hemisphere of the CIA, contacted the President’s Special Assistant for National Security Affairs. Fitzgerald wrote, “The sabotage raids are conducted by Cuban exile groups held and trained in Florida and entirely subject to our planning and control.” He added that “our only real leverage on them is through our financial support but withdrawal of this support would probably be fatal to their operations in time.” In other words, these violent Cuban exile groups would likely cease to exist without U.S. government support.

Two months later, Manuel Artime’s group, the Revolutionary Recovery Movement (MIRR), attacked a sugar mill in Cuba destroying 70 tons of sugar. That created $3 million worth of economic damage.

The severity of Artime’s attacks escalated quickly and his targets shifted from infrastructure to civilians. In September 1964, his group overwhelmed a Spanish freighter, Sierra Aranzazu, with gunfire. The ship was carrying food to Cuba. They murdered three people and wounded eight others. This was not an act of “sabotage” as the extremist community labels these attacks; it was terrorism.

Afterward, the U.S. State Department helped to cover up the crime. Records show that Secretary of State, David Dean Rusk “assured the Spanish Ambassador that the United States would assist in the investigation of the incident.” Meanwhile, the U.S. State Department “generally agreed that the U.S. should not lend weight to the case against Artime and the findings should remain ‘as indeterminate as is plausible.’” That means that the American government helped cover up the crime, which is the definition of state-sponsored terrorism.



Freedom Fighters or Terrorists

Fidel Castro and Che Guevara visited New York a few months later for a meeting at the United Nations. While Guevara spoke at the podium, an explosion shook the building. A group of Cuban exiles had misfired a bazooka from across the East River.

These operatives from the “Cuban Nationalist Movement” terrorist organization were tied to U.S. intelligence. While awaiting trial, their attorney compared their violence to that of “Sinn Fein or Haganah without which we wouldn't have two states in being — Israel and (Ireland).”

That statement dives directly into the essence of what mars this discussion. There’s often a dishonest game of semantics with this subject. One person’s “freedom fighter” is another person’s “terrorist.” There needs to be a line drawn that labels terrorism for what it is and doesn’t hide behind the freedom fighter label.

The three members of the Cuban Nationalist Movement had their charges dropped due to a legal technicality because the NYPD didn’t allow them to have an attorney present during questioning. Two of those perpetrators, Ignacio Novo and Guillermo Novo, would go on to commit many other acts of terrorism.

The Cuban Nationalist Movement’s leader, Felipe Rivero, publicly took credit for multiple acts of terror, including a bazooka attack at the Cuban embassy in Ottawa, Canada. He said, “The Ottawa bazooka blast marks a new beginning for our movement.”

Unlike Osama Bin Laden who needed to record videos of his threats from a cave, Rivero declared these warnings as a free man in Miami. He didn’t need to hold back, in part, because the American media offered a sympathetic view, even once labeling him like “James Bond.”

Another reason for Rivero’s hubris was the tremendous support that he had in the local community. It took nearly a year for him to be arrested after ordering the Cuban embassy attack and taking credit for it. Hundreds of Miami residents responded with a brief labor strike in an act of solidarity. Remarkably, Rivero served only a few months in jail before being released after signing an agreement to never commit terrorist acts in Canada again. Predictably, his organization was back forming violent plans within months.

As mentioned earlier, Ignacio Novo and Guillermo Novo continued committing acts of terror for the Cuban Nationalist Movement. Guillermo Novo was convicted in the U.S. in 1974 for conspiring to bomb a Cuban ship in Montreal. Remarkably, he was sentenced to only three years in prison and released on parole after serving a mere six months. That’s nowhere near the appropriate punishment for such a serious crime.

At that time, the Novo brothers collaborated with a high-profile Cuban exile/CIA asset, Orlando Bosch, who led a terrorist organization, CORU, which consolidated multiple terrorist groups into one organization. Those links led the Novo brothers to violate their probation and travel to Venezuela and Chile to meet with intelligence officials. They conspired to kill Orlando Letelier in one of the most heinous political assassinations on U.S. soil.

Orlando Letelier - Wikimedia Commons

Letelier fled political persecution in Chile and became a high-profile critic of the dictator Augusto Pinochet. He worked for the D.C. think tank, the Institute for Policy Studies. On September 21, 1976, Letelier and his colleague, Ronni Karpen Moffitt, were killed in a car bombing. Pinochet’s goons chose to outsource the explosives to members of the Cuban Nationalist Movement.

Cuban terrorism peaked in the mid-1970s. For the sake of scale, there was an 18-month period in which over 100 bombings took place in Miami alone. In 1974, forty-five percent of global terrorism was committed by Cuban exiles, according to author José Luis Méndez Méndez.

One of the most notorious terrorists of the last century, Luis Posada Carriles, was trained by the CIA to be a “demolitions expert.” Posada became a paid CIA informant (code-name AMCLEVE 15) in 1965. His handler at the agency severely miscalculated Posada’s character. Internal memos show that he viewed Posada as a moderate and valuable asset who could keep an eye on the extremist Cuban exiles. Early records show that Posada informed the CIA about a plan in 1965 by Jorge Mas Canosa to bomb a Cuban or Soviet ship in Mexico.

Luis Posada Carriles - Latin American Studies

By the 1970s, Jorge Mas Canosa was the unofficial political leader of the Cuban-American community who had direct communication with multiple American presidents. Mas Canosa fought hard to publicly distance himself from the terrorist elements in his movement. He even sued the New Republic for labeling him as a “mobster.” The U.S. government didn’t expose his links with terrorism until 2009 (via a FOIA request), which was 22 years after his death.

Mas Canosa had a clean public image and was revered in the exile community in Miami. He has a local street, school, and recreation center in his name. Mas Canosa’s advocacy group, the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), exerted pressure on both parties as it donated over $1.6 million to different candidates over 18 years. CANF also received funding from the CIA’s cut-out organization, the National Endowment for Democracy.

Jorge Mas Canosa (Wikimedia Commons), Jorge Mas Canosa statue (Po-Shen Loh - LinkedIn), Jorge Mas Canosa Middle School, Jorge Mas Canosa Blvd- @ermitadelacaridadmiami Instagram

Back to the man who the CIA in 1965 surmised had “good character,” Luis Posada Carriles. Records show that within a year after that assessment, this CIA-trained “demolitions expert” began providing bombs to Frank “Lefty” Rosenthal (the mafia-linked bookmaker portrayed by Robert Dinero in Casino) on multiple occasions. Rival bookies and thieves who didn’t want to pay the mob’s extortion money faced bombings.

Posada, as did other Cuban exiles, joined foreign intelligence agencies while being paid by the CIA. Officially, according to CIA documents, Posada was “amiably terminated from the agency” in June 1974, but his connections continued long after. That’s the same month that his accomplice who was mentioned earlier, Orlando Bosch, fled the U.S.

Orlando Bosch had already confessed to several terrorist attacks, according to DOJ documents. He also didn’t show up to court after being subpoenaed in the murder trial of the Cuban exile, José Elías de la Torriente, who many locals reviled for raising funds thousands of dollars to overthrow Castro and never following through with his plan.

Orlando Bosch - Wikimedia Commons

Bosch, up to this point in history already had an extensive background in terrorism and received the kinder side of U.S authorities. He, and five others, were arrested in 1965 in Florida when plotting to bomb an oil refinery in Cuba. The police confiscated 18 aerial bombs. His charges were light, considering the offense, merely exporting war materials without a license. He received a fortuitous break when the charges were dropped a few days later. A few months later police pulled him over and found another six aerial bombs and dynamite. Later that year, federal authorities also indicted Bosch for extorting Cuban exiles to fund his operations.

Bosch’s organization, Cuban Power, unleashed 15 attacks across New York City over eight months in 1968. He was arrested in September 1968 for shooting a bazooka at a Polish freighter off the coast of Miami. That led to an eventual conviction, but he miraculously only served four years before being paroled, which was aided by a recommendation from then-Florida Governor, Claude Kirk.

When Bosch fled the U.S. in 1974, he found a safe haven in Venezuela where Posada was an intelligence agent in the DISIP. Bosch wore out his welcome within months after bombing the Panamanian embassy in Caracas. He fled to Costa Rica and was arrested for possessing a fake passport. Even though he was a notorious fugitive, and Costa Rican officials offered extradition, the U.S. government declined.

The American government’s choices essentially provided freedom to Bosch who in June 1976 gathered the leaders of multiple Cuban exile terror groups. They agreed to merge into one group under Bosch’s direction, the Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations (CORU). In what was likely not a coincidence, Luis Posada Carriles contacted the CIA in the same month asking for a U.S. passport so that he could have a “vacation.”

The CIA and FBI knew Posada was up to no good. A high-level Venezuelan government official notified the FBI in September 1976 that CORU was developing plans to assassinate the Prime Ministers of Guyana and Jamaica (Forbes Burnham and Michael Manley) who had formed diplomatic relations with Cuba.

CORU also sought to attack Mexican government targets unless it released two of its operatives (Orestes Ruiz Hernandez and Gaspar Eugenio Jimenez) who attempted to kidnap the Cuban consul in Mexico. Gaspar Jimenez managed to escape prison in Mexico and find freedom in Miami even though he was suspected in the car bombing of a radio host, Emilio Milián, who spoke out against Cuban terrorism. He enjoyed that freedom due to a $50,000 bribe provided by the founder of World Finance Corporation, Guillermo Hernandez-Cartaya, whose bank was tied to drug money laundering and a suspected CIA slush fund.

Forbes Burnham, Michael Manley, Emilio Milián, Guillermo Hernandez-Cartaya

In September 1976, one of the CIA’s sources relayed that Orlando Bosch had returned to Venezuela and was under the protection of President Carlos Andres Perez who had reportedly received money from the CIA in the past. Bosch’s behavior was so brazen that he sought extortionary bribes from the Venezuelan government threatening that he’d provoke Cuban exiles to protest Perez when visiting the United Nations. It’s impossible to believe that an international fugitive terrorist acted in this way unless he was still under the protection of the CIA.

During that same meeting, Bosch said “Now that our organization has come out of the (Orlando) Letelier (assassination) looking good, we are going to do something else.” Days later Luis Posada Carriles said, “We are going to hit a Cuban airplane” and “Orlando has the details.” Did the CIA warn the Cuban government? No.

A bomb exploded on Cubana Flight 455 from Barbados to Jamaica on October 6, 1973. All 73 passengers died. Shortly afterward, Bosch received a message from one of the bombers, “A bus with 73 dogs went off a cliff and got killed.” This was the deadliest airline terrorist attack in the Western Hemisphere until 9/11.

Venezuelan authorities arrested Posada and Bosch. Months later, an American freelance journalist, Blake Fleetwood, somehow finagled his way into the jail and interviewed Posada and Bosch. They confessed to the crime. Fleetwood’s initiative was bold on multiple levels. Fleetwood communicated his whereabouts to Eugene Propper, the Assistant US Attorney in Washington D.C., who was investigating the Orlando Letelier murder. Propper warned him that the “CIA told the secret police everything. They are out to get you. You are in great danger.’’ Fleetwood managed to escape Venezuela unscathed and published the story without any mainstream media attention.

Posada remained in prison until 1985 when he escaped. Ricardo Mas Canosa later testified that his infamous brother, Jorge Mas Canosa, directed him to pay a $50,000 bribe to a Venezuelan prison worker to set him free. Another notorious Cuban exile CIA asset, Felix Rodriguez, transported Posada to El Salvador where he became a key player in the illegal Contra weapon supply line. Operatives like Posada are often the type that the CIA seeks out because of the legal leverage that they have over them.

The support for such a notorious terrorist, Orlando Bosch, in Miami was stunning. Former Miami mayor, Maurice Ferre, visited Bosch while he was on hunger strike in his Venezuelan jail cell. In fact, the Miami City Commission honored him by declaring March 25th to be “Dr. Orlando Bosch Day.” Even though Bosch and Posada confessed to a Trinidadian police official who visited Venezuela, Bosch was eventually acquitted in Venezuela because the judge didn’t accept their confessions into evidence.

Bosch was arrested upon his return to America in 1988, but he didn’t face charges for any of the plethora of terrorism offenses he committed. Instead, he was arrested for violating his parole. It helps to have friends in high places. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the first Cuban American elected to Congress, helped raise $265,000 for Bosch’s legal defense fund, which helped land Raoul Cantero, a future Florida Supreme Court justice.

The timing of this lobbying effort was ironic. The FBI released a study in 1989 finding that the city with the highest number of terrorist attacks in America was Miami. All of the attacks were committed by Cuban exile extremists targeting individuals considered too liberal towards the Castro government. Unfortunately, this form of terrorism has been effective and it has stifled free speech in that community.

Despite so much domestic terrorism in his home state, former Florida Governor, Jeb Bush, helped arrange a meeting for Ros-Lehtinen with his father in the White House. That eventually led to Bosch’s release. Bosch was never held accountable for his crimes and he never showed any contrition.

Posada never showed any remorse either. He told The New York Times in 1998 that he “sleeps like a baby.” Bear in mind, he candidly admitted to directing a string of hotel bombings a year earlier in Havana, Cuba that killed one person and injured another eleven people. A few years later, Panama authorities arrested him for an assassination attempt against Castro.

Posada and his three accomplices, two of which were mentioned previously (Gaspar Jiménez and Guillermo Novo), served a few years in prison before they were pardoned by the Panamanian President, Mireya Moscoso, a few days before leaving office. Moscoso allegedly received a $4 million bribe from a Cuban exile and the U.S. embassy provided false documents to help Posada leave Panama.

Posada delayed returning to America, but his three accomplices were greeted with cheers from an adoring crowd when they returned to Miami. “I dreamt of this day, but I did not have the confidence that it would come. This is a triumph. ... It was the Cuban exile community that did this," said Guillermo Novo.

Guillermo Novo - Latin American Studies

Posada later returned to the U.S. seeking asylum. Fortunately for him, the FBI’s Miami field office had destroyed its evidence against him a few years earlier when it closed its case against Posada. This was part of why he never faced any charges commensurate with his level of violence. He was eventually indicted for obstruction of justice, immigration fraud, and perjury, but acquitted of all counts. Notably, there were no terrorism charges. The U.S. government even denied extradition requests from Venezuela and Cuba. One of the most notorious terrorists of his time, was never held accountable by the U.S. government and lived as a free man in Miami until his death.

There are so many other Cuban exile terrorists who benefitted from an unusually soft touch from the American criminal justice system. One of the other founders of CORU, Armando Lopez Estrada, participated in a televised CBS report by Bill Moyers, “The CIA’s Secret Army,” in which he admitted to multiple terrorist attacks. However, he denied being a terrorist; he preferred the term “revolutionary.” He, and six others, were arrested a month later when three boats, a canon, and machine guns were confiscated by federal authorities.

Estrada and his accomplices were surveilled making trial runs for an attack on Cuba by U.S. Customs, the FBI, Dade County Public Safety Department, Miami Police Department, U. S. Coast Guard, and the ATF. This group was charged with the unlawful possession of firearms and destructive devices and violating the Neutrality Act, which prohibits Americans from waging war against countries that the U.S. isn’t at war with.

Judge Joe Eaton of the Southern District of Florida (Miami) dropped the Neutrality Act charges. Stunningly, Judge Eaton felt that the prosecutors couldn’t prove that Cuba was “a country with which the United States is at peace.”

All of the defendants confessed to planning the attack. But part of the defense was that Armando Lopez Estrada testified that the weapons were an old cache supplied by the CIA. Ultimately, all of the defendants were acquitted.

One of those defendants, Pedro Gil, was a long-time operative for the CIA. His name reappeared in the national press in 1986 as part of the Iran-Contra scandal. The Nicaraguan government captured two Cuban-Americans who were recruited/trained to fight for the Contras by Pedro Gil. In a puff piece by The New York Times, Gil acknowledged that he was on the CIA’s payroll for nine years but he claimed the relationship ended in 1971. It’s inconceivable that Gil could have operated as a recruiter/trainer for the Contras in Miami while working entirely independently from the CIA.

So many Cuban American extremists were able to avoid terrorism charges due to their links with the CIA. The court system in Miami has historically enabled their behavior as well. It would be a natural assumption that the actions by Judge Joe Eaton were an anomaly, but that type of mentality has been standard operating procedure for many years.

Alpha 66, which remains somewhat active today, has claimed credit for numerous attacks in Cuba over the years. One of its members, Ivan Leon Rojas, was captured in 1993 by the U.S. Coast Guard 50 miles north of Cuba. On his boat were machine guns, explosives, assault rifles equipped with rocket launchers, and 10,000 rounds of ammunition.

Despite all of the evidence, Rojas was only charged with one count of knowing possession of unregistered firearms. More noteworthy, Rojas’s attorneys actually argued that the Southern District of Florida (Miami) had typically acquitted defendants in similar cases. And that was the truth. Case in point, the same judge had dropped charges against six members of Alpha 66 under extremely similar circumstances a month earlier. In the end, U.S. District Judge James Lawrence King sentenced Rojas to only probation. “In this particular case, it was intended by this defendant, Ivan Rojas, not to harm America or any of its citizens, but a private war of his own,” King said.

Keep that laissez-faire sentiment in mind when reviewing the case of the “Cuban Five.”  The Cuban government sent a group of intelligence officers, known as the WASP Network, to Florida to infiltrate the Cuban exile groups in hopes of preventing more of these crimes. The U.S. government was not aware of the WASP Network’s presence in the U.S. until June 1998 when FBI agents were invited to Havana.

Cuban officials provided the FBI with extensive details about 64 known terrorists living in the U.S. There’s no evidence that the WASP Network was spying on U.S. govt officials. Their operation was truly to defend against acts of terror and their information helped to prevent multiple attacks.

Nonetheless, U.S. authorities charged the “Cuban Five” a few months later with several espionage-related charges. The timing couldn’t have been worse for the Cuban Five because they awaited trial during the Elian Gonzalez international custody dispute that consumed the local Cuban-American population.

The Cuban Five (Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Ramón Labañino, Fernando González, and René González)

Many in the Miami community were also looking for retribution for the controversial shoot-down in 1996 by the Cuban government of two “Brothers to the Rescue” planes. Jose Basulto, another CIA-trained, Bay of Pigs veteran who had committed attacks against Cuba in the 1960s, founded Brothers to the Rescue. His group branded itself as a humanitarian organization because it had helped rescue a few thousand Cuban refugees fleeing the island via raft.

Their organization also engaged in subversive acts. Over a two-year period, their pilots violated Cuban airspace on 25 occasions, often dropping propaganda leaflets. These flights all originated from the U.S. and the Cuban government requested that the American government stop these flights. That didn’t happen. In February 1996, the Cuban government shot down two of their unarmed Cessnas off the coast of Cuba, killing three of their members.

That made the Cuban Five a symbolic target for American authorities. The leader of the Cuban Five, Gerardo Hernández, faced trumped-up charges for conspiracy to commit murder related to the Brothers to the Rescue shootdown without any actual evidence. The Cuban Five’s attorneys asked for a change of venue because it would be difficult to get a fair trial in Miami, but that was denied. That type of concession has been accepted in other cases.

Unbeknownst to the public and court at that time, the U.S. government violated its propaganda laws and paid ten local Miami reporters who published over 1,000 prejudicial articles.

The Cuban Five were issued sentences ranging from two life sentences to 15 years. Eventually, diplomatic measures helped to ensure the freedom of the remaining members in 2014. Amnesty International and the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention concluded that it wasn’t a fair trial. The jurors reported to the judge intimidation tactics by members of the media who photographed them and their license plates. Considering the lengthy history of terrorism in Miami, it’s fair to say that these jurors would have put their lives at risk if they came back with a not-guilty verdict.

Is the Threat of Cuban Exile Terrorism Still Present?

There remains an element of extremism today within the Cuban-American community, but it has drastically dropped off. The most fanatical were armed, trained, and financed by the CIA in the early 1960s, but most of those militants have died or aged out of these violent activities. Nonetheless, it’s disheartening that the American government has never taken a firm stand to hold these people, nor their government enablers, accountable. After all, terrorism is a crime that has no statute of limitations and terrorism is the pretext for so much of America’s warfare worldwide.