N E W S

Havana. February, 2 2004

MEL MARTINEZ
Terrorist candidate for U.S. Senate

BY JEAN-GUY ALLARD —Special for Granma International—

U.S. Senate candidate Mel Martínez – George W. Bush’s former secretary for housing and urban development – maintains close ties with the Cuban Liberty Council (CLC), the Cuban-American group that most encourages terrorism, with several of its leaders who have histories of terrorism, while he has openly taken part in this organization’s activities.

Last October 10, when the leader of the White House, accompanied by his Secretary of State Colin Powell, effusively embraced terrorist Luis Zúñiga Rey in the Rose Garden, Mel Martínez could not restrain a huge smile.

Zúñiga is a founder member of the CLC, along with 24 other former directors of the Cuban-American National Foundation (CANF), who were all expelled from that organization after a fight with Jorge “El Niño” Mas Santos, shortly before the events of September 11. All those CANF “dissidents” share the characteristic of being identified with the “hard line” of the terrorism-supporting Miami mafia.

On October 10, 2001 Zúñiga had been recruited as a “special guest” at the press conference convened to publicly announce the founding of the CLC at the Biltmore Hotel in Coral Gables.

Following this public event, the founder members went up to the ninth floor, escorted by U.S. Secret Service agents, to have lunch and plan their mafia activities in peace.

Amongst the CLC capos present with the then federal secretary for housing and urban development were:

• Alberto Hernández (Jorge Mas Canosa’s successor in CANF), whose links with two of the international terrorists imprisoned in Panama, Luis Posada Carriles and Gaspar Jiménez Escobedo, are well-known in Miami. He joined this organization’s paramilitary group together with Feliciano Foyo.

• Ninoska Lucrecia Pérez Castellón, wife of terrorist Roberto Martín Pérez, who openly supports the terrorists detained in Panama on her Miami mafia radio station show.

• Feliciano M. Foyo, former CANF treasurer, contributed to funding Luis Posada Carriles’ campaign of terrorist attacks on Cuban tourism facilities in 1997, including the explosion that killed Italian Fabio di Celmo. He was also implicated in the failed assassination attempt on the Cuban president at the 7th Ibero-American Summit on the Isle of Margarita that resulted in the arrest in Puerto Rico of several individuals linked to the CANF.

• Horacio García Sr., linked to the CANF paramilitary wing; he also has close ties with Roberto Martín Pérez and Alberto Hernández, who were CANF executives involved with the organization’s paramilitary group.

• Elpidio Nuñez, linked to the terrorist networks of international terrorists Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch.

• José Antonio Llamas, an individual publicly linked by the FBI to terrorist activities.

• Lawyer Ignacio Sánchez, advisor of Bacardí’s “special services”.

As for Luis Manuel de la Caridad Zúñiga Rey – Luis Zúñiga Rey for short – Mel Martínez must be aware that this CIA confidante played an active role in the CANF during the 1990s as head of subversive activities.

On several different occasions, he contacted, recruited and supplied Cubans traveling from the United States to engage in acts of terrorism on economic targets in Cuba. He then occupied a post for some years within the Nicaraguan delegation to the Human Rights Commission in Geneva on behalf of the CANF as well as directing this extremist organization’s activities in Madrid.

On October 10, 2002, when the CLC decided to celebrate its first anniversary with a banquet at the Renaissance Hotel in Biscayne Bay, Zúñiga and Pérez-Castellon invited their buddy Mel Martínez as the special guest to deliver a speech during the ceremony.

AMERICANIZED BY OPERATION PETER PAN

Martínez, aged 57, was born in Sagua La Grande, Cuba but taken to the United States in the lamentably notorious Operation Peter Pan – a cynical operation provoked by the United States that forced more than 14,000 children into exile with the concealed intention of overthrowing the Revolution.

Forced to assimilate and abandon a large part of their identity, the Peter Pan children became “the most Americanized of all Cubans”, Martínez confided years later.

Martínez practiced law in central Florida before being appointed as head of the body responsible for housing in Orlando, a post that subsequently led to a promotion to the executive of Orange County.

His appointment as secretary of housing – a federal institution frequently charged with lax morality in terms of real estate corruption – cam as no surprise to anyone in the Florida mafia.

IN THE WINGS, ARMANDO CODINA

Martínez’ aspiration to join the Senate has caused disagreements between Republican supporters in Florida, as Congress members Lincoln and Mario Díaz-Balart are committed to supporting Representative Bill McCollum.

But apart from terrorists and fascists, Martínez’ friends include licentious representatives of high finance and real estate such as multimillionaire Armando Codina, also a “Peter Pan” child¼.

In 1985, this other “grand figure” of Miami’s financial world encouraged his big buddy Jeb Bush – who then possessed no other talent but his daddy’s protection – to obtain a loan of some $4.56 million from the Broward Federal Savings & Loan Association, in Sunrise, Florida, in order to purchase a property in Miami.

Months later, after realizing that the business was a disaster, Bush and Codina managed to reduce their loan repayments to $505,000 thanks to an active, but concealed, intervention by the federal organization responsible that immediately reduced the value of the property they had purchased. A straightforward operation.

Thanks to Codina and the Miami-Cuban clique, Jeb then met other businesspersons of a similar ilk with whom he experienced many adventures and misadventures. They included Leonel Martínez who, besides being a speculator has the special characteristic of being a known drug trafficker; Mario Castejón, who made the most of the war illegally-waged by the CIA with their Nicaraguan Contra forces to provide “medical services” for the mercenaries; Miguel Recarey, another “successful” Cuban-American, currently wanted by the FBI; and Camilo Padreda, a former officer in Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista’s counterintelligence services.

Corrupt speculator Codina invested in both real estate and politics. He was CANF director until 1992 and was known as a supporter of the most extremist nucleus. These days he’s so close to the Bush family that, during a recent visit by his Spanish buddy José María Aznar, he was given the responsibility for singing the praises of the distinguished neo-Falangist. Without so much as a titter, Codina compared the mustachioed Spaniard to Winston Churchill.

These days, Codina is a grand voter in Florida and both he and Mel Martínez contributed to George W. Bush’s election to the presidency – with the interruption of the vote recount and harassment by Vigilia Mambisa’s fascist hordes.

Today he and many other conspirators can be relied on to reach the Senate and defend the interests of the Miami terrorist mafia and the most underhand representatives of the Florida peninsula’s establishment, ridiculing the silent majority of the U.S. public.

Whilst this buddy of Miami’s terrorist capos is preparing to enter the national Senate, five Cuban patriots imprisoned in this country as a result of an explicit decision by the White House, are coming under increased pressure in the form of punishment measures in their respective jails and cruel restrictions on visits from their relatives.

Not to mention the disgraceful silence about the case from the so-called “free press”, one that submits itself to the dictates of a mafia that is ready to actively collaborate in November 2004 in the election and reelection of its most illustrious servants.