I N T E R N A T I O N A L

Havana. August 2, 2005

Montaner, the terrorist

BY JEAN-GUY ALLARD—Special for Granma International—

AT lunchtime on Saturday, December 24 of 1960, a few hours before Christmas festivities, the popular Flogar Department Store on the corner of Galiano and San Rafael Streets in Havana was full of customers. Juan René Maragosa, 13 years old, was leaving the cafeteria along with his sister Marta and their mother when a heavy explosion suddenly knocked them to the floor.

When they were able to look around them, they saw another dozen injured people on the floor, including 5-year-old Olga and 14-year-old Marta Borroto.

Juan René, his face covered in blood after being hit by a fragment of the powerful explosive, was quickly given first aid and taken to a hospital, where the efficient medical personnel saved his life.

Investigators from state security – known then as the G-2 – swiftly interceded, looking for clues that would confirm their suspicions. Yet again, the bomb that was placed in the store had been made with gelatinous dynamite, a product brought into the country by U.S. intelligence services.

It was just two years after the triumph of the Revolution and less than four months after the Bay of Pigs invasion, and counterrevolutionary groups, directed from Miami were very active, with total support – both financial and material – from the Central Intelligence Agency.

But the youthful Cuban counterintelligence did not fail to make its mark.

On Monday, December 26, in the early dawn, a broad operation by the G-2 dealt a mortal blow to a ring that had been placing bombs in shopping centers for some while.

Within a few hours, 17 terrorists had been located and arrested, most of them at their homes, while three bomb-making factories were uncovered and a large volume of weapons, explosives and bomb-making materials confiscated.

The next day, Revolución newspaper announced in giant letters on its front page: “Bomb-making factories taken!” and reported the arrest of those Cubans, whose ties to the CIA would be rapidly exposed; it also reported on the discovery in those individuals’ homes of 17 U.S.-made bombs “fabricated with gelatinous dynamite,” a highly explosive material derived from nitroglycerine.

They also confiscated several blocks of C-3, an explosive known for being highly volatile and prone to being set off by heat, a flame or just a spark. The boxes holding the blocks were marked: “One block equal to half a pound of TNT.”

AMONG THE SUSPECTS, A YOUNG FANATIC

One of the suspects identified by the newspaper was a young fanatic, Carlos Alberto Montaner Suris, “resident of No. 309 88th Avenue, on the corner of Tercera A,” in the then-exclusive neighborhood of Miramar in Havana.

In Montaner’s home, the newspaper specified, “a canvas bag was confiscated with four detonators, a roll of fuse, a bottle with three bars of live phosphorus, two rolls of tape, four cartridges of ammunition, two olive-green pairs of pants and two militia uniform shirts.”

Even though he was only 17, Montaner had already developed links with the CIA through his association with the Movement for Revolutionary Recovery (MRR).

In the homes of Alfredo Carrión and Manuel Néstor Piñango Pérez, two of the ringleaders, counterintelligence officials found a “submachine gun and two .38 revolvers.”

Finally, it mentioned the other element directly linking the ring to the Flogar store: “at No. 3505 46th Street in Marianao, a quantity of loose cigarettes were confiscated whose boxes (the terrorists) used as recipients for the petards that they fabricated with gelatinous dynamite.”

While Montaner’s accomplices were tried and convicted due to the enormous volume of evidence, the legal authorities took his age into account and confined him to a minimum-security juvenile institution. A few months later, he escaped....to take refuge in an indulgent Latin American embassy where he was awaited, along with instructions for facilitating his safe-conduct pass.

The young terrorist left Cuba, headed for the United States, on September 8, 1961.

WITH POSADA AND BOSCH IN FORT BENNING

In his new country, Montaner joined the armed forces and in early 1963, was inserted into a group of CIA agents in the US terror academy in Fort Benning, Georgia.

He was there with Luis Posada Carriles, Jorge Mas Canosa, Orlando Bosch and four other future “leaders” of the Miami mafia.

After three years in Puerto Rico, then-CIA agent Montaner was assigned to Francisco Franco’s Spain, where he carried out several tasks for the “Company,” always in collaboration with the Spanish secret police, which was subject to the guidance of the U.S. special services.

Among other terror-related activities, in July of 1973, following CIA instructions, Montaner helped terrorist Juan Felipe de la Cruz enter Spain and secretly cross the border into France to repeat there the attack he had carried out in Montreal one year earlier, which caused the death of Cuban diplomat Sergio Pérez Castillo. On August 3, 1973, De La Cruz died when a bomb exploded in a Paris suburb.

It is known that Montaner always maintained very fluid ties with his buddies from Fort Benning: Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles, the founders of CORU – the most active of Miami’s terrorist groups; and Jorge Mas Canosa, creator of the Cuban-American National Foundation, who assured Posada and his mercenaries of never-failing financial and logistical support.

Nevertheless, many questions remain open regarding the individual who tried to create for himself the comfortable image of a Madrid “intellectual.”

What was Montaner doing while CORU was placing bombs and committing assassinations from Montreal to Buenos Aires, supporting the Operation Condor of Pinochet’s DINA? 

Where was that Cuban-American CIA agent par excellence when Michael Townley, the henchman lent by the “Company” to the Chilean dictatorship, was in Madrid conspiring with Italian fascist Stefano delle Chiaie to carry out the assassination in Rome of Chilean Christian Democrat leader Bernardo Leighton and his wife?

What secrets remain hidden in the files of the Spanish CESID, the sinister secret police of the Franco dictatorship – whose top agents were trained in Fort Bragg in the United States – regarding Carlos Alberto Montaner and his support for anti-Cuban terrorism?