Bush receives well-known accomplice of Posada at the White House

BY JEAN-GUY ALLARD—Special for Granma International—

ON Friday, May 20 at the White House Oval Office, US President George Bush received a small Cuban-American delegation headed by terrorist Luis Zúñiga Rey, founder of the Cuban-American National Foundation’s paramilitary committee in Miami, which for years assured the financing and logistics of Luis Posada Carriles’ terrorist activities.

Zúñiga created and led the CANF paramilitary committee with Horacio García, Roberto Martin Pérez, Alberto Hernández and Feliciano Foyo. The international terrorist Luis Posada Carriles publically designated that committee and those individuals as his primary financial and logistical support.

That individual previously had been captured on August 1, 1974, near Boca Ciega, in Havana, when he was caught red-handed with a load of explosives and weapons, together with two other members of a terrorist commando who had infiltrated with the objective of carrying out attacks.

Percy Alvarado, the famous Agent Frayle of Cuban state security, met Luis Zúñiga in Miami, during a mission.

"Zúñiga told me, face to face, that it was necessary to be violent and cold-blooded, calculating and merciless, to overthrow Fidel and the Revolution," the Guatemalan recently recalled in a memoir.

"I can still see him that November night in 1993, when he proposed sinister plans by the CANF to set off powerful bombs in Havana’s Hotel Nacional and in a famous restaurant in that city."

"He had no shame or concern for the consequences of the proposal he had just laid out for me: ‘Do it,’ he said, ‘and you will be well-compensated!’ A supply of weapons and explosives had to be organized so that my supposed cell would place the bombs in the hotels and tourist sites in Havana."

"They also would give me eight capsules of live phosphorus to burn down cinemas and theaters full of innocent Cubans," he recalled. "During those nights of November and December of 1993, he had no pity, just irrational hate and a thirst for vengeance," Percy Alvarado commented, adding that Zúñiga demanded that he study the vulnerability of Cuban hotels, thermoelectric plants and refineries for future attacks.

Former Agent Frayle specified that Zúñiga systematically recruited Cubans or visitors to the island to carry out acts of terrorism. In 1993, he charged him with blowing up the Tropicana nightclub in exchange for $20,000, making that proposal from his position as director of CANF.

Zúñiga is now executive director of the Cuban Liberty Council, an organization that brings together the most fanatical elements of the Miami mafia – several of them with pasts as CIA "collaborators" – who supported, financed and supplied Posada’s criminal operations for decades.

The group received by the US president also included Eleno Oviedo Alvarez, arrested in Cuba on February 21, 1963, together with other members of a terrorist commando (Eumelio Viera Mollinedo, Domingo Martínez Cárdenas, Rafael Santana Alvarez, Juan Reyes Morales, Juan and Armando Morales Pascual and Agustín Viscaíno Pino) as they were unloading weapons and munitions on the Cuban coast.

Some of the prisoners admitted to having participated in an attack on Cuban fishing boats that belonged to a cooperative in Cárdenas, Matanzas, a week earlier, injuring two fishermen, Armando and Ramón López Ruiz. The attackers took both boats to Elbow Key, in the Bahamas, where the injured men were left to their fate.

Another of Bush’s guests was music businessman Emilio Estefan, a stockholder in Bacardí, which financed terrorist actions in Nicaragua, Angola and Cuba. Along with singer Gloria Estefan, he has generously sponsored organizations such as Brothers to the Rescue, led by terrorist José Basulto, who was a member of the CIA’s Operation 40, along with Luis Posada Carriles.