"Nobody is in agreement…It’s that, no one says it and no one takes the risk to say it, to speak the truth. That’s what is happening. In other words, one of the foundations, of what are the regimes in the entire world, in all of history, has been fear and lies. In other words, once you are in fear that's when you don’t take a risk, where you collect yourself and don’t unite…understood? To be in fear is not to offer help to anyone because that signifies risk." -Gorki Águila Carrasco, lead singer, guitarist of the music group Porno Para Ricardo and political prisoner
"Socialist ideology, like so many others, has two main dangers. One stems from confused and incomplete readings of foreign texts, and the other from the arrogance and hidden rage of those who, in order to climb up in the world, pretend to be frantic defenders of the helpless so as to have shoulders on which to stand." --Jose Marti

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Sunday, October 26, 2008

ANOTHER COMMUNIST CUBAN LIVING AMONGST SURVIVORS?

http://www.miamiherald.com/457/story/741916.html

The hijacking suspect next door

In 1958, armed Castro sympathizers hijacked a flight from Miami, causing it to crash off Cuba. One suspected hijacker has been living here -- not far from two survivors.

Miami survivor of hijacked Cuban plane tells his story
Osiris Martinez, now living in Miami, recounts the 1958 hijacking of a plane that crashed, killing his wife and three young children.
El Nuevo Herald

msallah@MiamiHerald.com

Before the plane slammed into the darkness of the ocean, Omara Gonzalez fixed on an image that has haunted her for 50 years: the hijacker's piercing eyes and white shoes.

''There are things you don't forget,'' she said tearfully of the deadly hijacking that left 14 dead and four wounded. ``I can still see him in those shoes, standing by the [cockpit] door.''

While the Coral Gables woman grapples with images of the crash that changed her life a half century ago, she now confronts a new twist in the disaster: The suspected hijacker is living just miles from her home.

Edmundo Ponce de Leon, who quietly moved to Miami from Cuba in 1994 -- with no barriers to his entry -- is one of the only surviving suspects from the famous hijacking of a Cubana Airlines plane on Nov. 1, 1958.

State Department records obtained by The Miami Herald say the 72-year-old and four others were identified as the armed men in dark fatigues who took over the plane during a flight from Miami to Cuba -- the first international hijacking from U.S. soil.

The plane -- secretly loaded with arms for Fidel Castro's rebels -- crashed off the coast of Cuba while running out of fuel in an event that rocked Miami and Havana. No one was ever charged in the crime.

Ponce de Leon says he was on the airliner that night, but insists he was not among the hijackers. ''I was going on a vacation trip,'' he said in an interview at his home. ``I was just going for a few days.''

But witnesses tracked down after the crash said he was one of the hijackers who later joined the revolutionary forces in Havana, according to State Department records.

His emergence in the case represents a new dilemma in one of the first hijacking investigations in U.S. history.

Though the case was investigated by the FBI and State Department for several weeks, it was never officially closed, records show.

Because Ponce de Leon and other suspected hijackers remained in Cuba after the crash, the U.S. attorney's office concluded they could not be prosecuted because they were outside the jurisdiction of the United States, State Department records indicate.

A spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney's office declined to say whether the case would be reopened. ''We simply do not comment on whether we plan to open or reopen any investigation,'' said Alicia Valle, special counsel.

The event nearly faded from history until early this year when a dispute erupted between Ponce de Leon and a sister over ownership of their mother's home.

An attorney for the sister pressed to interview survivors about the hijacking, but the case was settled.

Several former federal prosecutors say the case presents legal challenges for the justice system because of due-process protections, but one thing is for certain: There's no statute of limitations on murder.

''You still have real-life survivors,'' said Christopher Bruno, a former federal prosecutor in Washington, D.C. ``Just because the years have gone by doesn't mean you just close the books.''

In the days after the crash, the investigation of the hijacking was considered a priority by the FBI and State Department.

The suspects were identified right away, including Ponce de Leon, a U.S. Air Force veteran born in Cuba and raised in New York and Miami, where he attended Edison High School.

The British-built plane was one of many flights connecting Miami and Cuba at the time, when relations between Havana and Washington were normal.

But the situation in Cuba was deteriorating: Castro's rebels were advancing and President Fulgencio Batista seemed ready to relinquish power. On the eve of the flight, an election loomed to choose a presidential successor.

For days, U.S. embassy agents interviewed survivors and witnesses who helped pluck the bodies out of the sea off eastern Cuba.

IDENTIFIED SUSPECT

One of those survivors, Osiris Martinez -- now living in Miami -- identified Ponce de Leon from a photo provided by investigators just five days after the crash, records state.

Martinez, now 81, whose wife and three young children, 2, 4, and 5, died when the plane plunged into the sea, said he was certain during interviews with investigators that Ponce de Leon was one of the armed men who commandeered the turboprob plane.

''There was no doubt,'' he said in an interview with The Herald last week. ``I recognized him right away.''

Martinez, who says he now has a more difficult time recognizing the aging man in the photos, said he and other passengers were in the plane with the hijackers for several hours.

''I saw them when we were on the plane, and I saw them again when they jumped from the plane'' after it broke apart on the water.

Gonzalez, then 16, said she recognized Ponce de Leon from photos shown to her last week by The Herald, including a black-and-white photo from the 1950s and another taken recently. ``I can see his eyes. I'll never forget them as long as I live.''

Gonzalez, whose grandfather died in the crash, said she spent several hours watching the hijackers move down the aisle.

''We were all so panicked,'' she recalled in an interview. ``We didn't know what they were going to do.''

The men, who boarded the Vickers Vicount airliner dressed in street clothes, jumped from their seats about 20 minutes after the plane departed and shouted they were taking over, according to Gonzalez and Martinez.

The hijackers yanked open a floor compartment, pulling out large green canvas bags stuffed with machine guns, handguns and ammunition, Martinez said.

With passengers watching, they stripped down to their underwear and put on olive fatigues and black and red armbands of the July 26th Movement -- Castro's rebel forces.

''They told us not to move,'' recalled Gonzalez, who was sitting near her 9-year-old cousin.

She said the man she recognized as Ponce de Leon was wearing white shoes, standing near the cockpit. ''Not tennis shoes,'' she said. ``White shoes.''

Instead of flying to Varadero -- a resort town on the northern coast -- the plane headed to eastern Cuba, where the rebels were to land at Sierra Cristal to deliver the weapons to Raúl Castro, said Gonzalez and Martinez.

But the hours passed, and darkness set in.

`VOMITING, SCREAMING'

The pilot struggled to find a runway because of the lack of lighting on the mountainous terrain.

The airliner ''kept going up and down and up and down,'' recalled Gonzalez in an interview.

Martinez said all the passengers, including his children, were getting sick. ``They would rev up the motors and the plane would shoot up. The carts and the suitcases would fly to the back of the plane. Everyone was vomiting and screaming.''

At one point, Gonzalez said she overheard a hijacker say they would ``have to kill the pilot.''

''He apparently wasn't doing what they wanted,'' she said in an interview.

Martinez told investigators the pilot tried to land the plane 10 times, but each time, he would pull back in fear of missing the mark.

Shortly after 9 p.m. -- more than four hours after takeoff -- the hijackers ordered the passengers to strap in. ''They said to buckle our seat belts. There was no gas,'' said Martinez in a recent interview.

After slamming into the water, the plane broke into pieces, with some of the passengers still alive in their seats. 'I looked over at my grandfather, who was buckled in, and I heard him say, `Save yourself,' '' Gonzalez said.

She and her young cousin, Luis Sosa, were pulled from the water by a fisherman as they clung to a floating suitcase.

Martinez was pulled from the water by the same fisherman.

HIJACKERS' BODIES

Two of the hijackers died in the crash, their bodies found floating while still clad in fatigues and armbands. Fourteen people died, although news reports initially said 17.

The day after the crash, U.S. Ambassador Earl Smith ordered an investigation by the embassy in Havana, while requesting help from the FBI in Miami.

Citing top Cuban authorities, Miami Herald correspondent George Southworth reported Ponce de Leon was one of the hijackers.

But at the time, no one was able to find him, said Wayne Smith, an embassy diplomat who interviewed survivors.

However, Smith managed to interview a man identified as Ponce de Leon's cousin, Carlos Arias Aguero, who told embassy officials Ponce de Leon ''had been engaged in revolutionary activities in Miami,'' records say.

''He had reason to believe that Edmundo Ponce de Leon might possibly have been one of the gunmen who commandeered the ill-fated Varadero flight,'' the report states.

By then, the three surviving suspects had traveled to the mountains, according to hospital workers interviewed by the embassy.

During an interview at his home last week, Ponce de Leon -- who is now blind in one eye and has a heart condition -- gave a vastly different version of the final hours leading to the crash and how he ended up staying in Cuba.

He said he boarded as a tourist, and in all his years, ``I have never owned a pair of white shoes.''

He said the hijacking took place ''over Cuba'' and not 20 minutes after departing.

He said during the flight to the island, he did not believe the captain was threatened, insisting that most passengers were sympathetic to the rebel cause.

''There was no violence or hostility aboard the plane,'' said Ponce de Leon.

But Gonzalez said she and the other passengers were terrified because the hijackers threatened them with guns and ordered them to sit with their heads between their legs and pillows over their heads.

''I still have nightmares,'' she said.

Martinez said the hijacking ``was an act of terrorism. They were carrying weapons.''

After the crash, Ponce de Leon said he swam with the hijackers to safety and was later ''taken prisoner'' by the rebel forces. One of the suspects: Manuel Fernandez Falcon, who became a top Cuban military commander.

By Jan. 29, 1959, a month after Castro took power, records state that Ponce de Leon was a lieutenant in the revolutionary forces and ``stationed at the Havana Tourist Police Station as second in command.''

Ponce de Leon says he was never an officer, but an interpreter who worked at the police station after the revolution.

He said he stayed in Cuba because he met a woman and decided to get married, and moved back to the United States in 1994 to join his family in Miami.

Though he came to this country as a naturalized U.S. citizen, experts question how he was able to enter without being interrogated about a major hijacking case -- even one from decades earlier.

''That is why you have border alerts,'' said Bruno, the former federal prosecutor. ``If this happened today, there's no way you could come back into the country.''

Federal prosecutors in Miami reviewed the case in early 1959, but declined to prosecute, ''at least for the present,'' because Ponce de Leon and the others were not in the United States, records state.

Ricardo Bascuas, a University of Miami law professor and former federal public defender who reviewed the government documents for The Herald, said the suspects could have been charged without being in the country.

''There were any number of crimes that could have been considered, including murder, assault and possibly even transporting arms,'' he said.

Bruno said one reason to drop a prosecution is because of a lack of evidence, but because sworn statements and supporting evidence existed in the case, a grand jury could have been summoned.

''I would have pursued it,'' said Atlee Wampler III, the U.S. attorney in Miami in the early 1980s. ``Anytime you have people hijacking airlines, you act on that. It's too dangerous.''

James Guilmartin, Miami's U.S. attorney during the investigation, died in 1984.

SHIFT IN CUBA

However, Bruno questioned whether influences beyond the justice system played a role in the outcome of the case. Cuba was in turmoil.

While the United States had diplomatic relations with the fledgling Castro government, ''you have to wonder whether this case was a political hot potato,'' Bruno said.

Many top officials in the State Department were trying to maintain relations with the new leadership. The lone person pushing the case, Earl Smith, the U.S. ambassador and an ardent Castro foe, resigned on Jan. 20, 1959. By the following month, the investigation was suspended, records show.

''You got to think of the time period -- it's right after the revolution,'' Bruno said.

Now, bringing the case to court would present challenges, say legal experts.

''The government knew where he was,'' said Richard Strafer, a Miami criminal attorney. ``The problem is a defendant can make the case there was a delay in due process.''

Gonzalez, who says she remains shattered by the experience, says Ponce de Leon should have been charged then -- and now. ''He has to pay for this,'' she says.

``They destroyed the lives of people. This is the United States of America. If this had been an accident it would be one thing, but this was a hijacking. Babies died.''

Martinez says he was never contacted by federal prosecutors after the crash. ''In all that time, no one came to me,'' he said.

He said he believes Ponce de Leon, with his nagging ailments, ``is paying the price right now. He's fat and old. He's sick. That's his punishment.''

http://www.miamiherald.com/news/southflorida/story/741903.html

OSIRIS MARTINEZ

Cuban hijacking survivor's grief tinged with regret

A man who survived the doomed hijacking has struggled for half a century with pain and regret over the loss of his wife and three young children.

msallah@MiamiHerald.com

When Osiris Martinez broke to the surface of Nipe Bay that night five decades ago, he began to scream for his wife and three children.

There was no answer.

He and his family were among the 20 passengers aboard the Cubana Viscount turboprop that crashed into the water after hijackers seized the plane following takeoff from Miami on a flight to Varadero on Nov. 1, 1958.

He was one of the survivors. Fourteen people died, including his wife and three children, ages 2, 4 and 5.

He heard boat paddles splashing in the water. A man approaching in a canoe asked Martinez to climb aboard, but Martinez couldn't muster the strength. Several of his ribs were broken.

Eventually, Martinez climbed inside, but started convulsing. Suddenly, the boat was in danger of capsizing.

' `We are going to turn over, we are going to turn over,' the man said while I shook out of control and he shined his flashlight on my face,'' Martinez recalled.

The man managed to keep the canoe afloat and eventually reached shore, where two other passengers, Omara Gonzalez, 16, and her 9-year-old cousin Luis Sosa, were resting.

VISIT TO MORGUE

Two days later, with his wounds sutured and his ribs wrapped in bandages, Martinez had to go inside a hospital morgue room and identify his wife's body.

Around the ankle of a severed leg he saw a small chain bearing her name: Betty.

''I recognized her because I had given her a little chain with her name on it,'' he recalled.

Martinez, then 31, said he has lived with the pain of losing his family and regret for not heeding his wife's plea not to move the family to Cuba.

His 25-year-old wife developed an aversion to the island after one of the children nearly died from dysentery contracted during a prior family visit.

But Martinez was able to land a good job in Cuba as an inspector at a paper plant in Cardenas, near Varadero.

He was offered $615 a month -- three times his salary at the paper company where he was working in Tennessee.

NEW START

Though born in Cuba, Martinez said he was unfamiliar with Varadero, a resort town on the island's northern coast. He rented a house and planned to start a new life.

''I called my wife and told her sell or give away our house and bring the children,'' Martinez recalled.

His wife reluctantly agreed, and told him to meet her and the children in Miami. She didn't want to travel to Cuba without her husband.

The children also were not pleased about the move. Martinez said his wife's parents had to drag the screaming children to the plane.

Martinez said the family almost didn't board the Cubana Airlines turboprop at Miami. He said airline employees claimed his immigration papers were not in order. Martinez now suspects airline workers knew of the conspiracy.

''They knew they would endanger an American family and they didn't want children aboard,'' Martinez said.

While there's nothing in the records to prove the claim, U.S. embassy officials in Havana suspected someone from the crew -- possibly a flight attendant -- helped load the plane with the canvas bags of weapons and ammo, records state.

''It is evident that all of this material must have been loaded on plane sometime before departure,'' said a U.S. State Department report.

But the investigation of the crash was suspended in February, 1959, with the suspicions never resolved.

Martinez said in the months after the crash, he struggled to keep his emotions in check.

''I would talk to the pictures of my children,'' he said. ``It was very difficult.''

He remembers his wife's final request as she was boarding the plane.

``She said that if something happened and the plane crashed, she didn't want to be buried in Cuba. She wanted her body to be brought to the United States.''

But in the end, Martinez was unable to grant her wish: The lack of refrigeration and the conditions of the bodies prevented shipment to Miami, records stated.

They were buried in Cuba.

Thursday, October 9, 2008

Cuba sends Spies to US via Academia

The Miami Herald

Jan. 10, 2006

Suspects led low-profile lives

Accused Cuban spies Carlos and Elsa Alvarez lived low-profile lives in the academic community. Colleagues are shocked at the government's allegations.

BY NOAH BIERMAN, FRANCES ROBLES AND CASEY WOODS

For most of his 44 years in Miami, accused Cuban spy Carlos M. Alvarez has been a quiet academic, seldom joining public causes or speaking out about conditions on the island where he was born.

But in 1991, Alvarez published a personal account of a return trip to Cuba in the opinion page of The Miami Herald. He blamed the island's communist government for responding to hopelessness among Cuba's people ``with ideological rhetoric and actions framed within rigid and anachronistic political schemes.''

Despite that strong criticism, federal agents say Alvarez and his wife, Elsa, have been secretly spying for the Cuban government for decades, using their academic stature as covers.

It's that contradiction that baffles friends and colleagues.

SURPRISED BY ARREST

''I'm shocked that anybody would arrest him. It just can't be anything reasonable,'' said Joan Wynne, an urban education professor who works down the hall from Carlos Alvarez at Florida International University. "Everybody loves Carlos . . . The secretaries love him, the professors love him . . .''

Alvarez, 61, was a lifer at FIU, teaching education classes since 1974 and building a strong friendship with President Modesto ''Mitch'' Maidique, who attended his bond hearing on Monday. Elsa Alvarez, 55, began working at FIU in 1999 as a counselor in the psychological services department.

Together, the two earn a combined salary of just more than $100,000 from FIU. Carlos Alvarez also earned money over the years teaching diversity workshops in the school district. And he conducted psychological screenings for local police departments.

BORN IN CARDENAS

Carlos Alvarez was born in Cardenas, Cuba, in 1944. When he was 17, he left the island. He earned U.S. citizenship in 1972, while he was a 27-year-old graduate student at the University of Florida in Gainesville.

Elsa Alvarez, born in Cuba in 1950, came to Miami after she completed high school, according to an application she filed for FIU employment. She earned her U.S. citizenship in 1979.

The couple married in 1980. Together, they have three children, plus two from Carlos Alvarez's prior marriage. Elsa's parents live with the couple in their large cream-colored home in South Miami.

The family is active in St. Thomas the Apostle Catholic Church -- the same parish that has held several memorial services for the four downed members of Brothers to the Rescue, considered martyrs in the anti-Castro movement.

Alvarez implied in his Miami Herald account that his 1991 trip to Cuba, for an academic conference, was his first since leaving the island as a teenager. He wrote about the surprise and disappointment of seeing ''a depressing human reality,'' people living with shortages and lack of hope.

''My experience with our academic counterparts was, however, intellectually stimulating and humanly rewarding,'' he wrote. "Most of our discussions were remarkably frank and cordial, even though the perspectives were often diametrically opposite.''

RETURNED MANY TIMES

Since then, Alvarez has returned several times, both with FIU's Cuban Research Institute and with Puentes Cubanos /Cuban Bridges, a group that promotes direct exchanges between the two countries. Alvarez, a psychologist and expert in conflict resolution, gave workshops on Cuban identity in Havana.

''Carlos is an excellent person, a dreamer, who has sought national reconciliation for many years,'' said Maria Cristina Herrera, founder of the Institute of Cuban Studies and its former executive director. ``I'm sick over this.''

He had not traveled under FIU's license in several years, according to Damián Fernández, director of FIU's Cuban Research Institute. And Puentes Cubanos lost its license to travel to Cuba in 2004, after President Bush tightened travel restrictions, according to Silvia Wilhelm, executive director.

Co-workers said Alvarez is a very friendly, religious family man who has been preoccupied with his wife, who has a bone or muscle disease that has required her to request medical leave in recent months.

''My concern is that people tend to be considered guilty before there's any evidence,'' Fernández said. ``These things tend to stick.''

ADMINISTRATIVE LEAVE

Citing university policy, FIU put the Alvarezes on administrative leave with pay Monday, the first day of classes for the spring semester. Several supervisors were told to direct questions to FIU's media relations director, Mark Riordan.

Riordan said Alvarez's three classes in the education department were being reassigned. Maidique did not respond to requests for an interview.

Riordan said Alvarez and Maidique have been friends for 25 years, since before Maidique became FIU president. ''He's highly regarded,'' Riordan said of Alvarez. "From what I understand, he's a real gem of a guy.''

Herald staff writers Jay Weaver, Myriam Marquez, Marika Lynch and Scott Hiaasen contributed to this report.

The Miami Herald

Sun, Feb. 03, 2008

Former Cuban spy may lose psychology license

BY ALFONSO CHARDY

Florida's surgeon general has filed a complaint with the state Board of Psychology against Carlos Alvarez, a psychologist and former Florida International University professor convicted of conspiring to act as an unregistered agent for Cuba.

The administrative complaint is being reviewed by the department's attorneys before it goes to the board, said Eulinda Jackson, a spokeswoman for Ana Viamonte Ros, the state surgeon general and Florida health secretary. Viamonte Ros complaint, filed in December, asks the board to consider penalties against Alvarez, including revocation or suspension of his license, limiting of his practice, a fine or a reprimand.

Viamonte Ros told the board in the eight-page complaint that Alvarez violated rules of his profession for being convicted and failing to advise the board of his guilty plea in a timely manner.

Steven Chaykin, Alvarez's attorney, said the complaint will have no impact on his client, because he did not practice psychology.

''Anyone who has a professional license and is convicted of a felony goes through a similar bureaucratic administrative process,'' said Chaykin. ``Though a suspension or revocation of his license is embarrassing, he did absolutely nothing wrong with his license . . . He didn't practice psychology. He did not have patients.''

Over the years, Alvarez taught diversity workshops in school districts and conducted psychological screenings of cadets for the city of Miami and Miami-Dade County police departments.

Alvarez and his wife Elsa, both former FIU academics, apologized at their sentencing hearing Feb. 27 for giving Cuba information on Miami's exile community.

U.S. District Judge K. Michael Moore sentenced Carlos Alvarez to the maximum five-year prison sentence for conspiring to act as an unregistered Cuban agent and Elsa Alvarez to the maximum three years' imprisonment for failing to report her husband's intelligence work.

Viamonte Ros wrote in the complaint that Florida laws require that a psychologist be disciplined if convicted of a crime that relates to the practice of the profession.

''A health care practitioner who manifests such complete and reckless disregard for the law as respondent demonstrated by his activities as an agent of a foreign government cannot be entrusted with the responsibility associated with the practice of psychology,'' Viamonte Ros wrote.

Gov. Charlie Crist named Viamonte Ros, a Cuban American, secretary of the Florida Department of Health in January 2007. In July, she became the first State Surgeon General.

Soon to come....

WESUB will soon begin to post new information and stories concerning Cuba and its government's crimes against humanity...as of now WESUB's efforts will be concentrated on the financial crisis affecting the US and the police state that exists there....STAY TUNED.....