by BELEN FERNANDEZ
Luis Posada Carriles, who has a long history of involvement with terrorist activities in Latin America, comfortably lives in Miami, campaigning against Castro and selling landscape portraits to fellow right-wing Cuban exiles PHOTO/EPA
Austin, Texas – In the 1950s, my father’s uncle Benito was summoned to Havana by Santo Trafficante Jr, Mafia boss for the southeastern United States and Cuba and a childhood friend of Benito’s from the Ybor City neighbourhood in Tampa, Florida.
In Havana, Benito was tasked with surveillance duties at the Sans Souci night club and casino run by Trafficante, a close friend of pro-US Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. Trafficante had inherited the position from his father, the Sicilian-born Santo Trafficante Sr, who had been appointed by organised crime icons, Meyer Lansky and Lucky Luciano, to oversee gambling and drug operations in the Cuban capital, which served as a storage facility for heroin en route from Europe to the US.
Benito’s responsibilities at the Sans Souci included sounding an alert if the wife of a casino patron or other relevant figure arrived at an inopportune moment. Prospects for job security were slashed with the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959, however, and Benito returned to Florida to sell furniture while Trafficante enhanced his CV by becoming an accomplice of the CIA in the mission to assassinate Fidel Castro.
As journalists Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St Clair note in their book Whiteout: The CIA, Drugs and the Press, anti-Castro plots concocted by the Agency ranged from “tr[ying] to devise a way to saturate the radio studio where Castro broadcast his speeches with an aerosol form of LSD and other ‘psychic energisers'” to sabotaging his appearance before the United Nations in New York in 1960 by “plac[ing] thallium salts in Castro’s shoes and on his night table in the hope that the poisons would make the leader’s beard fall off”.
As for Trafficante’s contributions to the effort, he delivered six lethal CIA-manufactured botulinum pills as well as a box of toxic cigars to an ally within the Cuban government in 1961. The plan fell through.
According to Cockburn and St Clair, US Attorney General Robert Kennedy, “who was obsessed with the elimination of Castro, told [CIA director] Allen Dulles that he didn’t care if the Agency employed the Mob for the hit as long as they kept him fully briefed”.
Lest US taxpayers worry that government expenditures over the years have been wasted on projects that do not reinforce national security, a 2006 article in the Guardian entitled “638 ways to kill Castro” outlines additional CIA assassination schemes:
“Knowing [Castro’s] fascination for scuba-diving off the coast of Cuba, the CIA at one time invested in a large volume of Caribbean molluscs. The idea was to find a shell big enough to contain a lethal quantity of explosives, which would then be painted in colours lurid and bright enough to attract Castro’s attention when he was underwater. Documents released under the Clinton administration confirm that this plan was considered but, like many others, did not make it far from the drawing-board. Another aborted plot related to Castro’s underwater activities was for a diving-suit to be prepared for him that would be infected with a fungus that would cause a chronic and debilitating skin disease.”
Entertainment value aside, such endeavours might of course also be construed as illegal according to international law – just as the blowing up of 73 people on board a Cubana de Aviacion flight might, under objective scrutiny, qualify as terrorism.
The accused mastermind of the latter event, which occurred in 1976, is Luis Posada Carriles: ex-CIA asset, Bay of Pigs veteran, Havana hotel bomber, and would-be Castro assassin. A Cuban exile and Venezuelan national, Posada was recently acquitted by a Texas court on charges related not to terrorism, but rather to lying to US immigration authorities about how he entered the country.
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