5-8-07, 1:32 pm PDT
BY JEAN-GUY ALLARD
Jose Antonio “Toñin” Llama, the Cuban-American National Foundation leader who made headlines months ago when he revealed how he was cheated after investing millions in an anti-Cuba terrorist conspiracy, has just confirmed to The Miami Herald that he participated in meetings of Miami groups where plans were made for the bombing attacks that occurred in Havana throughout 1997.
The business owner, who was a member of the directors board of the Cuban-American National Foundation (CANF), tells how that mafioso organization, created by the CIA, had formed, for a time, a “military group” that dedicated itself to planning terrorist acts.
Llama explains that in the 1990s, he was present in meetings “where a bomb attack against a Havana hotel was planned.” He credited the idea to the now-deceased New Jersey businessman Arnaldo Monzón Plasencia, a leader of the northern section of the CANF based in that city.
“He had a plan, the bombs in the hotel in Cuba,” Llama told the Miami newspaper.
When contacted, the CANF responded with a press release denying the accusation and affirming that it “has always advocated a peaceful transition” in Cuba, an affirmation refuted by a long series of events.
Last August, Llama publicly stated that the CANF acquired a cargo helicopter, 10 ultra-light airplanes with remote control, seven boats and plentiful explosive materials with the explicit goal of carrying out terrorist actions against Cuba.
Those plans did not go ahead because of the unforeseen capture, by the U.S. Coast Guard in 1997, of the yacht La Esperanza, something that Llama himself was accused of and then exonerated, thanks to the FBI of Héctor Pesquera, the same official whose son destroyed, in August 2003, Luis Posada Carriles’ file.
Llama affirms that he contributed $1,471,840.35 of his own money “to finance the project” of the terrorists that was hatched during the annual congress of the CANF in Naples, Florida in June 1992. He believes that the enormous amount of money was swindled from him by various Foundation leaders.
On April 12, 1997, the first bomb exploded in a campaign of terror that Luis Posada Carriles, then based in Central America, unleashed at that time in Havana. A decade later, this series of crimes remains unpunished and its perpetrator is in Miami, in the midst of a legal process aimed at preventing him from being accused of terrorism.
According to The Miami Herald, a New Jersey grand jury has particularly studied the participation of several individuals from the Cuban-American terrorist fauna in the conspiracy that led to a series of attacks using C-4 explosives in Havana. Italian Fabio di Celmo was victim of one of these bombs, which also injured several others, as well as causing considerable material damage.
In New Jersey, two former local leaders of the CANF, Abel Hernández, a resident of Cliffside Park, and Oscar Rojas, who was an accountant for 20 years for Monzón Plasencia, have been interrogated by the grand jury, along with two more of Posada’s accomplices, likewise associated with the CANF: Angel Alfonso Alemán, a former Monzón employee, implicated in the 1997 assassination plot against President Fidel Castro, thwarted by the capture of the yacht La Esperanza, and José Alemán, his son.
Angel Alfonso Alemán is a known collaborator of Cuban-American Congressman Albio Sires, a former mafioso mayor of West New York.
According to experts on the subject, the members of this group designed to organize terrorist actions included, along with the now-deceased chairman Jorge Mas Canosa, several well-known individuals, all of them accomplice to Posada’s crimes, most of them based a few kilometers from the FBI’s offices in Miami.
They include, among others, Luis Zuñiga Rey, now a director of the Cuban Liberty Council (along with being a member of the executive board of Radio y TV Marti, according to the Chicago Tribune); Roberto Martín Pérez, coordinator of the group, henchman and son of a henchman under the Batista dictatorship; documented terrorist and wife of radio/television announcer Ninoska Pérez Castellón; José Antonio Llama himself; Juan Bautista Márquez, a former CIA ship’s captain, now in prison for drug trafficking; Gaspar “Gasparito” Jiménez, Pedro Remón and Guillermo Novo Sampoll, all of them freely walking the streets of Miami after their shameful release from prison in Panama; Félix Ismael “El Gato” Rodríguez Mendigutía, the man who murdered Che Guevara on orders of the CIA; the doctor Alberto Hernández and José Francisco `Pepe' Hernández; Feliciano Foyo, now a capo of the CLC; his buddy Horacio García… and quite a few more.
This most recent confession and the investigation of the grand jury itself confirm that the terrible conspiracy that took the life of Fabio di Celmo was not hatched in some remote location in Central America; it was planned right inside the United States, which places Luis Posada Carriles even closer to the U.S. justice system.
The Bush administration continues to refuse to charge Posada Carriles with terrorism; he is now back in his house in Miami, where he meets with his accomplices, while at the same time, five Cubans who had managed to infiltrate his terrorist network remain in prison.
Translated by Granma International.
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