The first exiles travel and a martyr is born
Carlos Muñiz Varela (Part 2 of 3)
By Eduardo Santana Castellón and Raúl Alzaga Manresa
On Dec. 21, 1978, the first group of 85 Cubans traveled from Puerto Rico to Cuba via Miami and Kingston, Jamaica. Cubans’ interest in reuniting with the family and Cuba was enormous. Three thousand Cubans, out of a population estimated at 22,000, traveled to Cuba in the first three months of the program. But the dice had been cast. The lack of experience and the youthful feeling of immortality blinded Carlos and his companions to the impending developments.
On Jan. 4, 1979, the first bomb exploded outside the Viajes Varadero Travel Agency. Thus, previous journalistic intimidation escalated to terrorist violence. That day, a second group of more than 80 people left for Cuba. The newspaper La Crónica said: “Yesterday, an explosive device caused considerable damage [to the travel agency] […] Our congratulations to the Cuban patriots.”
On April 28, as Carlos drives to his mother’s house, a car rams his vehicle from behind, then moves alongside and a gunman fires several times. One shot hits Carlos in the back of the neck. He loses control of the car, which hits the curb and overturns. One of the assassins steps down and fires the coup de grâce. The threat had been carried out.
Two days later, a self-described “Commando Zero” phones a radio station in Miami and claims responsibility for the assassination in a communiqué that says: “This despicable fellow named Carlos Muñiz is the first one to fall in this Fidel-American plot, but he will not be the only one.”
A latter communiqué (10/05/79) reported by United Press International says “To the People of Puerto Rico in general and Cubans in particular. In an assembly held May 19, we determined the following: (1) We openly oppose the resumption of relations with Cuba and its dictatorship; (2) We shall fight against the Castro dictatorship for all eternity; (3) We shall consider any Cuban or Puerto Rican or American who travels to Cuba, no matter what his purpose, as our enemy; (4) We are obligated to pass sentence on them the same way we did with Muñiz Varela. Signed: Commando Zero. Branches in all free lands.”
Carlos’ death did not satisfy the murderers. According to declassified FBI documents obtained under the United States’ Freedom of Information Act, one and a half months after the assassination, elements of the CORU met in Florida to plan the assassination of Raúl Álzaga, who replaced Carlos as director of the Viajes Varadero Travel Agency and, with friend Ricardo Fraga, directed the Antonio Maceo Brigade.
The terrorists did not carry out the second assassination, but placed two bombs outside the Viajes Varadero Travel Agency on July 26, 1979, and Jan. 19, 1980. (See the documents regarding Muñiz Varela’s assassination in http://verdadyjusticia.net/index.html ) However, in the United States they kept their word, committing several bomb attacks and murdering — on Nov. 25, 1979, and in front of his 12-year-old son — Eulalio Negrín, leader of the Cuban community in New Jersey, a man who advocated dialogue with Cuba.
In retrospect, it was impossible for right wing paramilitary Cuban groups not to respond to the challenge, given that their survival was at stake. Areíto magazine, the Brigade and El Diálogo represented the first major crack in the monolithic image of a rabidly counter-revolutionary Cuban community abroad. They represented a new option within an exile community that until then had been controlled by far-right violent groups that punished anyone who opposed their bellicose vision of Cuba.
The First Contingent of the Antonio Maceo Brigade — created in 1977 by 55 young people, among them Carlos Muñiz — represented a landmark in the relations between the Cuban nation and the émigrés. The young people in the first contingent, and the hundreds of youths who followed them in more than 15 subsequent contingents, raised the level of awareness inside and outside Cuba about the migratory process and everything that represented the separation and breakup of the Cuban family.
It was obvious that the Brigade’s trips to Cuba would foster changes in the opinions abroad about Cuba, but those trips also transformed the perceptions inside Cuba about the Cuban community abroad. The émigrés’ new acceptance within Cuba was crystallized when the book “Against Wind and Tide,” a collective testimony by Areíto members about the experience of uprootedness, and the collection of poems “Words Bring Revolution Together,” by Lourdes Casals, a Cuban living in New York, won the prestigious Casa de las Américas award in Havana in 1978 and 1981, respectively.
For the first time, Cubans abroad are acknowledged in their country to be not “defectors” from a revolution but compatriots living a different process.
In this context, Andrés Gómez, leader of the Antonio Maceo Brigade in Miami, recalls Carlos’ contributions thus: “Carlos contributed to […] one of the Brigade’s greatest accomplishments — the development in Miami and Puerto Rico of a more pluralistic and participative political climate on topics related to Cuba. The Brigade allowed Cubans abroad to reinsert themselves in their country’s patriotic legacy, with the honor and privilege of having defended, against wind and tide, the sovereignty, freedoms and revolutionary process of the Cuban people from the same places dominated by their enemies.”
That’s why Carlos was assassinated.
Eduardo Santana Castellón teaches at the University of Guadalajara, Mexico. From 1979 to 1983, he was an active member of the Antonio Maceo Brigade in Puerto Rico. Raúl Álzaga Manresa is co-founder of the magazine Areíto and the Antonio Maceo Brigade. Upon Carlos Muñiz Varela’s death, he became director of the Viajes Varadero Travel Agency in Puerto Rico.
Carlos Muniz Varela (Part 1)
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