A Mothers’ Day present — 30 years later
Carlos Muñiz Varela (Part 1 of 3)
A Mothers’ Day present — 30 years later
By Eduardo Santana Castellón and Raúl Alzaga Manresa
His mother always said good-bye to him with a kiss, asking him to take care of himself. But a mother’s love was not enough to keep a terrorist bullet from striking the head of her 25-year-old son a few blocks from home and on the eve of Mothers’ Day. Ever since, for 30 years, Idaena Varela Rodríguez has spent every Mothers’ Day waiting for justice for the assassination of her son, Carlos Muñiz Varela, a young Cuban-Puerto Rican killed for building bridges between Cubans and promoting a better relationship between Cuba and the United States.
Hope is the last thing to die, and the recent statements by presidents Raúl Castro and Barack Obama about opening channels of communication between their countries and supporting the trips of the Cuban community — along with last year’s request to the President-elect of the United States from then-Governor of Puerto Rico Aníbal Acevedo Vilá to clear up the assassination of Muñiz Varela — bring to Doña Idaena a ray of hope that her son did not die in vain. To foster justice, let us analyze the assassination committed on April 28, 1979, in Puerto Rico and let us remember that promoting terrorism and granting it impunity eventually strikes back any society hoping to live in peace.
Operation Peter Pan
In 1961, Doña Idaena, a widow living in Colón, Matanzas province, Cuba, was worried by the (false) rumors that the Cuban revolutionary government would strip parents of their rights over their children. For their own good, she decided to send Carlitos, then 8, and his sister Miriam to the United States. The rumors were part of Operation Peter Pan, directed by the Central Intelligence Agency in collusion with the Catholic Church, an act of “emotional terrorism” in the psychological war waged by the United States against Cuba ever since the triumph of the Revolution on Jan. 1, 1959.
This triggered the exodus of about 14,000 children from their country and provoked great suffering and the splitting up of thousands of Cuban families. The phenomenon had no precedent in the hemisphere and was of a magnitude similar to the exodus of Basque children during the Spanish Civil War, or of Jewish children from Nazi Germany, except that in this case the exodus was organized and orchestrated with phony excuses by a foreign country.
Months later, the mother manages to travel to Puerto Rico with her children. Carlos grows up and, as a student at the University of Puerto Rico, he participates actively in the Pro-Independence University Youth, leads labor-and-student campaigns, and actively supports the Pro-Independence Party of Puerto Rico. In late 1973, Carlos gets together with young Cubans who publish the innovative magazine Areíto and works as that publication’s coordinator on the island.
In 1977, staff members of Areíto, along with other Cuban émigrés create the Antonio Maceo Brigade (BAM), which organizes the travel to Cuba of young people who, like them, were removed from the island as children. Those young people demand the right of Cuban families to reunify after 15 years of separation, and the right of Cubans abroad to participate in Cuban society on the basis of respect for Cuba’s sovereignty and for its revolutionary process. Areito and the BAM were the first manifestations of a rift with the political discourse that predominated among Cuban exiles — the violent overthrow of the revolutionary government.
In 1978, as part of a process called “the dialogue” between the Cuban government and the Cuban community abroad, Carlos participates in the accords to initiate trips to Cuba and, in the framework of that dialogue, the Cuban government releases almost 3,500 prisoners. Travel agencies opened that specialized in allowing Cubans living abroad to travel to Cuba, and Carlos and his friend Raúl Álzaga Manresa create the Varadero Travel Agency in Puerto Rico. Carlos is its director. These young persons from Areíto and the BAM never suspected that this humanitarian and legitimate activity — promoting dialogue and family contacts with Cuba — would constitute a mortal danger for them.
Counter-revolutionary Cubans in exile
By that time, a whole series of violent organizations operated clandestinely in Florida, New Jersey, New York and Puerto Rico. They were anti-revolutionary Cubans who had been trained by the CIA to carry out acts of sabotage and terrorism against Cuba. (See listing of terrorist organizations and their actions worldwide in http://www.antiterroristas.cu). Many of these individuals, some with proven criminal records, represented the darkest sectors of the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, who had been toppled by the Cuban Revolution.
From those states, those counter-revolutionaries participated in actions like the Bay of Pigs invasion and Operation Mongoose, which were directed from the CIA’s intelligence radio station JMWave, on the University of Miami campus. At one time, JMWave was the largest CIA-run station in the world, with more than 2,000 Cubans and 600 Americans on the payroll, and just as many people associated with clandestine operations. It operated through dozens of “front” businesses that, some people believe, helped reactivate South Florida’s economy.
After John F. Kennedy won the presidential election in 1960, after the Bay of Pigs invasion attempt failed loudly in 1961 and after the 1962 October Crisis led mankind almost to the brink of a nuclear war (because the U.S. installed missiles in Turkey and the Soviet Union did the same in Cuba), the United States was forced to abandon its intention to invade Cuba and dismantled many of the clandestine groups it had created. However, it continued to promote acts of sabotage and terrorism that included assassination attempts on Cuba’s president, Fidel Castro. In addition, it tightened its politico-economic blockade around the island.
This way, many Cuban-American elements who had been trained in terrorism went “freelance” and organized lucrative (and in many cases fraudulent) businesses to raise money to “liberate” Cuba and finance their violent actions against that country. Some engaged in drug and arms trafficking, using the connections they had established while collaborating with the CIA. The U.S. tolerated the activities of those groups because they coincided with its policy to destroy the Cuban government and its desire to conceal the dirty deeds in which they had participated with the CIA.
Washington also began to utilize them in its covert wars against liberation movements in Central and South America, even inside U.S. territory. (All this has been documented by the U.S. Congress itself, and can be checked in the Web pages dealing with Congressional hearings and the National Security Archive: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/, http://www.gpoaccess.gov/chearings/index.html, http://www.aarclibrary.org/publib/contents/church/contents_church_reports.htm).
Groups like Omega 7, CORU, Alpha 66 and Abdala carried out countless murders and dynamite bombings, including the horrible blowing up in 1976 of a Cubana de Aviación airliner that was taking off the island of Barbados, killing all its 73 passengers, including the Cuban national fencing team.
Simultaneously, in this context of the Cold War, political violence increases in Puerto Rico because of its own internal social processes. In 1968, the right-leaning Progressive New Party (PNP), whose goal is Puerto Rico’s annexation by the U.S., wins the gubernatorial elections for the first time and the political climate polarizes. Violent acts by pro-independence and annexationist groups increase. The PNP loses the elections in 1972 but wins them again in 1976 with Carlos Romero Barceló, who, in collaboration with agencies of the federal government, promotes program of espionage, harassment and repression against Puerto Rico’s pro-independence and socialist sectors.
Members of the PNP promote alliances between Puerto Rican rightist groups and Cuban counter-revolutionary groups. During this time, in 1976, a Cuban-American assassinates Santiago Mari Pesquera, son of the Puerto Rican Socialist Party’s gubernatorial candidate, Juan Mari Bras. The intellectual authors of this crime still remain at large. An analysis made by Raúl Alzaga of the most violent terrorist aggressions in Puerto Rico 1959-2005 shows that most of the 125 bomb and firebomb attacks, plus assassinations, occurred between 1970 and 1980.
That was the environment that surrounded the young men from Areíto and the Antonio Maceo Brigade when they promoted dialogue with Cuba and questioned the hegemony of the exile organizations that decided what could be said or done in Cuban communities. The violent organizations in exile decided to combat the young upstarts because the normalization of relations between Cuba, the émigrés and the U.S. implied the financial and political end of their projects.
The members of Areíto and the BAM began to be intimidated by the exile’s communications media, were the targets of attacks and were illegally watched and spied upon by U.S. federal agencies such as the FBI and the CIA. Réplica Weekly, on May 19, 1977, said: “How repugnant are these young people who unfortunately were born in Cuba and taken into exile by their parents!” The magazine Crónica, on Sept. 28, 1978, referring to a meeting in Havana between the émigrés and the Cuban authorities, said: “Time has reserved a moment for these cowards. It’s a question of waiting. They will pay for what they’ve done.”
And in Crónica’s Nov. 14, 1978, issue there is a picture of a hooded man, identifying himself as “Comandante Zeta,” military chief of Omega 7, saying: “We shall not permit the dialogue to advance. Dynamite is the only language we’ll use to dialogue.” But the dialogue went on.
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 took over the Varadero Travel Agency in Puerto Rico.
