Viajes Varadero’s 46th Anniversary – Part II Persecution (+Español)

On July 10, 1979, Ricardo Fraga and I applied for a license to possess and carry firearms, as businesspeople and heads of family and in the face of all the terrorist actions against us, including the assassination of Carlos Muñiz. It’s important to mention that, according to declassified documents, on July 6 the FBI had neutralized a conspiracy planned by Reynol Rodríguez González to assassinate both Bernardo Bennes, a banker from Florida, and myself. In mid-July and early August, Julio Labatut asked Félix “Tuto” Zabala to record the entry and exit of people at the building where I lived—we had to pass in front of his house in order to enter our building—for the purpose of planning an attack on me. The chief of police, Desiderio Cartagena, former director of the Intelligence Division, denied our firearm license application, stating that our request was not “favorably considered.” Our lawyers filed a lawsuit in court on September 24 to demand that the chief of police present proof for the denial of the license. The party representing the police did not respond to the court summons on October 18 and the judge declared valid our request to possess and carry a firearm. Our firearm licenses were formally issued on November 13, 1979. A second bomb had been placed on July 26th, but did not explode due to a manufacturing defect. The idea had been to render us defenseless and force us to arm ourselves illegally so that they could arrest us and “take us out of circulation.”

In the meantime, the Public Service Commission, then in charge of regulating travel agencies, issued a cease-and-desist order against Viajes Varadero for non-compliance with documentation requirements. We had already filed some, but not all the documents needed to obtain a travel agency license. Our lawyer filed a motion indicating that we did not sell airline tickets on commercial airlines, but used charter flights originating in Miami that were not regulated by the Public Service Commission. We resisted another attempt to implement the Puerto Rico Senate resolution of January 24, 1979 (see Part I of this article).

After many years, in 1995, through our requests for declassification of information, we discovered that from 1983 to 1991 the FBI had conducted an intense surveillance against us and Viajes Varadero, entering our offices and assembling shredded documents, watching our movements from small aircraft, and writing reports about us every three months, then six months, and finally once a year. It started when a customer of ours, cousin to a friend in New York, alleged that I was watching her from my car parked in front of her house. She was the wife of FBI supervisor Víctor González, who covered terrorist activities in Puerto Rico. It was all a set up that has yet to be cleared up, meant to justify a prolonged, in-depth investigation against us, with no results whatsoever to back the FBI’s aim, which was to declare us “unregistered agents” and withdraw our U.S. citizenship.

Another incident we had to address at Viajes Varadero was when convicted terrorist Antonio de la Coba, editor of La Crónica weekly who was serving probation in Puerto Rico, published photos of Carlos Muñiz’s autopsy in September 1983, forcing us to file a petition for a restraining order and a lawsuit for damages in the name of his widow, Pilar Pérez, before the Superior Court of San Juan. The outcome of both actions was positive: we were able to ban the publication of the photos for a period of nearly 10 years and the family was awarded one hundred thousand dollars in damages. As a result of the lawsuit and the complaints we filed with the Federal Probation Office for Antonio de la Coba’s violations of his parole, the terrorist was imprisoned on March 26, 1985; he was released three months later on allegations that he had not violated his parole. The feds protected him and, in our opinion, recruited him.

These types of obstacles, which we consider state persecution of Viajes Varadero and its directors, would continue. On November 29, 1993, we received a cease-and-desist order on remittances to Cuba issued by the Office of the Commissioner of Financial Institutions (OCIF), which is in charge of regulating and supervising transactions by banks and financial institutions in Puerto Rico. We again had to resort to our lawyer, who prepared a motion stating that said office did not have jurisdiction on the subject. He used the legal argument of “occupied field” by a higher jurisdiction, in this case the federal government through the Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC), which issues licenses and authorizations for those transactions with Cuba. After attending a hearing and presenting the legal motion, the institution had no other choice but to dismiss the order on April 19, 1994.

In October 1998, the House of Representatives, through statehood party representative Ángel M. Cintrón García—former student leader and participant in the demonstrations in support of convicted terrorist Antonio de la Coba while he was under investigation by the civil Rights Commission in 1987—approved a resolution and order to investigate the agencies that organized visits to Cuba from Puerto Rico. The Viajes Varadero subpoena stated that they were investigating travel agencies for “allegedly [sic] organizing travel by students and professors in Puerto Rio to Cuba without the authorization of federal agencies.” Again, with our earlier experience with the cease-and-desist order from OCIF, we reiterated the legal argument of “occupied field” by a higher jurisdiction. This helped dismantle the attempts at criminalizing activities by Viajes Varadero and similar agencies that provided travel to Cuba.

Aniversario 46 de Viajes Varadero (Parte II). La persecución (+English)

Although violent acts against Viajes Varadero had stopped after the third bomb was placed on January 19, 1980, the campaigns organized by terrorist and counterrevolutionary groups in the media, or through their contacts and influence in the Puerto Rican government, to justify the investigations mentioned above continued. An incident that could have had serious consequences occurred on September 2, 1994, when a group of Cubans led by Guillermo Toledo, Sergio Ramos, and Julio Labatud with close links of the former weekly La Crónica, together with about twenty Cubans, organized a demonstration in front of the federal building to protest Havana’s sinking of the tugboat 13 de marzo, where a group of people perished. From there, where they had heated discussions with newspeople who were covering the protest, they decided to move with their two symbolic coffins to the offices of Viajes Varadero. Luckily, there were two Puerto Rican friends near the demonstration who heard the conversation and came to warn us. There were only three of us working at the agency that day, plus my eldest son who had come by to say hello and the two friends who came to warn us. The demonstrators were aggressive and started moving towards  our door. Given their history, I thought that they could dare to enter and vandalize our offices. Then, remembering we had some sticks at hand, we grabbed one each and stood at the entrance, giving the clear message that an attempt to enter would not be without consequences. There were tense moments where insults and threats were hurled at a short distance. My instructions were to not respond to the attacks and just defend the entrance. At some point, an employee, acting irresponsibly or perhaps nervously on her own, hurled an object outside the office. This action was used by the protesters to file a complaint with the police for aggression, when in reality they had been the aggressors from the beginning. On our part, we filed a complaint with the police for threats and for putting the security and lives of the people inside the Viajes Varadero offices at risk. We also filed a report on the lawyer Guillermo Toledo before the Bar Association, for his violation of the Canons of Professional Ethics by taking part in a threatening demonstration, thereby risking disbarment. This complaint apparently got them thinking of the dangers they faced, and the lawyers from both sides negotiated an agreement signed on March 30, 1995 where both parties withdrew their police complaints and civil lawsuits, and, most importantly, which recognized that both parties had the right to “…express their political viewpoints and their philosophical and ideological beliefs in a civilized and orderly manner” and that “the signatories promise to respect the right to freedom of expression possessed by all citizens and to act within Puerto Rico’s legal framework in defense of their ideological beliefs.”  This agreement was a victory for us, at least symbolically, in that the representatives of the Cuban counterrevolution in Puerto Rico were required by a legal document to recognize our right to express our political ideas.

Following the example of our colleagues at Marazul who had a similar background, in 1987-1989 we decided to publish a four-page newsletter, Varadero Informa, with the aim of informing our customers about the changes taking place in Cuba and the services offered to facilitate their stays on the island. A review of those newsletters reminds us of events such as the beginning of the remittance service, the authorization for Cuban residents to travel abroad to visit relatives, the extension of the time allowed to stay in Cuba from 7 to 14 days, as well as the first authorizations for Cubans who had left the island after 1978 to make return visits. In the Varadero Informa Year 2, Issue No. 1 issue of September 1988, we celebrated our 10th Anniversary and published an evaluation of the developments we had seen, stating: “Finally, we would like to say that we continue to insist that Cuban authorities grant us the four basic requests made by the Cuban community in Puerto Rico: that travel not be limited to once a year, that the hotel payment be made voluntary and not obligatory, that they allow visits for a longer period (15 days), and that they make restrictions on travel by those who left the island after 1978 more flexible.”

Viajes Varadero’s life cycle is coming to an end, although we would have liked to stay longer. Willpower, discipline, commitment, sacrifice, solidarity, and luck have allowed us to navigate these 46 years, offering the best possible service to our customers and defending their interests, despite the times when we it was not clear where our friends were, or our adversaries. We have overcome many obstacles and defeated many individuals and groups who didn’t want us to exist.  We leave knowing that we didn’t get rich in the process or let ourselves be intimidated by powerful people. This is our best tribute to our compañero Carlos Muñiz Varela.

Raúl Álzaga fundador y actual presidente de Viajes Varadero, San Juan, Puerto Rico.
Translated by Vivian Otero

 

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