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• The political culture of terrorism in Cuban Miami

The political culture of terrorism in Cuban Miami

Steve Ludlam examines the connections between exile and terrrorism in Miami.

Summary

This article discusses Miami-based terrorism. I argue that this phenomenon originates in the exile group associated with the deposed Batista dictatorship who were trained to mount terrorist attacks against civilian targets in Cuba and especially, from the 1990s, targets linked to tourism. The continuation of this terrorism can be explained by two general factors. Firstly, the batistianos’ capacity to dominate the wider exile community through local economic and political patronage and media control; lobbying in Washington and participation in US Cold War programmes; and the creation of an exilio culture mobilised by anti-communism and conservative Catholicism. In this context, exiles advocating dialogue with Cuba could be isolated and intimidated by verbal or physical assault. The second general factor has been the support, overt or covert, offered by key US government agencies. The article asks whether political and generational change may weaken this culture. It also notes the contradiction between the US anti-terror policy and the US imprisonment of five Cuban anti-terrorism agents.

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Intoduction

In October 2008, the general secretary of the British Trades Union Congress, with other senior UK and US union leaders, joined and addressed a protest demonstration at the US embassy in London. This was a rare event, especially as they were protesting on behalf of the secret agents of another state: the protest marked the 10th anniversary of the arrest in Miami of five Cuban agents, whose case the TUC has taken up. The Five, as they are now known, were infiltrating anti-Cuba terrorist groups, to prevent attacks on Cuba and tourists travelling to Cuba. Their long prison terms, however, rested on guilty verdicts on charges of conspiracy to commit espionage against the US itself, and in one case conspiracy to commit murder in relation to the shooting down of two aircraft belonging to the Miami-based Brothers to the Rescue (BTTR) group (1). Concern over the case of the Five agents has been marked, above all, by the argument that a fair trial in Miami was impossible because of anti-Cuban sentiment in local, exile-dominated politics.

This issue of jury bias was the basis of the Five's first legal appeal, heard by the 11th Circuit of the US Court of Appeal, which ordered a new trial on account of 'the perfect storm created when the surge of pervasive community sentiment, and extensive publicity both before and during the trial, merged with the improper prosecutorial references' (United States Court of Appeals, 2005, 91). The judgement cited evidence of the long history of political bombings and killings in Miami attributed to Cuban-American terrorist groups. The Appeal Court noted that jurors had 'expressed concern that they were filmed "all the way to their cars and [that] their license plates had been filmed"' (United States Court of Appeal, 2005, 30/1, 66). Their license plates were indeed broadcast on local TV. In 2005, the U.N Working Group on Arbitrary Detention, who condemned the convictions, noted that men in paramilitary uniforms had appeared in the courthouse (United Nations, 2005). A legal psychologist alerted the Appeal Court to 'an attitude of a state of war between the local Cuban community against Cuba' that had created, 'deeply entrenched body of opinions [so entrenched as to often not be consciously held] that would hinder any jury in Miami-Dade County from reaching a fair and impartial decision in this case.' Florida International University's Professor of Sociology concluded that 'the possibility of selecting twelve citizens of Miami-Dade County who can be impartial in a case involving acknowledged agents of the Cuban government is virtually zero ... even if the jury were composed entirely of non-Cubans, as it was in this case' (United States Court of Appeal, 2005, 72-4). The Court held that swearing in an impartial jury "in this community was an unreasonable probability because of pervasive community prejudice" (United States Court of Appeal, 2005, 86-7) (2).

The fate of the Five poses the wider question of the political culture that produced both the Miami-based terrorism and Cuba's clandestine activity. Since the defeat of the dictatorship in 1959, according to the Cuban government, terrorist attacks on Cuba have taken 3478 lives, and injured 2099 others (Rodríguez Cruz, 2005, 271). Proportionately, this is as if some 95,000 US citizens were killed by Cuban attacks (none have). Attacks have included chemical and biological weapons, from napalm bombs to crop viruses. A member of the exile terror group Omega 7 claimed responsibility for introducing dengue fever, which affected over 300,000 Cubans in 1981 and killed 158 including 101 children (Rodríguez Cruz , 2005, 134). In 1976, a bomb destroyed a Cuban airliner, killing all 73 people on board: the worst terrorist outrage in the Americas until 9/11.

US officialdom's apparent toleration of this terrorist culture in Miami seems in contradiction with President Bush's declaration of the 'war on terrorism', and his insistence that those who harbour terrorists are themselves terrorists. I will argue that the explanation lies in the nature of the immediate post-revolutionary exile wave; in the subsequent ability of this group to mobilise and dominate subsequent waves of Cuban emigrants; and in the connivance of US agencies and politicians.

The batistiano machine

As one eminent exilio sociologist has pointed out, the usual explanation of Miami extremism is the nature of the first wave of exiles (Portes, 2007, 123-137). These were the batistianos, prominent officials and supporters of the Batista dictatorship. Some fled with a vast treasury including Cuba's entire foreign currency reserve, but they left behind properties, family members and colleagues, some of whom were executed for crimes committed by Batista's forces, and many more imprisoned. These bitter batistianos regarded themselves as a government-in-exile. As a Miami FBI veteran told the leading US investigative journalist in this field, some, including Havana's former chief of police, simply took up where they left off: "To some extent, the gansterismo of Havana was transferred to Miami by a handful of early batistiano arrivals … they set up shop here just like they did in Havana - running protection rackets and illegal gambling" (Bardach, 2002, 116). The batistianos were at any rate determined to preserve the cubanidad de antes - the 'cubanness' of before the Revolution - and to organize a swift counter-revolution. Arriving in a still-segregated Miami, they reopened Havana's 'big five', racially exclusive clubs. Within a couple of years they had, the CIA reported, created 371 counter-revolutionary groups in the US, competing for US support (Arboleya, 2002, 171ff ). Bombings and arson attacks on Cuban targets followed. The chief executive of the Bacardí rum company actually bought a B-26 bomber to attack the island's oil refineries (Calvo Ospina, 2000, 19). It was this community which supplied the bulk of the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion force.

Yet these batistianos reportedly accounted for only about 5000 of the 200,000 migrants who arrived in the US, the majority in Miami, between 1959 and the missile crisis in 1962 (Levine, 2001, 55ff). Thereafter, until Richard Nixon ended the 'freedom flights' in 1973, some 340,000 more exiles arrived; around 125,000 arrived in the 1980 'Mariel boatlift'; and several tens of thousands more in the 'rafter crisis' of the mid-1990s. These successive waves resemble a social pyramid, with the batistiano core first, followed by members of the white middle class dismayed at the Revolution's left turn. Later came mainly working class economic migrants, some of them black. The latter, a US sociologist has noted, arrived to face explicit racism that the Revolution had removed (Sawyer, 2006, 159). Not only racism, but sexism and class discrimination have characterized a Miami Cubanidad grounded in extreme anti-communism and a 'discourse and practice of intransigence', in the view of a Cuban-American theologian (de la Torre, 2003, 117, 126).

How could batistiano extremism remain hegemonic in this wider Cuban-American community? The most prominent Cuban-American sociologist of migration focuses on two factors: the consolidation of political and economic interests; and the deployment of commemorative ritual (Portes, 2007). As Portes puts it, "… Cuban-American economic and political power created a mass of resources and opportunities available to friends and allies. Fellow Cubans stood first in line as recipients of this largesse but only on condition that they adhered strictly to the ideological outlook of the enclave" (Portes, 2007, 131-2). This fund of financial and social capital, including the 'official pulpit' of exile-controlled radio stations, permitted both reward and punishment (de la Torre, 2003, 47-8). Bernardo Benes suggested that "[a] million Cubans are blackmailed, totally controlled, by three radio stations" (cited by de la Torre, 2003, 49). Exile capital had poured into construction, dominating the key trade associations. "The basic dynamics of this machine are easy to understand," explains Portes, "Cuban-American entrepreneurs contributed to the campaigns of Cuban-American politicians who, once in office, reciprocated the favour" (Portes, 2007, 127). When the 'anglo' elite promoted anti-Cuban referendums in the form of anti-bilingualism ordinances, Miami-Cubans were urged to naturalize and vote. The war on Castro, "turned the city into a one-issue community in which candidates for positions ranging from school boards to judges are assessed by their political beliefs regarding Cuba" (Levine, 2001, 218). Miami became the only city in the US where first-generation immigrants dominate city politics. As one exile scholar has noted:

"By the 1990s, the majority of city commissioners were Exilic Cubans, as was the mayor. The superintendent of Dade County public schools, the state chairs of the Florida Democratic Party, and the local chairs of the county's political chairs are Exilic Cubans. Further, the president of several banks (about twenty) and of Florida International University, the Dade-County AFL-CIO, the Miami Chamber of Commerce, the Miami Herald Publishing Company, and the greater Miami Board of Realtors (a post I held) are or have been Exilic Cuban. It is common to find Exilic Cubans occupying top administrative posts in City Hall, at the Miami Herald, and in the city's corporate boardrooms" (de la Torre, 2003, 19).

Hence, as one deviant but defiant Cuban businessman, whose premises were bombed and vandalized, told Bardach, 'The batistiano element here is very small in their numbers, but they control the media and the political machinery and just about all business contracts handed out in Dade County' (Bardach, 2002, 118).

Ritual commemoration and cultural revolution

The second instrument of hegemony Portes notes is the commemoration of ritual. This refers to the mobilisation around key dates such as the Bay of Pigs landing, and key sites such as the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Charity, 'because [the] interest of machine leaders lies in cultivating a mobilized, emotional state among the mass of exiles' (Portes, 2007, 133). In his work, de la Torre portrays la Lucha - the struggle - as the theology of Exilic Cuba. On his account, the ferocity of the first exiles was reinforced by the messianic anti-communism of the Cuban Catholic Church. Miami-Cuban religiosity helped the community deal with exile and alienation; focused religiosity on the struggle between good (Exilic Cuba) and evil (Fidel Castro), and the occasional 'atheism' of US Cuba policy: and justified any action against non-believers and against the island in this just, holy war against Satan-Fidel (de la Torre, 2003, 29, 42).

A crucial dimension of extremist hegemony that Portes neglects, in the work cited here, is the role of terror and intimidation. As Bardach put it in her study, the political culture of Miami '... is the product of four decades of seething betrayal, suspicion and conspiracies … it was out of such thinking that the boundaries of the Castro War were drawn: any individual or business viewed as sympathetic to Havana became fair game for vigilante justice' (Bardach, 2002, 113). Even in the 1960s, when counter-revolutionary groups were focused on action in Cuba, they carried out 156 terrorist actions within the US and in other third countries (Arboleya, 2002, 141). After the Bay of Pigs failure invasion and the settlement of the missile crisis, an acceptance that there would not be an early restoration of the old order in Cuba led some to facilitate charity and family travel to Cuba, and even dialogue with the Cuban government. These processes produced a violent backlash. In 1973-76 alone, the FBI investigated 103 bombings and six murders within the US that were credited to Cuban exile groups.

After 1976, President Carter initiated limited dialogue with Cuba. Supportive exiles were condemned as dialogistas and worse, and their addresses and telephone numbers published in exilio media. Dialogistas found their businesses bombed and staff threatened; two were assassinated (de la Torre, 2003, 49). The most prominent, Bernardo Benes, made repeated secret trips to Cuba, securing the release from Cuba of 3,600 political prisoners. Yet his bank was bombed and the FBI foiled a plot to murder him (Levine, 2001, 183ff). The de facto US ambassador in Havana noted Benes's enemies had adopted "war to the death" as their slogan, as they fought "from the safety and comfort of their homes in Miami" to block, in effect, the return of thousands of compatriots imprisoned for fighting Castro inside Cuba (Smith, 1987, 162).

More generally, a 'cultural revolution' targeted academics and cultural industries deemed 'soft' on Cuba. In the early 1990s, the human rights group Americas Watch and the Fund for Free Expression published Dangerous Dialogue: Attacks on Freedom of Expression in Miami's Cuban Exile Community. It found that "suppression of dissent in Miami takes a variety of forms, including attacks on artistic freedom, academic freedom, the press, and human rights activists" (Human Rights Watch, 1993). Bardach gives examples of Cuban musicians whose performances were cancelled after bomb threats. When a popular actress was denounced on exilio radio for visiting Cuba, a mob urinated on her star on Miami's Walk of Fame and dug it out (Bardach, 2002, 112-14). The exile director of the Institute for Cuban Studies, at Miami-Dade University, was denounced for organizing unapproved conferences on Cuba, culminating in a bombing. Miami's Cuban Museum of Arts and Culture was vandalized and twice bombed, because it showed works by Cubans from the island.

With US opinion soured by the image of mob rule created by the Élian González case, some exile leaders sought to show their community's tolerance by securing the 2001 Latin Grammy Awards for Miami (3). However, threats by over a hundred exile groups, because several Cuban artists were nominees, forced the organisers to relocate to Los Angeles. The day after the Grammys pulled out, a full-page advertisement in the Miami Herald urged unity against Fidel Castro. A former Cuban American National Foundation leader commented, "It is a message that there should not be any kind of deviation in the exile community from the position of never compromising with the Castro regime, or any other type of alternative toleration that only serves to send mixed signals to the Communist regime" (cited in de la Torre, 2003, 133). In an article that prompted furious reaction, a Miami New Times writer, noting that "lawless violence and intimidation have been the hallmarks of el exilio for more than 30 years", compiled a list of 68 such acts within Miami including forty bombings and six murders (Mullin, 2000).

Harbouring terrorism

Miami-Cuban terrorism was not confined to Florida, of course. In a long list of such incidents since 1990, The Cuban National Assembly reported that on 26 April 2001, "three terrorists of the Commandos Groups F-45 and Alpha 66 tried to land on the north coast of Villa Clara province and, after firing shots at Cuban coastguard troops who had spotted them, were taken prisoner" (National Assembly of Cuba, 2006). A key explanation of such terrorism is the long relationship between the exile community and US government agencies. In the initial counter-revolutionary struggle, the exile community was inextricably linked to the CIA's secret 'dirty war' against Cuba, as both US and Cuban agencies have since revealed in compelling detail (Kornbluh, 1998; Elliston, 1999; Rodríguez, 1999; Escalante, 2004, 2006). The 'JM/WAVE' CIA station in Miami paid an army of batistianos running armed groups inside Cuba and preparing for the 1961 invasion. The mafia, evicted from its Havana rackets, was recruited too, infamously when the CIA hired mafiosi from the FBI's most-wanted list, to murder Fidel Castro. After the Bay of Pigs debacle, the CIA launched Operation Mongoose, identifying hundreds of civilian targets in Cuba, and employing some 3000 exiles (de la Torre, 2003, 40). Mongoose ended after the 1962 missile crisis, whose resolution included a US commitment not to invade Cuba. This commitment drove many Miami paramilitaries to the fringes of US politics. As the former US de facto ambassador has put it:

The most violent would spend their lives organizing terrorist activities against Cuba, including the Cubana airliner bombing, and serving anti-communist regimes across Latin America (Dinges 2004, 128 et passim). Bosch served as security advisor to the dictator Pinochet in Chile. Posada ran Venezuela's intelligence service, inviting Bosch to join him. Bosch thus left the US, in violation of parole after conviction for a bazooka attack in Miami on a Russian merchant vessel. Both were imprisoned in Venezuela for masterminding the airliner bombing in 1976. CIA documents endorse the charge (Bardach, 2002, 189). Bosch served eleven years but Posada escaped, and went back on the CIA payroll helping run US Colonel Oliver North's drugs-for-guns operation with the Contras in Nicaragua (see National Security Archive (a), National Security Archive (b)). Back in Miami, other exilios were making fortunes in the dirty wars. Miguel Recarey, an associate of mafia boss Santo Trafficante Jnr, with whom he had assisted CIA assassination plots against Castro, ran International Medical Centers (IMC), which provided medical support to the Contras, and perpetrated the biggest Medicare fraud in US history (Bardach, 2002, 313-15).

One employee of Recarey was Jeb Bush, George W's brother. The Bush family connection, dating back to George Snr's early years in the CIA, illustrates a key explanation for the longevity of Miami extremism: political alliances. After Bosch left prison in Venezuela, he entered the US and was arrested for parole violation. The US Attorney General rejected Bosch's application for political asylum, declaring that for three decades Bosch had been 'resolute and unwavering in his advocacy of terrorist violence' and had "repeatedly expressed and demonstrated a willingness to cause indiscriminate injury and death" (cited in Bardach, 2002, 202). However, the man regarded by the FBI as Miami's top terrorist had friends in high places. His release became a key demand of the 1988 congressional campaign of Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, managed by Jeb Bush, future Governor of Florida. Ros-Lehtinen applauded Bosch as a patriot. Bosch's lawyer Raul Cantero III, Batista's grandson, described Bosch as a "great Cuban patriot" on Miami radio. Later, Governor Jeb Bush appointed Cantero to the Florida Supreme Court and President George Bush Snr overruled the Justice Department to release Bosch.

Posada continued to run terrorist activities from Central America. Percy Alvarado, a Cuban agent, was recruited in Miami to bomb the famous Tropicana nightclub in Havana (United States Court of Appeal, 2005, 47). In his memoir, he records receiving with C4 explosives for the attack from Posada (Alvarado Godoy, 2004, 129-130). In 2000, Posada was jailed in Panama for a plot to blow up Fidel Castro while he addressed a university audience. Pardoned by the Panamanian president in 2004, Posada re-entered the US illegally and was arrested. The US Justice Department informed the immigration court that Posada was 'an unrepentant criminal and admitted mastermind of terrorist plots and attacks on tourist sites' (cited in Lacey, 2006). Posada's claim to political asylum was based, his lawyer said, on his record of clandestine work for the US government. The government of George W. Bush declined to press terrorism charges. In 2007, Posada was released, to live in Miami where he was greeted as a hero.

A related explanation of the persistence of Miami-based terrorism is the tolerant behaviour of local law enforcement agencies. When the Cuban government gave the FBI evidence about terrorist activity in Miami in 1998, the information was not used to arrest terrorists, but to trace and arrest Cuba's anti-terrorism agents. Human Rights Watch reported in the 1990s that,

The 1999 FBI report Terrorism in the United States 1999: 30 Years of Terrorism, a Special Retrospective Edition contained a list of 'terrorist activity in the United States 1980-89' which included 27 acts attributed to Cuban-American groups, mostly bombings (Federal Bureau of Investigation, 1999). The FBI in New York had described the main Cuban group listed in the chronology of bombings, Omega 7, as "the most dangerous terrorist organization in the United States" (Levine 2001, 188). Yet, in 62 pages of analysis, there is no mention either of the 27 acts, or the groups involved, or their Miami hinterland. Neither does the report mention terrorist attacks launched against Cuba, in violation of the Neutrality Act. Among dozens of terrorist events against Cuba, nine were bombings of hotels and restaurants, which had killed an Italian tourist and injured eleven others in 1997 (National Assembly of Cuba, 2006). The FBI had been informed by Tony Alvarez, a Cuban-American in Guatemala, that his business partners were acquiring explosives, meeting with Posada, and boasting of their work whenever a hotel bombing was reported from Cuba. Alvarez told Bardach that, having warned him his life was in danger, the FBI never contacted him again. Posada himself, who confessed his involvement in New York Times interviews published in 1998, was never contacted by the FBI about the bombings, and boasted that the FBI agent whom Alvarez had contacted was an old friend. Alvarez agreed, "I think they are all in cahoots, Posada and the FBI. I risked my life and my business, and they did nothing" (Bardach, 2002, 207 et passim). One FBI agent complained to Bardach that, "every day we have a Neutrality Act violation because people leave to do runs on Cuba. But no one will allow us to do our job" (Bardach, 2002, 117). José Basulto, the BTTR founder, took a different view: 'Violators of the Neutrality Act are, in my eyes, patriots' (cited in de la Torre, 2003, 45).

In the sphere of formal national politics, the exile community built a formidable lobbying machine. Funded by the National Endowment for Democracy, the heart of the lobby from 1981 was the Cuban American National Foundation. The CANF's founding leader, José Mas Canosa, and other CANF leaders, maintained links with the clandestine wing of el exilio (see Calvo and Katlijn Declercq, 2000). Mas Conosa had worked with Posada in actions against Cuban targets (Bardach, 2002, 182). When bombs were exploding in Cuban hotels in 1997, CANF issued a statement saying it did not condemn the bombings (Bardach, 2002, 211). CANF's most important role in exile politics, however, was its political clout in Washington. Its two outstanding victories were the laws known popularly as the Torricelli Act (1992) and the Helms-Burton Act (1996), both designed to tighten the US trade embargo and finish off the Cuban economy after the Soviet collapse. The sitting Presidents, Republican George Bush Snr and Democrat Bill Clinton had opposed the respective Bills, but flip-flopped in election years in the face of the threat of the loss of the Union's second most-populous state. In 1992, when candidate Clinton declared his support for Torricelli, Bush Snr rushed to sign the Act on TV surrounded by CANF leaders. In 1996, the fury in Miami over the BTTR shootdown overcame President Clinton's resistance. The US government committed vast funds to Radio and TV Martí aimed at Cuba, and to prepare for Cuba's post-Castro 'transition'. This provided a steady stream of indirect funding for exiles and their institutions, later boosted in Bush Jnr's elaborate transition plans.

Looking to the future

Some combination of political change in Miami, the White House, and Havana may herald a decline in the political culture of terrorism. In 2008, President Barack Obama took Florida from the Republicans by 2%, despite having pledged to reverse Bush's controls on family visits and remittances, and hinting at new talks with Havana (though not lifting the blockade). Two of the three 'hardline' Republican Cuban-Americans in the House of Representatives in South Florida, the Diaz-Balarts and Ros-Lehtinen, faced prominent Cuban-American Democrat challengers in 2008. All three held their seats, but with majorities that fell on average by 7% from the 2006 results, to 16% in two cases, 6% in the third. They had enjoyed majorities of between 30% and 50% during the previous decade. Perhaps after half a century the electoral reflection of Miami extremism is finally fading, weakening one constraint on foreign policy reform. Time will tell. In the meantime the stark contradiction represented by the fate of the Cuban Five remains. In the 1990s, the bombing of tourist targets was intended to prevent Cuba recovering economically through international tourism. It was to prevent such attacks that the Five infiltrated the Miami groups. Veteran US civil liberties lawyer Leonard Weinglass, one of their appeal court attorneys, has insisted, "The Five were not prosecuted because they violated American law, but because their work exposed those who were. By infiltrating the terror network that is allowed to exist in Florida they demonstrated the hypocrisy of America's claimed opposition to terrorism" (Weinglass, 2005, 124). The tenth anniversary of their imprisonment is a reminder of the extraordinary political culture that has existed for half a century in Cuban Miami.

Steve Ludlam is Senior Lecturer in Politics at the University of Sheffield
The author is grateful to two anonymous referees; also to Jutta Schwartzkopf and Anton Kirchhofer for permission to reproduce the material that will appear in their Workings of the Anglosphere (Wissenschaftliger Verlag, Trier, 2009).

Notes

(1) This group, led by Bay of Pigs veteran José Basulto, initially searched for Cuban rafters headed for Florida. After US policy changed, and rafters were interned in Guantanamo Bay and Panama, BTTR began leafleting in Cuban airspace. BTTR's military Cessnas, modified for bomb dropping, had previously been supplied by the US Navy to the Contras in Nicaragua. After twenty-five Cuban warnings to the US Federal Aviation Authority following illegal intrusions, two Cessnas were shot down after being warned to turn back.

(2) A subsequent Appeal Court judgement set aside the 2005 ruling (United States Court of Appeal, 2008). In June 2009, the US Supreme Court rejected an application to review the case.

(3) Élian González survived a raft crossing in which his mother drowned. In the midst of a political storm, a custody battle ensued between the boy's father in Cuba and family relatives in Miami backed by the exile community. When US courts found in the father's favour, the family refused to release the boy. He was eventually seized by armed police, prompting violent protests in Miami.

References

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Arboleya, J. (2002) The Cuban Counterrevolution. Havana: Editorial José Martí.

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de la Torre, M.A. (2003) La Lucha for Cuba: Religion and Politics on the Streets of Miami. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Dinges, J. (2004) The Condor Years: How Pinochet and his Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents. New York: The New Press.

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Human Rights Watch (1993) Freedom of Expression in Miami's Cuban Exile Community http://hrw.org/reports/1993/WR93/Hrw.htm, accessed 8 April 2008.

Kornbluh, P. (ed.), (1998) Bay of Pigs Declassified: the Secret CIA Report on the Invasion of Cuba,. New York: the New Press.

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National Assembly of Cuba (2006) Summary of the Main Terrorist Actions against Cuba (1990-2000). http://www.parlamentocubano.cu/, 25 Sep 2006.

National Security Archive (a) "Bombing of Cuban Jetliner: 30 Years Later" http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB202/index.htm, accessed 5 may 2008.

National Security Archive (b) "Luis Posada Carriles: The Declassified Record. CIA and FBI Documents Detail Career in International Terrorism; Connection to U.S." http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB153/index.htm, accessed 5 may 2008.

Portes, A. (2007) The Cuban-American Political Machine: Reflections on its Origins and Perpetuation. In Hoffman, B. and Whitehead, L. Debating Cuban Exceptionalism. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.