Luis Posada Carriles facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Luis Posada Carriles
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Luis Posada at Fort Benning, Georgia, US, 1962
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| Born | February 15, 1928 Cienfuegos, Cuba
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| Died | May 23, 2018 (aged 90) Miami, Florida, US
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Luis Clemente Posada Carriles (February 15, 1928 – May 23, 2018) was a Cuban exile militant and Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) agent. He was considered a terrorist by the United States' Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the Government of Cuba, among others.
Born in Cienfuegos, Cuba, Posada fled to the United States after a spell of anti-Castro activism. He helped organize the Bay of Pigs Invasion, and after it failed, became an agent for the CIA. He received training at Fort Benning, and from 1964 to 1967 was involved with a series of bombings and other covert activities against the Cuban government, before joining the Venezuelan intelligence service. Along with Orlando Bosch, he was involved in founding the Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations, described by the FBI as "an anti-Castro terrorist umbrella organization". Posada and CORU are widely considered responsible for the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed 73 people. Posada later admitted involvement in a string of bombings in 1997 targeting fashionable Cuban hotels and nightspots. In addition, he was jailed under accusations related to an assassination attempt on Fidel Castro in Panama in 2000, although he was later pardoned by Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso in the final days of her term. He denied involvement in the airline bombing and the alleged plot against Castro in Panama, but admitted to fighting to overthrow the Castro regime in Cuba.
In 2005, Posada was held by US authorities in Texas on the charge of being in the country illegally: the charges were later dismissed. His release on bail in 2007 elicited angry reactions from the Cuban and Venezuelan governments. The US Justice Department had urged the court to keep him in jail because he was "an admitted mastermind of terrorist plots and attacks", a flight risk and a danger to the community. The decision was also criticized within the US; an editorial in the Los Angeles Times stated that by releasing Carriles while detaining a number of suspected terrorists in Guantánamo Bay, the US government was guilty of hypocrisy.
Posada died in May 2018 in Florida, where hardline elements of the anti-Castro exile community in Miami still regarded him as "a heroic figure". Reporter Ann Louise Bardach called him "Fidel Castro's most persistent would-be assassin, while Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive referred to him as "one of the most dangerous terrorists in recent history" and the "godfather of Cuban exile violence."
Personal life
Posada married in 1955. He separated from his first wife a few years after first moving to the US. He married his second wife, Elina Nieves, in 1963 while at Fort Benning. Nieves and he had a son while still in the US: a daughter was born after the family had moved to Venezuela in 1968. Posada and Nieves lived apart for most of their marriage. He had a lengthy relationship with Titi Bosch, who died of cancer in 2001. Towards the end of his life, Posada lived in Miami, where he often attended fund raisers among the right-wing exile groups, and participated in protests against the government of Fidel Castro. Among Cuban exiles, he was nicknamed "Bambi".
A November 2016, El Nuevo Herald newspaper article described Posada in a Miami restaurant celebrating Castro's death. The article reported that the then-88-year-old Posada was a cancer survivor and had suffered a stroke. He died on May 23, 2018, in Miami, aged 90: an obituary in The Washington Post stated that he had been diagnosed with throat cancer five years previously. His lawyer stated that Posada Carriles died at "a government home for veterans".
See also
In Spanish: Luis Posada Carriles para niños
