The staunch opponent of Fidel Castro, acquitted of bombing a Cuban airliner in 1976, dies after four months in hospital
The prominent Cuban exile militant Orlando Bosch, who was acquitted in Venezuela of the 1976 bombing of a Cuban jetliner, has died in Miami. He was 84.
Bosch's wife, Adriana, said he died at midday on Wednesday at a suburban Miami hospital. She said he had suffered complications from various illnesses and had been in hospital since December.
"Knowing him, it doesn't surprise me that he waited to pass away until after Fidel Castro formally retired from power," said Pepe Hernandez, head of the Cuban American National Foundation in Miami. "He died in the satisfaction of knowing that the struggle, even though by other means, is kept up by those of us yet to go."
Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles, another opponent of communist Cuba, were both accused in connection with the 1976 bombing that killed all 73 people aboard a flight bound for Cuba.
Venezuelan authorities arrested Bosch and held him for 11 years, alleging he was behind the attack plotted there. They failed twice to convict him and finally freed him to return to the United States. The federal government then held Bosch for three years in a Miami jail as an "undesirable alien" and released a report linking him to rightwing terrorist groups suspected of some 50 bombings in Miami, New York and Latin America. Posada escaped from a Venezuelan prison after his acquittal by a military court, while awaiting retrial.
Adriana Bosch said she wanted her husband to be remembered not for the accusations he had faced, but as a great father, husband and doctor who had spent much of his life fighting for the liberation of Cuba from communism.
"He was very loving and very giving," said Karen Bosch, his daughter. She added: "I never considered him a violent man, growing up with him, and I don't relate him to any violence."
Federal attorneys told a judge in 1990 that they had tried to deport Bosch to 31 countries, but all had refused to admit him. Cuba wanted him returned there to stand trial, but Washington refused that request.
Eventually in 1990, Bosch was released, thanks in part to a very public campaign on his behalf by Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, the Republican member of Congress for Miami. "He was a freedom fighter for Cuba and passed away without seeing his beloved homeland free of the Castro dictatorship," she said.
Others cast him in a different light. "Orlando Bosch lived a life of unrepentant terrorist violence," said Peter Kornbluh, head of the independent National Security Archives' Cuba project. "The verdict of history, rendered by formerly secret CIA and FBI intelligence reports, and court records, is that he was a mass murderer masquerading as a freedom fighter."
Kornbluh noted that his organisation declassified CIA and FBI intelligence documents that link Bosch to the 1976 bombing.
Bosch also had detractors in the Cuban exile community in the US. Nelson Diaz, who worked as a taxi driver in Cuba when the jetliner crashed, told the Miami Herald in 1989 that he had a friend whose daughter worked as a flight attendant and perished in the bombing. Diaz, who came to the US in 1981, was quoted as telling the newspaper: "How can you understand someone trying to get freedom for his country by blowing up a plane with innocent people on board?"
In Miami, Bosch once told a judge that the US had built up a voluminous file against him labelled "terrorist."
"Nonetheless, the government of the United States has never wanted to go into the depths of that file to understand that my persistence, my insistence and even my intransigence, are the product of a past, a sinful past, wherein the sovereignty and the freedom of my country were put in the balance and the right to belligerence was sacrificed in order to liberate Cuba from its tyrannous oppressors," he said.
Cubadebate, a state-run website in Cuba, noted the death of Bosch in a story that called him a terrorist. It was illustrated with an unflattering photo.
Wayne Smith, a former chief of the US interest section in Cuba and a senior fellow at the Centre for International Policy in Washington, said of Bosch: "He was someone who did a disservice to the cause of democracy and freedom."
Smith added that there were always those who, out of hatred for the Castro regime, applauded Bosch, "but the things he did were unconscionable".