[LINK] The anti-Castro extremist who will never give up his fight

[rfmcdonald]

The Toronto Star's Oakland Ross introduces his readers to Luis Posada Carriles, a Cuban-American accused of committing multiple terrorist attacks against civilians in his fight against Castro who has nonetheless found refuge in Florida.

Now 86, the terrorist/hero who allegedly once blew up a Cuban passenger plane, killing all 73 on board, is a free man in the U.S.A., still hoping to end the autocratic rule of longtime Cuban strongman Fidel Castro Ruz and his brother Raul, a mission that will brook no trace of compromise.

Last month’s stunning announcement that Washington and Havana intend to restore diplomatic relations following more than five decades of rancour was like a shot across the bow for Posada.

“It will not succeed,” he reportedly vowed during a Miami street demonstration last month. “You cannot do business with bandits. Nobody can do business with criminals, with murderers, with drug traffickers, and that is what they are, Raul and the horde alongside him.”

Posada speaks with difficulty now, in a voice that barely rises above a whisper, owing to an attempt on his life in 1990 in which he was shot a dozen times. But his defiant outlook hasn’t changed.

[. . .]

A terrorist in a land that professes to abhor terrorism, Posada is a one-man microcosm of all the explosive fury that has built up and not infrequently erupted among the anti-Castro exile community based mostly in South Florida, with its epicentre on Miami’s Eighth Street — Calle Ocho in Spanish — a bustling and bumptious barrio where “Castro” is a dirty word and always will be.

“Cuba is a terrorist state,” said Luis Molina, owner of the Molina Fine Art gallery on Calle Ocho, expressing a sentiment still popular in the neighbourhood. “Everybody knows it is a terrorist state.”