On September 10, the Cuban government announced that it had arrested a Salvadoran mercenary responsible for a number of bomb attacks against tourist sites in Havana, including the September 4 Copacabana hotel bombing that left an Italian tourist dead.
According to a Cuban Interior Ministry communiqué, "The investigation revealed, without the slightest doubt, the mounting and development of an operation meticulously organised from Miami, United States, by a subversive structure coordinated by the Cuban American National Foundation" (CANF).
Raul Ernesto Cruz Leon was arrested on September 4; he had entered Cuba as a tourist on August 31 aboard a flight from Guatemala. Cruz admitted that he had served as a soldier in the Salvadoran army, where he had attended an explosives training course with US instructors.
According to Cruz, his only interest in carrying out the attacks was "monetary"; he was paid $4500 for each attack.
The communiqué indicated that traces of explosives were found in Cruz's back-pack and on his hands and fingernails, and that he was caught with a list of Cuban tourist installations, tools and electrical materials, and a drawing of the kind of explosive device used in these actions.
The Cuban government announced on September 11 that it has irrefutable evidence that CANF financed the attacks against Cuban tourist sites that have taken place since April.
The Miami Herald has meanwhile published reports indicating that Luis Posada Carriles, a Cuban émigré and Salvadoran resident linked to the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), is the intellectual author of the explosives attacks.
The Herald points out that in 1995 Posada Carriles was linked in Honduras to a series of bomb attacks designed to "intimidate President Carlos Roberto Reina and make [the government] desist in plans to reduce the army".
Posada was also involved in the secret US supply operation in El Salvador for the Nicaraguan contras, just months after escaping in August 1985 from jail in Venezuela, where he was serving time for the October 1976 bombing of a Cuban passenger plane that killed 73 people.
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