putting sanctions on any country to somehow punish its leaders is a pretty silly idea. I hope the sanctions come down sooner rather than later.
i dont really care about cuba we already have all the hot cuban ass we can get right here in the u s of ass cuban ass is underrated imo
I am surprised this is not getting more press. I definitely think this guy should be in jail. Are we foolish to think he's not a terrorist? Does blowing up planes full of innocent civilians not count, if they are Cuban? This guy is just as bad as the 9/11 hi-jackers. I definitely think the Obama administration had a hand this matter. The timing is too perfect with the announcement coming just after the democratic delegation visited Castro. I am sure Fidel and Raul Castro said they would only negotiate with us, if we arrested Posada within a week. http://www.miamiherald.com/news/americas/cuba/story/993196.html Bombing victim's brother applauds Posada indictment A brother of an Italian tourist killed in a Havana hotel bombing welcomed the federal indictment linking Cuban exile Luis Posada Carriles to the 1997 attack. BY ALFONSO CHARDY achardy@MiamiHerald.com A federal indictment of Luis Posada Carriles linking the Cuban exile militant to Havana tourist site bombings in 1997 shows the U.S. government is finally acting in the case, the brother of an Italian tourist killed by one of the bombs said Thursday. ''My family and I have been waiting 12 years for the U.S. government to officially link Posada Carriles to international terrorism,'' said Livio Di Celmo, brother of Fabio Di Celmo, who was killed in the Copacabana bombing. ``It's about time now that something is being done.'' Livio Di Celmo was one of several people who spoke at a telephone news conference giving a cautious welcome to the indictment handed up by the grand jury in El Paso Wednesday. People who routinely denounced the U.S. government under the Bush administration for allegedly failing to prosecute Posada forcefully suddenly expressed some satisfaction. Some even left the impression the indictment was made possible by the change in administrations, a perception shared by some Cuban exiles who support Posada. ''It appears to come within the context of a new willingness to listen to Havana,'' said Mario Echevarria, president of Municipalities of Cuba in Exile, which is organizing an April 26 lunch for Posada to raise funds for his defense. Cuban state media reported on the indictment, conveying the impression the Cuban regime was pleasantly surprised. The government news agency Prensa Latina and the Communist Party newspaper Granma said the indictment signaled a ''surprising shift in strategy'' by federal prosecutors. The Justice Department denied any political overtones. ADDITIONAL COUNTS ''Indictments are brought only when the facts and the evidence of the particular case permit,'' said Dean Boyd, a Justice Department spokesman. ``This superseding indictment is no exception. Yesterday, the United States sought and obtained a superseding indictment against Mr. Posada that added new counts based in part on additional information the government obtained since the first indictment was returned.'' FBI agents visited Cuba in the fall of 2006 to gather evidence in the bombings, and a federal grand jury in New Jersey had been looking at Posada's alleged fundraising for the bombings among Cuban exiles in Union City. The superseding indictment did not charge Posada, 81, with planting bombs or plotting the bombings that rocked Havana hotels, discotheques and restaurants. It only accused him of lying in immigration court about his alleged role in the attacks. The indictment charged Posada with perjury for denying in 2005 ''soliciting others'' to plant the bombs and arranging for a Salvadoran suspect to carry out the bombing that killed Di Celmo. Posada could not be reached for comment. His Miami attorney, Arturo V. Hernandez, said his client ''obviously cannot be happy'' with the new indictment but has ``faced so many other challenges in his life that this is just one more.'' Hernandez said Posada intends to plead not guilty. An arraignment had been scheduled for April 17 in El Paso, but Hernandez said that won't happen and that motions and pleadings will be filed in court documents. Jury selection is now scheduled to begin Aug. 10. José Pertierra, a Washington, D.C., attorney who represents the Venezuelan government, said Caracas viewed the indictment as a ''positive first step on the part of the Obama administration'' in the Posada case. But Pertierra said the United States has to go further and indict Posada for murder in connection with the bombings and comply with the Venezuelan government's renewed demands that Posada be extradited to Caracas to stand trial. EXTRADITION He said President Hugo Chávez planned to raise the extradition issue when he attends the fifth Summit of the Americas in Trinidad and Tobago. President Obama is scheduled to attend the April 17-19 meeting. Posada was charged in Caracas in connection with the 1976 bombing of a Cubana de Aviación jetliner off Barbados that killed 73 people. Posada, who has denied any connection to the plot, was tried and acquitted in a military court in 1980, but the verdict was later annuled and the case refiled in civilian court. Posada escaped from prison in Venezuela before the civilian court acted. After Posada turned up in Miami in March 2005, the Venezuelan government demanded his extradition. Miami Herald translator Renato Pérez contributed to this report.
I like this story from Time Magazine better. http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,1890462,00.html Militant's Indictment Could Boost U.S.-Latin Ties By Tim Padgett and Siobhan Morrissey / Miami Friday, Apr. 10, 2009 There's a piñata of reasons why relations between the U.S. and Latin America deteriorated under George W. Bush. But the most serious was Bush's petulant assumption that the region didn't back his war on terrorism, especially after most Latin American governments refused to bless his invasion of Iraq. But Latins argue that they had a hard time taking the Bush crusade seriously when he himself was harboring a suspected terrorist. That would be Luis Posada Carriles, a Cuban exile suspected and arrested in various countries, and once convicted (though later pardoned), for crimes that included the 1976 bombing of a Cuban jetliner that killed 73 people, the 1997 bombings of two Havana hotels that killed an Italian tourist, and a 2000 plot to assassinate Fidel Castro. After entering the U.S. illegally in 2005, Posada, 81, is today a free man in Miami. But the Obama Administration, a week before the Summit of the Americas in Trinidad, looks set to reverse Posada's good fortune. Wednesday night, federal prosecutors filed a superseding 11-count indictment against the aging militant in which, for the first time, the U.S. links him to at least the 1997 bombings. It doesn't directly charge Posada with the crime, but it accuses him of lying about his role in it, claiming he perjured himself and obstructed justice in 2005 when, while answering questions from immigration authorities, he denied involvement in the Havana attacks even though he had told the New York Times in 1998 that he'd taken part in them. Posada's Miami lawyer, Arturo V. Hernandez, says his client denies the charge. "[His] defense will be a clear and direct one, which is that he told the truth," Hernandez tells TIME. "We share in a common sense of optimism about the truth coming out in the end." (Hernandez won't say why Posada claims he didn't lie to immigration officials; Posada in the past has suggested that his flawed English led to a misunderstanding in the Times interview.) (See the top 10 news stories of 2008.) In any case, the official shift in the treatment of Posada will most likely enhance the hemisphere's early optimistic mood about President Obama when he lands in Trinidad next week. "This will certainly be construed by Latin America as a positive step," says Daniel Erikson, a senior analyst at the Inter-American Dialogue, in Washington, and the author of The Cuba Wars. "The region sees the Posada case as one of the worst examples of a U.S. double standard regarding the rule of law, a subject we often lecture Latin America about." Both Cuba and Venezuela, where Posada had citizenship when the the Cubana Airlines flight blew up in 1976, have demanded Posada's extradition. So far, federal judges have declined to send him to either country, where Posada insists he would be tortured. (Cuban President Raúl Castro and Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez have insisted he wouldn't.) But some analysts believe that if the U.S. were to eventually lock Posada away — a grand jury in New Jersey is investigating his involvement in the bombings — it might turn down the volume of the calls for extradition in Havana and Caracas. Though it urged Obama to go further than mere perjury charges against "the hemisphere's most famous terrorist," the Cuban government's official newspaper, Granma, on Thursday called Posada's indictment "a surprising strategic change." (Read "What Chávez Win Means for Latin American Democracy.") Posada's is a quintessential Cold War story. As a CIA operative in the 1960s, he worked unsuccessfully to overthrow the communist regime of then Cuban leader Fidel Castro (who officially ceded power to his younger brother Raúl last year because of failing health). At the time of the 1976 airliner bombing, he worked for Venezuela's secret police. Despite abundant evidence against him, a Venezuelan military tribunal acquitted him of the Cubana attack. That verdict was overturned, however, and in 1985, while Posada was being tried in a civilian criminal court, he escaped disguised as a priest. Posada and three other Cuban exiles were convicted in 2000 of conspiring to kill Fidel Castro during a summit in Panama. But four years later, inexplicably, then Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso pardoned the four men. (The Bush Administration denied that it had pressured her as a favor to Miami's politically powerful exile community.) Cuba insists it has ample evidence to try Posada for the 1997 bombings, which killed Italian businessman Fabio di Celmo as he sat in the lobby of the Copacabana Hotel. "My family and I have been waiting 12 years for the U.S. to officially link Posada to international terrorism," Di Celmo's brother Livio told reporters Thursday via conference call. But the U.S. may have felt emboldened to indict Posada this week for perjury in no small part because the FBI — whose informants have linked Posada to the 1976 airline bombing, and whose agents in 2006 traveled to Havana to conduct their own investigation of the hotel bombings — in turn may have stronger evidence of Posada's participation. One of the issues Posada is accused of lying about is whether he arranged for a Salvadoran man, Raul Cruz Leon, to take explosives to Cuba in 1997. Dennis Jett, an international-relations professor at Penn State University and a former U.S. ambassador to Peru, says the new Posada indictment is "probably just an extension of the judicial process that has been under way for years, rather than a change of policy." Still, Obama can add the Posada indictment to the list of fence-mending planks he's taking to Trinidad — most of them involving Cuba, which has shaped up to be the central focus of the summit. Most Latin American leaders consider a change in Washington's Cuba policy — including the 47-year-old trade embargo — to be a sine qua non for improving hemispheric relations in general and the strongest indication that the U.S. is willing to deal with Latin America with the same multilateral, dialogue-based approach that Obama pledged at the G-20 summit this month in London. Though he has said he'll keep the trade embargo intact until he sees more political reform in Cuba, Obama is expected to lift restrictions on Cuban-American travel and remittances to the island before the Americas summit begins. The U.S. Congress, for its part, appears closer than ever to passing legislation to lift the Cuban travel ban for all U.S. citizens — prominent lawmakers like Indiana Republican Senator Richard Lugar now call the embargo a failed policy — and Obama would probably sign such a measure. At the same time, Fidel and Raúl Castro have both in recent days expressed an unusual willingness to talk with the U.S. about improving Washington-Havana relations. The two aging communists even met with a delegation of U.S. Congressmen this week and asked what they could do toward that end. One possible answer: if the U.S. does lock up Posada, Cuba could respond in turn by freeing some of the scores of dissidents languishing in its own prisons.
I think this is a huge story. Things appear to be moving faster than I expected. From the Los Angeles Times U.S., Cuba mutually signal thaw in relations A day after President Raul Castro says 'we could be wrong' about Cuba's adversarial stance toward the U.S., President Obama calls for a 'new beginning' with the island nation. By Paul Richter and Peter Nicholas 6:22 PM PDT, April 17, 2009 Reporting from Tobago, Washington and Port Of Spain, Trinidad -- Progress toward a thaw in U.S.-Cuban relations gained unexpected new momentum Friday as leaders of the two countries signaled a willingness to open potentially historic talks on issues that have bitterly divided them since the early days of the Cold War. President Obama called for a "new beginning" with the island nation, capping a surge of gestures fed by a Cuban President Raul Castro's declaration Thursday that his country "could be wrong" about its adversarial approach to its powerful northern neighbor. The flurry of overtures represented the latest in the diplomatic choreography that began with the election of Obama, who has called for a new openness to Cuba, and who this week began easing rules governing contacts with the island. But Castro, using conciliatory language of a kind rarely heard in the 50 years since the Cuban revolution, grabbed the attention of U.S. officials when he said: "We could be wrong, we admit it. We're human." Castro spoke at a meeting of leftist leaders in Venezuela. "We are willing to discuss everything -- human rights, freedom of press, political prisoners, everything, everything, everything they want to talk about," Castro said. The explicit offer to discuss issues such as political prisoners and human rights with U.S. officials was apparently a first for a top Cuban official, and White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said the Obama administration was struck by the comment. Obama, arriving in Port of Spain, capital of Trinidad and Tobago, for the Summit of the Americas, a gathering of the Western Hemisphere's 34 democratically elected leaders, did not say he would end the statutory U.S. trade embargo against Cuba. But he indicated an openness to change. "The United States seeks a new beginning with Cuba," Obama said. "Over the past two years, I have indicated -- and I repeat today -- that I am prepared to have my administration engage with the Cuban government on a wide range of issues -- from human rights, free speech, and democratic reform to drugs, migration and economic issues." U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton, speaking earlier, addressed Castro's remarks more directly. "We welcome this overture," she said at a news conference. "We're taking a serious look at how we intend to respond." Cuba was not invited to the summit because Castro was not democratically elected. However, the country's inclusion in the economy and diplomatic affairs of the hemisphere emerged as a top subject of the three-day summit meeting. In one other indication of momentum, the secretary-general of the Organization of American States, Jose Miguel Insulza, said he would push for Cuba's inclusion in the organization. In recent decades, the Cuban government has repeatedly hinted that it was ready for a thaw in U.S. relations, only to clamp down, possibly fearful that better relations with the United States would threaten its hold on power. Cuba experts and American lawmakers cautioned that the newest signs of warming could be short-lived as well. "I think they get spooked whenever we get closer, and they want to push it back," said Rep. Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.), a longtime advocate for expanded U.S. contact with Cuba. "I've never been convinced they want us to fully lift the travel ban." paul.richter@latimes.com http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-us-cuba18-2009apr18,0,1280937.story
