ORLANDO BOSCH REDUX: FIDEL & ORLANDO

I wrote Orlando Bosch's obituary for the Independent five years ago, and I thought it might be worth posting it here to widen the perspective of reflection on the death of Castro, and American attitudes toward terrorism. The death toll from Operation Condor alone is instructive. You can look at my original posting here at IT which I wrote when I linked to the Indy piece: it includes the Dealey Plaza photo. I've posted my original copy here; it was edited slightly in the Indy, and I've added a couple of notes.

ORLANDO BOSCH: CUBAN EXILE CONVICTED OF TERRORISM

It is said that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom-fighter. If so, Orlando Bosch, who has died aged 84, was all things to all men. A dedicated anti-Castro Cuban, Bosch was implicated in dozens of terrorist acts, including the 1976 bombing of Cubana Air flight 455, which killed 73 people, and the assassination in Washington, DC the same year of the Chilean exile Orlando Letelier. Hailed as a hero by America's Cuban exile community, Bosch was a prime example of the double-standards of the Bush administration's so-called 'Global War on Terror' and the long-standing policy of the US toward Cuba, especially considering the electoral importance of Florida's Cuban vote. Despite his terrorist record, Bosch was personally championed by Jeb Bush, and released from US custody by his father, President George HW Bush.

Orlando Bosch Avila was born 18 August 1926, five days after Fidel Castro, in Poterillo, Cuba. His father, a former policeman, ran a restaurant; his mother was a teacher. While studying medicine at the University of Havana he became friends with Castro, a law student; both were in the student government. He completed his medical internship in Toledo, Ohio and his residency in Memphis before returning to Cuba, where he was the first doctor to provide the new polio vaccine. At the same time he began organising underground support for Castro's campaign against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista, for which he was forced to flee to Miami with his wife Myriam and their children. He returned after Batista fell, but quickly became disenchanted with his old friend, and after launching a failed counter-revolution, returned to Miami in 1960.

He became general coordinator of the Insurectional Movement of Revolutionary Recovery (MIRR), and joined Operation 40, a CIA-backed effort to arrange Castro's assassination, whose membership included future Watergate burglars E.Howard Hunt and Frank Sturgis, and a former Cuban intelligence officer named Luis Posada Carilles. Meanwhile, he lost his medical job for using the hospital to store explosives, and was arrested numerous times for violating the Neutrality Act, once for towing a home-made torpedo through Miami's streets. According to a later Justice Department report, between 1961 and 1968 Bosch was involved in some 30 terrorist operations, often organised with Posada, most notoriously the phosphorus bombing of Cuban sugar factories.

Some researchers claim to have spotted Bosch in Dealey Plaza, sitting next to the 'umbrella man' in the aftermath of John Kennedy's assassination; the photographs are more convincing than the so-called 'tramp' photos which purported to include Hunt or Sturgis, but still the figure looks more like an older Bosch than how he might have appeared in 1963. In 1985, when Hunt lost a libel suit against a magazine which claimed he was in Dallas on 22 November 1963. Marita Lorenz, once Castro's mistress and later Sturgis' girlfriend, testified under oath linking Bosch to, among others, Sturgis, Jack Ruby, and Lee Harvey Oswald. Later witnesses placing Bosch in Dealey Plaza are generally considered less reliable, and investigation by the House Select Committee on Assassinations 'failed to support that claim'.

In 1968, he was sentenced to 10 years in prison for firing a bazooka at a Havana-bound Polish freighter docked in Miami. While he was in prison his wife divorced him. Released in 1974, he immediately broke parole and travelled around Latin America, often overstaying his welcome by being caught in terrorist activity. He was arrested in Venezuela for planning to bomb the Cuban embassy; the US declined extradition, and thanks to the intervention of President Carlos Andres Perez he was released quickly. He moved to Chile, where he met his second wife, Adrian, and in the next two years, according to the US government, attempted postal bombings of Cuban embassies in four countries. After another arrest, in Costa Rica, Bosch went to the Dominican Republic, where the CIA, now headed by George HW Bush, attempted to unify and control the various Cuban exile groups by forming the Coordination of United Revolutionary Organisations (CORU).

The scale of Bosch's operations increased, including the failed assassination of the Cuban ambassador to Argentina and the bombing of the Mexican Embassy in Guatemala City. In September 1976, Bosch and Posada met with Michael Townley, a CIA agent assigned to DINA, the Chilean secret police, and the architect of Operation Condor, which killed or 'disappeared' at least 60,000 people around Latin America, to plan Letelier's killing.

Flight 455 was brought down the following month, while en route from Barbados to Jamaica; Cuba's entire national fencing team was killed. Barbadian police arrested two Venezuelans, who confessed and named Bosch and Posada as the men who gave them their instructions. When Venezuelan authorities arrested them, Posada was still carrying a map of Letelier's route to work. The two were acquitted of planning the bombing by a military court in 1980, but eventually civilian authorities struck down the verdict and ordered a new trial. But by then, coincidentally, key evidence had gone missing in police custody, and the confession of the two bombers was ruled inadmissible because it was in English. While in prison Bosch allegedly told the journalist Alicia Herrerra, 'we planted the bombs—so what?' With judges wary of Bosch's connections with President Lopez, the Venezuelan bombers were sentenced to 20 years each, but Bosch and Posada were finally acquitted in 1987, by which time Posada had already bribed his jailers and escaped. Since then, freedom of information requests have revealed documents noting both foreknowledge of the attack by the CIA and confirmation by an FBI informant that Bosch received a phone call from the bombers saying 'a bus with 73 dogs went off a cliff and all got killed'.

US ambassador to Venezuela Otto Reich arranged for Bosch to return to Miami, where he was greeted as a hero by the Cuban community, but almost immediately arrested for absconding while on parole. He served three months in prison, and the US Justice Department called for him to be deported; Associate US Attorney General Joe Whitely said Bosch was 'resolute and unswerving in his advocacy of terrorist violence.' The only country willing to accept Bosch was Cuba, where he would have been tried again as a terrorist, but by then Jeb Bush, at the time head of the Dade County Republican Party and with close financial ties to the exile community, took the forefront of a campaign to have Bosch allowed to remain in the USA. In 1990 Jeb's father, by now president, overturned Bosch's deportation order by presidential fiat, in effect pardoning him. As part of the deal, Bosch promised to renounce the use of violence. In a later interview, he called his promise 'a farce', saying 'they purchased the chain but they don't have the monkey'.

While in prison Bosch had taken up painting, and his work commanded high prices in Miami's Little Havana. He set up 'Mortar for Masons' to fund resistance to Castro, and acknowledged the money raised was not for 'flowers or hot meat pies'. When he was linked to a 1997 series of bombings in Cuban hotels, which killed an Italian tourist, he denied it with a wink, saying 'we have nothing to do with these attacks. Besides, if we did, we'd still be denying it, since that's illegal in this country.' Earlier this month, Posada received a hero's welcome in Miami, after being acquitted by a Texas jury of lying on his immigration forms, but by then Bosch was already ill. Bosch died 27 April in Miami and is survived by his second wife, and six children, five from his first marriage. In Miami, there were public demonstrations of mourning the man who said, 'you have to fight violence with violence. At times you cannot avoid hurting innocent people.'

FIDEL CASTRO: BASEBALL PROSPECT

The stories of Fidel Castro being scouted by major league baseball teams, or even offered a contract in some tellings, are apocryphal; Castro could pitch a little, and apparently did for the law school at University of Havana, which would qualify as something like intramurals as best I've been able to figure. But Cuba was then and is now baseball-obsessed; there's a nice photo of Castro pitching with the revolutionaries wearing an Oriente cap.

Cubans shared that passion for baseball with Americans, along with a parallel passion for boxing. You have read  The Old Man And The Sea, right? But where the mutual love of music also survives (see Buena Vista Social Club), baseball is no longer America's national pastime; that's now television, and the new national sport is the more violent and uniquely American football. Even MMA fighting seems to have replaced boxing for Americans.

Metaphorically it marks a change for the worse in modern America that Cuba, cut off in many ways, has been unable to follow. And note that when Cuban baseball players defect to the major leagues, they inevitably establish their residencies in the Dominican Republic, trying to escape MLB's cartel monopoly on amateur talent.  Viva la revolucion! Actually, much like Ho Chi Minh, Castro, while holding no illusions, originally seemed to think he could reason with the Americans. So imagine what might have happened had John Foster Dulles not snubbed Castro to go golfing, shades of Donald Trump, when the Cuban came to Washington in 1959, and taken him to ballgame instead.

In 1959 the Havana Sugar Kings were champions of the AAA minor International League, and took on the Minneapolis Millers of the American Association in the 'Little World Series'.  There's a nice photo of Fidel with a group of Millers including Gene Mauch, the future Phillies and Angels manager. It was also during that season Fidel formed a pick-up team, called Los Barbudos ('the Bearded Ones') and actually pitched a couple of innings against a team from the Havana police before a Sugar Kings' game. Of course a minor league franchise in Havana couldn't survive the embargo on Cuba, and Cuban baseball became a strictly amateur (in the Eastern European sense of 'state-sponsored') sport which Cuba dominated internationally for many decades.

When I worked for Major League Baseball I was told this story, by a long time baseball coach: Two scouts are talking during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. One mentions that he scouted Castro for the Washington Senators, who in that era boasted two Cuban pitching sensations, Camilio Pascual and Pedro Ramos. 'Imagine if we'd signed Castro,' he muses to his friend. 'How different history might have been.' 'Bull,' says his friend, spitting tobacco juice on the ground. 'The Senators were crap and one more Cuban pitcher wouldn't have made a damn bit of difference.'

BASEBALL DIPLOMACY IN HAVANA HAPPENED BEFORE: THE LOST 1999 FT ARTICLE

President Obama's trip to Havana to watch the Tampa Bay Rays take on the Cuban national team was a huge news story, with the predictable condemnation from the right. Cuba remains a contentious issue in the USA, just as the US remains contentious in Cuba. But the visit reminded me that this baseball diplomacy had actually begun March 28, 1999, when the Baltimore Orioles went to Havana and played the Cubans, and another Democratic President was being vilified for allowing it to happen. Note it did not happen again for 17 years. 

Of course the real story this time was Obama, not the baseball team, going to Cuba. In retrospect it's an interesting study in role reversal: right-wing presidents can indulge in rapprochement with enemies that they would condemn were it done by a Democrat; Democrats like Clinton can indulge in financial or welfare 'reform' that would draw weak howls from the center were a Republican to try them. Certainly Obama looked a lot more relaxed doing the wave at the stadium with Raul Castro, than either then-baseball commissioner Bud Selig or Oriole owner Peter Angelos had looked with Fidel in 1999. Note too, there aren't any luxury boxes in Havana's biggest stadium.

In March, 1999 I was in Melbourne, Florida, where the story was big news, with the invective often being the lead. The piece I wrote was commissioned by the Financial Times' sports page, meant to appear on Friday 26th, two days before the game. But it was killed when their news pages decided to send a staff reporter to Havana for the Saturday paper. The perspective was somewhat different, and the history somewhat absent. 

The Orioles won that game 3-2, but the game's star was Jose Contreras, who came in to pitch in the second inning, after Jose Ibar allowed a two-run homer by Charles Johnson. Contreras pitched eight innings of two-hit ball and struck out ten; scouts noticed. He would also start the return match in Baltimore; he got shelled but Cuba won that 12-6. In 2002 Contreras left the Cuban national team at a tournament in Mexico; he was signed immediately by the New York Yanquis. 

BASEBALL DIPLOMACY: CAN THE US AND CUBA STOP PLAYING HARDBALL?

Last season Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa both smashed the Major League Baseball home run record of 61 set by Roger Maris in 1961. This Sunday, a different sort of mark, two years older than Maris’, will fall, when the Baltimore Orioles take the field in Havana’s Estadio Latinoamericano against a Cuban national selection. It will be the first time in forty years that a major league team has visited Cuba, the first time since the Los Angeles Dodgers and Cincinnati Reds played an exhibition game there in 1959, only weeks after Fidel Castro's revoilution had ousted the dictator Fulgencio Batista, the American-backed man in charge of keeping the island safe for sugar companies and mafia casinos. 

 

The game will mark the first major break in the embargo the United States has maintained against Cuba since 1962. Set up under pressure from Cuban exiles in the wake of the failed Bay of Pigs invasion, it prohibits trade and even travel between the two countries, less than 90 miles apart. This series (the Cubans will play a return match in Baltimore in May) has already been compared with Nixon’s “ping pong diplomacy” which launched the normalizing of US relations with China. But Bill Clinton’s “baseball diplomacy” has met with fierce opposition in South Florida, where Cubans exert considerable political clout in an electorally crucial state.

Protestors picketed two of the Orioles’ spring training games in Fort Lauderdale, both against Miami’s team, the Marlins. Fewer than 200 people demonstrated against the games, but they generated a hugely disproportionate media barrage. Miami Republican Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart likened the Orioles trip to travelling to Berlin to take part in the 1936 Olympics, or going to play in apartheid South Africa. “It would be rightfully seen by history as shameful.”

Since the agreement was announced in early March, relations between the countries have done anything but improve. Cuba cut telephone links to the US in retaliation for bills unpaid by US phone companies, and the US protested the harsh sentences meted out to four Cuban dissidents under recently enacted sedition laws. But to the baseball organisers, this has nothing to do with politics. 

 

“This is really about the common ground that the two peoples have, apart from any positions taken by government entities,” said Orioles Executive Vice-President John Angelos. Angelos’ father Peter, owner of the team, spent three years laying the groundwork for the series. “It’s been a priority for Peter Angelos for years,” says Orioles press director John Maroon. “These are two countries that share a passion for baseball.”

Baseball is America’s national pastime, but it may be Cuba’s national obsession. Fidel Castro himself was a pitcher for the law faculty at the University of Havana; legend has it he was scouted by the Washington Senators, which prompted the story about the two old baseball scouts discussing how different history might have been had Castro become a baseball player. One cogitates, then says, 'no, it wouldn't have made a difference. Washington were terrible then, and he wasn't good enough to change that.' Baseball's world view can be rather narrow.

 

When America’s National League began play in the 1870s, the Troy (New York) Haymakers boasted two Cuban players. In the apartheid years when MLB was segregated, light skinned Cubans escaped the colour bar, while others played their way into baseball’s Hall of Fame in America’s Negro Leagues. More recently, Boston’s Luis Tiant and Cincinnati’s Tony Perez became heroes in their adopted communities.

Although the flow of Cuban stars dried up following the embargo, current sluggers like Jose Canseco and Rafael Palmiero were among the generation brought to the US as infants fleeing Castro. Keeping their best players at home, Cuba's own teams, meanwhile, dominated amateur play, including the Olympics. 

International play allowed some defectors to prove the current crop of Cubans were as good as ever.

Livan Hernandez, who fled the national team during a tournament in Mexico, became the most valuable player in the Marlins’ World Series championship in 1997. His brother Orlando, confined to Cuba after Livan’s defection, nearly died escaping the island in a home-made boat. Two years later, he was winning World Series games for the New York Yankees.

Though their journeys are held up as examples of those seeking 'freedom' in America, ironically neither of the Hernandez brothers actually established residency in the United States, preferring other Caribbean islands whose players remain outside the major league baseball's amateur draft. Avoiding the US meant they were free to sign with the highest bidding team.

The Cuban team that plays the Orioles reportedly will not include players from the island’s top four teams, who are still involved in the National Series playoffs. But it will boast third-baseman Omar Linares, who has been considered the best baseball player outside the major leagues for the last decade, and is still only 28. Scouts will get their first chance to see Linares play with a wooden bat, rather than the lighter and stronger aluminium generally used in amateur play. In a major concession, Cuba agreed to the visitors’ choice of weapons. Their National Sports Institute (INDER) was quick to point out this gave the Orioles a decided advantage.

But the big story, of course, is outside the ballpark. The prospect of seeing Havana from the inside has attracted over 500 accredited media. The game will be televised nationwide in the US by the cable sports giant ESPN. “We’ve organised seven charter planes, and expedited visas with the cooperation of both governments,” explains MLB Vice-President Tim Brosnan, who points out the series is just another step in baseball’s expanding international expanding activity. For the innately conservative lords of the game, this is a commercial opportuinity, not a political statement.  “We have exhibition games in Mexico and the Dominican Republic,” he says, “and for the first time two teams will open their official season outside the US or Canada, in Monterrey Mexico. We’re also close to finalizing a season opener next year in Japan.”

Cuba has played, and usually beaten, American amateur teams for decades. But their success in Olympic and World Championship events would be threatened if MLB’s plans to allow its players to represent their home countries in international play come to fruition. “At very least, the top players from the minor leagues will play in the Sydney Olympics,” says Brosnan. 

 

In the days before the revolution, Havana had a top minor league team in the International League. In 1959, the Sugar Kings won the Junior World Series. Felo Ramirez broadcast that series then, and now does Spanish radio broadcasts for the Marlins.  Like many who left Cuba in the early days, he's against the series.  “I don’t like it that the Orioles play in Cuba,” he says. “If not for Castro, Havana would have a team in the major leagues right now. We wouldn’t need exhibitions.”

In Miami the spectrum of opinion extends only as far as others, like Miami Herald writer Robert Steinbank, who favour the series only  because they sees the temptations of capitalism as the ultimate threat to Castro. But even Steinbank points out the game “reveals the limits of Miami’s Cubans to steer US policy.”Even so, on Sunday as 50,000 Cuban fans fill the stadium in Havana, in Miami many will echo the frustration of Tony Perez, now Vice President of Community Relations for the Marlins. “It’s done,” he says, “there’s nothing we can do about it.”