Orlando Bosch - Career

Career

After meeting Castro at the University of Havana, Bosch went on to play a part in underground cells that later carried out the Cuban Revolution of 1959. Bosch himself did not take part, being forced to flee to Miami to escape arrest. He returned to Cuba after the Revolution, but rapidly became disillusioned, leaving Cuba in July 1960 after helping to organize a failed anti-Castro rebellion in the Escambray mountains. In his autobiography, Bosch wrote that he had refused to participate in the 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion because the US had refused to help the Escambray rebellion.

Bosch was in contact with the CIA in 1962 and 1963, as the agency itself admitted, as recorded in the National Security Archive. At this time, Bosch was the General Coordinator of the Movimiento Insurreccional de Recuperacion Revolucionaria (Insurrectional Movement of Revolutionary Recovery, MIRR), which in 1967 became Poder Cubano (Cuban Power). He was a member of the anti-Castro Operation 40.

In 1968 Bosch was arrested in Florida for an attack on a Polish freighter with a 57 mm recoilless rifle and was sent to prison for a ten year term. He served four years before being released on parole in 1972, and fled the country, leaving on 12 April 1974. He moved to Venezuela, where later that year "he was arrested and jailed for two weeks by Venezuela authorities after admitting to two bombings of Cuban and Panamanian buildings in Caracas. He was mysteriously released and turned up in Curaçao where he told a Cuban exile radio newsman from Miami: "We will invade the Cuban embassies and will murder the Cuban diplomats and will hijack the Cuban planes until Castro releases some of the political prisoners and begins to deal with us." He told The Miami News in June 1974 that he was the head of Accion Cubana, and claimed the organization was responsible for a series of bomb attacks on Cuban consulates in Latin America since August 1973.

Bosch moved to Santiago, Chile on 3 December 1974, staying in a military house. According to the government of Augusto Pinochet, Bosch "lived quietly as an artist", while the US government held Bosch responsible for postal bombings of Cuban embassies in four countries. The US also accused Bosch of involvement in the August 1975 attempted assassination of Emilio Aragones, the Cuban ambassador to Argentina, and the September 1976 bombing of the Mexican Embassy in Guatemala City. After an arrest in Costa Rica which saw the US decline an offer by the authorities to extradite Bosch to the United States, he was deported to the Dominican Republic, where June 1976 saw the founding of the Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations (CORU). Bosch returned to Venezuela on 23 September 1976, aged 50.