The longtime Cuban exile militant Orlando Bosch has died at the age of 84. According to the U.S. Department of Justice, Bosch was involved in 30 acts of sabotage in the United States, Puerto Rico, Panama and Cuba between 1961 to 1968 as part of his failed campaign to topple the Fidel Castro government. In 1989, a Justice Department attorney said that Bosch had been “resolute and unwavering in his advocacy of terrorist violence” and had repeatedly “demonstrated a willingness to cause indiscriminate injury and death.” Despite this finding by the Justice Department, President George H.W. Bush overruled Bosch’s deportation order in 1990, allowing Bosch to remain free in Miami where he had lived for the past two decades. In 2005, the late attorney Leonard Weinglass appeared on Democracy Now! to discuss Bosch.
Leonard Weinglass: “He was a man who was convicted in Miami of firing a bazooka at a Polish freighter in the harbor. He is a man who’s implicated in the shootdown of the commercial aircraft, the Cuban commercial aircraft. And he applied to have permanent residency in the United States. Department of Justice ruled that he was not qualified, because he’s a known terrorist. The President of the United States overruled the Department of Justice at the insistence of his son, who was Jeb Bush, and the President was Bush, Sr. But Mr. Bosch was given permanent residency in the United States where he currently lives.”
A note about Leonard Weinglass: A memorial for him is taking place on May 13 at the New York Society for Ethical Culture in Manhattan. He died in March at the age of 78.