Cuba-US thaw brings fate of cold war-era fugitives on the island into focus

Cuba-US thaw brings fate of cold war-era fugitives on the island into focus
William Morales was a bomb maker for a militant Puerto Rican group that
bombed a New York tavern in 1975, killing four. His status and that of
dozens of other US fugitives sheltering in Cuba is now uncertain
Alan Yuhas in New York
@alanyuhas
Tuesday 21 April 2015 20.42 BST Last modified on Tuesday 21 April 2015
23.12 BST

"I saw Morales' face back then in the papers, growing up. He was the
face of evil to me. He was the man who I viewed as responsible for
killing my father."

Morales was a bombmaker for a Puerto Rican nationalist group which
claimed responsibility for a January 1975 attack on a New York tavern in
which Connor's father and three others were killed. Nobody was ever
charged over the bombing of the Fraunces Tavern, but Morales was
eventually convicted on explosives charges in 1978.

A year later, he escaped from prison and eventually made his way to
Cuba, where he has lived freely to this day. But since the US and Cuba
announced a historic deal to start normalising relations in December,
that freedom has been thrown into doubt.

Last week the State Department said Cuba had agreed to discuss the
status of Morales and Joanne Chesimard – better known as Assata Shakur –
as part of talks on increasing law-enforcement cooperation between the
two countries.

Shakur – the godmother of the rapper Tupac Shakur – was sentenced for
the 1973 murder of a New Jersey policeman, in a trial her supporters
described as a "legal lynching". She escaped prison in 1979 and fled to
Cuba, where she is perhaps the most prominent of many American fugitives.

Victor Manuel Gerena is believed to have fled to the island after
robbing a Connecticut company of $7m; Charlie Hill escaped there in 1971
after he and two others were accused of killing a New Mexico policeman;
Ishmael LaBeet hijacked a plane to Cuba after he was arrested for
murdering eight people in the Virgin Islands in 1973.

But while some estimate there are about 70 fugitives hiding in Cuba,
that number probably only represents those responsible for the most
high-profile and spectacular crimes of decades past.

With neither a formal protocol to track fugitives nor any extradition
records with the country, law enforcement officials believe there may be
hundreds of people who have fled there from more mundane charges of
theft, drugs and fraud. US marshals in south Florida are now "scrambling
to compile a list of people", Florida's Sun Sentinel reported in
February after a lengthy investigation.

Joe Connor remembers 24 January 1975 as a sunny, clear day, his mother
preparing lasagne to celebrate her sons' ninth and 11th birthdays, just
a week apart. That afternoon, the brothers were playing at a New Jersey
park when their mother heard about the bombing from the radio. It had
destroyed a marble and cement stairway, blasted through a wall and blew
shards of wood and brick out windows. She called her husband's office at
the bank nearby, and a man picked up.

Relieved, she didn't wait: "Frank, thank God you're OK."

"This isn't Frank. We don't know where he is."

Later that day, as friends started arriving at the house, the two
brothers learned that their father's co-workers had identified the body.

The Armed Forces of National Liberation (FALN) immediately claimed
credit for the bombing, in which four people were killed and 63 injured.
They left a communiqué in a nearby phone booth: "We warned the North
American government that to terrorize and kill our people would mean
retaliation."

But despite the note and two sketches of suspects, police never charged
anyone for the Fraunces Tavern bombing, and dozens of FALN attacks
continued in New York and Chicago over the next few years.

Morales, a native New Yorker who gave up film studies at City College,
had joined the group in 1970 because he felt that Puerto Ricans,
alongside black people and other minorities, were oppressed in the US.

Puerto Ricans feared speaking Spanish in the street, he told an
interviewer in 2004. "They taught us to almost hate ourselves for being
Puerto Rican." He became a bomb maker. In June 1978, a device he was
building at a Queens safe house blew up in his hands.

"His fingers were blown off so badly that they stuck to the ceiling,"
said Antonio de la Cova, a professor of Latin American studies at the
University of South Carolina.

Arrest and escape
The apartment where police arrested Morales, without fingers and
half-blind, also contained the closest physical link between the
Fraunces Tavern bombing and a member of FALN, said Richard Hahn, a
retired FBI agent who pursued the group for years around the US. A
wet-ink copy machine had survived the blast, and imperfections on the
communiqué identified the device as its source.

Morales was convicted on weapons charges, but escaped months later from
Bellevue hospital. One of his lawyers smuggled wire cutters into the
ward, according to a FALN source who told Hahn the story. Morales cut
the window screen at night, tied sheets together, and somehow crawled
down a story or two's worth of makeshift rope – and then "slipped and
fell and injured himself by striking a window air-conditioner", Hahn
said. Radical groups waiting below helped him down and ushered him away.

Morales rejoined FALN in Chicago, but as his injuries made him
recognizable, he eventually fled to Mexico, where Hahn and the FBI
tracked him down. Morales and a bodyguard killed a policeman there, but
after serving five years in prison, Morales walked free and fled to Cuba.

Back in the US, Connor and his brother did not let go, and began an
extradition campaign that continues today. Connor wrote letters to the
Justice Department, testified before Congress, and made contacts with
the State Department and Joint Terrorist Task Force. For the majority of
his 20-year campaign, he saw shrugs: "We have no relations with Cuba."

Other members of FALN were hunted down – most captured by the FBI in
Chicago, a leader killed in a shootout in Puerto Rico, and some
eventually granted clemency by the Clinton administration. Morales
remained at large, a symbol of an era when violent leftist groups sowed
fear and found sympathizers in the US and Latin America, and when bombs
and hijackings were not uncommon dangers.

"Clearly, things have changed," Connor said of the shift in relations
between Cuba and the US, but he reserved criticisms for how Barack Obama
has handled normalization, saying the US had "capitulated" too soon to
demands.

"I'm not jumping for joy here," he said. "I've worked awful hard at this
for an awful long time. I want Morales returned and Morales is in his
cage. It's not like he has to come to court here; he's already been
sentenced. It's easy."

'Caught in a time warp'
De la Cova briefly corresponded with Morales about a decade ago, when
Morales contacted him from Cuba to correct a detail on the professor's
website. Morales spouted "typical revolutionary rhetoric", De la Cova
said, adding that the conversation left him in no doubt that Morales,
although battered, was still committed to his cause – even though a few
years later 61% of Puerto Ricans would vote for statehood.

"He got caught in this time warp," De la Cova said. "The world is no
longer the world of the 1970s, and he totally got frustrated, and now it
could possibly catch up to him. [Cubans] are not committed to this
revolutionary internationalist fervor of the 60s and 70s. They could be
playing these people – Morales, Chesimard – off as pawns."

While Cuba was once an attractive destination for criminals,
revolutionaries and skyjackers – 34 of 62 American plane hijackers flew
to Cuba in 1969 – Fidel Castro lost patience with the swarm as early as
the 70s. He considered many of the fugitives "undesirable malcontents",
according to Brendan Koerner, author of The Skies Belong to Us.

Cuba's secret police often interrogated new arrivals, sending them
through a decrepit transit house and sometimes to "the gulag system" of
sugar farms, Koerner said, where "nightmarish conditions" reigned.
Morales, once protected by his revolutionary bona fides, may now at the
age of 65 be vulnerable to long-simmering Cuban disillusionment and the
push for extradition.

The campaign wears on longest for Connor's mother, her son said. "She
said to me around Christmas: 'I just want to live long enough to see
Morales returned.' I told her I can't be sure that's going to happen,
but I'm sure as hell going to try."

Source: Cuba-US thaw brings fate of cold war-era fugitives on the island
into focus | World news | The Guardian -
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/apr/21/cuba-us-thaw-fugitives-william-morales