Cuba frees man who participated in 1997 attacks on hotels in Havana, orchestrated by Cuban exiles

HAVANA (AP) — Cuban authorities released a Salvadoran man who was convicted of participating in a string of hotel bombings on the island in 1997, a government-run news site said.

The Cubadebate website reported Monday in a lengthy editorial that Raul Ernesto Cruz Leon was freed after completing a 30-year prison sentence, but added that the men who planned the attacks have not been brought to justice. “The liberation of Cruz Leon today, after completing his sentence, exemplifies the coherence of Cuba’s legal system,” Cubadebate said. “However we cannot forget that the intellectual authors of these terrorist acts … have lived and died in the United States without facing justice.” In 1997, several hotels and bars in Cuba were bombed by enemies of Fidel Castro’s communist government, looking to undermine the island’s tourism industry. An Italian tourist was killed in one of the attacks.

The bombings were allegedly masterminded by Luis Posada Carriles, a Cuban exile who sought refuge in the United States in 2005 and died in 2018 without facing prosecution for the attacks. Posada Carriles discussed the bombings with The New York Times in a 1998 interview, saying that he lamented the death of Italian tourist Fabio Di Celmo, while adding that the attacks were meant to frighten tourists from visiting the island. The attacks happened at a time when Castro was looking to develop new sources of income for his cash-strapped government, which was reeling from the economic impact of U.S. sanctions and the collapse of the Soviet Union.