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

HAVANA — 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.

In a 2011 interview with The Associated Press, Cruz Leon confessed to placing a bomb in the Hotel Copacabana that killed the Italian tourist. Cruz Leon said he had received the explosives from Francisco Chavez Abarca, another Salvadoran mercenary. Chavez Abarca was arrested in Venezuela in 2010 and extradited to Cuba, where he was also convicted for his role in the attacks.

“I am simply a soldier who was sent to a war that I did not belong to, and in which I should have not gotten involved,” Cruz Leon told AP in the 2011 interview.

Cruz Leon was initially sentenced to death. But his penalty was reduced to 30 years in prison in 2010. Under Cuba’s legal system, 10 months in prison is equivalent to a year of sentencing, which explains his release in 2024.

Cuban officials have not provided further information on where Cruz Leon has gone since being released, or made any other statements about his release.

Cubadebate’s article on Monday reiterated demands made by the Cuban government for the island nation to be removed from a U.S. government list of nations that sponsor terrorist groups.

Cuba was removed from the list in 2015 by the Obama administration as relations warmed between the countries, but it was once again designated a state that sponsors terrorism by the first Trump administration.

Cuba’s latest inclusion on the list happened after its government refused a request by Colombia to arrest rebel leaders from that country who had been in Havana for peace talks.

Colombia's new government run by leftist leader Gustavo Petro has withdrawn that request and asked the U.S. to remove Cuba from the list of terrorist states.

“The U.S. list of terrorist states is hypocrisy,” the article said.