Last week, Riptide was all about Eduardo Arocena, the Miami dockworker convicted in 1985 of setting off 32 bombs in Little Havana and Manhattan. A certain mayoral candidate (ahem, Tomas Regalado, ahem) seems to have flirted with supporting Arocena back in the day, not that he'll admit it.
We noted how strange it was for Regalado to run away from the Arocena issue in a town that still harbors noted Cuban terrorists such as Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles.
Posada, if you're unfamiliar with your violent anti-Castro types, has been convicted in absentia of bombing a jetliner in 1976 that killed 73 Cubans. He's also admitted to planning a series of bombings around Havana in 1997, and was briefly jailed on a plot to assassinate the bearded one in Panama in 2000.
Seems like a pretty bad dude, right? Well, a whole new side of Posada emerged this morning thanks to a recently declassified ream of CIA documents.
Between planning bombings and going after Fidel, Posada was apparently also a big-time CIA snitch, informing on other anti-Castro radicals to the feds.
"[Posada] is not a typical kind of 'boom and bang' individual. He is acutely aware of the international implications of ill-planned or overly enthusiastic activities against Cuba," wrote one of Posada's CIA handlers back in 1962, according to the Associated Press's story about the new files.
It's difficult to say who looks worse thanks to the newly public papers.
Is it Posada, who surely is going to have some uncomfortable questions to answer next time he sets up shop with the old guard at Versailles?
Or the CIA, which apparently groomed Posada for years, insisting he was "moderate" even as he planned the most deadly anti-Castro violence ever pulled off from American soil?
We've got to go with the CIA on this one. Call it another huge misfire for America's bumbling spies.
