MIAMI _ Luis Posada Carriles, the Cuban exile militant who left no bomb or bullet unturned in a fruitless four-decade-long series of attempts to kill Fidel Castro, died early Wednesday after a long battle with throat cancer.
Probably the last of an aging cadre of Miami exiles who pursued Castro with a violent vengeance _ at first with the not-so-silent support of the United States government, later in an increasingly lonely solo mission _ Posada Carriles' peaceful death in his sleep at Memorial Regional Hospital in Hollywood was a stark contrast with the way he lived his life.
From joining the CIA-backed exile army that in 1961 invaded Cuba at the Bay of Pigs to his arrest in Panama in 2000 just as Fidel Castro entered the country for a regional political summit, Posada Carriles roamed Latin America in search of opportunities to combat Cuba's Communist regime.
In the process, Posada Carriles was jailed many times and shot nearly to pieces. (He once jovially described to a Miami Herald reporter how his tongue was left "hanging out like a piece of liver" after a Castro pistolero shot him in the mouth during a gunfight in Guatemala.)
He was courted by many of the hemisphere's spy agencies _ he was employed at one time or another by the CIA and intelligence services in Venezuela, Guatemala and El Salvador _ but in the end denied by them all. When Posada Carriles was crisscrossing Central America recruiting help for a bombing campaign against tourist facilities in Cuba, the State Department sent a stern cable to embassies there (and followed it up with visits by FBI agents) to warn against helping him.
"Our message is that we're not behind Posada, that we're concerned about his activities and we want them stopped," said one U.S. diplomat.
Posada Carriles always denied any specific criminal charges in connection with anti-Castro violence of which he was accused _ particularly a 1976 midair bombing of a Cubana airliner with 73 people aboard and a 1997 hotel bombing in Havana that killed an Italian tourist _ but never contested his general intent to do away with the man he considered a venal, vicious dictator.
"Wherever Castro was," he told the Herald in a 1991 interview, "there was I."
Long before they became blood enemies, Posada Carriles and Castro were acquaintances at the University of Havana, where they both were students in the late 1940s and shared a revulsion for Cuban dictator Fulgencio Batista. But they soon parted ways, with Castro going to Mexico to raise an army against Batista and Posada Carriles joining the underground resistance.
Castro jailed Posada Carriles briefly soon after coming to power in 1959. Two years later, Posada Carriles fled the island for Argentina before working his way to the United States, where the CIA was recruiting for the Bay of Pigs invasion force. For the rest of his life, Posada Carriles never had any other profession than seeking the overthrow of Castro.
At least, any known profession. Government documents declassified in 2017 showed that the U.S. Bureau of Narcotics and Dangerous Drugs _ the predecessor of the DEA _ believed in 1973 that there was "little doubt that Posada is a (drug) trafficker" who should be kept under tight surveillance.
The bureau also suspected him of dealing in stolen watches and counterfeit dollars. But after Posada Carriles passed a lie detector test, government suspicions waned.
Through it all, Posada Carriles _ though he certainly had his detractors _ was widely regarded as a hero among his contemporaries in Little Havana, who also raised money to fund both his clandestine operations and the legal fees for his scrapes with law enforcement. His supporters noted, correctly, that he was never convicted of anything violent.
Even the nine years or so he spent in a Venezuelan prison for the bombing of the Cubana airliner was while he was awaiting trial. Venezuelan courts acquitted him of the crime twice, but Posada Carriles remained jailed when prosecutors filed appeals. (Finally he escaped prison.)
Most recently, he had been living in a veterans home in Pembroke Pines.
As the generation of Posada Carriles _ and Castro _ receded into the misty corners of history, so did many of the strong feelings. The news of his death Wednesday brought mostly a wistful nod to times past.
"Sadly, he's another Cuban who died without seeing a free Cuba, despite having fought for it so long," said Spanish talk-radio host Ninoska Perez, head of the Council for Liberty of Cuba. "Some may have criticized him, others may have admired him, but he was always somebody for whom Cuba was the point of everything."
