Cuba severed diplomatic relations Thursday with Panama, angered by the outgoing Panamanian president’s decision to free four activists accused of trying to blow up Cuban President Fidel Castro four years ago.
The Cubans left Panama on two private planes only hours after President Mireya Moscoso, who leaves office next week, issued the pardon.
The Cuban government, calling Moscoso an “accomplice and protector of terrorism,” said in a statement that diplomatic relations with Panama were broken off indefinitely.
Havana said that the pardon was “an affront to the victims of terrorism and their families” and that history would hold Moscoso responsible for “new crimes these abominable assassins commit in the future.”
Plot to bomb Castro during speech
The Cubans were among six sentenced in April for their part in the failed attempt to bomb a University of Panama auditorium where Castro was due to speak during a summit of Iberian and Latin American leaders.
Three of the plotters were Cuban-born U.S. citizens, and on their release they flew directly to a small airport in Miami, where they were met by their families.
The fourth was prominent anti-Castro activist Luis Posada, who escaped in the 1980s from a Venezuelan jail where he faced charges of planning the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed 73 people. Posada is not a U.S. citizen, so he did not travel to Miami, and it was unclear where he was.
Panamanian media speculated that the pardon was requested by the United States, whose decades-old dispute with Cuba has been fanned by President Bush’s tough new restrictions on traveling or sending family remittances to the island. Moscoso has enjoyed close relations with the Bush administration.
But Moscoso said she freed the four because they were convicted for relatively minor crimes rather than attempted murder. She denied claims that the United States had pushed her into it.
“No foreign government has pressured me to take the decision,” she said at a news conference. “I knew that if these men stayed here, they would be extradited to Cuba and Venezuela, and they were surely going to kill them there.”
Dressed as a priest
A Panamanian court in April sentenced the Cuban exiles to prison terms of seven and eight years on charges of endangering public safety and falsifying documents. It ruled that there was not enough evidence to try them on charges of attempted murder.
Cuba wanted the men extradited, and Venezuela also sought Posada. He was never convicted of the Cuban airliner bombing, but he was arrested in Venezuela and denied bail for nine years until he escaped prison disguised as a priest in 1985.
Panama’s president-elect, Martin Torrijos, said he disagreed with the pardon and pledged to work to repair any damage to relations with Cuba once he takes office next Wednesday.
Torrijos is a centrist and the son of popular former dictator Omar Torrijos, who negotiated a 1977 treaty with Washington that led the United States to hand over control of the Panama Canal.
Union leaders also blasted the pardon and rallied their members to take to the streets in protests.
Cuba had said Sunday that diplomatic ties would be automatically broken if Panama pardoned “these monstrous criminals.” Panama responded by ordering Cuba’s ambassador out of the country and recalling its own ambassador in Cuba.
