On January 11, 2025, it was 50 years since January 11, 1975, when right-wing Cuban and Puerto Rican terrorists placed a bomb that detonated in a cafeteria in Mayagüez, just moments before a political event began in the Public Plaza of that city to honor two anniversaries: the birth of the hero and teacher Eugenio María de Hostos and the founding in 1959 of the Pro-Independence Movement of Puerto Rico (MPI). Both Hostos and the MPI were from Mayaguez. In 1971, the MPI had transformed into the Puerto Rican Socialist Party (PSP) and occupied a prominent place among the pro-independence organizations of that time in Puerto Rico.
The bomb that resonated loudly and dispersed the massive crowd that had attended the event, claimed the lives of Angel Luis Charbonier Concepción, a young union member and PSP activist, and Eddie Roman Torres, a cafeteria employee. It also left 12 wounded and a trail of unanswered questions in the midst of an extremely hostile and violent political context. Days later, a clandestine organization of Cuban exile terrorists claimed responsibility for the criminal attack, which remained anonymous and unpunished for 50 years. Today, we know that the armed attack was conceived and directed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the United States, with three agents in charge, and made up of four Cuban and four Puerto Rican operators, as part of an offensive by the intelligence and espionage forces of the American government, with the objective of misinforming, destabilizing and repressing the PSP and the fighters for independence and socialism in Puerto Rico. At that time, the preaching and political practices of the PSP were gaining ground in our country.
As part of his doctoral research, a young Puerto Rican educator and historian found in a document repository in the General Archives the memorandum addressed to the then Governor of Puerto Rico, Rafael Hernández Colón, by the director of the Special Investigations Division of the Department of Justice that corroborated the existence of said secret CIA unit and its operations in Puerto Rico. This vindicates the complaints repeatedly made by the PSP leadership and our newspaper CLARIDAD about the presence and activity of the CIA against the Puerto Rican independence movement, its organizations and members. This information was handled as a “state secret” with the complicity of the governments in power in Puerto Rico, both the Popular Party and the New Progressive Party (PPD-PNP).
The footprint of the crimes of the CIA and the United States intelligence apparatus in Puerto Rico is long and deep. Since the late 1950s and early 1960s, the CIA used the lands occupied by the United States Navy in Vieques to militarily train exiled Cuban troops and rehearse operations to invade Cuba and overthrow the recently victorious Cuban Revolution, led by Fidel Castro, whose struggle and example began to spread like wildfire in Latin American and African countries, impoverished and plundered by imperialist policies. Defeated by the Cuban Revolutionary Army in its attempt to invade Cuba at Playa Girón in 1961, the CIA always kept Puerto Rico as a beachhead in its agenda of intervention and destabilization not only in Cuba but also in the Dominican Republic, Panama, Grenada, Nicaragua, Chile, Guyana, Jamaica and Haiti, among many notorious and destructive imperialist interventions in our region. More recently, Puerto Rico is among the jurisdictions that maintain a large digital surveillance network for the United States, through which antennas, satellites and other electronic surveillance systems are used for detection and information gathering purposes, as stated in NSA documents disclosed by former intelligence analyst Edward Snowden to independent journalists and published in newspapers such as The Guardian and the Washington Post.
But the greatest weight of the CIA’s operations was felt after the bombing of Mayagüez, when the conjunction of forces between Cuban exiles trained, armed and protected by the CIA, a gang of corrupt and criminal police under the command of Lieutenant Colonel Alejo Maldonado and an Intelligence Division of the Puerto Rican Police commanded by its worst elements left the balance of seven young pro-independence fighters murdered in the space of five years from 1975 to 1979:
January 1975, Angel Luis Charbonier, murdered by bombing in Mayaguez.
March 1976, Santiago Mari Pesquera, son of the Secretary General of the PSP, Juan Mari Brás, killed in his vehicle by a contact shot to the temple. Murder unsolved.
October 1977, Juan Rafael Caballero, pro-independence activist and organizer of the Union of Tronquistas, tied up, murdered and found in a pasture.
July 1978, Carlos Soto Arrivi and Arnaldo Dario Rosado, young pro-independence activists trapped, arrested, tied up and murdered in cold blood in Cerro Maravilla by police from the Intelligence Division of the Puerto Rican Police.
April 1979, Carlos Muniz Varela, young Cuban-Puerto Rican, pro-independence activist and worker for the reunification of Cubans, shot to death in his vehicle as a result of an ambush. Unsolved murder.
November 1979, Angel Rodriguez Cristobal, pro-independence activist and member of the Socialist League, was murdered in a jail in Tallahassee, Florida, where he was serving a sentence for civil disobedience for the occupation and activities of the U.S. Navy in Vieques. It was reported as a false suicide but his body was badly beaten.
History does not lie. Nor does it forgive. And with these recent revelations, the veil of espionage and repression against the pro-independence movement that is part of the CIA’s footprint in Puerto Rico has begun to be lifted. A legacy of infamy and cruelty that our people cannot and should not forget.
Claridad/ Resumen Latinoamericano, January 18, 2025.