Cuba found 2 bombs after arrest made

By JUAN O. TAMAYO
Herald Staff Writer

Two more bombs targeted at Cuban tourism, and alleged by police to be part of a bombing spree financed by Miami exiles, were placed around Havana in October but failed to explode, knowledgeable Cuban sources say.

The devices were found about one month after the arrest on Sept. 4 of a Salvadoran man portrayed by Havana as a mercenary paid by Cuban exiles to carry out six of the 11 bombing attempts that had been reported since April, the sources said.

One of the October bombs was found in a small shoulder bag left in Havana's Jose Marti International Airport, and the second a few days later in a minibus used to shuttle tourists between the airport and Havana hotels, the sources added.

Cuba's Interior Ministry traced the explosives to a foreign tourist -- different versions have him as traveling on a Costa Rican, Colombian or Guatemalan passport -- but he had already left the island, they said.

Cuban government officials declined to comment on the two new bombs, although several versions of the story have been circulating around Havana for several weeks.

Cuban police believe the same group responsible for the first 11 bombs carried out the last two, but the group botched them in its haste to cast a shadow of doubt on the Salvadoran's guilt, one source said.

``They believe this was a quick job, done by someone who was not well trained or got scared, to say, `Hey! You have jailed the wrong guy,' '' said the source, who has contacts among top Cuban security officials in the tourism industry.

Security in Havana tourism centers was increased during the summer and remains ultra-tight these days, said the sources, who all work with Cuba's tourism industry.

But the two latest bombing attempts underlined just how susceptible Cuba has become to infiltration and terror attacks from abroad now that it has opened its borders to mass tourism.

Cuba has charged Raul Cruz Leon, 26, of El Salvador, with four bombings Sept. 4 and two July 12. The Herald has reported that Cruz was part of a criminal ring, paid by Cuban exiles in El Salvador and Miami, which was behind eight of the 11 bombings.

Only after Cruz was arrested did Cuban officials acknowledge that the bombs had indeed slowed tourism, now the island's most profitable industry, even though arrivals are still expected to hit a record 1.2 million this year.

The two latest bombs used the same timers -- Casio pocket calculators with alarm clocks -- and the same C-4 explosives as the first 11, two of the sources said they were told by Cuban Interior Ministry officials.

But they were improperly wired and failed to go off, the sources said they were told. An airport worker who found one device happily showed friends the calculator, unaware it was rigged to explode, one source said.

The 11 earlier bombs sparked huge concern in Cuba, a country that has seen little political terrorism since the early 1960s. They also sparked widespread speculation, dismissed after Cruz's arrest, that they were the work of Cuban military and security officers opposed to President Fidel Castro.

The first of the 11 bombs went off April 12 in a public bathroom of Havana's luxury Hotel Melia Cohiba, another was found unexploded shortly afterward in an upper floor and a third one exploded in the lobby of the same hotel on Aug. 3.

Two more went off July 12 in the Capri and Nacional hotels in central Havana, and two others exploded in hotels in the famed beach resort of Varadero, a two-hour drive east of Havana.

Capping the campaign, four blasts went off Sept. 4 at the hotels Triton, Copacabana and Chateau Miramar, and at Havana's best-known restaurant, the Bodeguita del Medio.

Most of the bombs were small, apparently designed more to make noise than to cause damage. But one sent a glass shard flying about 90 feet that killed a foreign visitor, Fabio Di Celmo, 32, a Genoa native living in Montreal.