Castro: US, Cuba shared intelligence
Cuba and the United States, in the late 1990s, shared extensive information in hotel bombings and terrorist attempts, President Fidel Castro has said.
He said the past collaboration had been forgotten in the current case involving militant Luis Posada Carriles.
Speaking to several thousand government supporters,
gathered for his evening address on Friday, Castro read extensively from declassified Cuban documents that indicated frequent exchanges of information between the countries after the bombings of Cuban tourist installations in 1997.
One explosion killed a young Italian man.
Posada, being held in the United States on immigration charges, at one point acknowledged involvement in the hotel bombings but later recanted.
Posada, arrested in Miami on 17 May, is sought by Venezuela to be retried in the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed 73 people. The 77-year-old Cuba-born Posada, a naturalized Venezuelan citizen, denies the charges.
Castro said that in May 1998 that Colombian writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a friend of Castro’s, had delivered a message to then-US president Bill Clinton’s advisers alerting them to plans by violent exile groups to plant bombs on flights between Cuba and the United States.