HAVANA: Cuba released on Monday a Salvadoran man, Raul Ernesto Cruz Leon, after he served 30 years in prison over a wave of 1997 hotel bombings, local media reported.
“Today, after serving his sentence, Cruz Leon has been released, demonstrating that Cuba respects its laws and guarantees justice, even for those who have committed serious crimes,” the pro-government news portal Cubadebate said.
Cruz Leon was arrested in September 1997 and confessed to carrying out six bomb attacks that targeted hotels, one of which killed an Italian tourist.
He was sentenced to death in 1999, when he was aged 27. Cuba’s Supreme Court commuted the sentence in 2010 to a 30-year jail term.
Another Salvadoran, Otto Rene Rodriguez Llerena, was also sentenced to death for the attacks before his sentence was also commuted to 30 years’ imprisonment.
Llerena confessed to bombing Havana’s luxury Melia-Cohiba hotel in August 1997 and to attempting to smuggle two powerful bombs into Cuba.
Their trials gave the Cuban government a springboard for tough charges against anti-Castro organizations in Miami, where they charged the plot was “carefully planned” with tacit assent from Washington.
Former president Fidel Castro accused the US government of being responsible.
“While Cuba applies its judicial system impartially and with respect for human rights, the United States has allowed the masterminds and financiers of these terrorist attacks to live free and unpunished in Miami,” Cubadebate said.
“Personalities like Luis Posada Carriles, responsible for numerous terrorist acts against Cuba, have died without being tried for their crimes,” it said.
Posada Carriles, a Cuban-born former CIA agent and anti-Castro militant, was accused by Havana of blowing up a Cuban airliner in 1976, as well as being behind the 1997 wave of bombings.
He was never tried in the United States, where he died at age 90 in 2018.