Orlando Bosch Ávila

Orlando Bosch Ávila, also known as Ernesto, led Cuban Power, a militant anti-Castro exile organization. A federal jury convicted him in a Miami prosecution involving damage to a Polish vessel, conspiracy and threatening telegrams to governments whose ships traded with Cuba. The Fifth Circuit upheld the convictions in 1971. An FBI report states that he was actually paroled on December 15, 1972 after more than four years of a ten-year sentence. His exact first admission date remains unresolved. He later fled the United States and was imprisoned separately in Venezuela. After returning to the United States in 1988, he was detained for a parole violation and then by immigration authorities; he left federal jail for restrictive house arrest on July 17, 1990. His anti-Castro political motive does not make the criminal conviction a finding of wrongful prosecution.

The FBI’s June 29, 1976 Accion Cubana memorandum records a June 25, 1974 US parole-violation warrant, which is not proof of arrest that day. Its later pages reproduce Bosch’s letter saying he began a hunger strike at 10 a.m. on March 12, 1976 while jailed by Costa Rican authorities, alleging abuse, lack of due process and US pressure and denying an alleged assassination plot against Pascal Allende. A March 23 interview report says he had been released from Costa Rican jail and planned to travel to Chile. These are foreign custody and attributed claims, separate from his US imprisonment, with no exact foreign admission, discharge or measured duration established. An informant account also places him representing Accion Cubana at a June 11–12, 1976 Dominican Republic meeting that allegedly coordinated exile groups’ operations; the alleged plans are not adjudicated findings or evidence of a new US arrest. Source: https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB157/19760629.pdf#page=6; pages 1,7–9.