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On October 6, 1976, a Cuban airliner carrying 73 passengers was blown out of the sky off the coast of Barbados. All of the men, women, and children aboard were killed in what was, at the time, the most flagrant act of aviation-related terrorism ever committed in the Western Hemisphere.
CIA and FBI intelligence reports identified two leaders of the violent anti-Castro movement, Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles, as masterminds of the plane bombing. Both were arrested and incarcerated in Caracas, Venezuela, their base of operations. Both managed to get out—Posada escaped from prison in 1985 and, a year later, Bosch was acquitted by a Venezuelan tribunal after dubious legal proceedings. And both eventually returned to the United States, illegally, to take up residence in that bastion of anti-Castro activity, Miami. Despite the fact that the Justice Department identified Bosch and Posada as purveyors of terrorism (“For 30 years Bosch has been resolute and unwavering in his advocacy of terrorist violence,” one DOJ assessment stated in 1989, before President George H.W. Bush ordered his release from an immigration detention center and granted him asylum), both of them managed to evade full accountability for their atrocities and live out their violent lives as free men in Florida.