Sunday, April 6, 2014

A Cuban man, slain in 1995, was preparing to testify about Cuba’s bioweapons capabilities to Congress, el Nuevo Herald has learned.

Posted on Saturday, 04.05.14

A Cuban man, slain in 1995, was preparing to testify about Cuba's
bioweapons capabilities to Congress, el Nuevo Herald has learned.
BY JUAN O. TAMAYO
JTAMAYO@ELNUEVOHERALD.COM

When Cuban exiles Lilian Rosa Morales and husband Manuel Ramirez were
murdered in an execution-style shooting in Coral Gables shortly after
midnight on Feb. 2, 1995, most news reports on the case focused on Morales.

After all, Morales, 25, was known as the host of a radio program on
astrology and a flashy dresser who favored big hats in vivid colors. The
reports noted that her recent New Year's prediction that Fidel Castro
would survive 1995 might have angered a listener.

Ramirez, 57, was mentioned in the reports only as her husband. They said
he had died at Jackson Memorial Hospital soon after Morales was
pronounced dead at the scene, around the corner from the WCMQ radio
station on Ponce de Leon Boulevard.

Few people, in fact, knew at the time that Ramirez was a very important
man. He had led the construction of Cuba's top-security biological
laboratories in the 1980s and was preparing to testify about the
island's bioweapons capabilities to the U.S. Congress when the couple
was murdered, el Nuevo Herald has learned.

Ramirez also had directed the construction of some of Cuban ruler Fidel
Castro's offices and several military bunkers, and had received a U.S.
visa under a semi-secret "national interest" program for top island
defectors managed by exiles in Miami.

A former Cuban government official has now told the newspaper that the
killer was a petty Havana thief living in Miami who was ordered by
Havana officials, perhaps Castro himself, to murder Ramirez for
allegedly stealing $2 million from the government.

The killer was nicknamed "Indio" and was rewarded afterward with
permission to traffic narcotics from the island to South Florida, said
the former government official, who asked to remain anonymous because of
fear of retaliation.

No one was ever charged with the murders. The former official's tale
could not be confirmed independently, but some of his key assertions
matched details of the case. The Miami-Dade Police Department declined
to comment because the case remains active.

ROLE OF RAMIREZ

Ramirez was clearly the star manager of Cuba's key construction projects
in the 1980s, including the Russian Embassy, the Convention Palace and
eavesdropping-proof offices for Castro, which he listed in a nine-page
résumé written shortly after he arrived in Miami in 1991.

But his key project was the Center for Genetic Engineering and
Biotechnology (CIGB) in western Havana, a complex of a dozen buildings
and more than 100 individual laboratories, Ramirez wrote in the résumé,
obtained by el Nuevo Herald.

Ramirez wrote that he had a good relationship with Castro because he
headed the Havana branch of UNECA, Cuba's top state construction firm,
and Castro visited the CIGB project four or five times per week to
discuss its progress.

A friend now in Miami confirmed that Ramirez was known to Castro.
"Manolito managed to reach a high level of communication and acceptance
with el Comandante," the friend said. He and others interviewed for this
story asked for anonymity to speak frankly.

The résumé adds that Ramirez and Castro eventually had "a couple of
somewhat disagreeable arguments" that got him banished in 1986 to a
UNECA project in Czechoslovakia. He did not explain the reasons for the
clashes.

RETURN TO CUBA

The engineer returned to Cuba in 1990, and later was invited by a
Russian friend to visit Moscow. Ramirez passed the word to a brother in
Hialeah that he wanted to defect with his second wife, Morales. The
brother declined to comment for this story.

The brother asked for help from Horacio García, a member of the Cuban
American National Foundation (CANF) who ran the hush-hush U.S. "national
interest" visa program out of his personal office to keep a distance
from CANF.

The U.S. government had promised 200 such visas for top defectors, like
diplomats, who had to be first vetted by U.S. officials, García said.
About 100 such visas were eventually issued, including two for Ramirez
and Morales.

The couple flew from Moscow to Spain, and from there to the United
States on Jan. 6, 1991. Ramirez was then flown to Washington for two
weeks of intensive debriefings by Pentagon officials, according to a
knowledgeable exile in Miami.

After their, return to Miami, the couple seemed to do well building new
lives in exile. By 1995, they owned three properties, heavily mortgaged
but valued at $660,000. He worked for a home construction company, and
they owned the Futuro astrology magazine and had registered two
parapsychology-related businesses.

Her résumé says Morales graduated from the Exact Sciences Institute in
Cuba and studied communications electronics in Ukraine. She boasted in
Miami that she studied theology in Ukraine, metaphysics in Austria and
parapsychology in Czechoslovakia.

WCMQ did not pay Morales for her programs. But she used them to
publicize her astrology work under the professional name of Liliam Rosa
Morad, said radio and TV talk show host Tomas García Fuste, at the time
news director of the radio station.

BIOWEAPONS HEARING

In early 1995, a group of exiles persuaded Bob Menendez, a Cuban
American from New Jersey then in the U.S. House of Representatives and
now in the Senate, to arrange a congressional hearing on Cuba's
bioweapons capabilities. Ramirez was to be one of three Cubans to
testify at the hearing, one of the exiles said.

A four-page report by Ramirez, written in preparation for the hearing,
detailing the top security labs he built at CIGB, known as P-3 and P-4
level labs, said they were made entirely of stainless steel, with
special welding and filters to ensure nothing dangerous escaped into the
atmosphere.

The report offered no evidence that Cuba had manufactured any biological
weapons, but said the island had the facilities and know-how to develop
them for either sale to others or threaten or attack other countries.

"Given Fidel Castro's . . . war-like attitude, his intransigence, his
arrogance and his craze for power, it is possible to reach the
conclusion that he is capable of producing a holocaust," Ramirez wrote
in the report, obtained by el Nuevo Herald.

In 2002, John Bolton, then U.S. Under Secretary of State for Arms
Control and International Security, publicly asserted that Cuba had the
capability to produce bioweapons. The CIA later circulated a more
cautiously worded assessment.

About two weeks after Menendez agreed to arrange the hearing, Ramirez
and Morales were gunned down in what clearly appeared to be a targeted
assassination. There was no sign of an attempted robbery or domestic
dispute, police said at the time.

Morales had just finished her Spanish-language radio program on
astrology, A Traves del Pensamiento, weekdays from 11 p.m. to midnight,
and walked out of WCMQ by a side entrance on Santillane Avenue near the
corner with Ponce.

One neighbor told reporters he heard six or seven shots. Another
reported seeing a shadowy figure hop into a parked car and speed off.
Ramirez and Morales were found in their blue 1992 Mercury Cougar, parked
on Santillane. They left an 18-month-old baby.

Friends said there was initial speculation that the murders might have
been drug-related because the couple was friendly with a notorious Miami
drug trafficker. García Fuste said there had been rumors that Ramirez
was targeted because "that man had too much information."

Brian Latell, a retired CIA analyst and author of the book Castro's
Secrets, said there have been a number of known Cuban government
attempts to assassinate defectors and others, especially people who
angered Castro in some way.

"Fidel operated during all his years in power as Cuba's supreme
spymaster. He called the shots in every important case. And defectors
who damaged Cuba always became his cases," Latell said.

The former Cuban government official said he obtained information about
the Ramirez and Morales killings through three separate contacts with
relatives and friends as well as acquaintances within the island's
intelligence agencies.

Cuba's main spy agency, the Intelligence Directorate of the Interior
Ministry, tasked two female collaborators living in Hialeah with the job
of monitoring Ramirez and Morales soon after the couple arrived in South
Florida in 1991, the former official told el Nuevo Herald.

One of the women regularly reported to Havana on the activities of
anti-Castro exiles, he added, such as the CANF leadership and former
Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, R-Miami, and his family.

In 1997, he obtained evidence that the killer was a Cuban man in his 30s
known as "Indio" because of his dark skin and straight hair, the former
official added. "Indio" had been jailed in Cuba for petty theft and went
to South Florida during the Mariel boatlift of 1980.

Cuban officials asked the man to kill Ramirez in retaliation for
stealing the $2 million, he said over a string of lengthy interviews.
The former official provided el Nuevo Herald with other details but
asked that they not be published to protect his identity.

He did not know exactly who in Havana ordered the assassination, the
former official added, but he surmised it might it well have been Castro
himself, often known on the island as El Uno — the Number One.

After the murders, the defector said, a Cuban government official told
the killer, "You made El Uno very happy."

Source: A Cuban man, slain in 1995, was preparing to testify about
Cuba's bioweapons capabilities to Congress, el Nuevo Herald has learned.
- Breaking News - MiamiHerald.com -
http://www.miamiherald.com/2014/04/05/4042050/a-cold-case-with-connections-to.html

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