Cuba on Monday freed Raúl Ernesto Cruz León, a Salvadoran citizen sentenced on terrorism charges and who confessed to having committed a series of hotel bombings in 1997 in which an Italian tourist was killed, an official media site reported.
The Cubadebate portal indicated that Cruz León, who was first sentenced to death for the attacks, although his sentence was later commuted to 30 years in prison, was released, but no further details were offered about the man’s situation.
“The release of Ernesto Cruz León today, after serving his sentence, is an example of the coherence of the Cuban legal system. However, we cannot forget that the masterminds of these terrorist acts, those who planned and financed the attacks, have lived and died in the United States without facing justice,” said the brief information offered.
Cuba suffered a series of bomb attacks on its tourist resorts in 1997, one of which killed the young Italian Fabio Di Celmo.
Cruz León—currently 53 years old—and another compatriot named Otto René Rodríguez Llerena—who planted another explosive device in 1997—were sentenced to death sentences in 1999, but in December 2010 they were commuted to 30 years in prison.
Rodríguez Llerena was released in 2016 on the grounds that his attack did not claim any lives.
In an exclusive interview in 2011 with The Associated Press, Cruz León acknowledged his responsibility for the bomb that killed Di Celmo and assured that he had received the explosives, training to place them and the payment money from another compatriot, Francisco Chávez Abarca, arrested in in mid-2010 in Venezuela under a false identity and immediately extradited to Cuba at the request of Interpol.
Chávez Abarca was sentenced by the island’s courts to 30 years in 2010.
“I am simply a soldier who was sent to a war that I did not belong in and that I should never have gotten involved in,” Cruz León told the AP when recounting his personal story in El Salvador in the 1980s and accusing former CIA agents. of Cuban-American origin to finance and order the attacks to undermine the thriving tourism sector on the island.
U.S. officials did not comment on those allegations.
Cruz León’s sentence is considered complete in Cuba, since for the prison system 10 months are equivalent to one year in prison.
The Cubadebate portal also reiterated the demand that the island be removed from a US list of countries sponsoring terrorism, in which it was included within the framework of sanctions increased during the first term of today’s president-elect Donald Trump and which causes many. damages in their foreign trade.
“Cuba reiterates its commitment to the fight against terrorism and the need for the international community to act firmly against those who promote and finance these actions. The false list of sponsorship of terrorism by the United States is manifest hypocrisy,” the portal said.
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