Miami conspiracy to attack Venezuela

www.granma.cu Havana. January 30,  2003

WASHINGTON (PL).- The White House might have announced that it was initiating a war on terrorism, but in its own backyard extremist groups Cubans and Venezuelans are plotting and receiving military training to attack their own countries of origin.

In their determination to bring down Presidents Fidel Castro and Hugo Chávez, the capos of the F-4 organization, who have admitted their involvement in acts of terrorism against Cuba, plus the so-called Venezuelan Patriotic Front — led by a coup officer from the Venezuelan army — have signed a "civil-military alliance", according to The Wall Street Journal.

The F-4 Commandos are led by 56-year-old Rodolfo Frómeta and the Patriotic Front by coup member Captain Luis Eduardo García, (aged 37). During last April’s failed coup d’état, he was one of the first military dissidents to attack the Caracas Presidential Palace in order to topple the South American country’s democratically elected president.

According to the daily, the two groups are committed to uniting their "combined military experience and exchanging espionage information" in their attempts to attack the legitimate authorities in Havana and Caracas.

García himself revealed that he is offering military training to 50 F-4 Commando members at a firing range located in the Everglades swamps; 30 of the recruits are Cuban-American and the rest are Miami-based radical dissidents.

Miami has become the refuge for a growing number of anti-Chávez extremists, in the midst of an exodus in which some 10,000 Venezuelans have gravitated to the city in the last three years.

"New arrivals" discover a well-established Cuban-American community whose most radical sectors are particularly enthusiastic allies in the fight against Chávez, notes the publication.