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Rolando Otero

Cuban exile charged with nine Miami bombings of 1975, including the FBI office, who fled to Chile and was handed to the FBI by Pinochet's government in 1976, a surrender the Cuban Nationalist Movement resented.

Location Miami, Florida Mentions 5 Cluster Washington, D.C. · State Department · Chile Tags PersonRolandoOteroCubanExilesTerrorismMiamiDINAChile

At 5:58 on the morning of October 17, 1975, an Eastern Airlines reservation clerk took a call: "Listen to me. This is not a joke. We have planted some bombs in the complex. The first one will go off in a couple of minutes." Minutes later a bomb went off in a bank of lockers at Miami International Airport. A federal grand jury indicted Rolando Otero Hernández for that bombing and others of December 3 and 4, 1975, in a seventeen-count indictment, later moved to Jacksonville for the press coverage in Miami. The clerk picked his voice from a spread of five by "accent, tone, rhythm and word formation." The state charged him with nine bombings, among them the FBI office in Miami, and tried him from November 15, 1976.12

Chile

Otero fled to Chile. In 1976 the FBI's legal attaché in Buenos Aires, Robert Scherrer, obtained his surrender. "The Chilean government first denied having Otero, then offered to turn him over in a coffin." Cuban exiles complained that Chile had given haven to Otero and Orlando Bosch, "both fugitives from the FBI, only to betray them." When Michael Townley of DINA asked the Cuban Nationalist Movement for help against Orlando Letelier in September 1976, Guillermo Novo argued that "DINA should have killed Otero rather than turn him over to the FBI." A Dade County detective went to Venezuela in October 1976 to persuade Ricardo Morales Navarrete to testify at Otero's trial. An index to Morales's deposition of 1981, as transcribed on an exile website, lists Otero under the alias "Condor."34

Sources

  1. United States v. Otero-Hernandez, 418 F. Supp. 572 (M.D. Fla. 1976). ↩
  2. Federal Bureau of Investigation, Miami, teletype to Director, "Bombing of Cubana Airlines DC-8 Near Barbados, West Indies, October 6, 1976," November 2, 1976, JFK Assassination Records Collection. National Security Archive, Electronic Briefing Book 153, document 10. ↩
  3. Dinges, John, and Saul Landau. Assassination on Embassy Row. McGraw-Hill, 1980, pp. 9-10, 130. ↩
  4. Deposition of Ricardo Morales Navarrete, Dade County Circuit Court, criminal case 81-17247, index. ↩

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