For relatives of terror victims, Cuba detente revives painful memories

For relatives of terror victims, Cuba detente revives painful memories
By James RosenPublished February 09, 2015FoxNews.com

Joe Connor was just a few days past his ninth birthday when the news hit
on January 24, 1975: His father, Frank, a financial executive, had been
killed that afternoon by a bomb blast at a lower Manhattan restaurant.

He had taken some out-of-town clients to lunch at Fraunces Tavern – the
Revolutionary War-era watering hole where George Washington bade
farewell to his troops – when someone who has never been identified
placed a knapsack with a bomb in it just behind Frank's chair. He died
instantly in the blast, as did one of his out-of-town clients.

That day, the militant Puerto Rican nationalist group FALN issued a
communique to the news wire services claiming responsibility for the
attack, which killed four and injured five dozen others. The group said
it chose the tavern – which was popular with Wall Street types – in
order to target "reactionary corporate executives," and had committed
the attack in exchange for a deadly bombing a few days earlier in the
Puerto Rican town of Mayaguez, which locals blamed on the Central
Intelligence Agency.

"It's something I struggle with all the time," says Connor today, four
decades after the afternoon that changed his life, and the lives of his
family members, forever. A financial adviser in his own right, with
children of his own, Connor has spent much of his free time over the
past two decades writing to officials, testifying before Congress,
appearing on TV programs – including some on Fox News – campaigning for
Cuba to extradite the one man whom Connor has reason to suspect played a
direct role in his father's killing.

That would be Guillermo Morales, once the chief bomb-maker for FALN.

Five years after the Fraunces Tavern attack, Morales blew off both his
hands when one of his incendiary creations detonated prematurely in
Queens. Despite that handicap, he managed to escape from Bellevue
Hospital in New York and fled to Mexico. A deadly confrontation there
led to his spending five years in a notoriously harsh Mexican prison.
But in 1988, without explanation, the Mexican authorities allowed
Morales safe passage to Cuba, where he lives fairly openly to this day.

Morales is, in fact, one of an estimated 70 fugitives from American
justice believed to be living in Cuba today. The crimes of which these
fugitives are accused range from Medicaid fraud to terrorism and even
murder. Even more infamous than Morales is the case of JoAnne Chesimard,
a Black Power radical convicted in the killing of a New Jersey state
trooper during a bloody shootout along the New Jersey Turnpike in May
1973. Chesimard was captured in the gunfight, but – like Morales –
escaped from incarceration. In Chesimard's case, freedom came with the
aid of three armed accomplices who broke her out of a state prison in
1979, two years after her conviction.

Reports differ as to how soon Chesimard – who calls herself Assata
Shakur – arrived in Castro's Cuba; the State Department says it was
1979, the same year she escaped from prison, but her literary agent once
placed the date of arrival in 1984. Either way, she, too, has lived
fairly openly, at certain points even listing herself in the Havana
phone book.

State Department officials dating back at least to the Clinton
administration have pressed, in vain, for her extradition; in 2005, the
FBI made Chesimard the first woman to appear on the bureau's most wanted
terrorists list.

The Obama administration's decision, in December, to reestablish full
diplomatic ties with Cuba has angered some victims of the fugitives'
crimes and their families, particularly because the State Department is
not pressing for the fugitives' return as a condition for the reopening
of an American Embassy in Havana.

"It's amazing," Connor told Fox News in an interview last week. "In the
last few days, you had Raul Castro making demands of the U.S. for
normalization of relations, including closing Guantanamo Bay, when we're
the most powerful nation on earth. We shouldn't be taking demands from
Cuba to basically infuse life-saving capital into their country; it
should be going quite the opposite."

Assistant Secretary of State Roberta Jacobson, the U.S. official
spearheading the normalization talks with Cuba, told lawmakers last week
that she presses the Chesimard case, and those of the other fugitives,
every time she interacts with her counterparts in the Castro regime. The
Englewood, New Jersey native met with those counterparts in late
January, when she led the highest-level U.S. delegation to Havana since
1980.

Jacobson calls herself "a child of New Jersey," and said she grew up
with the Chesimard case. But when asked what the Cuban diplomats
actually say as to why their regime has so long blocked extradition of
the convicted cop killer and terrorist, Jacobson demurs. "I can't give
you much more in the way of a rationale because they have not given much
more," she told reporters in December.

Critics in Congress have assailed the Obama administration for not
formally linking the case of Chesimard to the normalization process.
"Why was her return not part of the deal?" asked Sen. Bob Menendez, D-N.J.

Jacobson told a Senate hearing last week that reopening the U.S. Embassy
in Havana "would enable us to do more, pursue additional things – for
example, in our law enforcement, in getting fugitives returned."

For the moment, Connor remains skeptical. But he sees some light
creeping in from the end of the tunnel. He believes Chesimard, the aging
revolutionary, remains popular in the Castros' inner circle, but that
Morales, the bomb-maker with no hands, has, as Connor puts it, "worn out
his welcome in Cuba."

"He's no longer viewed as an asset to the Castro regime," Connor told
Fox News. "So I think at this point they're probably not going to put up
much of a fight to keep him."

Extradition of Morales would bring some measure of closure to the Connor
family, and help Joe Connor better navigate the demands of work, family
– and justice. "When I'm sitting on the couch watching TV with the
family, sometimes I'm thinking maybe I should be writing something [ to
advance the case]," he said. "This stuff is draining….Writing about it
continuously, over and over, is physically and mentally draining."

But it's the precious photographs and home movies of Frank Connor that
keep his son going.

"My dad deserved my best," he said.


James Rosen joined Fox News Channel (FNC) in 1999. He currently serves
as the chief Washington correspondent and hosts the online show "The
Foxhole."

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