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EFE NEWS SERVICES
Cuba Financed 1983 Wells Fargo Robbery, Former Cuban
Agent Says
January 4, 2000
Copyright © 2000 EFE NEWS SERVICES. All Rights Reserved.
Source: World Reporter (TM)
Miami - Jorge Masetti, a former Cuban intelligence officer,
said the Cuban government financed the robbery of a Wells Fargo
armored truck by Puerto Rican nationalists in what was one of
the largest robberies ever pulled off in the United States.
Masetti testified in a public hearing Monday held by the House
Government Reform Committee in Sweetwater, located west of Miami,
as part of a congressional investigation of alleged ties between
the Cuban government and drug traffickers.
The Argentine-born former intelligence officer alleged that
the Cuban government financed the 1983 robbery of a Wells Fargo
armored truck in West Hartford, Connecticut, that was carrying
$7.2 million.
Masetti also alleged that Juan Segarra Palmer, a Puerto Rican
nationalist, received $55,000 from the Cuban government.
Segarra was later captured and sentenced to 55 years in prison
for his role in the robbery. Segarra was one of 12 members of
the FALN -- the Spanish abbreviation for the Armed Forces of National
Liberation -- granted clemency by Clinton in August. Eleven of
those were released, but Segarra struck a deal that will allow
him to go free in five years.
Masetti, who defected from Cuba in the early 1990s in Europe,
repeated the account of the episode that appeared in his book,
"La furia y el delirio" (The Fury and the Delirium).
Masetti also said the stolen money was stashed in a vehicle
with secret compartments and taken to Mexico City, where he assisted
in transferring $4 million of the Wells Fargo money from the Cuban
Embassy to Havana.
The Cuban Interests Section in Washington, which acts as Cuba's
embassy, said earlier this year that the tale was "more science
fiction than anything else."
In Puerto Rico, nationalists said their links to Cuba were
confined to Cuban support for Puerto Rico's independence from
the United States -- support that predated Fidel Castro's 1959
communist revolution.
Masetti's testimony is part of the committee's latest effort
to link Cuba to the FALN and a Puerto Rican group, the Macheteros.
The FALN carried out a wave of bombings in the United States in
the late 1970s and early 1980s. The Macheteros have been responsible
mainly for attacks in Puerto Rico.
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