Cuba pays homage to fugitive Puerto Rican
independence activist recently killed in FBI shootout

By Anita Snow

Associated Press , October 6, 2005

HAVANA -- A son of the fugitive Puerto Rican independence activist who was recently killed in a shootout with FBI agents joined President Fidel Castro and other Cuban authorities Thursday in remembering his late father, Filiberto Ojeda Rios.

"Filiberto lives," the son, Edgardo Ojeda, told an evening gathering of hundreds of top Cuban officials and young people, saying his father's death was "an act of terrorism of state" by the U.S. government and that FBI agents had orders to kill rather than arrest him. "They violated his right to life," he said.

Flanked to his right by the similar red, white and blue flags of Cuba and Puerto Rico, Ojeda told the enthusiastic audience from a gleaming mahogany lectern that "I appreciate this act of solidarity."

Castro, dressed in his typical olive green uniform, sat in the front row of the event at Havana's Karl Marx Theater. Many other top officials were on hand, including Ricardo Alarcon, president of Cuba's parliament.

The event featured traditional Puerto Rican music, as well as a brief, surprise performance by South African singer and activist Miriam Makebo, who stopped in Cuba on her global farewell tour.

The 72-year-old Ojeda Rios, killed in a Sept. 23 raid on a farmhouse in southwestern Puerto Rico, had been sought for a 1983 robbery of $7.2 million from an armored car depot in West Hartford, Conn. He was the leader of the militant independence movement known as the Macheteros, or Cane Cutters, and had been on the run for 15 years.

The death of Ojeda Rios has provoked outrage in Puerto Rico, where he was seen as a heroic figure to some in the movement for the U.S. territory's independence from the United States.

Critics have faulted the FBI's handling of the operation, especially for waiting nearly 24 hours to enter the farmhouse after the fugitive had been wounded. An autopsy showed Ojeda Rios, shot once in the shoulder, might have survived if he had received immediate medical attention.

After the killing, protests broke out in the streets of the capital of San Juan during which demonstrators burned American flags and scrawled graffiti on two McDonald's restaurants. Machetero leaders vowed to avenge Ojeda Rios' death.

Earlier Thursday, Edgardo Ojeda oversaw a simple a ceremony in which a memorial plaque with his father's name was unveiled at a monument honoring numerous political leaders and social activists in a seaside government plaza facing the U.S. Interests Section, the American mission here.