A recently released book points out that former Cuban dictator Raúl Castro allowed the Medellín Cartel, one of the largest drug trafficking groups in history, to use the island as a transit point to take cocaine to the United States.
The book, titled “Life and death of the Medellín cartel”is based on the accounts of Carlos Lehder, one of the founders of the cartel, who served time in the United States for drug trafficking and currently lives in Germany.
According to Lehder, he met with Raúl Castro in the 1980s and received implicit approval to operate from Cayo Largo, an island in Cuba. Lehder claims that Castro was more interested in the dollars that drug trafficking would generate than in other goods. He also says that he also negotiated with Daniel Ortega, dictator of Nicaragua.
Lehder also highlighted the role of the late Colonel Antonio de la Guardia, former Cuban Interior Minister, who, according to him, brokered the connection between the heads of the Colombian cartel, such as Pablo Escobar and Gonzalo Rodríguez Gacha, and senior officials of the communist regime Cuban. Lehder says he paid $5 million in cash to the colonel to cover the Cuban regime's expenses on the island.
Lehder's accusations are not the first to link the Castros to drug trafficking. Another former member of the cartel, Jhon Jairo Velásquez Vásquez, known as “Popeye”, also stated in his autobiography that Fidel and Raúl Castro were involved in these operations, facilitating the entry of drugs into the island.
The Cuban regime, in 1989, tried and executed several high-ranking officers, including General Arnaldo Ochoa and Colonel De la Guardia, in an operation seen as an attempt to “cleanse” the image of the Castro regime in the face of drug trafficking accusations. However, Lehder's recent revelations once again shed light on the dark relationship between the Cuban communist regime and the Medellín Cartel.
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