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get too close to the most famous killer in all of South America. "Over the at that table. That's him."I told Bosch that not only hadn't they asked me whom I was going to see, but that they had somehow missed the compact tape recorder in my briefcase. Bosch, as it turned out, was anxious to talk to a foreign reporter, saying that the Venezuelan government had prevented other interviews. For six hours, over the din of homemade drums in a nearby courtyard, he poured out his story."Fidel Castro and I were born in Cuba the same month 50 years ago. We both came from fairly prosperous middle-class families. We both ended up at the University of Havana in the late 1940s. I was in medical school and president of the student council, and Castro was a delegate to the student council from the law school. Although we had our differences, we worked together often and were both elected to our positions from the same political party, which was very much in the center between the right and left. It's not like today when all Latin American universities are dominated by Marxists. We were both very anticommunist and anti-Batista and very nationalistic."Bosch left Cuba in 1952 for two years of internship in pediatrics at Toledo Hospital in Ohio. "When I finished in 1954, I returned to my hometown of Santa Clara and set up a practice as a pediatrician. But the tyranny of the Batista dictatorship made me join up with Castro again.""The Batista dictatorship was choking us. I became the leader of the July 26th Movement in my province and we won the fight. I was appointed to the government as a minister of communication. But even as the war was ending, we were having problems with the Communists. They were taking over everything. I complained, I fought against it, but there was nothing I could do. At the time, I still had faith in Castro and his revolution. But then it got too bad, and after a month I resigned from the government. That's when I started conspiring against Castro."Bosch told me about the group of anti-Castro guerrillas he had led in the Escambray mountains in Cuba in 1960. Castro, Bosch says, sentenced him to death. After running out of supplies, he and his followers fled to Florida, where they found a benefactor in the CIA. At one point, the agency had up to 6.000 Cuban exiles on its payroll.Bosch interrupted himself and took a to his cell, a small sixty-eight foot room lined with Spanish tile wallpaper. A small Sony television sat on a shelf in the corner, and there were fresh "designer" sheets on the bed. Bosch introduced his cellmate, Luis Posada, who is also being held in connection with the plane bombing. Posada pulled out a box of Havana cigars and offered me one: "America may have an embargo against Cuban cigars, but we don't."Bosch and Posada had worked together during the heyday of CIA-sponsored anti-Castro activities in the early sixties, including bombing missions against Cuban sugar mills and gunboat attacks against Castro's fishing boats. But, in 1963, after the Cuban missile crisis and the subsequent reduction of anti-Castro activities by the Kennedy administration, Bosch realized that the CIA was no longer wholeheartedly committed to his cause. "I felt betrayed by the Kennedy administration and by the CLA. They held out a dream to us and then let us down."### "The Dominican government let me stay in the country.and organize 'actions.'! wasn't going to church every day. We were conspiring there. Planning bombings and killings"His own militancy had only increased. An exile group he led claimed credit for 11 bombing attacks against Cuban territory; six times Bosch was arrested for violating U.S. neutrality lawsFinally, on September 16, 1968, ho was caught in the act of firing a makeshift bazooka into the hull of a Polish ship docked in Miami.Most of this testimony against Bosch at his subsequent trial came from Ricardo Morales Navarrete. Morales is a man of many hats-terrorist, informant, hit man, mercenary and cop. He had been an agent in Castro's secret police, a CIA operative, a paid informant for the FBI, an agent provocateur, an anti-Castro terrorist. Today he is a top Venezuelan secret-police official.Bosch and Morales met in Miami in 1968. Morales, acting on instructions from the FBI, supplied Bosch with dynamite and C-4 explosives for blowing up ships. He also fixed and put in firing condition the bazooka Bosch used against the Polish ship. Morales testified that Bosch had said he was sorry that the bomb he planted in a ship called the Osaka Maru went off in Tampa Bay, because "the thing that he wanted was for that ship to blow up outside in the middle of the sea because he was anxious to see all the Japs swimming and screaming 'Wee, wee, wee!' while the ship was sinking."Bosch was sentenced to ten years in federal prison, but was freed on parole on November 1, 1972.During his imprisonment, Bosch's wife had left him. His voice broke as he told me about it. "This fight cost me my family and my five kids. They love me and are very proud of their daddy, but I was in jail for five years when they really needed me. They were 13, 11, 10, 8 and 5. They grew up without me. You know how society is there, all the drugs and crime. I wasn't a very good husband."Bosch has always lived simply, wearing a succession of old baggy suits, often staying at the slum houses of his supporters. "If I had stayed in Miami and practiced medicine I would have made many millions by now. But I could not do that while my country was in agony. I have paid very much for the struggle, very expensively, but that's the only way I know. Sometimes a man has a higher duty than to his children. Sometimes a man has a duty to his homeland. That's the duty I feel."Soon after his release from prison, Bosch's sense of duty took an ominous new turn. Detente between the United States and Communist countries was chilling to the militant Cuban exiles. A new exile group formed the National Front for the Liberation of Cuba, or FLNC, said to be modeled after the Palestinian terrorists. Soon an FLNC death list began to circulate around Little Havana, and then one exile leader on that list, Jose Elias de la Torriente, was assassinated. Ricardo Morales narrowly escaped death, when a bomb exploded under the front seat of his car. The Miami homicide squad wanted to talk to Bosch, but he had disappeared.A few months later, in a clandestine interview with the Miami News, Bosch praised the Torriente assassination as "a good lesson to the exile community, so that no one else will now come forth with phony theories to fool and rob the people." Nevertheless, he disclaimed direct responsibility, and said he had gone underground because he had coincidentally violated his parole by traveling to New Jersey around the timeNew York free-lance writer Blake Fleetwood last wrote for New Times on mercury poisoning in Canada.