Omega 7

Omega 7 was an anticommunist Cuban terrorist group that engaged in more than 30 attacks against Cuban-linked targets in the 1970s and 1980s.

The 1959 overthrow of Cuba's Batista government by Fidel Castro and his Communist guerrillas initiated a massive exodus of refugees with links to the old regime. These exiles were welcomed in the United States, where they have established large Cuban enclaves in several cities, most visibly in Miami. The U.S. government strongly opposed the Castro regime, and in the early 1960s began training a guerrilla force with the intent of overthrowing the Communist government. The 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion was a fiasco, however, and the United States declined to involve itself in further military operations. By the early 1970s, some members of the Cuban American community had grown dissatisfied with only politically opposing Castro. With the support of the larger Cuban political organizations, a Cuban refugee named Eduardo [Page 273]Arocena began to recruit a small elite force, many of them veterans of the 1961 invasion, that would assassinate and bomb people and institutions deemed to be pro-Castro.

Founded on September 11, 1974, Arocena's group became known as Omega 7, after the original number of members (drawn from the Movimiento Insurreccional Martiano [MIM] and the Cuban Nationalist Movement [CNM]). Omega 7 appears to have never had more than 20 members. Most of its financial support came from these groups and wealthy Cuban businessmen. However, in 1981 Arocena and a few other Omega 7 members were paid by a Cuban marijuana trafficker to conduct surveillance and other activities (but Omega 7 did not sell or transport any drugs). As it operated with the tacit approval of many within the Cuban exile community, the FBI found the group extremely difficult to infiltrate—indeed, for several years, the FBI thought “Omega 7” was a cover name for the larger CNM, an impression that the CNM actively fostered.

The organization made its first attack in 1975, bombing the Venezuelan consulate in New York City on February 1. Over the next seven years, its targets included Soviet businesses and ships, Latin American embassies, and pro-Castro Cuban exiles and businesses in New York, New Jersey, Washington, D.C., and Florida. In the more than 30 attacks attributed to Omega 7, two people were killed and a few injured; property damage was extensive, however. Its most devastating attacks were against the Cuban Mission to the United Nations. On March 25, 1980, the group attached a radio-controlled bomb to the car of Dr. Raul Roa Kouri, the Cuban ambassador to the United Nations. In parking the car, the bomb was loosened from the undercarriage; Arocena decided not to detonate it. An Omega 7 gunman killed a Cuban attaché, Felix Garcia Rodriguez, on September 11, 1980.

Law enforcement agencies were beginning to close in following the group's bombing of the Cuban consulate in Montreal in December 1980. By 1981, dissention began to fracture the Omega 7 group. Chafing under Arocena's leadership, several members allied themselves with the more moderate Cuba Independiente y Democratica (CID). In September 1982, FBI agents investigating the bombing in Montreal approached Arocena, asking him to give information about the group's activities. Apparently convinced that his comrades were informing on him in an attempt to oust him from the leadership, Arocena agreed to be interviewed by the FBI. He admitted to being “Omar,” his nom de guerre as Omega 7's leader, and implicated himself and several colleagues in the murder of Rodriguez and the attempted murder of Dr. Kouri. After five days, Arocena fled New York for Miami, where he resumed his anti-Castro activities. Found and arrested on July 22, 1983, he is currently serving a life term in federal prison. Information Arocena provided led to the capture and arrest of several other group members, and the dissolution of the group.

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