Jesus Bernal, munitions man for the First Weekend in July Movement, saw the talk show and flew into action. It had taken only two hours to fashion an inconspicuous letter bomb with gunpowder, C-4, glass, wire, gum, and blasting caps. He’d addressed the package to the talk-show star at the television studio, and put it in a mailbox at Southwest Eighth Street and LeJeune Road (the same intersection where, years later, poor Ernesto Cabal would peddle his mangoes and cassavas).
At 4:10 P.M. on June 15, 1978—ten minutes after Jesus Bernal had deposited the lethal package—the mailbox blew up. No one was killed. No one was injured. It wasn’t even a particularly loud explosion, by Miami standards.
Jesus Bernal knew he was in trouble. Frantically he’d telephoned seven Cuban radio stations and announced that the First Weekend in July Movement was responsible for the bombing. They all wanted to know: what bombing?
Two days later, on orders from above, Jesus Bernal had tried again. Another letter bomb, another mailbox. Another premature detonation. This time it had made the newspapers: Feds Seek Postal Prankster.
When Jesus Bernal had translated this headline for the comandante of the First Weekend movement, the old man had erupted in fury, waving the newspaper with a scarred and trembling fist. We are terrorists, not pranksters! And you, Jesus, are a maricon! Make another bomb, a big one, and kill the coño on TV … or else. The comandante was a revered veteran of the Bay of Pigs, and was to be obeyed at all costs. Jesus worked swiftly.
It was the third bomb that made the pages of Time and U.S. News & World Report, where Viceroy Wilson read about it years later in the stacks of the public library. The third bomb was a delicate yet extremely powerful device that was meant to blow up a car. Jesus Bernal spent four days building the bomb in the kitchen of a Little Havana rooming house. He had personally transported the device to the television station, where he’d meticulously affixed it to a forest-green El Dorado which, in the darkness of the night, appeared identical to the one driven by the seditious TV talk-show host.
Unfortunately, the El Dorado was not identical; in fact, it was not the right automobile. The El Dorado that blew up on the Dolphin Expressway on June 22, 1978, actually belonged to a man named Salvatore “The Cleaver” Buscante, a notorious loan shark and pornographer who had often played gin with Meyer Lansky.
The headline the next day said: Anti-Castro Terrorists Claim Credit for Mob Hit; Feds Puzzle Over Cuban Connection.
Jesus Bernal immediately was expelled from the First Weekend in July Movement, and ordered at gunpoint to leave Florida. He spent ten miserable months in Union City before being recalled by the comandante, who had come to miss Bernal’s public-relations acumen. So what if he’d bombed the wrong guy? He got press, didn’t he?
Over the protests of almost all the First Weekend in July’s hardcore soldiers, the comandante had promoted Jesus Bernal to defense minister and bought him an IBM Selectric. From then on, the First Weekend was known for having the most impeccable press releases in the hemisphere. In his new role Jesus Bernal was an innovator: he even sent communiques on embossed letterheads—italic for bombings, boldface for political assassinations. Even the most skeptical commandos had to admit that the kid from Dartmouth had style. Soon the First Weekend in July became the preeminent anti-Castro group in the United States.
In the summer of 1981, under Bernal’s inspired guidance, the terrorists launched an ambitious PR campaign to discredit Fidel Castro. Although this effort again won national publicity, it also led to Jesus Bernal’s second and final banishment from the First Weekend in July.
The linchpin of the campaign had been a “letter” from a renowned Swiss doctor reporting that President Castro was dying of a rare venereal disease transmitted by poultry. The malady supposedly was manifested by a number of grotesque symptoms, the mildest of which was drooling insanity. Of course the Swiss letter had been invented by none other than Jesus Bernal, but the document was accepted in Miami so unquestionably, and with such patriotic fervor, that Bernal decided to unleash it in Cuba as well. He hatched a daring scheme and persuaded the comandante to donate $19,022—a sum which, sadly, represented the entire treasury of the First Weekend in July Movement.