---
alias:
- Rolando Otero Hernandez
category: Extremism & Violent Networks
created: 2026-09-21
location: Miami, Florida
summary: Cuban exile charged with nine Miami bombings of 1975, including the FBI office,
  who fled to Chile and was handed to the FBI by Pinochet's government in 1976, a
  surrender the Cuban Nationalist Movement resented.
tags:
- Person
- RolandoOtero
- CubanExiles
- Terrorism
- Miami
- DINA
- Chile
updated: 2026-09-21
---

At 5:58 on the morning of October 17, 1975, an Eastern Airlines reservation clerk took a call: "Listen to me. This is not a joke. We have planted some bombs in the complex. The first one will go off in a couple of minutes." Minutes later a bomb went off in a bank of lockers at Miami International Airport. A federal grand jury indicted Rolando Otero Hernández for that bombing and others of December 3 and 4, 1975, in a seventeen-count indictment, later moved to Jacksonville for the press coverage in Miami. The clerk picked his voice from a spread of five by "accent, tone, rhythm and word formation." The state charged him with nine bombings, among them the FBI office in Miami, and tried him from November 15, 1976.[^1][^2]

### Chile

Otero fled to [Chile](/places/chile/). In 1976 the FBI's legal attaché in [Buenos Aires](/places/buenos-aires/), [Robert Scherrer](/people/robert-scherrer/), obtained his surrender. "The Chilean government first denied having Otero, then offered to turn him over in a coffin." Cuban exiles complained that Chile had given haven to Otero and [Orlando Bosch](/people/orlando-bosch/), "both fugitives from the FBI, only to betray them." When [Michael Townley](/people/michael-townley/) of [DINA](/organizations/dina/) asked the [Cuban Nationalist Movement](/organizations/cuban-nationalist-movement/) for help against [Orlando Letelier](/people/orlando-letelier/) in September 1976, [Guillermo Novo](/people/guillermo-novo/) argued that "DINA should have killed Otero rather than turn him over to the FBI." A Dade County detective went to Venezuela in October 1976 to persuade [Ricardo Morales Navarrete](/people/ricardo-morales-navarrete/) to testify at Otero's trial. An index to Morales's deposition of 1981, as transcribed on an exile website, lists Otero under the alias "Condor."[^3][^4]

The letter rogatory sent by the federal court in Washington to Chile in February 1978 put to the bearer of the name Juan Williams Rose, which Michael Townley had carried on a Paraguayan passport in July 1976 and Captain [René Riveros](/people/rené-riveros/) of DINA on a Chilean one in August: "In February 1976, you met with Rolando Otero Hernández, who at that time was a fugitive from United States law. Present at that meeting was a man who introduced himself as Major Torres of DINA," and another "under the name Marcelo Estobel," and asked their true names. Townley testified that at the meetings in Union City in September 1976 the talk included "spreading rumors to justify and explain Otero's arrest in Chile and his subsequent handover to the FBI. The idea was to blame Otero himself for his 'blunder.'"[^5]

Admiral [Ronald McIntyre](/people/ronald-mcintyre/) of the Chilean naval mission testified that when the leadership of [Brigade 2506](/organizations/brigade-2506/) came to his office in early September 1976 "the only discordant note" was the feeling of its president, Roberto Carballo, "over the detention in Chile and handover to US authorities of the Cuban Otero," and that the [New Jersey](/places/new-jersey/) group had refused to attend the visit of the training ship Esmeralda in July "precisely because of the handover of Otero," in a letter signed by Novo.[^6]

[^1]: *United States v. Otero-Hernandez,* 418 F. Supp. 572 (M.D. Fla. 1976).
[^2]: Federal Bureau of Investigation, Miami, teletype to Director, "Bombing of Cubana Airlines DC-8 Near Barbados, West Indies, October 6, 1976," November 2, 1976, JFK Assassination Records Collection. National Security Archive, Electronic Briefing Book 153, document 10.
[^3]: Dinges, John, and Saul Landau. *Assassination on Embassy Row*. McGraw-Hill, 1980, pp. 9-10, 130.
[^4]: Deposition of Ricardo Morales Navarrete, Dade County Circuit Court, criminal case 81-17247, index.
[^5]: Fiscalía Militar Ad-Hoc, Santiago, causa 192-78 (fiscal Héctor Orozco), as reproduced in *Proceso contra Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda y Pedro Espinoza Bravo,* ministro instructor Adolfo Bañados, tomo 1, scan at https://www.latinamericanstudies.org/MNC/Causa-Contreras-Espinoza-1991.pdf. Quotations translated from the Spanish, letter rogatory, Exp. 20931, questionnaire; declaración of Michael Vernon Townley Welch, March 29, 1978.
[^6]: Fiscalía Militar Ad-Hoc, Santiago, causa 192-78, as reproduced in *Proceso contra Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda y Pedro Espinoza Bravo,* tomo 2, scan at https://www.latinamericanstudies.org/MNC/Causa-Contreras-Espinoza-1991-2.pdf. Quotations translated from the Spanish, sworn declaration of Admiral Ronald McIntyre, 1978.