Darian Taylor
The Miami Herald
Saturday, April 16, 1988

Cuban ex-prisoner on trial for alleged missile buy

The two TOW missiles are drab, four-foot tubes lying in crates on the courtroom floor.

The LAW rocket is smaller. It fits easily on a courtroom table.

Both can pierce thick armor. Both, the government says, were weapons Ernesto F. Botifoll tried to buy.

Botifoll, a slight man who spent 19 of his 59 years as a political prisoner in Cuba, is on trial in federal court.

U.S. Customs and Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms agents say Botifoll and Elio Leal put down $47,500 for the missiles, hoping to donate them to the Nicaraguan contras.

“Both guys were political prisoners in Cuba,” said Assistant U.S. Attorney Robert O’Neill. “They hate Castro and they hate communism. They think that what’s happening in Nicaragua is what happened to Cuba.”

* * *
A Miami federal judge Friday dismissed two of four weapons charges against a former Cuban political prisoner accused of buying two military missiles for the Nicaraguan contras.

U.S. District Court Judge Kenneth L. Ryskamp dismissed both interstate and international weapons transport charges after attorney David M. Garvin, lawyer for Ernesto Botifoll, argued that donating arms to the contras is legal.

Ryskamp’s decision came on the third day of Botifoll’s trial and after the government rested its case.

Botifoll, a 59-year-old, Hialeah vertical blinds maker, still faces two weapons charges. He and Elio Leal were arrested in November on charges that they negotiated to buy a TOW missile and a LAW rocket for $47,500. Federal agents said the men wanted the weapons to give to the contras.