Granma newspaper reports on Thursday on an interview published from Miami, Florida, by Associated Press (AP) in which Hernandez confessed that he carried out missions for the CIA in different parts of the world and cynically said that, like him, his friend Posada Carriles is not a terrorist.

This is the second time this year that the anti-Cuba extremist admits his ties with international and self-confessed terrorist Luis Posada Carriles who, along with another terrorist, Orlando Bosch, planned and ordered the mid-air blowing up of a Cuban airliner in 1976 that resulted in the death of all 73 people on board.

“Public opinion portrays him as a terrorist but he is not,” said Hernandez. “Like me, he always wanted to overthrow the Cuban government but not to terrorize the Cuban people,” he continued.

Earlier this year, Hernandez claimed that President Barack Obama eliminated the Cuba travel restrictions for Cuban-Americans on a recommendation by the CANF.

Hernandez was one of the first executives of the CANF, a group founded during the early 1980s by Jorge Mas Canosa following orders from the CIA and which aimed at creating a Cuban-American lobby with influence among politicians in Washington.

In the interview with AP, Hernandez gives details of the services he rendered to the CIA during the first years of the Cuban Revolution, with mercenary troops that were then operating in Cuba at the service of the CIA.

He was captured after the failed Bay of Pigs invasion and afterwards he continued with his activities against Cuba and with plans to assassinate then Cuban President Fidel Castro. In this regard, he participated in assassination attempts planned for the summits of Iberoamerican heads of state and government held in Venezuela’s Margarita Island in 1997 and in Panama, in 2000.