Nearly four decades ago, on Sept. 12, 1983, a young man from Hartford’s Frog Hollow neighborhood stunned the country, carrying off what was then the richest cash robbery in U.S. history. Victor Gerena pulled a gun on guards at a Wells Fargo depot in West Hartford, stuffed $7 million into a rented Buick and vanished.
It was a year before the FBI made any progress on the investigation, and what agents learned then was as stunning as the crime itself. Wiretapped conversations in San Juan revealed that Gerena, the $7 million and Hartford’s politically energized Puerto Rican community were enmeshed in an armed rebellion thousands of miles to the south. Militants calling themselves Los Macheteros — an underground group supported by Fidel Castro’s revolutionary government in Cuba and sharing his nationalist dream — had “expropriated” the money to finance a war for Puerto Rico’s independence.
From that point, the case file reads like a Caribbean thriller. Macheteros met secretly with senior Cuban intelligence officers at safehouses in Panama, Mexico and Cuba. Money was exchanged via Cuba’s “diplomatic pouch.” The Macheteros blasted federal government buildings with rockets the U.S. left behind in Vietnam. The militants smuggled Gerena into Mexico and handed him to the Cubans, who gave him a dye job and a phony beard and flew him to Havana. He is still at large.
But missing from the story for years is a credible portrayal of the man behind a political crime that has become a defining moment for Hartford and its increasingly influential Puerto Rican community. The gap will be filled in Wednesday with the local premier of the documentary film “Filiberto,” a captivating exploration of the life of Filiberto Ojeda Rios, founder of, not only Los Macheteros, but the modern, militant — and violent — wing of Puerto Rico’s independence movement.
Puerto Rican filmmaker Freddy Marrero Alfonso spent 12 years putting together “Filiberto,” which was judged best documentary by the Havana Film Festival in New York. The film is being presented by the Hartford Public Library at 5:30 p.m. Wednesday in its third-floor Hartford History Center. It is sponsored by the San Juan Center. There is no charge, and Marrero will be present to discuss the film.
Ojeda was a brilliant trumpet player, as is demonstrated by archival sound recordings Marrero located. But he was foremost a nationalist and Independentista. He became involved in the movement while working as a musician in New York in the 1950s. He moved his young family to Havana in the early 1960s, following Castro’s seizure of power, and joined dozens of other left-leaning Puerto Ricans who arrived with him to argue over how to duplicate Castro’s success in San Juan.
Ojeda had Castro’s ear and won Castro’s support when he broke with the Puerto Rican socialists advocating non-violent, political revolution. Ojeda went underground to wage a guerilla war with Los Macheteros and allied groups. He also joined the Cuban intelligence service, the DGI, according to the FBI.
He died in a bloody shootout with the FBI in Puerto Rico on Sept. 23, 2005 — the 137th anniversary of the Grito de Lares (Cry of Lares), a commemoration of a short-lived revolt in the city of Lares, the first popular uprising against the Spanish. Ojeda was a fugitive at the time and living in the Puerto Rican mountains. He was armed with a machine gun and wearing a bullet-proof vest. He seriously wounded an FBI agent before he was fatally wounded and bled to death.
The manner of Ojeda’s death that day convulsed Puerto Rico. His nationalism, or perhaps the cultural pride it engendered, resonated on the island — even though few shared his politics. More than 90 percent of Puerto Ricans regularly vote for options other than independence in plebiscites on the island’s political status.
In spite of his legend, little was known generally about Ojeda the man, something that is hardly surprising in someone who spent his adult life underground, forced to leave his family and to change residences, identifies, even his appearance to stay a step ahead of his pursuers in the FBI and the anti-communist, anti-Castro groups active in Miami and San Juan after the Cuban revolution.
Marrero studied film at Cuba’s Escuela Internacional de Cine y TV and returned to San Juan in the fall of 2005, just as Ojeda’s death and funeral became an island-wide event. A pop song about Ojeda dominated local radio, and tens of thousands lined the route of his funeral procession, among them children, excused from school and holding toy machetes.
“I saw that he had a huge impact on the population,” Marrero said by telephone from San Juan last week. “This was a man who had been hunted by the FBI as an outlaw and yet his wake was attended by ex-governors and the Cardinal of San Juan. It was not the kind of reaction you see to the death of someone who had been shot as an outlaw. We started shooting, just by instinct, that part of the story — his wake, the funeral.”
Ojeda believed the U.S. is oppressing Puerto Rico with a colonial regime that stifles freedom and exploits its economy. He was a doctrinaire Marxist-Leninist, as were many others in the clandestine independence movement in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s. He wanted to replace the U.S. territorial government with Castro-style communism.
The U.S. government considered Ojeda a terrorist and a symptom of Cuban expansionism in Latin America.
Among other things: In 1979, Los Macheteros machine-gunned a U.S. Navy bus, killing two and wounding nine. In 1981, the group took credit for the biggest loss of U.S. aircraft since Pearl Harbor when it blew up 11 jet fighters at the Muniz Air National Guard Base in San Juan. From the 1960s through the 1980s, Los Macheteros and affiliated groups such as the FALN exploded more than 100 bombs on the island and the mainland, causing more damage in the U.S. than any other group until the al-Quaida attacks on the World Trade Center in New York in 1993 and 2001.
While “Filiberto” may be the best portrayal yet of the elusive Ojeda, it also binds Hartford to one of the important personalities and sensational events in the modern Puerto Rican independence movement — the robbery and subsequent Machetero trial in Hartford.
It should be no surprise that Ojeda chose to finance his war with a robbery a mile or two from Park Street, the center of the city’s then-brash, expanding and politically charged Puerto Rican community.
Islanders had been migrating north for work in the Connecticut Valley tobacco fields and nurseries for decades. By the late 1970s, Hartford was the country’s fourth-largest port of entry for Puerto Ricans. It had the highest per capita concentration of Puerto Ricans outside of Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico had a government office in Hartford. The Hartford school system had a teacher exchange program with the University of Puerto Rico. Candidates for office on the island campaigned in Hartford.
Politics everywhere had a radical edge, as the war in Vietnam wound down, and Hartford was no exception. Local Puerto Ricans were flexing new political muscle, building influence at city hall, while keeping a hand in island politics. The Puerto Rican socialist party was active in Hartford, and there was plenty of support for independence.
“After Puerto Rico, Hartford is the most important premier — more important than New York or Chicago — because it was the location for so many important events, the robbery, the trial,” Marrero said.
Marrero’s film includes both archival film of Hartford and recent interviews, most related to the years-long Machetero trial at the federal courthouse on Main Street that kept Hartford at the center of a national news story, once the FBI rounded up the Wells Fargo robbers.
Among those interviewed is Gerena’s mother Gloria, an ardent Independentista. Gloria Gerena was a subject of FBI investigation for years. Many in the FBI have long wondered whether she was somehow involved in the decision by Ojeda and Los Macheteros to make her son Victor the inside man in the robbery.
In “Filiberto,” she is interviewed on a rainy day in Frog Hollow, sitting in a sedan across the street from the brownstone where Ojeda and his lawyer lived during the trial. Gloria Gerena explains away the robbery as a legitimate act of war. And she tries to explain the absence from her life of her oldest son.
“Once it was understood that it was for a cause, many of us would say, and still say, ‘It’s an expropriation'” Gloria Gerena explains about the robbery. “Because that is what it is called, when you take away from the rich. Because if you say robbery, you’re criminalizing the struggle.”
Of Victor, she said: “I can’t say that I’ve paid more than anyone. But I do believe that with him being gone and his daughters growing up without him … not getting to know his grandchildren his nephew and not being able to see each other … that’s been tough.”
Edmund H. Mahony can be reached at emahony@courant.com.
