Political Activist. Once a respected pediatrician, he became one of the more militant members of the anti-Castro Cuban exile community. Born Orlando Bosch Avila in the village of Potrerillo to a prosperous family he earned his M.D. at the University of Havana where he met and became an early backer of Fidel Castro. After completing his pediatrics residency in Toledo, Ohio, he returned home where he was a pioneer in vaccinating against polio while providing behind the scenes support in Castro's fight to overthrow the Batista regime; soon after the successful revolution he decided that the new leader was, in fact, a Communist dictator and in June of 1960 fled with his family to Florida. Bosch went into a practice in Coral Gables but soon found himself in trouble after he was accused of various acts of anti-Castro violence. Said to have run a CIA training camp in Homestead, Florida, as part of Operation 40, he was rumored by some to have gone to Dallas in the fall of 1963 to help plan the murder of President Kennedy and even to have been the "dark-skinned man" photographed in Dealey Plaza on November 22; while never denying association with the CIA he always maintained complete noninvolvement in the JFK assassination conspiracy. Charged numerous times during the 1960s he was never convicted until he used a homemade bazooka to shell a Polish ship docked at Miami in 1968; sentenced to 10 years in the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary where he learned to paint and became skilled in landscapes, he was paroled after four and promptly escaped the country. Using multiple fake passports and names, Bosch lived in Nicaragua, Chile, Costa Rica, the Dominican Republic, and elsewhere; warmly received in Venezuela in early fall of 1976 he was accused of masterminding the October 6th. bombing of Cubana Airlines flight 455 which killed 73 people. Held in a Venezuelan jail for 11 years, he was finally tried for the attack and acquitted; arriving in Miami in February of 1988 there were quickly calls for his deportation, though no country but Cuba (to which the United States refused to send him) wanted him. A pariah to some he was a hero to others and a group of supporters led by Jeb Bush and Congresswoman Ileana Ros-Lehtinen lobbied for a pardon which was granted by President George H.W. Bush in 1990. Bosch lived his final years quietly though he never missed an opportunity to denounce Communism and Fidel Castro. Called in a 2003 book "the godfather of the paramilitary groups" Bosch maintained a following and in October of 2010 was honored with a plaque placed at the University of Miami. He published his own memoir entitled "The Years I Have Lived" in 2010 and died of multiple chronic illnesses regretting that he did not live to see a free Cuba. Speaking of the partial relaxation of the ban on travel to Cuba he said: "To those who return to the fatherland as tourists...one should remind them that in the face of tyrants only force can foster a dialogue".