HAVANA (Reuters) - Anti-Castro Cuban exile and former CIA operative Luis Posada Carriles, accused of masterminding the 1976 explosion of a Cubana Airlines jet, died early on Wednesday in the United States at the age of 90, his attorney's office said.
Posada Carriles was considered a hero by many Cuban exiles and a terrorist by Havana for his attempts to topple Fidel Castro's government following the 1959 leftist revolution.
"The biggest terrorist of this hemisphere died without paying his debts to justice or reparations to the victims," wrote Sergio Alejandro Gomez, the international editor of Granma, the official newspaper of Cuba's Communist Party, on Facebook.
"He died in Miami, the United States, the country that trained him to lay bombs and attack the lives of hundreds of Cubans."
Posada Carriles, who took part in the failed U.S.-backed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion against Castro, was wanted for trial in Cuba and Venezuela on charges he planned the 1976 bombing of a Cuban airliner that killed 73 people.
He was also accused of tourist bombings in Havana in 1997.
(Reporting by Sarah Marsh and Nelson Acosta in Havana; Editing by Dan Grebler)