CIA documents released in 2005 do indicate that the agency "had concrete advance intelligence, as early as June 1976, on plans by Cuban exile terrorist groups to bomb a Cubana airliner."

Former CIA operative and anti-Castro militant Luis Posada Carriles denied involvement but provides many details of the incident in his book Caminos del Guerrero (Ways of the Warrior).

For three months prior to the bombing of Flight 455, CORU waged a campaign of violence against several Caribbean countries which had established links with Cuba.

Realizing a successful landing was no longer possible, it appears that the pilot turned the craft away from the beach and towards the Caribbean Sea off Porters, St James, potentially saving the lives of many tourists.

All 48 passengers and 25 crew aboard the plane died: the victims comprised 57 Cubans, eleven Guyanese, and five North Koreans.

[1][2][10] Among the dead were all 24 members of the 1975 national Cuban fencing team that had just won every gold medal in the Central American and Caribbean Championships; many were teenagers.

Several officials of the Cuban government were also aboard the plane: Manuel Permuy Hernández, director of the National Institute of Sports (INDER); Jorge de la Nuez Suárez, secretary for the shrimp fleet; Alfonso González, National Commissioner of Firearm Sports; and Domingo Chacón Coello, an agent from the Interior Ministry.

Their testimony, along with other evidence, implicated Posada and fellow CIA operative Orlando Bosch, an anti-Castro Cuban living in Venezuela.

[17] On 25 August 1977, Judge Delia Estava Moreno referred the case to a military tribunal, charging all four co-conspirators with treason.

[19] On 8 August 1985, Venezuelan judge Alberto Perez Marcano of the 11th Penal Court convicted Lugo and Ricardo, sentencing them each to twenty years in prison.

Orlando Bosch was acquitted, because the evidence gathered by the Barbados authorities during the investigation could not be used in the Venezuela trial, as it was presented too late and had not been translated into Spanish.

[21] Freed from Venezuelan charges, Bosch went to the United States, assisted by US Ambassador to Venezuela Otto Reich; there, he was ultimately arrested for a parole violation.

[23] The U.S. Justice Department had urged the court to keep him in jail because he was "an admitted mastermind of terrorist plots and attacks", a flight risk and a danger to the community.

[25] "The U.S. authorities know that international terrorist Orlando Bosch Avila and his organization of which Luis Posada Carriles is a member hatched the plot to blow up this plane.

Associate Attorney General Joe Whitley, who analyzed hundreds of public documents and secret CIA and FBI files, concluded that the Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations was responsible for the attack and the top leader of this terrorist group is Bosch."

Luis Posada Carriles, a Cuban-born naturalized Venezuelan, was the Director of Counterintelligence at Venezuela's FBI equivalent, the DISIP, from 1967 to 1974.

Posada was heavily involved with right-wing anti-Castro groups, in particular the Cuban-American National Foundation (CANF) and the Coordinadora de Organizaciones Revolucionarias Unidas (Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations - CORU), led at the time by Orlando Bosch.

[30] On 3 May 2007, the National Security Archive, an independent research organization located at George Washington University, released documents linking Posada to the 1976 Cubana airline bombing and other terrorist attacks and plots, including those targeting a British West Indian Airways office in Barbados and the Guyanese embassy in Trinidad.

A monument was erected at Payne's Bay, Saint James, Barbados, to the memory of the people killed in the bombing.