Twenty-four members of Cuba’s national fencing team, many of them teenagers, also boarded Cubana Airlines Flight 455 in Port of Spain, wearing the gold and silver medals they had just won at a tournament in Venezuela. The plane was to stop briefly in Barbados and Jamaica before taking them home to Havana.

Some twenty minutes after takeoff, Ricardo pushed the rigged camera under his seat and walked to the rear restroom, where he hid an explosives-packed toothpaste tube. He was nervous, sweating heavily, and somehow jammed the door, trapping himself inside. A stewardess tried to pry the door open. Unsuccessful, she recruited the plane’s copilot, who kicked it loose, according to a passenger who disembarked with the two young men in Barbados.

Nine minutes after leaving Barbados, the pilot radioed distress. “We have an explosion on board,’’ he told the control tower. “We’re descending fast. We have a fire on board.’’ He asked permission to return to the airport. Then came a second, deafening blast. “Hit the water, Felo! Hit the water!” the copilot cried, as the plane started plunging. We have a total emergency!” the pilot shouted, and then the signal went dead. Sunbathers at Barbados’s Paradise Hotel watched in horror as the DC-8 dived into the sea.

All seventy-three people on board were killed: fifty-seven Cubans, six exchange students and a young family from Guyana, and five North Koreans.

Ricardo hailed a taxi at the airport in Barbados, and he and Lugo took a meandering trip through Bridgetown, at one point asking the driver to pull over so they could watch a plane pass overhead. Around 1:15 p.m., they checked into the Bridgetown Holiday Inn, room 103, under false names. Ricardo immediately placed a call through the front desk and left a message with Luis Posada’s secretary in Caracas. He then called his girlfriend, who worked at Posada’s detective agency, and asked her to relay a message to her boss. “We’re in a desperate situation and need help,” he said. Then he added, using a predetermined code, “The bus was fully loaded with dogs.” His next call was to a “Señor Paniagua,” the nom de guerre of Orlando Bosch, the legendary anti-Castro militant, then living in Caracas. He didn’t get through.

Ricardo was convinced a Cuban agent had seen him in the lobby; after a heated discussion, he and Lugo changed hotels. They took a walk by the sea to calm their nerves, but as word of the bombing buzzed among the locals, a panic-stricken Ricardo tossed a small package, which may have contained the detonator, into the sea and declared that they had to leave Barbados immediately.

On the short hop back to Trinidad, Ricardo alternated between euphoria and tears as he downed shots of whiskey. Seventy-three! More than the Jackal!” he boasted, comparing himself to Carlos the Jackal, the Venezuelan terrorist then at the height of his fame. “Now I’m the one who has the record, because I’m the one who blew up that thing.” Later he broke down, saying: “Damn it, Lugo, I’m desperate and feel like crying. I’ve never killed anyone before.”