Orlando Bosch, who battled Castro with bazookas and sabotage, dies at 84

Joe Whitley, who was then the associate U.S. attorney general, said in 1989 that Dr. Bosch had been “resolute and unwavering in his advocacy of terrorist violence” and had repeatedly “demonstrated a willingness to cause indiscriminate injury and death.”

The Justice Department asked 31 countries to take Dr. Bosch. All denied him entry. Another accepted: Cuba.

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Dr. Bosch’s lawyers equated the Cuban offer to a death sentence and refused. In 1990, President George H.W. Bush overruled Dr. Bosch’s deportation order, and he remained in Miami for the rest of his life.

Orlando Bosch Avila was born in Potrerillo, a village about 150 miles east of Havana, on Aug. 18, 1926. He was five days younger than Castro.

After graduating from medical school at the University of Havana, Dr. Bosch went to Toledo, Ohio, for his internship and served his pediatric residency in Memphis. He claimed to have been one of the first doctors in Cuba to administer the newly developed polio vaccine, in 1955.

He served as a provincial leader in Castro’s underground movement against dictator Fulgencio Batista before turning against Castro. He said he was trained in guerrilla warfare by the Central Intelligence Agency before the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of 1961.

His first marriage to medical school classmate Myriam Ares, an obstetrician, ended in divorce. Survivors include his second wife, Adriana Delgado Sepulveda Bosch; six children; and five grandchilden.

While in prison, Dr. Bosch took to painting landscapes in his cell. Using cheap brushes, and sometimes a spoon and fork, he composed pastoral scenes of windmills and dikes in Holland and tropical visions of Cuba.

His works sold for high prices in South Florida, especially Little Havana, where Dr. Bosch had a near-mythic reputation.

One morning, at a cafe in Miami, Dr. Bosch’s daughter Myriam was told she didn’t have to pay her bill.

As she told The Post in 1988: “This old man comes up and says, ‘You’re Bosch’s daughter. I’ve already paid. I tell you, I think of Bosch and then I think of my home country and then I just want to cry.’ ”