Lively Leader of Cuban American Community Among Florida Victims

Lively Leader of Cuban American Community Among Florida Victims
A memorial wall for the victims of the Champlain Towers South building collapse in Surfside, Fla., with a photo of Juan Mora Sr. and his wife, Ana Mora, on June 29, 2021. Gerald Herbert/AP Photo
|Updated:

Sixty years before Juan Mora’s Florida condo building came crashing down, killing him and at least 89 others, he was among hundreds of Cuban exiles who signed up for a covert, CIA-funded operation to overthrow Fidel Castro’s Soviet-backed dictatorship.

Mora’s dream of restoring democracy in his homeland took him from military training at a Guatemalan jungle camp to the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, where he was captured and then crammed into a decrepit, rat-filled Cuban prison for 20 months, friends once imprisoned with him told The Associated Press.