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Terrorist Actions Against Cuba

What were the Five protecting us from? In 1996 Noam Chomsky remarked that "Cuba was the target of more international terrorism than probably the rest of the world combined, up until Nicaragua in the 1980s." The following list is just a part of the terrorism directed against Cuba over the last 40 years. It is lengthy but key to understanding why Cuba feels the need to send people like René, Gerardo, Fernando, Antonio and Ramón to protect its citizens from such attacks.

From the outset of the Revolution, barely days after Washington recognized the new government of Fidel Castro in January of 1959, the CIA began a campaign to overthrow Cuba's new leader. It is a campaign that has lasted through today, and is replete with anecdotes and tragedy. From as early as March 10, 1959 the US National Security Council met in secret to discuss ways to replace the new Cuban government by any means necessary. In August two Cuban planes were destroyed in Miami in an attack against air travel to Cuba. Fortunately, no one was hurt. A small plane that originated in the US was intercepted by Cuban authorities with a US citizen on board intending to assassinate Fidel Castro. In October, the first of a wave of attacks on sugar mills by planes flying in from the US began; a plane from Miami bombed Havana; and a train was machine-gunned in Las Villas -- again from a light aircraft that had originated in the United States. All this happened in the first year of the Revolution. The message from Washington was clear and Cuban lives had already been lost in the process.

The following year, 1960, the Belgian ship, Le Coubre, blew up in Havana's harbor killing some 100 sailors and dock workers. In March, US President Eisenhower ordered CIA director Allen Dulles to organize and train Cuban exiles for an invasion of Cuba. By August the CIA was recruiting members of US organized crime - including Santos Traficante and Sam Giancana - to assassinate Fidel Castro who was then Prime Minister. The FBI under Hoover was fully aware of the plots and provided logistic support. The assassination attempts were later published in a damning report by the House Select Committee on Assassinations in the late seventies.

By the end of 1960, 17 former Cuban police/army members under the Fulgencio Batista dictatorship were arrested for throwing sticks of dynamite into stores and theaters, and the year was seen out with a fire that destroyed a famous Havana department store -- all done with money and support from terrorist groups operating openly in Florida as they do to this day.

By then Cuba had obviously got the message and was aware of the plans to invade the island. However, although the island presented ample evidence of Washington's intention to the United Nations, the General Assembly rejected a debate on the issue. Clearly Cuba was on its own. The year 1961 brought on further bombings, as well as the despicable torture killings of a number of 17- and 18-year-olds who were teaching farmers in the provinces how to read. They were murdered by groups funded by the CIA in an attempt to destabilize the government in Havana and destroy a massive literacy campaign underway across the nation.

By April, after the fatal blowing up of another Havana department store, the pending invasion was obvious to Cuban authorities. It began on April 15, with B-26 bombers attacking the island's defenses, killing a number of civilians. Two days later the Bay of Pigs invasion began. Cuba defeated the US backed forces with the loss of yet more Cuban life: 176 people.

The attacks, the bombings, the assassination attempts went on. Over 600 plans or attempts on Fidel Castro's life alone are known to authorities -- from exploding cigars, to a wet suit lined with poison, to a pistol hidden in a camera. Two of the most recent have been the snipers arrested before attempting to kill the president on Venezuela's Margarita Island in 1997, and the bombing plot in Panama City in 1999 which netted international terrorist Luis Posada Carriles, currently in jail in Panama awaiting trial. Things got to the point where the US allowed ships at sea to openly shell residential districts in Havana, as on August 24, 1962.

Who outside Cuba knows of the slaughter of half a million pigs after African swine fever was introduced into the island by the CIA in 1971? Who knows of the deaths of 81 children after their deliberate infection with dengue fever ten years later in 1981? Both instances were proven later, in declassified US documents, to be the result of CIA operations. And who can forget the bombing of a Cubana flight in 1976 with the loss of all 73 passengers and crew and the subsequent freeing of Orlando Bosch in 1990 by a US court after he was found to be the principal terrorist responsible for the crime?

In 1995 Leonel Macias González murdered a Cuban navy officer and hijacked a coast guard vessel to the United States. Macias assassinated Cuban navy officer Roberto Aguilar in Mariel Bay on August 8th, hijacked the boat, and afterwards picked up 24 passengers. Foreign Ministry official Rafael Dausa said that Cuba presented a video, and eye witness statements concerning the murder and statements to the effect that Macias himself admitted shooting the Cuban navy officer. US courts, however, did not take this evidence into consideration, and on April 17th , an INS appeals court granted political asylum to Macias. Cuba responded to his release by saying that it was the equivalent to condoning terrorism.

More recently, in 1997, came the bombings of tourist hotels in an attempt to destroy the tourist industry in Cuba. An Italian tourist was killed in one of the explosions. Subsequent investigation uncovered the hand of Posada Carriles with the financing of US government-sponsored organizations based in Miami.

These Cuban exile terrorists have been allowed to operate openly within the United States, where they are presented as heroes who are to be emulated. When Cuba legitimately attempts to defend itself by monitoring the actions of these organizations to prevent further terrorist acts against it, the United States government punishes those they catch with long prison sentences for combating the very same kind of despicable terrorism that so stupefied the world after its use against the World Trade Center.

If there's to be a serious effort made to bring an end to terrorism, it needs to be based on broad ethical and moral principles. Many in the world today ask how the US government can complain of Afghanistan harboring terrorists, when this very same government allows terrorists to operate openly on its own soil.

Other more recent terrorist actions against Cuba:

1993 - The most detailed report to date on the US Central Intelligence Agency's plotting with Mafia bosses to assassinate Cuban president Fidel Castro, came to light in Washington. The report, covering the period of the early 60s, was declassified and passed on to public archives. The document gives detailed information on the CIA execution action capability program, described as a preparedness plan for carrying out assassination actions whenever deemed necessary. The report documents plans for using poisoned cigars and ball point pens for murdering the Cuban leader. It quotes statements from William Harvey, the CIA officer in charge of coordinating the assassination plans, suggesting the involvement of the highest level of the US government.

1993 - Nine Cuban-Americans arrested by the U.S. Coast Guard in May 1993 in the Florida keys with a boat full of guns and explosives were indicted on May 26 by a federal grand jury for violating U.S. weapons laws. The accused were members of the anti-Castro paramilitary group Alpha 66.

1993 - On November 6, 1993, the Miami terrorist group Alpha 66 announced that starting on November 27, it considered tourists in Cuba as justifiable targets for kidnappings and assassinations. In the following months, travel wholesalers in Miami and a number of other cities, including Montreal, Canada, also received death threats.

1994 - Tony Bryant, the new leader of the Cuban-American group Commandos L, "warned international tourists to stay away" from Cuba, saying "We're going to attack them." Last October, Commandos L machine-gunned the hotel Melia at the Varadero beach tourist resort, in what Bryant said was meant as a message to tourists.

1994 - The terrorist paramilitary group Alpha 66 announced in Florida that several of its commandos attacked a tourist hotel on the northern coast of Cuba on March 11, in the start of a campaign against the island's tourist industry. According to Alpha 66, no one was hurt in the attack from the commandos' small boat offshore or by the fire returned by Cuban security forces. "All the Cuban tourist centers are military objectives for Alpha 66," said the group's military chief, Humberto Pérez. Pérez said the attack was launched from a base located outside the US, though it was coordinated in Miami; US legislation prohibits the launching of armed attacks from US territory against nations that are not at war with the US.

1994 - At a March 31 press conference in the Miami area, US representatives Lincoln Diaz-Balart and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, both Florida Republicans of Cuban-American origin, blasted the Pentagon's recent decision to prohibit flights to the migrant camps at the US Guantánamo naval base in Cuba by the Anti-Castro organization "Brothers to the Rescue." According to a letter from Under-Secretary of Defense H. Allen Holmes to Ros-Lehtinen, the group was banned from Guantánamo because the Cuban government formally complained to the US Interests Section in Havana that on Nov. 10, 1994, two of its planes tried to distribute leaflets not only over the camps on the US base, but also within Cuban territory.

1994 - On Oct. 15, seven Cuban-Americans armed with automatic rifles landed illegally at Caibarien on Cuba's north central shore; after attempting to steal a vehicle, they killed a local resident who was fishing in the area, and were arrested several hours later following a shootout with Cuban authorities and a local guard. The infiltrators were dressed in camouflage and armed with AK, M-16 and R-15 assault rifles, as well as pistols and other military supplies. In Miami, on October 17, Sergio González Rosquete of the Florida-based Democratic National Unity Party (PUND) said his organization was responsible for the action.

1994 - On November 2, FBI agents arrested three men from another rightwing terrorist organization in southern Florida as they attempted to firebomb a warehouse full of humanitarian aid collected by Cuban Americans seeking an end to the embargo. The aid was shipped to Cuba with the Pastors for Peace Friendshipment caravan of 1994.

1994 - On December 20, a federal judge in Miami sentenced two Cuban-American paramilitary leaders for attempting to buy high- powered weapons from an undercover federal agent. The two, Rodolfo Frometa and Fausto Marimon, were arrested on June 2 and convicted in September. Leaders of the paramilitary group Commandos F-4, Frometa and Marimon planned to use the explosives, grenades, anti-tank missiles and other weapons for attacks on tourist spots in Cuba. Frometa was sentenced to three and a half years in prison, while Marimon got one year of prison and two of conditional liberty.

1995 - The New York offices of El Diario-La Prensa were bombed after the paper ran an editorial endorsing visits to Cuba. The wording of the cover story in New Republic implicated wealthy Cuban exile leader Jorge Mas Canosa, dubbed by the magazine as "Clinton's Miami Mobster".

1996 - On January 4, a US federal judge denied bail to two of three Cuban- Americans accused of stockpiling an arsenal of weapons and masterminding a plan to invade Cuba and spark an armed rebellion against the government there. René Cruz, his son of the same name, and Rafael García were arrested on December 16 by FBI agents who seized three MAC-90 "sniper" rifles, 18 AK-47 assault rifles, a number of hand grenades and 14,000 rounds of ammunition, plus bullet-proof vests, radio equipment, maps of Cuba, air navigation maps, night vision glasses, and plans detailing an invasion of Cuba.

1994-1996 - A chronology posted by the Cuban Interests Section in Washington on the APC computer networks February 26, 1996, itemized 10 violations of Cuban air space from 1994 to 1996 alone. Notification was sent of almost all these incidents by diplomatic note to the United States Interests Section in Havana soon after their occurrence.

1996 - On March 7, 1996, the terrorist organization Brothers to the Rescue fired on civilians in Cuba, set fire to crops, spread chemical defoliants on Cuban soil and drop propaganda leaflets.

Biological War waged by the US against Cuba

--1962: A US intelligence agent is known to have given several thousand dollars to a Canadian to introduce a disease infecting Cuban sea-turtles.

--1965: A plastic balloon descends on a farm in Santiago de las Vegas. When it hits the ground it expels a white dust that spreads to cane plantation which is later destroyed.

--1968: A foreign specialist working for an international agency is expelled after he is confirmed to have introduced a virus affecting coffee crops.

--1970: The US is caught seeding clouds over Cuba in an attempt to affect the sugar harvest. The project was part of a larger research plan called "The Cooling" which was intended to devise ways of manipulating the weather for political reasons.

--1971: African swine fever is introduced in Cuba. Cuba asserted that the container transporting the virus came from Fort Gullick, a US military base in the Panama Canal Zone. Those involved in the attack have since testified to their part. The entire pig population of Cuba had to be slaughtered.

--1977: Cane smut is detected in Pilón, eastern Cuba. The disease had never been known in Cuba until this date.

--1978: A previously unknown variety of the fungus Blue Mould hits the sugar crops causing losses of approximately 344 million pesos.

--1978: Sugar cane rust affects a new variety of cane imported from Barbados. As a result 1.35 million tones of sugar are lost.

--1979-80: Two different strains of African swine fever are discovered emanating from distinct areas of contamination. Three hundred thousand pigs are slaughtered.

--1981: A previously unknown Bovine skin disease erupts affecting cows and bullocks throughout the island.

--1981: A sudden outbreak of hemorrhagic dengue fever affects 350,000 people. One hundred and fifty-eight people, mostly children, die from the disease. The outbreak had three initial breeding grounds in Cienfuegos and Camagüey, all very close to international air corridors. Just prior to the outbreak it was discovered that the entire personnel at the Guantanamo naval base had been vaccinated against dengue. As a result there was not a single case of the disease in the base.

--1981: Hemorraghic conjunctivitis caused by the Enterovirus 70 strain spreads throughout the island. The Pan American Health Organization is baffled because this strain had never been seen in the hemisphere before.

--1984: Eduardo Arocena, of Cuban origin and head of the Omega-7 terrorist organization, stands trial in the US accused of the murder of Felix Garcia Rodriguez, a Cuban diplomat to the UN. During the trial Arocena confesses to having introduced 'germs' into Cuba as part of the US biological war against Cuba. He affirms that the dengue outbreak was introduced into the island by terrorist groups.

--1984: An outbreak of dysentery causes the death of 18 children in Guantánamo province. Investigators pin down the start of the outbreak to two workers who had participated in a festive activity inside the US Guantánamo naval base. The strain was again of a type previously unknown in Cuba.

--1985: An infectious bronchitis poultry virus seriously disrupts egg production.

--1989: Ulcerative mammillitis in dairy cattle caused by a herpes virus spreads throughout the island affecting milk yields.

--1990: Black sigatoka, infects banana plantations throughout the island. Once again the disease had been hitherto unknown on the island. The disease appeared precisely as Cuba began to put plans into action to start intensive banana production.

--1991: Acariasis disease which affects bees is discovered, just as Cuban honey begins to be exported.

--1991: Thirty thousand tobacco seedlings are discovered to be infected with Fusorio, which once in the soil means tobacco production has to be halted for three years.

--1992: Black plant louse which carries a citrus disease known as Tristeza (sadness) is discovered.

--1994: Citric sapper blight is found in Pinar del Rio and Camagüey.

--1993: 122,135 rabbits have to be slaughtered after an outbreak of a viral disease.

--1995: February 10. A camera case in the luggage of a visiting US scientist is found to contain four small test tubes of a biological substance. On examination it is discovered to be the citric Tristeza virus.

--1995: Coffee borer is discovered in Granma province. Losses of 80 per cent were attributed to it and considerable resources have had to be spent on containing it.

--1996: Varroasis, another bee disease, is diagnosed in three apiaries in Matanzas. Previously unknown in Cuba, this disease is the worst of all that affect honey production in the world.