During the last 50
years, the United States has suffered from a constant stream of vicious
terrorist acts, first carried out by the Cuban government and then later
outsourced to anti-capitalist groups who were given safe haven in the country.
The human toll is enormous – 3,478 dead, 2,009 injured, and many more suffering
the mental health problems associated with traumatic stress. The
terrorist attacks include blowing up a civilian airplane, bombing hotels and
restaurants in tourist neighborhoods, machine gun attacks from speed boats
against coastal towns, introduction of chemical and biological agents such as
dengue fever, and a program of conspiracy between the Cuban state and the
Catholic church to remove thousands of children from their parents and the U.S.
All of this is true –
only in reverse. The victim of the hostile aggression has always been Cuba. The
country may be the worst victim of terrorism in the Post-WWII era. But in the
bizarro world of the U.S. government, in a textbook case of projection, it is
the Cuban government who is responsible for sabotage, destabilization and
interference. The U.S. has even designated Cuba as a “state sponsor
or terror.” In a historic irony, it was Saddam Hussein’s Iraq that was removed
from the list to make room for Cuba in the early ’80s.
Terrorism was the main
tactic in the campaign of subversion and interference that started immediately
after the success of the revolutionary movement led by Fidel Castro. In March
1960,President Eisenhower green-lighted the first funds for the CIA to
overthrow the new government. It is safe to say that Eisenhower did not lose
any sleep over the mandate in the U.N. Charter that nations must refrain from
the threat or use of force against another sovereign nation. By the time the
Bay of Pigs Invasion was carried out, after being approved by new President
John F. Kennedy, it was a full-scale ground operation launched in April 1961,
consisting of 1,400 paramilitary troops and air support from B-26 bombers.
The Cuban Army was quickly able to beat back the invasion, and the
terrorist and mercenary forces quickly surrendered.
While all of Latin
America rejoiced at the imperialist U.S.A. walking away with its tail between
its legs, the military planners in Washington were just getting started. Their
response to the humiliating defeat was not to obey international law and leave
the rightful Cuban government alone, but to double down. The result was
Operation Mongoose, which was authorized by President Kennedy in November 1961.
Operation Mongoose involved thousands of people, millions of dollars and
a violation of the Neutrality Act, which prevented CIA Operations in the United
States, according to Noam Comsky.
“These Operations
included bombing of hotels and industrial installations, sinking of fishing
boats, poisoning of crops and livestock, contamination of sugar exports, etc.
Not all these actions were specifically authorized by the CIA, but no such
considerations absolve official enemies,” Chomsky writes.
Harvard historian Jorge
Dominguez, in his review of thousands of declassified documents regarding the
terrorist campaign against Cuba notes the complete lack of indifference toward
human life.
“Only once in these nearly
thousand pages of documentation did a U.S. official raise something that
resembled a faint moral objection to U.S.-government sponsored terrorism’: a
member of the NSC staff suggested that it might lead to some Russian reaction,
and raids that are ‘haphazard and kill innocents … might mean a bad press in
some friendly countries,’” Dominguez says.
The hysteria of the
U.S. military planners is evident by looking at the proposed terrorist
campaign Operation Northwoods, a series of false flag attacks to be
carried out within the United States and blamed on Cuba to create public
support for a U.S. military invasion to overthrow Castro once and for all. The
project made it as far as getting approval from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, but
thankfully President Kennedy showed some semblance of humanity by rejecting
terrorism against his own citizens.
Terrorism against Cuba
continued throughout the ’60s and ’70s, but eventually operations were left to
right-wing anti-Castro militants based in Miami. The new government strategy
was to turn a blind eye. Many of the people in these terrorist organizations
were former CIA agents and paramilitaries who were veterans of the Bay of Pigs
invasion. The two most prominent and dangerous such agents were Luis Posada
Carriles and Orlando Bosch.
Posada and Bosch were
suspected in the bombing of Cubana de Aviación Flight 455 in 1976 that
killed all 78 people on board. The victims included all 24 member of the Cuban
national fencing team that was returning with gold medals, after being
victorious in the Central American Championships. Also on board were a group of
fisherman who had completed a contract fishing in Guyana. Two men who boarded
the plane and later disembarked before the plane took off from its final stop
in Jamaica were later caught. Both confessed that Posada and Bosch
were the masterminds behind the plot. A declassified FBI report quotes
a reliable source confirming that Posada was involved in the planning.
Both men later ended up
living in the U.S. Bosch would die in Florida a free man in
2011, after years of involvement with militant anti-Cuban organizations.
He was jailed on unrelated charges in the ’80s, but pardoned in 1990 by
George H.W. Bush. The first President Bush did so at the request of his
son Jeb, who was acting on behalf of his allies in the powerful Miami
anti-Castro community. The President issued his pardon despite warnings
from his own Attorney General who called Bosch and “unrepentant terrorist.”
Posada has also wound
up in U.S. jails but is now free living in the Miami area. The U.S. has refused
to extradite him to either Venezuela or Cuba. He continued his terrorist career
and was responsible for more deaths. Speaking to the New York Times,
Posada admitted: “he organized a wave of bombing in Cuba [in 1997] at hotels,
restaurants and discotheques, killing an Italian tourist and alarming the Cuban
Government.” Mr. Posada, the article states, “was schooled in demolition and
guerilla warfare by the Central Intelligence Agency in the 1960′s.”
The former CIA
terrorist also admitted the involvement of other groups based in Florida.
He said: “the hotel bombings and other operations had been supported by
leaders of the Cuban-American National Foundation. Its founder and head, Jorge
Mas Canosa, who died [in 1997], was embraced at the White House by Presidents
Reagan, Bush and Clinton.”
Today Posada lives as a
free man in Miami, as Bosch had before he passed away. Posada is still
active in supporting anti-Castro groups such as the Ladies in White, who
generated much controversy recently when members were detained in Havana for
several hours upon protesting publicly.
Another example of
horrific terrorist acts against Cuba are the numerous instances of chemical and
biological warfare. The worst may be the alleged introduction in 1981 of
dengue fever, which killed hundreds and sickened thousands more. Many
other cases involving poison and sabotage of tobbaco and sugar crops have been
reported.
In his excellent book “Voices
from the Other Side: An Oral History of Terrorism Against Cuba,” Keith Bolender
interviews survivors and relatives of terrorism victims in Cuba. His many
interviews include a woman who lost her leg as a child from machine gun fire by
terrorists from Miami attacking her coastal village; the wife of the pilot of
Flight 455; a mother who lost her daughter to dengue fever; and a man who as a
teenager found an unexploded bomb at a hotel while waiting to play in a chess
tournament.
Bolender also puts the
terrorist actions in the context of American policy.
“American aggression
ran from the embargo, propaganda, isolation, and the Bay of Pigs military
invasion. As the rhetoric increased, terrorist acts were formulated and
carried out.. American officials estimated millions would be spent to develop
internal security systems, and State Department officials expected the Cuban
government to increase internal surveillance in an attempt to prevent further
acts of terrorism. These systems, which restricted civil rights,
became easy targets for critics,” he writes.
There are many
other terrorist organizations who live openly in Florida. With names such as
Omega 7, Comandos F4, Brigade 2506 and Alpha 66, these groups have admitted to
killing people in the past and announce their intention to do so in the future.
“Other than an
occasional federal gun charge, nothing much seems to happen to most of these
would-be-revolutionaries,” write Tristram Korten and Kirk Nielsen in Salon.
“They are allowed to train nearly unimpeded despite making explicit plans to
violate the 70-year-old U.S. Neutrality Act and overthrow a sovereign country’s
government… No one has ever been charged for anti-Cuban terrorism under
[anti-terror] laws.”
The article goes on to
mention how the federal government has failed to extradite other militants
accused of terrorism and murder such as Luis Posada Carriles.
Anyone who has use of
his brain can see the hypocrisy in the U.S.’s official position on terrorism
enunciated by George W. Bush in an address to Congress the week after
September 11, 2001.
“From this day forward,
any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by
the United States as a hostile regime. Our nation has been put on notice, we’re
not immune from attack. We will take defensive measures against terrorism to
protect Americans,” Bush said. Shortly after, he ordered the invasion of
Afghanistan after refusing to provide the Taliban regime with any evidence that
Osama bin Laden was responsible for the 9/11 attacks.
According to his own
doctrine, Bush himself would be fair game for a Venezuelan commando raid on his
Crawford ranch. And his father would likewise be a legitimate target in his
Kennebunkport home for a Panamanian commando squad. Cuban jet fighters and
drones would be completely justified in launching attacks in Miami whenever
they saw fit.
In reality, the Cuban
government has decided to follow the course of international law in its efforts
to combat terrorism. They have managed to infiltrate right-wing militant groups
in Florida to prevent future plots. After gathering evidence and making a case
for what these groups were planning, Cuban authorities shared their
intelligence with FBI officials in 1997. The FBI listened to Cuba’s case,
took the information back to the States – and arrested the Cubans who had
foiled the plots. (For comparison, after catching the paramilitaries who
physically invaded Cuba on a military mission to overthrow the government at
the Bay of Pigs, most invaders were questioned and sent back to the U.S.)
The Cuban Five, as
those imprisoned for fighting terrorism are called, are hardly known, if at
all, in the United States. But they are heroes in the native country.
Stephen Kimber, writing
in the Washington Post, tries to put the story of the Cuban Five in
perspective: “Consider for a moment what would happen if American intelligence
agents on the ground in a foreign country uncovered a major terrorist plot,
with enough time to prevent it. And then consider how Americans would react if
authorities in that country, rather than cooperate with us, arrested and
imprisoned the U.S. agents for operating on their soil.
“Those agents would be
American heroes. The U.S. government would move heaven and Earth to get them
back.”
Members of Seal Team 6,
who carried out an illegal premeditated assassination of Osama bin Laden in the
sovereign territory of Pakistan, have been treated as heroes. As are soldiers
who have served in the occupations of Iraq and Afghanistan. How can the U.S.
expect to have any credibility in the world when it acts with such blatant
hypocrisy?
As Noam Chomsky
points out, the U.S. has a long history of hypocrisy when it comes to terrorism.
In the ’80s, after Reagan announced his desire to wipe out “the evil scourge of
terrorism,” the United Nations took up the issue with a resolution announcing
“measures to prevent international terrorism which endangers or takes innocent
human lives or jeopardizes fundamental freedoms.”
The bill was passed
with virtual unanimous approval of the entire world by a vote of 153 to 2. In
opposition were the United States and its client state Israel.
Chomsky describes the
U.S. use of the “propagandistic approach” to terrorism. “We begin with the
thesis that terrorism is the responsibility of some officially designated
enemy. We then designate terrorist acts as ‘terrorist’ just in the cases where
they can be attributed (whether plausibly or not) to the required source;
otherwise they are to be ignored, suppressed, or termed ‘retaliation’ or
‘self-defence.’”
A look at the U.S.’s
flagrant disregard for international law and principles reveals actions such as
denial of habeas corpus and due proccess (originated in the Magna Carta almost
800 years ago); unilaterally undertaking aggressive wars; “shock and awe”
bombings; extraordinary renditions; and extrajudicial assassinations, including
with drone strikes and Hellfire missiles. These all demonstrate the extent to
which the U.S. is willing to disobey all legal and moral conventions to achieve
its political goals, all in the name of fighting terrorism.
To deny that Cuba and
its residents have been, and are the victims of terrorism for more than half a
century is an outrage. To add insult to injury by labeling the Cuban government
a sponsor of terrorism because of political considerations is just cruel.
The many victims of
terrorism in Cuba may never see justice carried out by those responsible. But
their suffering is the same as that felt by Americans after 9/11. The
least we can do is admit that, and stop allowing our government to use
terrorism as a propaganda tool for its own convenience while the real human
cost is ignored in countries other than our own.
Source: http://www.counterpunch.org/
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