On September 19, 1960, Fidel
Castro and Malcolm X had an historic meeting in Harlem’s Hotel Theresa. Fifty years
later people packed a meeting hall in the Adam Clayton Powell State Office
Building across 125th Street
to commemorate that meeting. Among them were Cuban Foreign Minister Bruno
Rodríguez Parrilla and Cuban Ambassador to the United
Nations Pedro Núñez Mosquera.
What a different kind of
commemoration we could have had if such important leaders as Malcolm X, Patrice
Lumumba, Martin Luther King, Jr., Fred Hampton and countless others had not
been assassinated. When Malcolm X met with Fidel Castro they talked about Prime
Minister Patrice Lumumba of the Congo, a leader whose importance for Africa and
all of us was globally recognized. Only five days earlier, Lumumba had been
overthrown by Colonel Joseph Mobutu with the support of the CIA. Four months later
Lumumba was executed. And in less than five years assassination took away the
life of Malcolm X himself.
How did Fidel Castro escape
more than 600 assassination attempts? That’s no exaggeration; there really have
been more than 600 attempts to kill Castro. And the answer to that question is:
Because Cuban intelligence agents have risked their lives for more than 50
years to try to prevent assassinations and other terrorist actions aimed at the
Cuban people. Five of these brave agents, known as the Cuban Five, have been
held in U.S. prisons on phony charges for 12 years.
The FBI started trying to kill
Castro in 1958 while he was still in the Sierras, before the triumph of the
Revolution. The CIA began its campaign to kill him immediately after the Revolution
seized power.
Even as Fidel Castro and
Malcolm X were meeting in Harlem, the CIA was recruiting the Mafia to aid in
assassinating Castro. Washington launched a State of Siege, including invasion,
armed infiltration attacks, bombings, arson, sabotage, and bans on trade with
Cuba and travel to Cuba.
The War of Terror forced Cuba
to distort its economy by having to develop its Revolutionary Armed Forces and
the popular militia to defend the country constantly. From this dynamic between
terrorists and their targets came two opposing agencies: On the one hand, an
army of terrorists based in the United States and on the other, Cuba’s State
Security Department or G-2, which trained intelligence agents to find out and
stop plans by that army of terrorists.
Cuba has never had the option
of sending its armed forces to invade the United States in order to eliminate
terrorist groups like the ones included at the end of this article. Instead,
G-2 has had to infiltrate agents into those groups to uncover their plans. Fabián Escalante, former head of the State Security
Department, has written extensively about this “silent war against terrorism.”
People here in this country did
not know about that decision in August 1960 to recruit organized crime for help
in killing Castro until 1975 when, in the wake of the Vietnam War, the Senate
Select Intelligence Committee conducted hearings that included testimony about
the recruitment of Mafia assassins. That Senate Committee, by the way, did not
deal only with Cuba but with CIA involvement in other assassinations, including
that of Patrice Lumumba.
Plans for invasion at the Bay
of Pigs and plans for another invasion, Operation Mongoose, were kept secret
from people in this country, but G-2 found out about those plans right away.
Because Cuba was ready for the
invasion, the Bay of Pigs invaders were defeated in less than 72 hours. When
Cuba released more than a thousand of the invaders who were captured, they
joined other Cuban émigrés to be given further training by the CIA. From 1963
through 1966, about 300 CIA agents like E. Howard Hunt worked out of a CIA
station based at the University of Miami, training thousands of Cuban émigrés
who became the core of the network of terrorists who continue to operate to this
day.
Some Bay of Pigs veterans
enrolled at Fort Benning, Georgia, for CIA training that gave them commissions as Army lieutenants. Fort Benning was not
then the site of the School of the Americas, which did not move to Fort Benning
from Panama until 1984; the CIA was training terrorists at many bases.
Two trainees at Fort Benning
who became major terrorists were Luis Posada Carriles
and Jorge Mas Canosa. Posada told New York Times reporters that “`the CIA taught us
everything – everything.’” “`They taught us explosives, how to kill, bomb,
trained us in acts of sabotage.’” In that interview, published on the front
pages ofThe New
York Times on July 12 and
July 13, 1998, Posada acknowledged Jorge Mas Canosa,
chair of the Cuban American National Foundation, as his financier.
The Cuban American National
Foundation was created by President Ronald Reagan who anointed Mas Canosa as its leader. This organization, comprised of
Cuban-American millionaires, was the most powerful and influential of all the
terrorist groups, with its own military arm aimed at assassinating Fidel Castro
and overthrowing the Cuban Government while at the same time engineering both
the Torricelli Act and the Helms-Burton Act that tightened the trade embargo
against Cuba in the 1990s.
Luis Posada became a CIA
hitman, specializing in trying to kill Castro during visits abroad – for
example, in Chile in 1971. But in 1976 the Senate investigation resulted in a
report that the Ford Administration knew would recommend that the CIA stop
assassinating people all over the Globe. So the CIA privatized its
assassination business. Posada was removed from the CIA payroll in February
1976 to become a free-lance assassin financed by wealthy Cuban-Americans, especially
Jorge Mas Canosa.
Posada went on a rampage of
terror, linking up with Orlando Bosch in the Commanders of United Revolutionary
Organizations (CORU), devoted to terrorism against Cuba and any institutions
and individuals considered friendly to Cuba. In the last six months of 1976,
CORU set off 50 bombs in several countries.
Their most murderous bombing
came on October 6, 1976, when Posada and Bosch masterminded two explosions that
blew up a Cubana Airlines passenger plane, killing
all 73 people aboard – the first time in the Western Hemisphere that terrorists
aimed to kill all passengers and crew on a civilian airliner. The next time
that happened was on 9/11/2001.
In 1998, FBI agents went to
Havana where Cuban officials gave them literally reams of information gathered
by Cuban agents about terrorists based in the United States. But instead of
arresting the terrorists, the FBI arrested Cubans who had gathered the
evidence. The Cuban Five -- Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Ramón Labañino, Fernando González and René González -- were tried
and convicted in Miami. The 11th Circuit
Court of Appeals, in an opinion that unfortunately was later overturned,
provided legal recognition of the fact that the city of Miami is so inflamed
with passion against Cuba that it is unfit as a site for the trial of any case
involving Cuba where the defendant is not in favor of overthrowing the Cuban
government.
As Fidel Castro pointed out,
“The most tragic aspect of all this for the U.S. people is that while [Héctor] Pesquera [the head of the
FBI in Miami] and his troops were maliciously devoting all their time to the
persecution, arrest and rigging of the trial of the Cubans, no less than 14 of
the 19 responsible for the September 11 attacks on New York’s Twin Towers and
other targets were living and training exactly in the area for which Pesquera was responsible.”
Fortunately G-2 agents like the
Cuban Five continued their work and uncovered another plot to kill Castro in
the year 2000. Most of the hundreds of attempts to kill him have gone
unnoticed, but Fidel Castro made sure to call attention to this one.
After arriving in Panama City
to attend an Ibero-American Summit meeting, Castro
held a news conference to announce that Luis Posada and three Cuban-American co-conspirators
were planning to assassinate him by bombing the auditorium at the University of
Panama where he would be speaking. He even revealed where the police could find
the would-be assassins. G-2 agents not only saved the life of President Castro yet
again but also the lives of hundreds of people, mainly students, who packed the
University of Panama auditorium to hear Castro speak.
Nevertheless Posada and his
co-conspirators – Gaspar Jiménez, Guillermo Novo, and Pedro Remón
– were charged and convicted not with attempted murder but with less serious
charges, and they were pardoned in 2004 by Panamanian President Mireya Moscoso on her way out of office as she headed for her
comfort zone of life in Miami. Posada’s three co-conspirators immediately returned
to Miami as heroes.
Posada had to be smuggled into
Miami a year later because he is a naturalized citizen of Venezuela, not a U.S.
citizen. He, too, was welcomed openly as a hero. Arrested on charges of
violating immigration laws, Posada continues to avoid murder charges here in
the United States. He had escaped from a Venezuelan prison in 1985 when he was
awaiting trial for the murder of those 73 people aboard that plane back in
1976. Since Posada surfaced in Miami, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez has
repeatedly asked for his extradition to face trial on those charges of murder.
The so-called Justice Department has made no response to that request.
Now Posada is charged with
perjury for lying to Immigration officials, and his trial keeps being postponed.
Perhaps the Justice Department hopes he dies before he tells what he knows
about the CIA as his lawyer has threatened that he will do if taken to trial.
Keeping him on the waiting-for-trial list provides some cover for the Justice
Department’s refusal to recognize requests for extradition.
Lawyers for the Cuban Five
continue to try to find some avenue of achieving some kind of justice in their
case, but in the United States it is perfectly legal to harbor terrorists while
imprisoning counterterrorists. Luis Posada and
Orlando Bosch walk free among terrorists in Miami while the Cuban Five remain
in prison.
Meanwhile, Cuba must continue
to defend itself against acts of terror by groups which include the following
partial list.
Alpha 66: Responsible
for 100s of continuing raids against Cuba and countless assassination plots
against Cuban leaders, especially Fidel Castro. In the 2007 documentary, “638
Ways to Kill Castro,” Miami businessman Antonio Veciana,
recruited in Cuba by the CIA in 1960 and one of the founders of Alpha 66 in
1961, brags about the times he was close to killing Castro. Comandos
F4, a split-off from Alpha 66 in 1994, concentrates on raids and trains in
the Everglades for invasion.
Comandos L: Founded in 1962. After a raid in which
shots were fired at a tourist hotel in Cuba, the head of Comandos
L, Tony Bryant, announced at a televised Miami news conference in January 1993
that they planned more raids against Cuban targets.
PUND (Democratic
National Unity Party): One of its main leaders, Frank Sturgis, was one of the Watergate
burglars arrested in 1972, leading to the revelations that brought down Nixon.
In 1994 when Cubans captured seven PUND members after they landed in Cuba and
shot to death a Cuban fisherman, PUND representatives in Miami boasted to the
press about plans for more attacks.
Omega 7:
Created in 1974, Omega 7 operated for years with impunity as its members murdered people who promoted dialogue with Cuba, in
New Jersey (Eulalio José Negrín)
and in Puerto Rico (Carlos Muñiz Varela), and carried
out bombing attacks. When Cuban UN diplomat Félix García
Rodríguez was shot to death in New York City in 1980, the FBI was forced to
arrest some Omega 7 terrorists because of the international outcry. The head of
Omega 7, Eduardo Arocena, carried out at least one
biological weapon attack; Arocena testified in his
murder trial that he took “some germs” to Cuba. Omega 7 was also involved in
drug trafficking. Arocena is the rare Cuban-American
terrorist who was actually tried, convicted and imprisoned on multiple counts
of murder and drug-dealing. Campaigning in Miami in 2008, Republican
presidential candidate John McCain and Connecticut Senator Joe Lieberman
indicated that Arocena would be pardoned if McCain
became president.
CORU
(Commanders of United Revolutionary Organizations) Organized by Orlando Bosch, Luis Posada,
and others in 1976 when George H.W. Bush was CIA director. In
addition to acts discussed in this article, Posada boasted to The New York Times that he masterminded a bombing
campaign against tourist sites in Havana in 1997. Both Bosch and Posada have
repeatedly tried to kill Fidel Castro.
CANF (Cuban American
National Foundation) The
Reagan Administration created CANF because it wanted a “respectable”
Cuban-American lobby to carry out Washington’s policy of trying to starve the
Cuban people into submission. Jorge Mas Canosa and
the other millionaires delivered money and Cuban-American votes to legislators
in Congress and throughout Florida and New Jersey while at the same time
receiving money from Congress through the National Endowment for Democracy.
CANF was able to create both the Torricelli
Act and the Helms-Burton ACT and guide them through Congress to
become the law of the land. In the same year, 1962, that CANF orchestrated the
Torricelli Law, it created its own unlawful paramilitary arm dedicated to
killing Fidel Castro and overthrowing the Cuban Government. Although CANF
maintained it was nonviolent, its support for violent acts of terrorism was
well-known. Luis Posada in his book, The
Paths of the Warrior, named Mas Canosa, Pepe
Hernández and Feliciano Foyo as financial supporters.
He told New York Times reporters about Mas Canosa’s
financial contributions to him. In 2006 an angry former member,
multimillionaire José Antonio Llama, explicitly exposed the covert arm. He
described how he and other CANF members had planned to assassinate Fidel Castro
in Venezuela in 1997, a plot for which they were arrested, tried, and
acquitted, thanks to the “prosecution’s” strategic decision not to use a
blatant confession.
Oh, yes, and then of course
there are these:
U.S. Congressional Acts: Representative
Torricelli (D-NJ) stated on October 20, 1993, that the purpose of the trade
embargo is to “wreak havoc on
that island.” The trade
embargo, fully established in 1962, tightened by the TORRICELLI ACT in 1992 and
tightened further by the HELMS-BURTON ACT of 1996, is a government-approved
campaign of terror. In 1999 Cuba filed a lawsuit charging the U.S. government
with killing 3,478 Cubans, wounding and disabling more than 2,000 others, and
costing Cuba $181.1 billion. The damages continue to mount.
CIA (U.S. Central
Intelligence Agency): Bay of
Pigs invasion of 1961; constant attacks and sabotage during the plans for
another “secret” invasion, Operation Mongoose, in 1962, leading directly to the
October Missile Crisis; constant covert activities, including assassinations,
since 1958 against Cuba and Latin American countries friendly to Cuba.
FBI (U.S. Federal Bureau
of Intelligence): According
to Fabián Escalante in his book, Executive Action: 634 Ways to Kill
Fidel Castro, the FBI plotted to kill Fidel Castro as early as 1958. The
FBI has promoted terrorism, including deliberate failure to prosecute many
known terrorists.
***
Historian Jane
Franklin is the
author of Cuba and the U.S. Empire: A Chronological History.
E-mail: JaneFranklin@hotmail.com