Cuban Exiles Wage War of Terror

By Frank Joyce, AlterNet. Posted August 16, 2006.

It wasn't Libya, Afghanistan, or any other Arab-based group that first blew up a commercial airplane. Al Qaida had nothing to do with it. That first attack, on Oct. 6, 1976, came when Cuban-American terrorists and mercenaries blew up a Cuban civilian airliner. All 73 on board went down to a fiery and gruesome death, including the teenage members of the Cuban fencing team returning from a competition in Venezuela.

This tacitly U.S.-supported terrorist crime never appears on the "history" list of incidents involving civilian airliners, at least not in the U.S. media. Why? Cognitive dissonance is one explanation. The syllogism goes like this: The United States is a good country. Terrorism is bad. The United States funds and protects terrorists. Uh-oh -- we certainly can't talk about that.

In Barbados, where the bomb was placed on the Cuban airliner, the mercenaries were tried and convicted for the crime and served time. But the planners and instigators of the plot, Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch, got away clean. Posada is today being protected by the U.S. government from an extradition demand by Venezuela, where the crime was planned. (In a delicious irony, the U.S. government's position is that he can't be extradited to Venezuela because he would be tortured there.) Over the objections of his own justice department, George H. W. Bush in effect pardoned Orlando Bosch. He is today a free man living in Miami where he gives gloating TV interviews about his role in blowing up the plane.

The Cuban airline bombing was anything but an isolated incident. On Sept. 4, 1997, as on other occasions, U.S.-sponsored terrorists set off bombs in Havana hotels and restaurants. This time, one killed a tourist from Italy, Fabio de Celmo. Over the years death and injury to civilians has come from thousands of other attacks carried out in Cuba and elsewhere by land, air and sea against villagers, fisherman, children, tourists and diplomats by terrorists based in Florida.

The Al Qaida-like network -- which includes Alpha 66, Omega 7, Brothers To The Rescue, and Commandos L and others -- is as active today as ever. Just last month, Commandos F-4 held a press conference in Miami to announce they had successfully carried out sabotage raids in Cuba in four different provinces. A few weeks earlier police raided the California home of Robert Ferro, a self-proclaimed member of Alpha 66. Police and federal agents seized 35 machine guns, 13 silencers, two short-barreled rifles, a live hand grenade, a rocket launcher tube and 89,000 rounds of ammunition. Santiago Alvarez and Osvaldo Mitat were busted about a year ago with a similar stash in Fort Lauderdale. The defense claimed by all three is that they were acting as members of organizations working with the full knowledge and support of the U.S. government.

These arrests, by the way, do not mean that the U.S. government is aggressively trying to contain these terrorists. The raids are about window-dressing and deniability. They are not about a genuine effort to stop the Cuban exile terrorists. On July 10 of this year the "Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba," headed by Condoleezza Rice, issued a long-promised report. It sets out U.S. plans to increase and intensify support for those trying to overthrow the government of Cuba. The version posted on the website is 93 pages long; the entire report is 450 pages. Most of it is "classified." The secrecy is not about protecting aid to dissidents in Cuba -- it's about protecting terrorists in Florida.

Enter the Cuban Five

Someone should make a movie about the Cuban Five -- Rene Gonzalez, Antonio Guerro, Fernando Gonzalez, Gerrardo Hernandez and Ramon Labinino. They are poets, pilots, engineers, artists, college graduates, husbands, sons, brothers, fathers, Cubans, Americans. But that's not why the movie.

The movie is about why they are in five different maximum security prisons in the United States. Two of them are American citizens by virtue of having been born in the United States. Their parents were refugees from a Cuban dictator: Fulgencio Batista. When Batista was deposed by the Castro-led Cuban revolution, they returned to Cuba to live and raise their children.

The Cuban Five volunteered to come to Florida in the mid-'90s for the purpose of becoming "eyes and ears" into the plans and activities of the Florida-based terrorist groups. The escalation of efforts by groups like Alpha 66 and Commandos L drove the timing of their mission. The terrorists were openly targeting Cuba's growing tourism industry, which was being expanded to offset the loss of aid to the Cuban economy from the former Soviet Union.

The Five succeeded in infiltrating some of the most dangerous groups, but in September of 1998 they were arrested by the FBI. In a harbinger of post-9/11 civil liberties erosions to come, they were denied bail. They were placed in solitary confinement, separated from each other and their families. Their attorneys were prevented from gaining access to the evidence to be used against them at their trial. They were charged with a raft of crimes, including allegations of "conspiracy."

None of the accusations alleged any violent acts on their part. The Five's monitoring activities had nothing to do with threatening the United States in any way. Their mission was to protect Cuba. The only way you could argue otherwise would be to concede that the terrorists were carrying out the official foreign policy of the United States.

Frank Joyce is a journalist and labor communications consultant.

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