Five Decades of Terror against Cuba

One of my first journalistic jobs was interviewing Nancy, one of the thousands of Cuban victims of the political terror brewing against Cuba from the U.S. territory. I visited her home, and she showed me the irreparable damage caused to one of her feet by the murderous bullets fired from a U.S. pirate boat, which, during the early morning hours, fired shots at the coastal town of Boca de Sama in the municipality of Banes Holguin.

This was the first time that I felt the horrors of the nearly five decades of terror against the island, resulting from “terrorist ties to exiled-anti-Cuban-CIA-American authorities” by way of hired goons, foundations born from the enrichment of criminal groups, plans of attack and assassinations.

I was a girl when, through the media, all of Cuba knew about the crime of Barbados. Oct. 6 of this year was the 34-year anniversary of the brutal attack that took the lives of 73 people, including young members of the national fencing team who were on board the Cuban airliner that was blown up over the coast of this Caribbean island.

So I suffered with my people the pain of death and helplessness before impunity; I became aware of the nature of this evil and of the hatred for Cuba and its revolution that the perpetrators felt, including Luis Faustino Posada Carriles, someone who I know today stands out as one of the biggest criminals in the Western hemisphere and who drags behind him hundreds of dead and wounded, bereaved families and orphans.

In memory of this terrible event — the perpetrators of which remain free and in openly criminal activity — I reread the book “Posada Carriles, Four Decades of Terror” (Editora Politica, 2007). This book by Jean-Guy Allard, a Canadian journalist based in Cuba, reveals the criminal history of this CIA agent from his recruitment for the failed Bay of Pigs attack in 1961 to his illegal entry into the United States in 2004.

In these pages one may come to know the dehumanizing nature of this man who “kills with a smile on his lips” and the documentation of moments in the criminal life of the dangerous murderer, such as details of the preparation for, and the execution of, the La Havana hotel bombings in 1997 to disrupt tourism in the country, and the testimony of attorney Rosalba Álvarez regarding the murder of her father, Ramón Antonio Álvarez, the commander of Ground Zero, a Venezuelan revolutionary organization, among others.

These pages report that there is not an absence of accusations of the U.S. government — the creator of these monsters, which keeps the Cuban Five fighters prisoners in its jails — to reveal the actions of those who, like Posada, are directed to mutilate people like Nancy or to take the lives of others, like Ramón Antonio, with the impunity that is guaranteed to those who now hold Ramón, Antonio, Fernando, Gerardo and René in unfair captivity.