Legitimization and normalization of terror
By Jane Franklin
On Varadero Beach, a hail
of bullets fired from a speedboat hit their target, shooting up the
Hotel Melia, one of Cuba’s main resort hotels. A week later, the
Miami Herald reported
that it had received a “war communiqué” boasting that “On the
evening of October 7, 1992, Comandos L attacked a military objective
off the coast of the province of Matanzas, Cuba.” A tourist hotel
had become publicly — not secretly — a “military objective.”
And three months later, Tony Bryant, who headed Comandos L, boasted
on national TV at a Miami news conference of plans for more raids
against targets in Cuba, especially hotels. Warning tourists to stay
off the island, he declared, “From this point on, we’re at war.”
In fact, Washington had begun its War of Terror against Cuba in 1959.
Tony Bryant’s televised press conference merely exhibited how
legitimate and normal that War of Terror had become.
That year, 1992, with the
Soviet Union disintegrated, Washington could have seized an opening
for changing policy toward Cuba. Instead Congress tightened the trade
and travel bans with the Torricelli Act — one of the laws that is
part of the State of Siege, specifically aimed, in Torricelli’s own
words, to “wreak havoc on that island.” The Cuban American
National Foundation orchestrated the Torricelli Law at the same time
that it created its own unlawful paramilitary arm dedicated to
killing Fidel Castro and overthrowing the Cuban Government.
Terrorists understood that
by passing the Torricelli Law, Washington gave them a green light.
If arrested, they need not fear conviction. When Tony Bryant was
charged with possession and transport of firearms by a convicted
felon, Federal Judge James Lawrence King in Miami dismissed the
charges, deciding that “Bryant didn’t act like he committed a
crime.” The courts had become a cohort in the War of Terror.
The matrix for this
legitimization and normalization of terror was the plan for invasion
at the Bay of Pigs, combining the toxic mix of covert activities and
constant lies that have constituted U.S. policy toward Cuba ever
since.
In 1959 the State of Siege
began. Air raids repeatedly struck the sugar industry, mainstay of
the economy at that time. Others bombed Havana itself. Another
attacked a train full of passengers.
Cubans, on the receiving
end, experienced the deaths and destruction. But in the United
States, those attacks were discussed in secret memos among people
with security clearances on a need-to-know basis, developing an
addiction to the drama and the power of being among those who are
privy to the secrets.
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 various armed attacks and invasion. From this dynamic between
terrorists and their targets came two opposing agencies: On the one
hand, the army of terrorists based in the United States and on the
other, Cuba’s State Security Department or G-2. Cuba has no option
of sending its armed forces to invade the United States in order to
eliminate terrorist groups. Instead, G2 must 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.”
Who knew that in March
1960, President Eisenhower ordered CIA Director Allen Dulles to
organize Cuban émigrés for an invasion? Although a secret from most
Americans, it was found out by G-2 right away.
While G-2 had to fend off
assassins, the American people were kept in the dark about the CIA’s
far-reaching decision to recruit organized crime for help in killing
Fidel Castro before the invasion. Not until 1975 did that connection
become known when, in the wake of the Vietnam War, the Senate Select
Intelligence Committee and later the House Select Committee on
Assassinations conducted hearings that included testimony about the
recruitment of Mafia.
Richard Mervin Bissell
Jr., former Yale professor turned CIA chief of covert operations,
asked Col. Sheffield Edwards, director of the CIA’s Office of
Security, to locate someone to assassinate Prime Minister Castro.
Edwards relied on former FBI agent Robert Maheu, who recruited crime
bosses John Roselli, Sam Giancana and Santo Trafficante Jr.
Trafficante testified that he introduced Maheu, Giancana and Roselli
to some "very active" Cubans in Florida — perhaps the
origin of what Cuba calls the Miami Mafia.
Although plots to kill
Castro failed, the covert plots for invasion led to major overt
measures that have remained in effect. In January 1961, as part of
the invasion plan, Washington broke diplomatic relations with Havana
and imposed travel restrictions on Americans. But nobody was telling
Americans the truth about the changes. The Eisenhower Administration
was launching a process that became a way of life, a culture of
demonizing Cuba. Secrets and lies became the basis of beliefs and
policy.
After the invasion began
on April 15, with “softening-up” bombing raids, Prime Minister
Castro, at a funeral the next day for Cubans killed in those raids,
stated, "How these events help our people to educate
themselves!” Meanwhile, the American people were being told lies:
that the bombers were Cuban bombers flown by Cuban pilots rising up
against their government.
The pattern set by
President Eisenhower was continued by President Kennedy after the
defeat at the Bay of Pigs when he launched another secret plan for
invasion — Operation Mongoose. Once again, covert plans gave birth
to a major overt component of the War of Terror: In a January 18,
1962, secret memo, under the heading Economic
Warfare, CIA agent General Edward Lansdale
listed “plans for an embargo on Cuban trade.” Three weeks later
Lansdale’s plans became official policy. Again nobody was telling
Americans that the trade embargo was part of an invasion plan. People
still don’t understand the significance. Lansdale’s Economic
Warfare has continued at a cost to Cuba of
more than $93 billion and thousands of lives.
The target date of October
1962 for overthrowing the Cuban Government led directly to the
October Missile Crisis, almost resulting in nuclear war — the
ultimate CIA blowback. Cuba had announced repeatedly that a new
invasion was being planned, but somehow Washington, even after the
crisis was over, managed to conceal the connection between the
October Missile Crisis and Operation Mongoose. Cuba was further
demonized, and most Americans continue today to live in ignorance
about the cause of the Missile Crisis. The toxic mix of covert action
and lies persists.
The CIA-trained Cuban
terrorists created in the plans for the Bay of Pigs invasion became
major purveyors of this history of secrecy and lies. In December
1962, Cuba released more than a thousand prisoners of Brigade 2506,
the Bay of Pigs invaders. They joined thousands of 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. They controlled thousands
of Cuban operatives in a campaign of constant armed attacks,
sabotage, infiltration, propaganda, arson, and murder.
Some Bay of Pigs veterans
enrolled at Fort Benning for CIA training that gave them commissions
as Army lieutenants. Within the time frame of this forum, I’ll
follow briefly only one of these trained terrorists: Luis Posada, but
Posada had three important buddies at Fort Benning — Jorge Mas
Canosa, Orlando Bosch, and Félix Rodríguez — all of whom became
connected in some form or other to terrorism. Decades later, Luis
Posada told New York Times
reporters that “the CIA taught us everything — everything.” He
said, “They taught us explosives, how to kill, bomb, trained us in
acts of sabotage.”
Posada became a CIA
hit-man, specializing in trying to kill Fidel Castro during visits
abroad — for example, in Chile in 1971. But in 1976, those Senate
hearings resulted in a report that the Ford Administration knew would
recommend that the CIA stop assassinating people around the world. 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.
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 plot came in October 1976, when
Posada and Bosch arranged the 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.
Finally, just last month,
Posada was charged in El Paso, Texas — not Miami — with felony
perjury for lying to an Immigration Judge by denying that he had
arranged, in 1997, for a Salvadoran, Raúl Cruz León, to take
explosives to Cuba to set off bombs in hotels and restaurants in
Havana. Those bombs led to more death and destruction.
But Posada is charged with
perjury and not murder, and the Justice Department persists in not
extraditing him to Venezuela for trial on 73 charges of murder aboard
that civilian airliner.
In 1998, the FBI went to
Havana where Cuban officials gave them reams of information gathered
by Cuban agents about terrorists in Florida. But instead of arresting
the terrorists, the FBI arrested the Cubans who had gathered the
evidence. Now known as the Cuban Five — Gerardo Hernández, Ramón
Labañino, Antonio Guerrero, Fernando González, and René González
— were tried and convicted in Miami and remain imprisoned, two with
life terms and one with two life terms. In the United States, it is
legal to harbor terrorists and to send counterterrorists to prison.
I keep thinking of the
point made about the Cuban Five by then-President Fidel Castro in
2005. He said, “The most tragic aspect of all this for the U.S.
people is that while [Héctor] Pesquera [the head of the FBI in Miami
at that moment of the Cuban Five trial] 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
continued their work and uncovered another plot to kill Castro in the
year 2000. As Fabián Escalante has meticulously documented in his
book, Executive Action: 634 Ways to Kill Fidel
Castro, the CIA started these attempts in
1959 while the FBI started even before that, in 1958, while Castro
was still in the Sierras. Most have gone unnoticed, but President
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 Posada and his 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.
When Posada was pardoned
and smuggled into Miami, he was welcomed as a hero into Miami’s
community of terrorists. Fund-raisers are being held to pay his legal
costs. The normal way of life treats terrorists as heroes. In Cuba,
for half a century, the normal way of life has been a struggle to
defeat terrorism.
This paper was
presented at the conference, "The Measure of a Revolution: Cuba,
1959-2009" in Kingston, Canada, by writer and researcher Jane
Franklin.
