Cuba’s Real Commitment to Combating Terrorism

September 11, 2001, one news item monopolized headlines in media around the world, “The United States under attack.” Images of the Twin Towers in New York enveloped in clouds of smoke and dust became the symbol of a new era.

Author: Raúl Antonio Capote | informacion@granmai.cu

September 10, 2020 10:09:49

September 11, 2001, one news item monopolized headlines in media around the world, “The United States under attack.” Images of the Twin Towers in New York enveloped in clouds of smoke and dust became the symbol of a new era.

More than 3,000 people died in this sort of Moloch which the World Trade Center had become, an icon of finances and business.

The unfortunate event provided hawks just the pretext they needed to brandish their swords, sowing fear and death in the “dark corners of the world.” As former head of the CIA, General David Petraeus, said, “The war on terrorism will last generations.”

The masters of war - the same people who for years had sponsored terrorism as state policy against progressive countries, social movements, and left leaders around the world - in the ninth month of 2001, overnight became “leaders” of the struggle against this scourge of humanity. But the month has a history and Cubans victimized by this shameless policy remember other Septembers and other crimes.

September 11 of 1980, Félix García Rodríguez, a diplomat serving at the Cuban mission to the United Nations in the United States was driving down a New York City street, on his way to meet friends in Queens. Stopping at a red light, he was shot several times by a Mac-10, with silencer. The counterrevolutionary group Omega-7 took credit for the murder.

Earlier in the day, Félix and Chilean friends had recalled how President Salvador Allende courageously resisted the coup mounted by Augusto Pinochet.

This coup that took place on a September 11, seven years before the assassination of the Cuban diplomat, was planned and executed by military officers and politicians under the direction of the CIA, as part of the state terrorism strategy followed by the U.S. government in Latin America.

Also in September, but in 1997, a young Italian tourist was killed when a bomb exploded in Havana’s Copacabana Hotel, on orders from CIA collaborator Luis Posada Carriles.

The 681 proven and documented acts of terrorism committed in Cuba cost the lives of 3,478 women, men and children. Another 2,099 were injured and left incapacitated.

Our country has all the moral authority in the world to denounce the U.S. government as responsible for these acts.

The assault rifle attack on our embassy in Washington, this past April 30, and the federal government’s subsequent silence, not only serve to confirm the continuing implementation of this policy, that appears to have no end, but also the hypocrisy of those who in 2001 proclaimed themselves the sworn enemies of terrorism.