6-10-05, 8:53am

From Granma

TERRORISTS organized and financed by the CIA against Cuba did not hesitate, not even with respect to the damages and death they caused to the people and interests of the U.S. and other countries. Over nearly 30 years, more than half of such terrorist acts were carried out inside the United States itself, like the bazooka attack on the United Nations building.

Important contributions regarding these aspects were made during a panel discussion entitled 'Terrorism: the Miami connection' whose speakers included Cuban doctor Manuel Hevia; Argentine journalist and researcher Stella Calloni; Venezuelan journalist and writer Alicia Herrera, author of the book Pusimos la Bomba…¿ y qué? (We Placed the Bomb… So What?), an exceptional testimony to the sabotage of the Cuban passenger plane over Barbados; and Colombian journalist and researcher Hernando Calvo Ospina. Hevia also referred to the explosion of the French merchant ship La Coubre in the Port of Havana, killing 101 Cuban and French workers.

He revealed that President Eisenhower made a covert action plan proposed by the CIA into an official secret policy, and organized a domestic mercenary opposition, putting within its reach in Cuba hundreds of tons of explosives and weapons. According to US declassified documents, this resulted in 110 dynamite attacks, 200 detonated bombs, 950 fires and six train derailments in under 6 months before April of 1961, not counting human losses.

It was state terrorism that authorized the CIA to assassinate our main leader and created an executive body and secret program to physically eliminate foreign political leaders considered hostile to the United States, he noted. The mercenary Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 was part of that plan, as was the far-reaching subversion plot known as Operation Mongoose between 1962 and 1963, which caused dozens of innocent deaths, thousands of acts of sabotage and created pretexts for a US military invasion. As part of his accusations, Hevia noted the US terror policy of starving the Cuban people to death, still being applied with more force than ever. In that sense, he mentioned the biological warfare that killed children and elderly people, and has caused untold damage to the country’s economy.

He also mentioned the war over the radio waves from the U.S, which openly incites sabotage, murder and betrayal of the homeland.

During the early years of the Cuban Revolution, he recounted, the US government armed and fostered 299 groups of bandits and criminals in the Cuban mountains, causing 549 deaths and thousands of injuries, and Cuba emerged victorious and strengthened from that struggle.

During another part of his speech, Hevia affirmed that the US government had created a monster, a powerful mercenary army trained on its bases in Nicaragua and Panama – before the Bay of Pigs – in Fort Benning and in the Florida keys, on the orders of the CIA station in Miami, which with just over 250 officers and 2,000 Cuban-born agents, trained another 800 in the most refined methods of terrorism and assassination. He denounced how they were used as advisors to pro-Yankee regimes in Latin America, on counter-insurgency teams, in mercenary adventures in Asia and Africa, and how they were used in the murkiest operations on our continent, such as the assassination of the unforgettable Che Guevara in Bolivia; Operation Condor; Iran-Contra, and others.

Those Cuban-born soldiers of fortune constituted their own violent, fascist bands and groups based in Miami, New Jersey and New York. That is how they converted anti-Cuban terrorism into a profitable business, given carte blanche for their crimes. In exchange, old Bastista followers, embezzlers and torturers, transformed into 'honorable' Cuban-American businessmen and politicians, consolidated themselves into allies of the ultra-right and the Bush clan.

In those days the United States tolerated actions against Cuba, being careful not to publicly be seen as involved in acts of terrorism, but tolerating and contributing resources and money to that end, and secretly giving its support via the CIA.

Hevia noted that a large number of these terrorist crimes were carried out by the Miami mafia with the U.S. itself and in other countries.

After Cuba, the United States has been the largest target of terrorist acts perpetrated by anti-Cuban groups based within its own territory. Giving further details, Hevia explained that from 1959 to 1998, out of a total of 560 acts of terror committed abroad by these neo-fascist, anti-Cuban groups, 296 occurred in the U.S. He announced that in 1968 alone, Orlando Bosch committed 69 terrorist acts in that country, particularly planting bombs against Cuban interests. And between 1968 and 1974, these groups carried out 201 acts of terror in the Americas and in Europe using explosives. The list of terrorist acts became longer in subsequent years, and the CIA grouped together terrorist organizations under the so-called CORU; later, the crime over Barbados was committed, as was the murder of Orlando Letelier and General Prats, along with acts of terror in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Canada, Peru, Bahamas, Colombia, Venezuela, Costa Rica, Jamaica, Chile and Argentina, among other countries. Hevia made special emphasis on the links between these groups with the Pinochet dictatorship and Operation Condor, criminal acts in which Luis Posada Carriles actively participated.

THE U.S. KNEW ABOUT THE PLOT AGAINST THE CUBAN PASSENGER PLANE

Ricardo Alarcón de Quesada, president of the National Assembly of People’s Power, demonstrated with clear evidence that the CIA and FBI were fully aware of first, the organization and then the details of the explosion of the Cuban passenger plane over Barbados in 1976.

In defining its cover-up policy toward Posada Carriles, author of the horrendous crime along with Orlando Bosch, Alarcón commented that the emperor (George W. Bush) is naked, given that he has no more clothes to hide behind. He added that he has taken apart the UN Security Council resolution and the Montreal Convention, introduced by the U.S. itself against attacks on civil aviation.

Later on, he said, 'We are not in this struggle for our case alone, but also for those experienced by our brothers and sisters in the U.S., with the attack on La Guardia Airport in New York, in which 13 people died and more than 80 suffered serious injuries, described as one of the main terrorist actions of the 20th century, and which appeared under a very plain signature: The Condor.'

Great interest was also aroused in the testimony presented by Martín Almada, a key individual in the revelation of the Archives of Horror; Chilean Carmen Hertz; and Uruguayan Samuel Bixen, as well as the experiences of Chilean Ernesto Carmona.

They revealed that the flight of the Condor, although it took off much earlier, began officially in Chile, stimulated and encouraged by the United States, in a meeting attended by high-ranking military official from the Pinochet regime, as well as from those of Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay and Paraguay.

However, the Archives of Terror were found at the end of 1992, just 20 days after a judge ordered a prison sentence for General Alejandro Fretes Dávalos, described by Almada as condor No. 1 in Paraguay. In the famous archives, they found nearly 400 orders for arrest and torture decreed by that official.

Extremely emotional remarks were heard from Hebe de Bonafini, one of the leaders of the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo, who every Thursday for more than 28 years meet in that central square in the Argentine capital to demand the whereabouts of their children who disappeared under the military dictatorship.

'At the time we didn’t know anything, not even if our children were involved in the struggle. Later, we began to hear about Operation Condor, and we began to investigate. We learned that the repressors were trained at the School of the Americas, organized by the United States to combat revolutionaries, and that the Argentine Anti-Communist Alliance had been formed to kill our children.

'In our country, 64 concentration camps were operating, because they thought they were terrorists. All instigated by the United States, just as they have done with Iraq, where they are trying to do away with the whole people.

'We are proud of having revolutionary children, and that is why we vindicate them. We mothers are not going to abandon the struggle, because while there is still a single child who dies of hunger, there is no democracy. The opposite is the truth in Cuba, where no child dies of hunger,' she concluded.