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By Ángel Guerra Cabrera on May 21, 2020
The murder of Felix Garcia, in Queens, NY.
[su_dropcap style=”light” size=”4″]C[/su_dropcap]uban State Security has documented 581 acts of aggression in 41 countries against the island’s diplomatic personnel and buildings abroad. Here I am talking specifically about two that touched me personally. The high-powered bomb that exploded in the Cuban embassy in Lisbon around 5 p.m. when the young children of Cuban diplomats returning from school were entering the place. Like lightning it struck Adriana Corcho Calleja and Efrén Monteagudo Rodríguez, 35 and 33 years old respectively, officials of the diplomatic headquarters. The device was left next to the door of one of the departments that formed part of the Cuban embassy by an individual who entered the old building and left in a hurry.
That was April 22, 1976, four months after Cuban troops defeated a major attack carefully organized by the CIA against the nascent People’s Republic of Angola. The United States launched a powerful column of the racist South African army, numerous forces from neighboring Zaire and experienced white mercenaries against the young state. Realizing what was coming, Angolan President Agustino Neto requested Cuba’s support. I had met Adriana during a journalism assignment Lisbon during the Carnation Revolution and this made me shudder even more at the news of the terrorist attack. Very close to where the bomb exploded we had talked on more than one occasion and I was able to get an understanding of her revolutionary thinking, professional competence and solid character.
The first military defeat by Cuba in Angola – and even a much more resounding one in 1988 – infuriated the government of President Gerald Ford and in particular the CIA. Just six months after the crime in Lisbon and following another one with the bombing of the Cubana Airliner over Barbados killing 73, Fidel Castro said, “In recent months the U.S. government, resentful of Cuba’s contribution to the defeat suffered by the imperialists and racists in Africa, along with brutal threats of aggression, unleashed a series of terrorist activities against Cuba. That campaign has been intensifying for days and has been directed, fundamentally, against our diplomatic headquarters and our airlines.”
On September 11, 1979, Félix García, my friend and diplomat from the Cuban mission to the United Nations headquarters in New York, was on his way to a dinner in the Queens neighborhood, after having accompanied Chilean friends to an event to remember President Salvador Allende, who had been assassinated exactly six years earlier in a coup d’état orchestrated by the CIA, but he never reached his destination.
When his car stopped at a traffic light, the terrorist Pedro Remón, trained in this type of action by the US intelligence agency, fired a burst of shots at him from a motorcycle, ending his life. Never again would Felix light up my office at Bohemia magazine with his blithe Creole words and personal compassion.
Felix is the only case of a diplomat accredited to the United Nations who has been killed in New York. Remon claimed responsibility for the crime in calls to the media, but it was not until the late 1980s that he was tried and convicted by a U.S. court, when his bloody terrorist actions had begun to damage Washington’s interests.
By the way, as soon as he served his sentence he continued his terrorist activity against Cuba, inside and outside the United States, with absolute impunity.
 Posada Carriles at home, in front of some of his paintings. |
 Carriles in 1976, at the time of Cuban airliner explosion. “All communists are the same. All are bad, a form of evil.” |
 Posada (center) diminished by old age. Flanked on right by Antonio de la Cova, proudly wearing a t-shirt celebrating the Indonesian army, a longtime tool of US imperialism and one of the most criminal militaries in the world. |
 Posada (l) and Pedro Remón, in jail in Florida. Both proud, unrepentant, and treated like heroes. |
These two cases are among the most notable attacks perpetrated against Cuban headquarters and diplomatic officials, but blood has also flowed in many others, not only Cuban, but of people of other nationalities. Right here in Mexico, the same terrorist Pedro Remón took part in an attempted kidnapping, in 1976, of Daniel Ferrer Hernández, the Cuban consul in Mérida, in which the Cuban fishing technician Artagnan Díaz Díaz was murdered.
The history of terrorism against Cuba and, in particular, against its diplomatic headquarters, is a long one. But there is reason to believe that the fascist mafia in Miami and the cronies in the (dis)government of Donald Trump intend to encourage a return to such practices.
The United States continues to be complicit in the machine-gunning of the Cuban embassy in Washington on April 30. And yet not a word about such a serious event from the State Department seems to hide something unutterable. If this attack is not investigated and cleared up in accordance with the laws of the United States and the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations, it will set a terrible precedent.
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano, North America bureau
Addendum
[su_note note_color=”#eff6f7″ text_color=”#011115″ radius=”6″]AP, an American-controlled news agency, confirms, in essence, the above report. AP claims the assassins fired the fatal shots from a car, not a motorcycle. It’s obvious the US government could have easily snuffed out such terrorists activities against Cuba, instead of doing precisely the opposite, organising and facilitating them for several decades, and perhaps continuing to this day. But then again we know who the biggest criminals really are. [/su_note]
Three Indicted in Killing of Cuban Diplomat
Andres Garcia, Eduardo Losada-Fernandez and Pedro Remon, all alleged to be members of the terrorist group Omega 7, face mandatory life terms in prison if convicted of murdering the diplomat, federal prosecutors said Monday.
The indictment against them names Eduardo Arocena, the leader of Omega 7, as an unindicted co-conspirator. Arocena is serving a life term for ordering the murder of the diplomat, Felix Garcia-Rodriguez, a United Nations attache.
Remon, 45, of Miami; Losada-Fernandez, 48, of Newark, N.J.; and Garcia, 45, of Elizabeth, N.J., also are charged with conspiring to kill other Cuban diplomats including U.N. Ambassador Raul Roa-Kouri and to commit bombings from 1976 to 1980.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Michael Tabak said the three men have been jailed since 1982 for refusing to testify before a grand jury investigating Omega 7. He said they would be arraigned on the new charges within a week.
The Cuban diplomat was shot to death from a passing car Sept. 11, 1980. An anonymous caller to a New York radio station – Remon, according to the indictment – took responsibility in the name of Omega 7.
The bombings attributed to the group included attacks at the Cuban Mission to the United Nations, John F. Kennedy International Airport, Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, the Soviet Mission to the United Nations and the New York office of the Soviet airline Aeroflot. No one was killed, but the blasts injured several people, Tabak said.
Remon was charged separately with transporting a bomb from New Jersey to Montreal, where it exploded near the Cuban Consulate in 1980.
Additional documents
Assassin Pedro Remón in his own words: The long shadow of CIA-supported Cuban terrorism
Anti-Castro terrorist group Omega 7 member and Cuban diplomat assassin Pedro Remón Rodríguez interviewed (in Spanish) by anti-Castro journalist Pedro Corzo. It’s clear that Remon sees himself as a heroic fighter for freedom, as do many gusanos, against a “tyranny” that he argues “hijacked the revolution”. How Fidel Castro, a genuine revolutionary, highjacked the very revolution he led, is a rather oxymoronic way of looking at things. The thought that he willingly lent his skills as a combatant to a global criminal empire that only enslaved and exploited his people apparently never entered Remón’s mind. Which is unfortunate indeed, but such is the twisted nature of the reactionary vision of reality. The fanatical anticommunist mind is by definition a closed, poisoned mind immune to facts or reasoned argument. Like any extremist religion, it makes for a tragedy for all concerned. The whole history of the US relationship with revolutionary Cuba underscores the schizoid attitude of the US government, and its frequent two-faced hypocritical gyrations. On one hand, successive US administrations to this day have supported terrorist activities against the island. It is an open secret the CIA and the Pentagon, and other branches of the bloated US interventionist bureaucracy, provided training, weapons, logistical support and money to anti-Castro militants. (In a parallel case of Janusian hypocrisy, they did the same with Nicaragua, as the IranContra scandal showed the world.) On the other hand, from time to time, when the occasion required to show a semblance of judicial legitimacy, or when Cuban terrorists went beyond the parameters approved by their handlers, they have been momentarily repressed and given jail sentences, rarely commensurate with their crimes.
Anti-Castro exile accused of 1976 plane explosion dies at 90
HAVANA (Reuters) – Militant anti-Castro Cuban exile and former CIA operative Luis Posada Carriles, accused of masterminding the explosion of a Cuban airliner 40 years ago, died early on Wednesday in Florida at the age of 90, his attorney’s office said.
Luis Posada Carriles (R), 82, walks with his lawyers after leaving the court in El Paso, Texas January 10, 2011. Posada Carriles is on trial in an immigration case in which he is accused of lying on his entry to the United States. REUTERS/Gael Gonzalez.
Posada Carriles was considered a hero by some Cuban exiles for his attempts to topple Fidel Castro’s government following the 1959 revolution, while Communist-run Cuba called him a terrorist unjustly given haven by the United States. (Shooting down a civilian airliner is widely recognised as pure and simple cowardly act of terrorism, as it does not involve a genuine military target.)
He died in a U.S. veterans nursing home, 1-1/2 years after his arch-nemesis Castro died at the same age, his lawyer Arturo Hernandez said.
Posada Carriles had had surgery to remove cancerous nodules in his throat during that time, Hernandez said. He was also injured in a car accident.
“The biggest terrorist of this hemisphere died without paying his debts to justice or reparations to the victims,” wrote Sergio Alejandro Gomez, the international editor of Granma, the official newspaper of Cuba’s Communist Party, on Facebook.
“He died in …the United States, the country that trained him to lay bombs and attack the lives of hundreds of Cubans.”
For his generation of Cubans who went into exile as Castro turned their island into a one-party communist state and expropriated their businesses, Posada Carriles was an iconic figure, said Posada’s lawyer Hernandez.
“He was a patriot,” he said. “The priority he had in his life was bringing freedom to Cuba.”
Posada Carriles’ death is a painful reminder in Cuba of the 1976 plane crash that killed 73 people, as the country mourns the 111 who died last Friday in one of its worst air disasters ever.
Cuba has accused the United States of double standards in its war on terrorism for failing to make Posada Carriles face justice.
Trained by the CIA for its disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion to oust Castro in 1961, Posada Carriles was jailed in Venezuela for the 1976 Cuban airliner bombing but escaped in 1985.
Cuba also accused Posada Carriles of planning a wave of bomb blasts in Havana hotels in 1997 that killed an Italian tourist and of plotting to blow up Castro during a presidential summit in Panama in 2000.
“Groups like Omega 7 and Alpha 66 set off more bombs in Miami than they did in Havana,” LeoGrande said, referring to militant anti-Castro groups.
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This bloodsoaked monster is probably the most evil person on planet earth https://t.co/nGq2H1EPHt
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) April 9, 2020
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With roots in Camaguey, Cuba, Ángel Guerra Cabrera is a professor of politics & contemporary history at Casa Lamm in Mexico City. His essays are widely published in many leading progressive publications. He maintains a Facebook page here. (@aguerraguerra • Periodista, colaborador de La Jornada, profesor en Casa Lamm, latinoamericanista, romántico y rebelde con causa. Por una América Latina unida sin yugo yanqui.) [/su_box]
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