The Naked and the Un-Dead
Common Sense
John Maxwell
Havana, Cuba. Friday: For anyone who might feel queasy at killing a cockroach, the words and the images are more than disturbing: they begin to remodel one's view of 'human nature' itself.
Even though we know, in Jamaica, that people kill other people at the rate of two dozen a week, nothing can prepare us for the sight and sound of Orlando Bosch - a Cuban-born professional murderer, attempting to justify his part in killing a planeload of innocents off the coast of Barbados 30 years ago.
To Bosch they all deserved to die. The members of a Korean trade mission were, to him, evil allies of Fidel Castro; the teenaged Cuban fencing team was fair game because they were 'niggers' - teenagers who had won every fencing medal at the Pan American Games and were taking the medals home to present to Castro because "he had been so good to them".
The Guyanese students on their way to medical school in Cuba deserved to die because "Bishop (sic) was then president of Guyana" and so on.
It was worse to hear the stories of the survivors of the United States' four decades war against Cuba. Mothers awoke to the sound of gunfire to find their children's shredded bodies beside them, the young girl who had dreamt of growing up to wear high heels awoke to find her feet amputated by a 50 calibre machine gun bullet; the survivor of the sabotage of the ammunition ship La Coubre in Havana harbour - when hundreds died - awoke to find himself covered by human body parts.
And what could prepare you for the story of Hebe de Bonafini who has spent almost every day for the last 26 years with other mothers in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, Argentina, calling for justice for their children, tortured, murdered and 'disappeared'.
Bosch (left) and Posada Carriles. planned and executed the bombing of a Cubana Airlines plane on October 6, 1976
Bonafini lost one son to the murderers of the state, then another, then her house was burnt down; one of her compatriots disappeared, then another; Susanna, Estela and Mariposa, because they insisted on going to the Plaza de Mayo to demand justice.
And then she met the plausible young lieutenant who came ostensibly to give comfort but who was in reality a spy and a murderer himself. The mothers were terrified. Somehow they found the courage to continue. They read American-produced manuals of torture approved by the US State Department and the CIA.
One manual even instructed torturers in the kidnapping of children to terrorise the population. Pregnant women were murdered; babies and children of murdered mothers taken from them and given to their torturers and high officials of state, to be reared as anti-communist activists.
And the mothers read the manuals and learned in excruciating detail of the obscene horrors their children had been made to suffer, all in the name of anti-Communism and "Operation Condor".
"Operation Condor" was the name of a US-sponsored programme of terrorist murder, torture and 'disappearance' intended to cleanse Latin America of socialists and communists and revolutionaries and whoever got in the way of their crusade.
Operation Condor murdered Orlando Letelier, President Allende's foreign minister, seeking justice in Washington for his murdered leader. Condor murdered Ronnie Moffitt, Letelier's American secretary, blown up in the same fireball Condor made of Letelier's car. Condor killed Chilean generals Orlando Leighton in Rome and Carlos Prats in Argentina, because they were known to be loyal to the oaths they had sworn to protect Chile.
More than 3,000 friends of Cuba are in Havana, hearing evidence, giving testimony, intended to pressure the US to do the decent thing - to surrender Luis Posada Carriles to a properly constituted Venezuelan court to answer charges that he engineered the mass murder of 73 people in a Cubana Airlines plane off the coast of Barbados on October 6, 1976.
The Government and people of Cuba insist that they do not want revenge, only justice. They take President Bush seriously when he says that if you are not against terrorism, then you are a terrorist, or that he who shelters a terrorist is a terrorist himself.
Last week, the Cubans exposed a whole panorama of terrorism. As they pointed out, they have been terrorised for 46 years, ever since Castro, Che Guevara, Camilo Cienfuegos and Juan Almeida led the 26th of July movement in its three-year-long guerrilla war against the bloody tyranny of Fulgencio Batista.
Batista's henchmen presented to Haydee Santamaria, on a plate, the eyes of her murdered brother Abel. Today, nearly half-a-century later, the Cuban people are facing the same enemies, using the same methods to frighten them out of their freedom and rob them of their dignity.
In 1960, I was arrested in Havana's Parque Central. I was taking pictures of the young children of Juventud Rebelde (a sort of junior cadet corps) marching in the Parque Central.
A week or so earlier, Life magazine had published a spread on the same troop of Juventud Rebelde, drilling in the same park. The pictures had been taken by a Black American photographer. I was released to great jubilation when the police discovered that I was a British subject: "Ingles! Ingles!" they shouted when I found a UN temporary Press pass from the year before.
I had gone to Cuba at my own expense to find out about this Cuban revolution which was creating so many waves in North America. Everybody I knew was against my trip. Wills Isaacs, then minister of trade and industry, offered me a year on an Israeli kibbutz if I would give up my 'dangerous' plan.
In Cuba I found teenagers teaching their elders to read, I found the army leading construction brigades hand assembling prefabricated concrete houses to replace the 'bohios' (thatched huts) in Pinar del Rio. I saw and heard Fidel and Che at a million-strong meeting in the Plaza de la Revolucion and interviewed Carlos Rafael Rodriquez. I learned about the Agrarian reform.
I met former prostitutes who rejoiced in the fact that Fidel had freed them from bondage, teachers who had previously 'rented' their jobs from soldiers, milicianos and milicianas intent on creating a new Cuba. Right in front of the National Capitol was a huge sign advertising Coca Cola. Inside, the Capitol had been transformed into the Ministry for the Recovery of Stolen National Property.
The workers were militant. At Cuba's biggest daily newspaper, Diario de La Marina, the workers insisted on inserting 'coletillas' - brief disclaimers attached to anti-Castro propaganda reports. The management resisted; the Government intervened, the paper was taken over. Freedom of the Press, the Americans said, was dead in Cuba.
The night I arrived in Cuba, bandits sped down the Prado spraying machine gunfire indiscriminately. About that time, signs produced by the US Embassy began appearing on the houses of those more loyal to the US than to their own country: "This building is under the protection of the United States of America."
Like magic, new signs sprouted the next day: "This house is under the protection of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of the Republic of Cuba."
"We are no Communist, we are Humanist," the people told me then. Policemen could not be seen in bars. Pregnant women were told to go see their doctors every six weeks. Most Cuban doctors had deserted to the US. The Government began a crash programme to train doctors.
Nowadays, every city block has its own doctor, its own clinic. Thousands of Cuban doctors and nurses and teachers work in countries all over the developing world and Cuban biotechnology is among the world's best.
The Cubans estimate that the United States campaigns, not including the embargo, have cost them more than 3,000 lives and $65 billion. The embargo has cost them another $79 billion. Despite this punishment, the Cubans' education and health services are among the best in the world, and rates of crime and HIV/AIDS are practically undetectable.
The odds of getting mugged in Cuba are probably about the same as in Greenland. In all the words spoken at this conference, as harrowing and gut-wrenching as they have been, the most potent have been those of the president of the National Assembly, Ricardo Alarcon.
Alarcon, in his speech, quoted only official documents of the United States provided under the Freedom of Information Act.
These documents contain explosive information about the role of the US in terrorism in Latin America.
One wonders what the US Press, in its magisterial freedom, will make of them. Among other things the documents witness:
They infiltrated the Cuban Mafia in Miami and learned of plots to blow up aircraft. Their information was sent by Cuba to the proper authorities in the USA as required under the Montreal Convention. Instead of arresting the plotters, the US arrested the informants and sentenced them to long terms in jail, at huge distances from their families and under conditions which amount to torture.
While the Miami police were busy rounding up the Cubans and framing them for espionage, several gentlemen from Saudi Arabia and elsewhere were undergoing flight training at airfields nearby, for a mission that would shake the world.
John Maxwell
Havana, Cuba. Friday: For anyone who might feel queasy at killing a cockroach, the words and the images are more than disturbing: they begin to remodel one's view of 'human nature' itself.
Even though we know, in Jamaica, that people kill other people at the rate of two dozen a week, nothing can prepare us for the sight and sound of Orlando Bosch - a Cuban-born professional murderer, attempting to justify his part in killing a planeload of innocents off the coast of Barbados 30 years ago.
To Bosch they all deserved to die. The members of a Korean trade mission were, to him, evil allies of Fidel Castro; the teenaged Cuban fencing team was fair game because they were 'niggers' - teenagers who had won every fencing medal at the Pan American Games and were taking the medals home to present to Castro because "he had been so good to them".
The Guyanese students on their way to medical school in Cuba deserved to die because "Bishop (sic) was then president of Guyana" and so on.
It was worse to hear the stories of the survivors of the United States' four decades war against Cuba. Mothers awoke to the sound of gunfire to find their children's shredded bodies beside them, the young girl who had dreamt of growing up to wear high heels awoke to find her feet amputated by a 50 calibre machine gun bullet; the survivor of the sabotage of the ammunition ship La Coubre in Havana harbour - when hundreds died - awoke to find himself covered by human body parts.
And what could prepare you for the story of Hebe de Bonafini who has spent almost every day for the last 26 years with other mothers in the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos Aires, Argentina, calling for justice for their children, tortured, murdered and 'disappeared'.
Bosch (left) and Posada Carriles. planned and executed the bombing of a Cubana Airlines plane on October 6, 1976
Bonafini lost one son to the murderers of the state, then another, then her house was burnt down; one of her compatriots disappeared, then another; Susanna, Estela and Mariposa, because they insisted on going to the Plaza de Mayo to demand justice.
And then she met the plausible young lieutenant who came ostensibly to give comfort but who was in reality a spy and a murderer himself. The mothers were terrified. Somehow they found the courage to continue. They read American-produced manuals of torture approved by the US State Department and the CIA.
One manual even instructed torturers in the kidnapping of children to terrorise the population. Pregnant women were murdered; babies and children of murdered mothers taken from them and given to their torturers and high officials of state, to be reared as anti-communist activists.
And the mothers read the manuals and learned in excruciating detail of the obscene horrors their children had been made to suffer, all in the name of anti-Communism and "Operation Condor".
"Operation Condor" was the name of a US-sponsored programme of terrorist murder, torture and 'disappearance' intended to cleanse Latin America of socialists and communists and revolutionaries and whoever got in the way of their crusade.
Operation Condor murdered Orlando Letelier, President Allende's foreign minister, seeking justice in Washington for his murdered leader. Condor murdered Ronnie Moffitt, Letelier's American secretary, blown up in the same fireball Condor made of Letelier's car. Condor killed Chilean generals Orlando Leighton in Rome and Carlos Prats in Argentina, because they were known to be loyal to the oaths they had sworn to protect Chile.
More than 3,000 friends of Cuba are in Havana, hearing evidence, giving testimony, intended to pressure the US to do the decent thing - to surrender Luis Posada Carriles to a properly constituted Venezuelan court to answer charges that he engineered the mass murder of 73 people in a Cubana Airlines plane off the coast of Barbados on October 6, 1976.
The Government and people of Cuba insist that they do not want revenge, only justice. They take President Bush seriously when he says that if you are not against terrorism, then you are a terrorist, or that he who shelters a terrorist is a terrorist himself.
Last week, the Cubans exposed a whole panorama of terrorism. As they pointed out, they have been terrorised for 46 years, ever since Castro, Che Guevara, Camilo Cienfuegos and Juan Almeida led the 26th of July movement in its three-year-long guerrilla war against the bloody tyranny of Fulgencio Batista.
Batista's henchmen presented to Haydee Santamaria, on a plate, the eyes of her murdered brother Abel. Today, nearly half-a-century later, the Cuban people are facing the same enemies, using the same methods to frighten them out of their freedom and rob them of their dignity.
In 1960, I was arrested in Havana's Parque Central. I was taking pictures of the young children of Juventud Rebelde (a sort of junior cadet corps) marching in the Parque Central.
A week or so earlier, Life magazine had published a spread on the same troop of Juventud Rebelde, drilling in the same park. The pictures had been taken by a Black American photographer. I was released to great jubilation when the police discovered that I was a British subject: "Ingles! Ingles!" they shouted when I found a UN temporary Press pass from the year before.
I had gone to Cuba at my own expense to find out about this Cuban revolution which was creating so many waves in North America. Everybody I knew was against my trip. Wills Isaacs, then minister of trade and industry, offered me a year on an Israeli kibbutz if I would give up my 'dangerous' plan.
In Cuba I found teenagers teaching their elders to read, I found the army leading construction brigades hand assembling prefabricated concrete houses to replace the 'bohios' (thatched huts) in Pinar del Rio. I saw and heard Fidel and Che at a million-strong meeting in the Plaza de la Revolucion and interviewed Carlos Rafael Rodriquez. I learned about the Agrarian reform.
I met former prostitutes who rejoiced in the fact that Fidel had freed them from bondage, teachers who had previously 'rented' their jobs from soldiers, milicianos and milicianas intent on creating a new Cuba. Right in front of the National Capitol was a huge sign advertising Coca Cola. Inside, the Capitol had been transformed into the Ministry for the Recovery of Stolen National Property.
The workers were militant. At Cuba's biggest daily newspaper, Diario de La Marina, the workers insisted on inserting 'coletillas' - brief disclaimers attached to anti-Castro propaganda reports. The management resisted; the Government intervened, the paper was taken over. Freedom of the Press, the Americans said, was dead in Cuba.
The night I arrived in Cuba, bandits sped down the Prado spraying machine gunfire indiscriminately. About that time, signs produced by the US Embassy began appearing on the houses of those more loyal to the US than to their own country: "This building is under the protection of the United States of America."
Like magic, new signs sprouted the next day: "This house is under the protection of the Revolutionary Armed Forces of the Republic of Cuba."
"We are no Communist, we are Humanist," the people told me then. Policemen could not be seen in bars. Pregnant women were told to go see their doctors every six weeks. Most Cuban doctors had deserted to the US. The Government began a crash programme to train doctors.
Nowadays, every city block has its own doctor, its own clinic. Thousands of Cuban doctors and nurses and teachers work in countries all over the developing world and Cuban biotechnology is among the world's best.
The Cubans estimate that the United States campaigns, not including the embargo, have cost them more than 3,000 lives and $65 billion. The embargo has cost them another $79 billion. Despite this punishment, the Cubans' education and health services are among the best in the world, and rates of crime and HIV/AIDS are practically undetectable.
The odds of getting mugged in Cuba are probably about the same as in Greenland. In all the words spoken at this conference, as harrowing and gut-wrenching as they have been, the most potent have been those of the president of the National Assembly, Ricardo Alarcon.
Alarcon, in his speech, quoted only official documents of the United States provided under the Freedom of Information Act.
These documents contain explosive information about the role of the US in terrorism in Latin America.
One wonders what the US Press, in its magisterial freedom, will make of them. Among other things the documents witness:
- Luis Posada Carriles for most of the last half century has been a CIA asset, trained, supported and protected by the CIA;
- Orlando Bosch was involved in the assassination of Orlando Letelier; that he had boasted to that effect at a fund-raising dinner in Caracas and that those present drank a toast to the murder of Letelier;
- the US Government knew, three months before the event, that Orlando Bosch and Posada Carriles were planning to blow up a Cuban plane in the air;
- Bosch and Posada, with Lugo and Hernandez, planned and executed the bombing and reported back to the US to that effect;
- Bosch and Posada (then head of DISIP - the Venezuelan Secret Service) had plans to leave Venezuela after the bombing and that Henry Kissinger, then national security adviser to President Ford, was aware of the facts and that the CIA was attempting to get him out;
- the United States intervened to get official Salvadoran identity papers for Posada Carriles who then became national security adviser to the Salvadorean Government;
- in 1992, Posada Carriles spent six-and-a-half hours in the US Embassy in Tegucigalpa, Honduras;
- A bomb exploded at la Guardia Airport in New York - the most atrocious attack until then, in the USA. The perpetrator was Orlando Otero Hernandez, eventually identified as the culprit while he was in Chile with Bosch as the guest of Pinochet. He got eight years in prison for the atrocity.
They infiltrated the Cuban Mafia in Miami and learned of plots to blow up aircraft. Their information was sent by Cuba to the proper authorities in the USA as required under the Montreal Convention. Instead of arresting the plotters, the US arrested the informants and sentenced them to long terms in jail, at huge distances from their families and under conditions which amount to torture.
While the Miami police were busy rounding up the Cubans and framing them for espionage, several gentlemen from Saudi Arabia and elsewhere were undergoing flight training at airfields nearby, for a mission that would shake the world.
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