Friday, October 6, 2006 marked some thirty years since the bombing of a Cubana Airlines flight 455 over the Caribbean. History will recall that at 12.23 pm on October 6, 1976 an explosion shook the Cubana de Aviacion DC-8 within 8 minutes after it took off from Seawell International Airport in Barbados. The aircraft, engulfed in flames, fell into the sea within five minutes. All 73 persons on board perished.
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This was a clear act of terrorism. Several members of the US Congress, many years after, wrote a letter to the US President George W Bush identifying CIA–trained Cuban exile Luis Posada Carriles, a terrorist living in the USA and someone implicated in the bombing of the Cuban plane which started from a plot in Caracas, Venezuela where the airplane first lifted off. Posada who was also implicated in the assassination in Washington of Chilean Minister of Government Orlando Letiler in Sept. 1976 and in a plot to plant a bomb in November 1980 at the University of Panama’s Conference Hall where Fidel Castro was going to deliver a speech, is presently seeking asylum in the US after efforts to place him elsewhere by the US State Department have been rejected by Canada, Mexico and Costa Rica
The commemoration of the dastardly bombing act in Barbados did not pass unnoticed at the launch of a book by the Jamaica Cuban Friendship Society on October 6, 2006 at the Edna Manley College of the Visual and Performing Arts. The book entitled Cuba-47 years of 9/11 was launched on the very day of the 30th anniversary of this evil act by a reactionary cabal of Cuban exiles.
The book chronicles a litany of covert terrorist acts against the Cuban revolution, the Cuban people and their economy starting with the Eisenhower administration of the late 50’s, the Bay of Pigs Invasion through to the blow up by the CIA in the Havana harbour of the French steamer, La Coubre, that left 100 people dead; the murder of a Cuban diplomat, Felix Garcia at a traffic light intersection in New York in 1980; biological warfare such as swine flu that led to the slaughter of 500,000 pigs in Cuba and the bombing of hotels in the 1990s.
The gathering of friends, artistes and sympathizers resolved to continue the struggle to free Five Cuban Heroes still held in US prison on charges of espionage. The question being asked is why the US system imprisoned those who fought against terrorism--The US Court of Appeals dismissed as farcical the trial of the five in Miami and has ordered a retrial. The audience heard from Irma Gonzales, the daughter of Rene Gonzales who is one of the five still incarcerated and still being denied access by the family. The Cuban ambassador Gisela Garcia Rivera brought a brief message. President of the Jamaica Cuba Friendship Association, Dr Lorenzo Gordon, outlined the achievements of the Cuban revolution. MC of the occasion, Russell Bell, kept the programme moving.
The evening activity was brought o a close by trombonist Dean Fraser and congo drum player, KCOB Steve Golding, who had the audience on its feet rocking to his rendition of Paul Simon’s “Diamonds on the soul of your shoe.”
By Basil Waite
