Cuba and Terrorism

My friend Carlo, an Italian blogger at I Diavoli Neri, has painstakingly translated the following post from Italian to English and has asked that I cross post it here. Carlo focuses on terrorism and his European perspective would be beneficial to Americans. Patriotic Italians are watching their beloved country disappear... it should be a cautionary tale for all of us here in the United States.... Visit Carlo often.

My apologies to Carlo for not getting this posted sooner. He and his colleagues put a lot of research into this piece. If you are interested I can forward several links and books that were used to write this post.

“The people and the governments of Iran and Cuba can put the United States of America on their knees.”

International terrorism is an evil that attacks without making distinctions. It is a tie that joins those that use death and destruction as instruments to seed terror among the people whom they want to subdue. The targets are usually innocent victims used in order to leave tangible proof of their ability to bring damage. Contemporary terrorism is an effort aimed to tear apart and destroy the established democratic order. Its power is based on the degree of coldness with which it brings to term the crime. We are not speaking about isolated groups of disconnected actions, but of a solidly structured international net in which various keys of reading the phenomenon can be found. Masked by ideologies or religions, they share deep nexuses with the most ominous of the feelings: hatred.

“Above all we must maintain our hatred alive and feed it until the paroxysm”, these are the words of the guerrilla Ernesto Che Guevara shortly before his death. His message of goodbye indicated the use of hatred as an instrument to fight with. “Intransigents hatred towards the enemy takes the human being beyond his limits and makes him a cold and selective machine in order to kill”.

This macabre message became the official creed of every Cuban sent to fight in international wars and the philosophy of every contemporary group of guerrillas.

During the last 40 years, international terrorism has had an ominous godfather in the figure of Fidel Castro.

The president of the United States, George W.Bush, as answer to the terrorist attacks of 11th Septembers 2001 has perceived that the guilty will not escape and not even those who host or protect them. Just look in the direction 90 miles south of Florida and you’ll find a paradise for terrorists and fugitives that live under the protection of the Cuban regimen.
At the evidence of the recent facts, as the arrest of Ana Belèn Montes, civil employee of the Department of the defence (the Pentagon) of the United States, accused of being a spy of Cuba and arrested ten days after the 11 attacks of September, rises series questions.

Which role plays Fidel Castro in the sale of information to the terrorist countries? The arrests and the sentences of five spies (in reality they are 11 but there hasn’t been any mention of them *) of the call Avispa Net and the admissions of guilt from part of the remaining seven members have cleared that more than to spy on exiled Cuban the priorities for Cuba was possession of information on the American military bases and the introduction of weapons through the islands of Florida.

The island of Cuba for its privileged vicinity to the United States continues to be a springboard for the contraband.

A day before the attacks against the Twin Towers and the Pentagon has been published the news of the arrest of four Chinese citizens responsible of traffic of human beings, who, for the cost of 60.000 dollars per person introduced clandestine in American territory making them pass through Cuba and other islands of the Caribbean’s. An other fact worthy of attention: three Afghanistan citizens were arrested on the Cayman Islands have been accused of being entered illegally in American territory, coming from Cuba. Even more worrisome is the testimony of an Afghan deserter who was trained in one of the camps of Osama Bin Laden in mountains of Kunar. He has testified of the presence of Sudanese, Libyan and Cuban chemical weapons.
How not to believe that Fidel Castro is still a key person in the logistic aid to the international terrorism?
It’s very probable that the disinformation supplied by the spy Belen Montes has changed the general perception making to believe that Castro does not represent a threat for the United States. Instead his arrest right after the 11th of September evidence that the perception has changed.
The annual report of the American Department of State that designs the profiles of the protagonists of the world-wide terrorism includes Cuba in the list of the states connected with the terrorism. The American secretary of state, Donald Rumsfeld, has spoken to the television net CBS last year in order to evidence the connection: “we know which states figure in the list of the terrorist countries, the Irak is one of these, like Syria, North Korea, Cuba and also the Libya. We know that these states have supplied protection and attendance to terrorist organizations in order to carry to term terrorist action in other countries”.
Secretary Rumsfeld has emphasized that these countries are very active in programs of chemical and bacteriological war.
Osama Bin Laden is considered the main one in charge of the crime that has cost the life of more than 6000 civil citizens on the 11th September. But facts as these are the result of the actions of extremists who have found formation, training, and economic and professional support in a wide international terrorist net.

For more than 40 years Cuba has been one key factor in such net of the terror.
The recent arrest of the “ambassador” of the Irish army Niall Connolly, sent to collaborate with the Columbian guerrilla, has rendered public the fact that the Irish terrorist Sien Fein lives and operates in Cuba for the last five years and has contacted the Columbian guerrilla with the aid of the Cuban intelligence agencies. The foreign minister of Spain, without worrying of the interests of the Spanish investors on the island, has accused the Havana of giving asylum and logistic support to the Basque terrorists of the ETA. Ieng Sary, one of the heads of the Khmer Rossi, in charge of the murder of more than two million Cambodians, has bought a small farm at Cuba to escape from the justice and “to live in peace”. FBI has denounced that Cuba accommodates at least 77 persons wanted by the American justice. The visit of Fidel Castro on May of 2001 in the Arabic countries and his provocative declarations against the government of America, gives the prove of the role that still today Cuba plays as epicentre of the international terrorism.

According to the newspaper Ettelaat, Fidel Castro has been received by hundred of students of the Tarbiate-Modarres University of Tehran, who shouted: “guerrilla! Guerrilla!” The answer of the godfather of the narcoterrorism has been, according to the Kayhan newspaper: “There’s only one remaining Sha in the world, and that Sha is the American imperialism ........ close to my native land. It’s a profiteer Sha, and therefore as the one of the Iran has been taken down, also this Sha will fall”.

The Cuban connection with the international terrorism was born in the beginning of sixties. Under the cover of doctors and teachers thousands of Cubans were sent in Algeria.

Only two years later there was the Marxist military coup in that region.

The new leader of Zanzibar took control of the African island in 1964 after he had passed three years training himself and his men at Cuba.
John Okello triggered a slaughter comparable to the one of Fidel Castro when he took the power in 1959. Using terror Cuba created a solid operating base in the continent Africa where they trained guerrillas of low price to be exported, as courtesy of Fidel Castro.
In Guinea the Cuban councilmen were “genizaros” who accompanied Francisco Macias Nguema until the term of his reign of the terror, in charge of the death of 50 thousand of the 350 thousand citizens of the former Spanish colony.
In the summer of the 1968 the range of action was increased.
The Soviet Union, which thanks to the generous economic subsidies removed Cuba its self-determination, asked Fidel Castro to deliver the command of his politics to the Kremlin and to put his intelligence agencies at disposal of the K.g.b. Just during that summer, the Arabic Communists gathered at Moscow, received the order to infiltrate spies in the Palestinian armed movement. The Soviet master gave the orders and Cuba executed them, rendering its territory land of training of terrorists of several tendencies and nationalities.
The bases for these subversive operations were created in January of 1966.
At the Tricontinental Conference in Havana, to which assisted 513 delegated representatives of 83 groups of the third world: the base was the conviction to undertake the Armed Struggle against imperialism; Fidel Castro opened the doors of Cuba to the terrorism with its unconditioned support to all the revolutionary movements of the world.
From that moment the new front was an organization, with it’s headquarters in Cuba, of solidarity with the African, Asiatic and Latin American countries, known to us with the name OSPAAL. Its first general secretary was the famous murderer Osmany Cienfuegos. His cruelty in locking up more than 100 prisoners in a watertightly closed truck and the consequence of the deathf for asphyxia of many of these, conferred him all the titles for this new assignment.
The radical left of Africa, Europe, Asia, North and South America, has remained united to bless Fidel Castro in his disheartening language of the violence.
Disorders were created in France, Germany, in the Universities of the United States and in Turkey. The noise of the weapons jolt also Japan with the lead of the extremist Zengakuren. The violence burst in the Basque territories and in North Ireland.

In every single hotbed has been found the Cuban presence.

The doctrine of the red book of Mao Tse Tung and the logorrhoea rhetorical of Fidel Castro contaminated the minds of the young people and in the meantime at Beirut, George Habash inaugurated a new style of terrorism sending a command to divert an airplane of El Al at Rome, where another protect of Fidel Castro, the outlandish billionaire Giangiacomo Feltrinelli, made public appeal to the guerrilla war.
At Rio de Janeiro, Carlos Maringhella published the mini manual of the guerrilla, and the Havana took charge of its distribution. Fidel Castro received thousand of Soviet technicians who imposed the voluntary of Kremlin.
One of the most important was Victor Simenov which was put at the head of the General Direction office of Cuban counter intelligence (DGI).
All international terrorist movements of the time had a debit with the Havana. All received training at Cuba and economic and logistic aids in the Cuban embassies all over the world.
A colonel of the K.g.b., certain Vadim Kotchergine was the person in charge to make sure that Fidel Castro wouldn’t carry out his apocalyptic plans of destruction.
The demand of Castro to Nikita Khrushchev to launch missiles towards the United States during the Crisis of October was a warning for the Soviets not to leave the liberty of decisions to the “crazy Caribbean”.
In the beginning of the seventies, a deserter of the DGI, Orlando Castro Hidalgo, testified in front of the American Senate. Castro Hidalgo illustrated the complex net of support that Cuba offered through its embassies to the terrorist movements.
Money, airplane tickets, lodging, passports and visas were only some of the facilities that Cuba dispensed generously, while its population was victim of poverty, made official by the rationing ticket.
Later his superior commander and head of the Cuban mission in France, Armando Lopez Orta, a general of the DGI who operated with the coded name of “Archimedes”, was expelled from France in order to have given logistic support to Carlos Ilich Ramirez, the famous Venezuelan terrorist (remember the nationality and make the pair with Chavez) called “the jackal”. The Cuban embassies all over the world fed one complex net of terrorists and began also to put into effect recruitment on wide scale.

An other official of the DGI, Adalberto Quintana, became important for the development of a complex net that expanded quickly all over the world. The “Brigadas Venceremos” were created with the scope to destabilize the “enemy of the north”. Thousand of American students were trained to the art of creating chaos in large-scale, encourage riots and violent action. There are documents of the lessons given in the training fields of Cuba: the ingenuous Americans were deceived of facts as in lack of weapons a piece of wood with a nail can be as effective as a gun.

Later the Sandinistas and the Palestinian were those who enjoyed the greater attention regarding the training. The soldiers who carried the terror in Nicaragua in the Sandinista age were all trained in Cuba.
Then arrived Yasser Arafat together with George Habash in Havana in order to create the bases for the beginning of a long one and continues Cuban cooperation with the Palestinian movements and the terrorist regimes in medium orient that are still today in power. The complex net of support offered from the Cuban embassies to Syria and the Libya serves as cover for the terrorist groups of the Middle East.
In the United States at time the Cuban ambassador to the UN, Ricardo Alarcon, supported the Palestinian openly. The Cuban embassy at Cyprus supplied weapons to the OLP.
In 1978 as documented by the Lebanese press, the first “Cuban councilmen” arrived in the OLP training fields. In the same year Reuter’s agency confirmed that thousands of adept’s of the OLP received training in Cuba.
This was the result of the agreement signed by Castro and Arafat for the military cooperation and the supply of weapons to the Palestinian territories.
Fidel Castro didn’t miss to manifest for the umpteenth time his anti-imperialism denouncing the agreements of Camp David as “betrayal” (and the push of the world-wide left made them shipwreck when it seemed that the peace was on hand, writers note).
An year later the English newspaper The Economist revealed unquestionable proof of the cooperation between Cuba and OLP in order to offer training to the guerrillas.
This time the scene would have been the Central America. Once again the plague of the armed conflicts that threatened the western hemisphere had its origins in Havana.
In the south Yemen an other front of cooperation with Cuba had been created. The guerrilla training from Cuban instructors was received from Germans of de Baader Meinhof to the Japanese, Turks, Iranians, Armenians, curdi, Italians and French.
In Algeria similar conditions for the training of the Polisario front was created with the aid of Cuban staff masked as doctors and teachers.
In 1980 when Muammar Gheddafi took under his protection the Basque terrorists 150 Cuban instructors were in charge of training the Basques who still today seed terror in Spain.
The cooperation of Cuba with Syria and Lebanon proved important in the destitution of the Sha of Persia in Iran.
The activities reached the point that, according to the Swiss newspaper Journal de Geneva, Sam missiles were transported together with a contingent by Soviet ships that disembarked in the Arabic country with fake passports, working permissions and optimal acquaintance of the dialects and the habits of the various countries of the zone.
Courtesy of Cuba, many of them had been perfectly trained on the art of the city guerrilla, the fight in the desert, demolition operations and sabotage to oil installations etc.
These tactics, later, would have been taught to the Columbian guerrillas of the FARC (Fuerzas armadas revolucionarias colombianas) and to the ELN Army of national liberation that still today have active bases in Cuba.
In that period in all Cuba rises camps that have been used for the training of various Latin American groups like the Montoneros Argentine, the Tupamaros Uruguayan and Luminous Sendero in Perù. In less than 3 months an inexpert young person acquired the authority in the use of explosives, sabotage and city guerrilla.
Once again Cuba was in charge of the spilling of blood in the American continent. And in eighties the export of the terror took a militarist fold when the Cuban troops reached Africa and the Arabic countries.
NATO sources in Brussels informed that among the corpses recovered in the North Yemen there were Cubans.
Later the conflict in Angola left a wake of death and devastation with the aid of Cuban troops. Fidel Castro, as Osama Bin Laden is a harmful element that feeds himself of hatred in order to prevail his terrible doctrines.
Both expect to dominate the free societies through the terror. Both have passed the frontiers of theirs feuds in order to diffuse the terror in the humanity.
In the last Latin American apex at Panama, the president of the Salvador, Francisco Flores had the courage to face the Cuban dictator and remember him his responsibility in having scattered much blood in the Salvador while many other coward presidents remained mute.
The president George W. Bush has said that this war against terrorism will persecute and punish the guilty and their accomplices.

There is a phrase that upsets particularly the Cuban dictator: “either they are with us or they are with the terrorists” (the Italian government has made its choice).
The enormous file of Fidel Castro indicates that to the commander remains few friends.

Ninoska Perez Castellon
Miami, Florida
Settembre 2001