The Many September 11ths

By José Ramón Cabañas Rodríguez on September 11, 2021

This September 11, people around the world will remember the victims of the attacks on the Twin Towers in New York. More than 3,000 lives were lost, many of them Cuban. Their families are still reeling from their loss and, in some cases, have not even been able to recover the remains of their loved ones.

Thanks to the media and the nascent internet, a local event became global in an instant, creating an image of the United States as the sole victim of the attacks, which did not correspond to historical precedent.

That event marked a watershed in the definition of the term terrorism in the US political lexicon and was used as justification for the White House to launch a series of military actions against several countries, at a human and economic cost that multiplied the weight of the tragedy of that gray morning in Manhattan hundreds of times over.

Paradoxically, this year’s commemorations will take place against the backdrop of the debate generated by the United States’ hasty withdrawal from Afghanistan, which marks the end of a conflict that lasted 20 years and has redefined the United States’ ability (or lack thereof) to launch and sustain large-scale military conflicts abroad.

Fifteen years later, the US justice system is now preparing to try the individual it considers primarily responsible for the attacks, a move that will add to the doubts that already exist about the official version of events, which, in short, stated that a small number of foreigners of Arab origin trained in the United States, evaded US intelligence for months, on the same day, they bypassed security checks at several airports and were able to fly technically complex aircraft and crash them into their targets with pinpoint accuracy.

It has yet to be explained how a passenger plane took off from National Airport (now Ronald Reagan) in Virginia and crashed into the side of the Pentagon at such an angle without leaving any traces on the surrounding lawn or nearby roads. Despite being an area of heavy traffic, not a single photo or any other record of parts and pieces of the aircraft, which must have been scattered throughout the area after the explosion, has been preserved for history.

This is still an open wound in American society, one that may never heal, among other things because of the lack of a credible and definitive explanation.

September 11 already had a very painful connotation for Cubans 21 years earlier, as on that same day in 1980, in New York City itself, diplomat Félix García Rodríguez was assassinated by the counterrevolutionary organization Omega 7.

In Cuba and Latin America, September 11, 1973, is also remembered very vividly, when Salvador Allende was assassinated and a coup d’état was carried out against a socialist government elected by the people.

In both events, US federal agencies were involved and responsible, despite the fact that one took place on national territory and the other abroad, and neither was recognized as an act of terrorism.

When the Cuban Revolution triumphed and the first wave of emigrants to the United States began, within a few days the first terrorist organization was created under the name Rosa Blanca, led by former Batista senator Rafael Díaz Balart and former police officer Merob Sosa. This was just the beginning of a long list of groups and individuals who used violence as their main political weapon against Cuba for years.

The members of those small groups were part of the social sample from which the Central Intelligence Agency and other entities recruited personnel for the Bay of Pigs invasion, Operation Mangoose, and so many other plans that were successively developed against the island.

The CIA had as many as 400 officers and operatives working with terrorists in Miami in the 1960s, amassing an incalculable fortune that justified to some extent the “Cuban business success” in that city, until the massive arrival of narcotics in the 1980s took the enterprise to new levels.

The buying and selling of terror in Miami reached unimaginable extremes, publicly acknowledged by former CIA officials in Havana in 2001, during the sessions of the event 40 Years of Playa Girón. Absolutely anyone who presented a plan to assassinate Fidel Castro, attack a sugar mill, or a children’s circle in Cuba received immediate funding. The only requirement was to comply with the principle of plausible denial: there could be no traces linking the terrorist who carried out the attack to the US executive.

Those were not years when there was talk of votes, programs, scholarships, dissidents, opposition, alternative currents, pseudo-artists, or alternative press. That paraphernalia came later.

The Cuban counterrevolution was born amid dynamite and ammunition, however much it now tries to deny its origins and appear refined. Cuban terrorists were as useful to US politicians (Richard Nixon-Watergate) as they were to the foreign policy of the executive (Ronald Reagan-War in Central America).

They helped foment terror within the United States, such as in the assassination of former Chilean Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier in the heart of Washington in 1976, or the brutal murder of Cuban activist Carlos Muñiz Varela in Puerto Rico in 1979.

Although Reagan promoted some of the leading Cuban terrorist operatives to the rank of political activists, grouped together in the Cuban American National Foundation, many of them continued to wear camouflage uniforms under their suits and ties.

Even on his deathbed in the 1990s, the leader of the FNCA was financing and organizing terrorist acts in Havana, which caused extensive property damage and the loss of an Italian tourist’s life. Shortly before 9/11, a group of veterans of the dynamite attacks planned in 2000 to blow up the auditorium of the National University of Panama, where the Cuban president was scheduled to speak. The list of similar events is endless and well documented by both Cuban research centers and declassified US documents.

It should also include the judicial and media proceedings in Miami against five Cubans who had infiltrated Cuban terrorist groups. In order to protect the latter, US federal agencies committed all kinds of legal violations to sell as espionage an act that was not espionage and to bury men who were only defending their country’s national security in remote prisons for life.

And then came those terrible images of the World Trade Center falling to pieces.

There was an abrupt increase in US security budgets, procedures were changed, the police were further militarized, access to federal buildings that had previously been completely public was closed, and hundreds of new companies providing physical protection for buildings and individuals emerged. But the FBI also went door to door to several Cuban-born individuals to tell them clearly that there had been a fundamental change in the rules of the game and that they had to use other strategies.

At that time, the George W. Bush administration was in power, a family with structural ties to Cuban terrorist leaders, ranging from Bush Sr.’s connections to those from his time as a CIA operative to his position as director of the agency. The youngest of the brothers, Jeb Bush, who began his political training as an intern in one of the congressional offices of Cuban representatives, was governor of Florida at the time.

After that fateful September 11, although isolated acts of violence against Cuba continued, there was a general reduction in such acts, given the contradiction that the United States could not openly appear as a state sponsor of terrorism while at the same time supposedly waging an international campaign to eliminate the scourge. It was a change in appearances, nothing more.

These new rules caused rifts and changes among the main Cuban-American organizations based in the United States. On the one hand, the hardliners split from those groups that accepted the federal mandate, while others practically disappeared from the public scene and devoted themselves to writing poetry or collecting old cars.

Long before 2001, regime change programs against Cuba had emerged in the US Congress, but from then on they were reinforced. Bush himself articulated what was possibly the most complex of all these monstrosities in a long time, with the creation of the Commission for Assistance to a Free Cuba. Although armed terrorist actions against Cuba decreased, the strangulation of the Cuban economy and attempts to isolate the country internationally increased dramatically over eight years.

So, this September 11 will once again have different meanings for everyone, but at a time when extreme measures against Cuba remain in force, it is worth remembering that today’s lambs are the children of yesterday’s wolves.

Some of those who today occupy positions on the island or abroad, under the guise of academia, culture, or other noble social sectors, who softly promote a social explosion in Cuba, simply seek to achieve the same goal as those terrorists, but by other means. They are riding on an option that has no future, except for scorched earth. They have gone from the electric chair to lethal injection, nothing more.

Those who advocate for supposed freedoms in Cuba from South Florida should show that they enjoy them at least once and try going out into the streets to shout: Down with Batista (at least for the first time), Down with terrorism, No to war, Down with the hate industry, No to police violence, Medical security for all, Long live the Cuban family agenda, End unemployment, free COVID-19 vaccines for all, or some other similar slogan.

We can bet that the invisible and refined terror of that environment will immediately act against them: they will not find employment, they will be asked to change their children’s schools, unpaid bank debts will appear, they will be told that there are no reservations at any restaurants, posters will be written on their doors, their tires will be slashed frequently, they will hear noises near their homes every night, their cats will stop meowing, not to mention summary judgments on social media.

This September 11, we in Cuba mourn all the deaths and damage caused by terrorism anywhere in the world, and we will do everything in our power to ensure that such events never happen again. We will also make an effort to learn more about history, so that we are not sold a future that does not interest us.

José Ramón Cabañas Rodríguez is Director of the International Policy Research Center (CIPI) in Havana, Cuba.

Source: Cubadebate, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English