Rosa Miriam Elizalde on October 10, 2024 from Havana
“homeland or death” the explosion of La Coubre
On March 4, 1960, the French steamship La Coubre exploded in the port of Havana with its cargo of 76 tons of arms and ammunition, as well as French cheese, window glass, and agricultural machinery. A total of 136 people died and another 200 were wounded.
On March 5, during the burial of the victims, Fidel Castro pronounced his famous speech in which for the first time he enunciated the slogan “fatherland or death”. In the tribune that day were Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and the main Cuban leaders, and there Korda took the mythical photo of Che Guevara with beret and the lost look that would become a rebel icon.
The writer Guillermo Cabrera Infante, then a journalist for the newspaper Revolución, arrived at the disaster zone after the initial explosion. From the ship, he wrote, “was rising not a column, but a shower, a cataract of inverted fire”. And as he tried to approach the bow, a second explosion occurred: “The shock wave turned me to the right and made me lose my balance. I fell sitting down and when I tried to get up I noticed that I was missing a shoe.
I stupidly tried to crawl for it.
Then the people who came running threw me face up; someone stepped on my hand, and someone else put a foot on my leg, and someone else crushed my knee. I felt no pain or fear or anything at all, but just watched the fan of fire ascend and the shrapnel advance, slowly but ominously over us.”
From that moment on, all Cabrera Infante saw were torsos, legs, heads, intestines confused between flesh and blood. The main question on everyone’s mind was who was responsible for this atmosphere of apocalypse. The collective answer pointed to the criminal hand of the CIA, although to this day the U.S. government has not acknowledged it nor has it handed over a single document that could exonerate it of such responsibility.
Che, photo: Alberto Korda
As it happened with the explosions of the communication devices in Lebanon, asking who is the author of the facts is pure rhetoric. In the case of La Coubre, only a criminal organization such as the US intelligence services could organize a terrorist attack of such magnitude, with the capacity to plan a first explosion and then a second, even bigger one that would wipe out the people who came to help the victims and, possibly, the leadership of the Cuban revolution. They calculated that Fidel, Che, Raul Castro and others would arrive at the disaster zone, and they did. They miraculously escaped death.
In a recently published book, El enigma de La Coubre, researcher Hernando Calvo Ospina has shed new light on this attack. He had access to the archives of French Lines & Compagnies, located in the French city of Le Havre. There, the historical patrimony of the French Merchant Navy, its shipping companies and ports, including that of the Compagnie Gé né rale Transatlantique, owner of La Coubre, is kept.
For more than 60 years these documents were closed to the public and no one had contacted the ship’s crew members who managed to survive. Calvo Ospina discovered an essential clue in this story: when La Coubre docked in Antwerp, the two guards who were guarding the platform from where the arms for Cuba were being loaded suddenly fell ill. They had to be replaced by others who left no trace. Oops.
After the La Coubre explosion, hundreds of terrorist attacks against Cuba took place, including the sabotage with C4 explosive of a civilian airplane in mid-flight on October 6, 1976, which killed 73 people, among them the Cuban youth fencing team returning home after participating in the Central American and Caribbean Games. The great paradox is that Cuba has ended up on a spurious list accused by the U.S. of sponsoring terrorism.
Many of the attacks that the Caribbean nation has suffered in more than 60 years were of great complexity and could only be organized by a State or by criminal groups that had received the approval of a government. In most of the events, the criminal hand was a powerful intelligence agency, the CIA. Somewhere along the chain booby traps were introduced.
There were a large number of innocent victims. Attempts were made to assassinate local leaders.
Any resemblance to the wave of deadly explosions in Lebanon is not purely coincidental. Israel, the putative son of the US, does what it learned from its elders.
Source: La Jornada, translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English