By Yurina Piñeiro Jiménez on October 6, 2023 from Havana
family member of a victim of Barbados, photo: Ismael Francisco
Today is the 47th anniversary of the CIA orchestrated bombing of a Cuban airliner over Barbados killing 73 people. To this day nobody has paid for the crime and the perpetrators, who openly bragged about their role, have all died peacefully in their homes in Miami.
The Terror still surprises us when we look at the faces of those young people, almost children, who boarded Cubana de Aviación flight 455 on October 6, 1976, overflowing with joy and euphoria for the victory achieved in Caracas, Venezuela, in the Central American and Caribbean Fencing Championship. How could they commit such a horrendous crime? How is such evil possible, we ask ourselves again.
Our skin crawls every time we listen to the recording of the black box, the only survivor of the explosion and witness of the barbarism in flight. “Stick to the water, Felo, stick to the water! Then we wish that miracles existed and that when we turned our eyes, that was just the scene of a horror movie. But no, sometimes, as was the case, reality is scarier than the movies.
We put ourselves in the shoes of those families when they were told that the plane in which their loved ones were traveling had unfortunately suffered a terrorist attack, and we feel their grief as our own.
Our chest tightens when we see the interview of Nancy Uranga Rumagosa’s father, with that humility of a good guajiro, saying: “Today, just like the first day, I am always remembering her. But what are we going to do? Twenty or thirty years of putting flowers on her…”.
Tin Cremata with his father
The trace of terror marks us when we talk to Tin Cremata (national director of La Colmenita) and he confesses that he sows and sows love so that hatred does not prosper, because it was hatred that took away the most important person in his life; his father, the joy of the house. When they tell us how after losing their only daughter in that criminal act, some parents gave up on life. When we visit a friend like Raul Rodriguez Bocalandro and recognize in the largest painting in the room there is the young and beautiful face of his only sister, who also perished on October 6, 1976.
Our feelings cannot be contained as we think of those parents who could never again enjoy the presence of their children, embrace them, pamper them, hold them… When we imagine the orphanhood that overshadowed the days of those children whose father or mother were snatched away by terror.
Forgiveness resists sprouting in us because the goodbye was violent and forever. Because a bride was left waiting. Because a life that had just germinated in the womb of a woman never saw the light. Because many families were left with open arms forever waiting for the return of their children.
Ambassador of Guyana in Cuba, Halim Majeed, photo: Ismael Francisco
The ambassador of the Cooperative Republic of Guyana in Cuba, Halim Majeed, is well aware of this, since his brother-in-law, Sasenarine Kumar, was on that Cubana flight that terror caused to explode in mid-flight.
“On October 6, 1976, the Cuban Vice Consul in Guyana, Daniel Salas, visited my house and there he told me the sad news that Cubana Airlines Flight 455 had been blown up. He came to see me because a member of my family was aboard that aircraft. The only thing that could be recovered from his body in Barbados was his right hand, which had a ring with the initials SK”.
The Guyana consul recalls that then all hell broke loose in Guyana and relations between his country and the United States, from where the crime was forged and where the masterminds of the first aviation terrorist act in the Western Hemisphere found refuge -not justice-.
“The United States withdrew its ambassador from Guyana and we did the same. Because the two criminals who planted the bombs on the aircraft were apprehended in Trinidad and Tobago, but of course, the masterminds never faced justice. They sought and managed to find refuge in Miami and lived to a ripe old age”.
Like many other victims of terrorism, this ambassador has a memory and insists that the Barbados Crime has to be remembered and recalled. Therefore, since 2016 when he arrived in Havana as a diplomat, every October he sponsors a remembrance ceremony, in which a prayer for their families, so that they receive comfort, and for the souls of the latter, so that they reach eternal peace, is not lacking.
Yesterday the tribute took place at the Casa del Alba Cultural in Havana, which included a photographic exhibition by Ismael Francisco, Cubadebate’s photojournalist, who treasures in the lens of his eyes and camera, shocking images of the traces of pain of the Barbados Crime in its victims. Probably the most iconic is the snapshot of Fidel hugging Tin Cremata, son of one of the fatal victims.
Fidel embracing Tin Cremata, photo: Ismael Francisco
“I felt my father in Fidel’s embrace,’ Tin Cremata has confessed on several occasions when referring to that first photograph. The other also has a very touching story because that same day, after concluding the act of homage of the Heads of State at the Cuba-Caricom Summit held in Bridgetown, in 2005, Tin stayed by the monument, he did not want to leave, but as night fell, aware that he could not stay any longer, he caressed the name of his father written there; as if saying goodbye to him”, commented Ismael Francisco to those who asked him about those images.
The act of remembrance was attended, among other guests, by members of the diplomatic corps of the Caribbean countries, representatives of the Minrex, the Hero of the Republic of Cuba, Fernando Gonzalez and the Commander of the Rebel Army, Victor Drake.
Today injustice trembled again as it did on October 15, 1976, when our Commander-in-Chief bid farewell to the martyrs of Barbados before a sea of people in the José Martí Revolution Square. Because today an energetic and virile people once again mourned the victims of terrorism.
Source Cubadebate, translated by Resumen Latinoamericano – English