By José Luis Méndez Méndez on October 6, 2024
family members of those murdered in the bombing of the Cuban airliner. photo: Bill Hackwell
Almost half a century has passed since an avoidable crime went unpunished, and even with a long judicial process for more than eleven years in the Venezuelan justice system, justice was not brought to the 73 people who perished in the mid-air bombing of a Cuban civilian airliner off the coast of Barbados on October 6, 1976. For the Cuban people it remains an historical memory of pain that will never go away.
Fifty-three Cubans, eleven Guyanese and five citizens of the People’s Republic of Korea lost their lives.
Dozens of terrorists participated in the criminal conspiracy, the two Venezuelan mercenaries, paid employees of the CIA, Luis Posada Carriles, who was the mastermind of the act of terror along with the assassin Orlando Bosch Avila, both Cubans died years later unpunished for this crime.
The former escaped three times from high security prisons in Venezuela, in the third attempt the CIA protected him in El Salvador as he was part of their dirty war of that the Agency in Central America was conducting at the time. Posada continued participating in terrorist acts and was never extradited to Venezuela, where he had pending cases for crimes committed but President George H.W. Bush, who had been who had been Director of the CIA when the plane was shot down in 1976, pardoned him. He remained protected in the United States, continuing to proudly conspire to carry out acts of terror until his death recently.
2007- Cubans protest Bush and the terrorist Luis Posada Carriles. photo: Bill Hackwell
This abominable crime could have been avoided by the Republican administration of Gerald Ford: The CIA, his specialized spy agency, had advance knowledge of the plan on June 22, 1976, three months earlier and did nothing to prevent it. From a privileged source, it obtained details of the conspiracy in development, the name of the manager, the way it would be carried out and other revealing aspects of the criminal plot.
Years later, to the shame of the United States, secret U.S. documents were declassified and, without a simple erasure, what had happened became known and with it the possibility of having saved the lives of more than seventy people. The Cuban authorities were not alerted, nor were the conspirators dissuaded, most of whom were on record as having used terror throughout their career as a habitual method to achieve their political objectives. They were reckless from the start. On July 9 a bomb was placed in a suitcase that was going to be put in the plane that later crashed but for reasons of delay in the departure the bomb went off prematurely on the runway of an airport in Jamaica. Then on October 3 a bomb was placed in a wing of the plane, it fell without exploding and was removed, finally on October 6, when what was known three months before became a reality.
Bosch continued from prison ordering a repeat of the terrorist act, this time the plane chosen was a Mexican airline, whose origin was Miami with a stopover in Merida, Yucatan and final destination Havana. The terrorist Frank Castro, Bosch’s second in charge of the terrorist group said on May 27, 1977, barely 7 months after the crime: “this is so that anyone who tries to travel to Cuba, will be frightened”.
This revelation came to light in a summary report of the FBI, on its monitoring of the terror actions of the extremists of Cuban origin, dated August 1978. Neither the Cuban nor the Mexican authorities were informed of this ongoing plan.
Decades later, the CIA released “CIA Historical Review Program” and in it the following document was found:
Distribution June 22, 1976.SECRET CLASS REPORT WARNING WARNING- SENSITIVE. Intelligence sources and methods involved – Do not disclose to foreign nationals. Not for distribution to contractors or contracted consultants.
Country: Cuba/Panama/Dominican Republic.June 21, 1976.
Source: A businessman with close ties to the Cuban exile community. Usually a reliable informant.
1)- An extremist group of Cuban exiles, of which Orlando Bosch is a leader, plans to place a bomb on a Cubana airline flight traveling between Panama and Havana. The original plans for this operation called for two bombs to be placed on the June 21, 1976 flight, number 467, which was scheduled to leave Panama at 11:15 a.m. Panama local time.
2)- Bosch is currently residing in the Dominican Republic, Copy transmitted to: State Department, Army Intelligence Directorate, Army, Navy, Air Force, FBI, CIA and others. No Cuban entity was alerted.
The murderers remained unpunished along with the invisible intellectual authors. It was all a program of retaliation to punish Cuba’s internationalist presence in Africa at the time, something that the Cuban people are proud of.
José Luis Méndez Méndez is a writer and university professor. He is the author of several books and is a contributor to Cubadebate and Resumen Latinoamericano.
Source: Cuba en Resumen