Where Are the Cuban Terrorists?

Dmitri Prieto

The US State Department has again put Cuba on the list of countries that it says support terrorism.  This occurs at a time when the United States is applying rigorous control measures due to recent terrorist threats.  The designation  was responded to in Cuba with a statement from the Ministry of Foreign Relations (MINREX) and with meetings in workplaces and schools.

I wonder:  Does the Obama administration seriously believe that by “better” controlling passports, baggage and the bodies of people who travel to the US from “terrorist countries” they’ll be able to reduce the threat of new attacks?   Can anyone seriously believe that real terrorists would travel to the US from the same countries that sponsor and train them, and with their own passports and under their real names?

These measures remind me of the question that repeatedly appears on US immigration forms: “Are you or have you ever been a member of a communist and/or terrorist organization?” (Though it seems they’ve now removed “communist.”)

In Cuba, almost all of us were Young Pioneers when we were children, when we responded with a quasi-military salute shouting the slogan “Pioneers for Communism!  We will be like Che!” And almost all of us received military training under the Cuban national defense strategy doctrine of a “People’s War.”

So, are we all terrorists? Didn’t the Minutemen of 1776 perhaps receive similar training (though in accord with the technology of their time)?  Were they terrorists?

I don’t believe in the bureaucracy, and less still that somebody is capable of filling out a form to enter to USA admitting “Yes sir, I belonged to a terrorist organization that taught me how to plant bombs on commercial airplanes; in fact, once we did place one, and it worked.”

In and of itself, I find all those measures ineffective and ridiculous, or — to use what is almost a synonym for these adjectives— I think these steps are simply “political.”

What’s worse is that yes, it’s true, Cuban terrorists do exist.  There are Cubans who would in fact have to respond to whatever interrogation by Homeland Security by saying:  “Yes sir, I did belong to a terrorist organization where they taught me how to plant bombs on commercial airplanes. In fact, once we did – and it worked.”

Then Homeland Security would have to do with those Cuban terrorists what is usually done with terrorists.  Or, if they found it appropriate, they would have to return them to Cuba, or to Venezuela, or to wherever court cases were pending against them.

The ineffective and ridiculous or simply “political” point of the continuation of the “war on terror” —now with Obama out in front— is that the US itself (and not Cuba!) has become a safe haven (or, if they prefer, a “sanctuary”) for two self-confessed Cuban terrorists who once planted a bomb on a commercial aircraft – and it worked.  I’m not interested in mentioning the names of that ilk.

For “politics” to be political, it must be practiced with willfulness, courage, consistency and conscious politics.  It’s a shame, but not even winning the Nobel Prize for Literature would help to achieve what is lacking.  Wasn’t it for literature? Oops! It seems I’ve confused which Nobel …

By the way, if I’m not mistaken, Libya and North Korea no longer appear on the list of terrorist states.

I don’t believe in rhetoric or the effectiveness of propagandistic babble, but I do I believe that extreme decisions are effective only in increasing the political capital of extremists.  And it doesn’t matter which of the extremes we’re talking about.