Cuba Recalls Plane Bombing & Wants Freed Prisoner

By Circles Robinson, Photos: Jorge Luis Baños/IPS

HAVANA TIMES, Oct. 6 — Thursday marked the 35th anniversary of one of the darkest days in modern Cuban history when terrorists blew up a Cubana Airlines passenger plane killing all 73 passengers and crew.

The occasion included a vigil in front of the US Interests Section in Havana.

The site was chosen because of Washington’s unwillingness to prosecute or extradite the remaining  intellectual author of the plane bombing, Luis Posada Carriles.  The other intellectual author, Orlando Bosch, died earlier this year after living feely in Florida.

The two men have lived in Florida among the Cuban exile community, and have repeatedly justified their terrorist actions as part of their war against the Cuban government.

In the early years after the 1959 Cuban revolution, the government tallied 3,478 persons killed and another 2,099 left with serious handicaps in terrorist actions against factories schools, hospitals, ports, etc., perpetrated by the CIA and Florida based exile groups allowed to use US territory to launch their attacks on Cuba and its interests abroad.

Meanwhile, the demonstrators had another reason to be at the US diplomatic mission.

On Friday, Rene Gonzalez, one of the Cuban Five, is scheduled to be released from prison after over 13 years. The Five are considered heroes in Cuba and convicted spies by the US media.

The Cubans want Gonzalez to be allowed to return home to his country and family but the same Miami judge that tried him and his four compatriots wants him to serve out three years of probation in the United States.

Cuban-American congresswoman Illeana Ros-Lehtinen, the chair of the US House Foreign Relations Committee, called Rene Gonzalez “an enemy of America with American blood on his hands.”

The US Free the Cuban Five Committee told IPS that such “false accusations” by Ros-Lehtinen “constitute a clear call to violence and show the need for Rene to be allowed to return immediately to Cuba.”

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