Marilyn Buck or Alexander Alazo: Which one does the Castro regime recognize as a terrorist?

The Castro regime continues to double down in its claim that the April 30th 2:00am attack by Alexander Alazo, a man off his meds and apparently coked up, was an act of terrorism.  Meanwhile, Politico has published an account of acts of terrorism carried out by groups linked to the Cuban government in the 1980s of which more than one member ended up fleeing to Cuba where they received asylum from the dictatorship.

Alexander Alazo

Castro's official media honored Marilyn Buck in an article titled "Political Activist Marilyn Buck Dies at 62" in which it referred to  as an "activist and former political prisoner." Buck was a terrorist who bombed the U.S. Capitol in 1983 to protest the Grenada Invasion, and on October 20, 1981 as part of a group of Weather Underground and Black Liberation Army members assaulted a Brink’s armored car carrying $1.6 million in Nanuet, NY. Buck was a member of the Black Liberation Army. Two police officers and a guard were murdered in the course of the armed robbery and during the get away. She also pleaded guilty to the bombing of the US Capitol in 1988. 

Marilyn Buck: Terrorist and Political Prisoner died in 2010

Marilyn Buck died of uterine cancer at the age of 62 at her Brooklyn home but let us also remember the lives she cut short in the name of a failed revolutionary ideology she wanted to impose on Americans via bombs and guns there names were: Edward O'Grady, Waverly "Chipper" Brown, and Peter Paige.

Murdered by Marilyn Buck in an act of terrorism

Edward O'Grady was a native of Nyack and a graduate of Nyack High School before enlisting in the United States Marine Corps. He was a long time member of the Jackson Hose Company # 3, a unit of the Nyack Volunteer Fire Department, as was his father before him. At the time of his death, Edward left behind his wife Diane and three children, a son Edward, Jr., age six, and two daughters Patricia, age two and Kimberly, age 6 months. O'Grady's daughter Kim is got married, but thanks to Marilyn Buck her father was not there to walk her down the aisle.

Edward O'Grady

Waverly Brown had a seventeen year-old son and two grown daughters. He had a girlfriend in Nyack (Brown was separated from his wife). His mother, Dorothy DeLoatch, lived in Lawrenceville, Virginia, the small southern town where she was born sixty-seven years before the robbery. Brown liked to help out with the garden whenever he visited her. She had a small vegetable garden in which she grew corn, peas, lettuce and squash. Today, Waverly's son Gregory carries on his father's tradition as a police officer with the United States Postal Police.

Waverly Brown

Peter Paige began his employment with the Brinks Corporation as a guard in 1956. Never a stranger to hard work, he served Brink's loyally for 25 years until his untimely death in 1981. At the time of his death at age 49, Paige left behind a wife Josephine, a daughter Susan, (19) and two sons Michael (16) and Peter (9). He was also survived by six brothers and sisters. 

Peter Paige

A scholarship fund was set up in memory of the two slain police officers.

Alexander Alazo is a man who has been diagnosed with a psychiatric condition and was living out of his car for months. He shot up the Cuban embassy at 2:00am and hurt no one. The Castro regime calls him a terrorist. Meanwhile, the same regime declared Marilyn Buck an activist and political prisoner after she killed to police officers, and a security guard in a politically motivated bank robbery. When will the regime in Cuba stop sponsoring, sheltering, and training terrorists?

Terrorism, the responsibility to protect, Cuban diplomats, and the attack on the Embassy of Cuba in DC

Latest updates on the story, and brief overview of Cuban diplomacy post-1959

Damage to column and Jose Marti statue at the Cuban Embassy in Washington DC

Thursday, April 30 at 2:00am a man wielding an AK-47 fired three dozen rounds into the Cuban Embassy in Washington, DC. Embassy officials confirmed that no one was harmed, but there was some damage to the building.

SUV driven by the alleged shooter.

 D.C. police arrested the man on the scene and a day later we learned that the individual, Alexander Alazo, 42, of Aubrey, Texas "had been living in his car and moving from state to state for several months." Officials said that he "drove to Washington on Wednesday to target the Cuban Embassy 'because he wanted to get them before they got him, referring to the Cuban government, for the constant threats from the organized Cuban criminal organization,' according to court papers."

Police "believe he had been sleeping at rest stops and in parking lots for at least nine months" and was "off his meds."

The Castro regime has tried to exploit this tragic episode by blaming U.S. Cuba policy and Castro's foreign minister pointed out "the responsibility of States to protect diplomats accredited to them and their facilities." The Center for a Free Cuba pointed out that the assailant had been arrested on the same day as the attack, but that the "scores of diplomats harmed since 2016" in Havana and was "still not cleared up."

Individual in custody within hours of the attack in which no diplomats were harmed. Meanwhile at US embassy in Cuba scores of diplomats harmed since 2016 and still not cleared up. What was that about “the responsibility of States to protect diplomats”? https://t.co/pS8DGLrbDD

— Center for Free Cuba (@cubacenter) April 30, 2020

Regime apologists began to tweet away that the attacks had never happened, that they were psychosomatic, and a long series of unhelpful talking points echoing the Castro regime's unhelpful response since 2016. The mystery surrounding the harm done to Canadian and U.S. diplomats remains unsolved. 

Castro regime officials are calling the attack an act of terrorism and one of the dictatorship's diplomats based in New York City, Alejandro González Behmaras, posted a tweet denouncing the "act of terrorism" and the claim that "terrorism has never frightened Cuban diplomats!"

Last night's shooting against #Cuban Embassy in Washington is an act of terrorism. But terrorism has never frightened Cuban diplomats! We will continue to perform our duties on behalf of the noble people we have the honor to represent #SomosCuba #SomosContinuidad pic.twitter.com/tWiWRv5RuC

— Alejandro González Behmaras (@Behmaras1) May 1, 2020

Ambassador González Behmaras, who undiplomatically participated in the disruption of an event discussing the plight of political prisoners in Cuba on October 16, 2018, fails to mention that this lack of fear is due to the Castro regime viewing and promoting terrorism as a legitimate tactic.

Ambassador González Behmaras disrupts event on Cuban political prisoners

The Castro regime has explicitly viewed terrorism as a legitimate tactic to advance its revolutionary objectives. In 1970 the Cuban government published the "Mini Manual for Revolutionaries" in the official Latin American Solidarity Organization (LASO) publication Tricontinental and translated it into many languages, written by Brazilian urban terrorist Carlos Marighella, which gives precise instructions in terror tactics, kidnappings, etc. and translated into numerous languages which were distributed worldwide by the Cuban dictatorship. There is a chapter on terrorism that declares, "Terrorism is a weapon the revolutionary can never relinquish." This manual is still circulating today.

The Cuban dictatorship has trained terrorists that targeted the United States and other countries in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s with acts of violence with the objective of altering political behavior. John Hoyt Williams in a 1988 article in The Atlantic reported: "In the Arab world some 3,000 [Cuban advisers] can be found in Libya and Algeria, among other things training terrorists and Polisario guerrillas."

State Department spokesperson Morgan Ortagus on September 19, 2019 reported that "two members of Cuba’s UN mission engaged in activities harmful to U.S. national security, we asked them to leave the U.S. Members of Cuba’s UN mission are also restricted to stay in Manhattan. We take any and all attempts against the National Security of the U.S. seriously."  

Nevertheless, this does not excuse violence carried out against the Cuban Embassy or against Cuban diplomats, but it does call for governments hosting a Cuban diplomatic delegation to be vigilant and aware of their past bad acts. The Free Cuba Foundation condemned the attack on the Cuban embassy, but at the same time recalled the past bad actions of Cuban diplomats.

We condemn the attack on the Cuban Embassy while at the same time recognizing its problematic history as a center of espionage, and past attacks by embassy staff against non-violent protesters . https://t.co/BLcT5OmZQT

— Free Cuba Foundation (@freecubafndtn) April 30, 2020

We look forward to the day that the Cuban diplomatic corps return to the professionalism and democratic convictions of past great diplomats such as Willy De Blanc, Guy Pérez-Cisneros and Ernesto Dihigo. Individuals who played a leading and constructive role in the drafting of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

However, we cannot ignore the bad actions of Cuban diplomats in the United States since 1959, and what follows is only a partial revisiting of some of the most egregious examples.

New York City, New York (1962)
Cuban diplomats Elsa Montera Maldonado and Jose Gomez Abad, a husband and wife team at the Cuba Mission in New York City, who in reality were State Security agents who plotted to murder large numbers of Americans. Both were expelled for their role in a planned terrorist attack on the Friday after Thanksgiving in 1962 which sought to detonate 500 kilos of explosives inside Macy’s, Gimbel’s, Bloomingdale’s and Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal.

New York City, New York (1969)
A Black Panther plot to bomb five Manhattan department stores on April 3, 1969 during the Easter shopping rush was broken up by the indictment of 21 members of the militant group on April 2nd. The Chicago Tribune reported that they had planned to "set off bombs in the midtown stores of Macy's Alexander's. Bloomingdale's, Korvette's and Abercombie & Fitch. The bombings were to be accompanied by gunfire in the crowded stores." They had also planned to dynamite the tracks of Penn Central railroad at six location and bomb a police station in the Morrisania section of the Bronx to divert police from the railroad bombings. 

 On April 10, 1969 Andrew Tulley reported in the Reading Eagle that that the Communist Cuban mission to the United Nations has become a financial and propaganda headquarters for promoting revolution by black militants and white radicals. ... Specifically, it was said, these include the Black Panther Party. The United States denied re-entry visas to two Cuban U.N. diplomats ..."as a normal reaction to evidence that the Cuban mission is engaged in extensive subversive activities. One of the two diplomats, Jesus Jimenez Escobar, a mission counselor, is described as one of the Havana regime's leading experts in the export of revolution."  Tully had met one of the five other Cuban diplomats then under investigation in Cuba in  1959: Lazaro Espinosa, third secretary at the U.N. missions was introduced to him by Che Guevara at the Havana Hilton Hotel as Castro's "leading technician in terrorism." 

The judge presiding over the Black Panther trial on February 21, 1970 had three gasoline bombs explode in front of his home. On May 13, 1971 a jury with five African American members acquitted the thirteen Black Panther members of murder conspiracy charges.



West Hartford, Connecticut (1983)

In 1983 the Castro regime provided financial and logistical support for the Wells Fargo armored car robbery which netted the Macheteros $7.1 million dollars of which $2 million made its way back to Cuba via a diplomatic pouch. The whole story is detailed in a Hartford Courant investigative piece published in 1999. Below is a 2012 local news story about the case. The main culprit in the crime, Victor Manuel Gerena, is still a fugitive from American justice and is believed to be in Cuba.
 
New York City, New York (1994)
 The United States expelled two Cuban diplomats on April 12, 1995, for having assaulted people last August (1994) protesting in front of Cuba's mission to the United Nations. The diplomats, Edmundo Suarez Hernandez, a counselor, and Saul Hermida Griego, an attache, and their families were told are to leave by midnight Sunday. The Cuban Foreign Ministry responded with a statement that the incident in August had been "provoked by terrorist groups who go around unpunished because of the inefficiency of the New York police." 

On August 30, 1994 anti-Castro protesters chained themselves to the Cuban Mission door. Cuban diplomats attacked them with sticks, screaming, "Cuba Our Way!" Two diplomats wielded a crowbar and ax handle. More than a dozen police officers suffered injuries. Four Cuban Mission employees were arrested on assault charges. All four were released after claiming diplomatic immunity.  US officials said it's unusual for diplomats to be expelled for violent behavior. 

Washington, DC (2000)
On April 14, 2000 nonviolent protesters gathered in front of the Cuban Interests Section in Washington DC. In the early evening, a band of about 10 Cuban diplomats, alleged to have been drinking took off their coats, ties and jewelry, began screaming obscenities and yelling threats, and indiscriminately attacked 20 peaceful protesters  with fists and sticks, even injuring a Secret Service officer. Among the Cuban diplomats engaged in the violent assault, according to one of the victims, was Gustavo Machin Gomez.

The Castro regime's belief that terrorism is a legitimate instrument of struggle stretches back to their own bombing campaigns, and plane hijackings in the 1950s in their struggle against Fulgencio Batista.

Fidel Castro in 1978 gave a speech where he lied when declared that the Cuban revolution had never engaged in terrorism, but perhaps revealed more than he planned saying: "if the Cuban government were to dedicate itself to engage in terrorism, and to respond with terrorism to terrorists, we believe we would be effective terrorists. Let no one think otherwise. If we were to dedicate ourselves to terrorism with all certainty we would be efficient."  Terrorism is part of the Castro regime's DNA, of course Ambassador Alejandro González Behmaras isn't afraid of terrorism he is part of a diplomatic corps that has engaged in and sponsored it over decades.