"The first victory we can claim is that our hearts are free of hatred. Hence we say to those who persecute us and who try to dominate us: ‘You are my brother. I do not hate you, but you are not going to dominate me by fear. I do not wish to impose my truth, nor do I wish you to impose yours on me. We are going to seek the truth together’. THIS IS THE LIBERATION WHICH WE ARE PROCLAIMING."
Oswaldo José Payá Sardiñas (2002)
On this day in 1975 in New York City: Havana-backed Puerto Rican terrorists, the Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional (FALN), placed a bomb in Fraunces Tavernand exploded it at 1:29pm killing four, and wounding over 50 at the historic tavern.
In November 2017, recently freed Puerto Rican terrorist Oscar Lopez Rivera traveled to Cuba where he was honored by the dictatorship.
In the audience where members of the WASP network, including Gerardo Hernandez, who had been convicted of murder conspiracy for his role in the Brothers to the Rescue shoot down, and had his sentence commuted by Obama in 2014.
One of the men responsible for this terrorist bombing eluded, and still eludes justice, harbored by the communist dictatorship in Cuba.
The FALN bomb maker, William Morales, fled U.S. custody, following a shoot out in Mexico, he ended up in Cuba where he continues to be harbored by the dictatorship today, a fugitive from American justice.
Bearing witness. Survivors, family members of victims of 1975 Fraunces Tavern FALN bombing, and law enforcement that pursued terrorists gather to continue to seek & demand justice. pic.twitter.com/8qdYzUy8Bw
Today bore witness as survivors, family members of the victims of the 1975 Fraunces Tavern FALN bombing, and law enforcement that pursued terrorists gathered to continue to seek and demand justice.
Family, friends, and law enforcement gathered at Fraunces Tavern
They gathered together in the space in the Fraunces Tavern where the bomb had exploded killing Alejandro, Frank, James, and Harold, and injured over 50 others.
At 1:29pm they held a moment of silence outside of the Fraunces Tavern, and held a press conference demanding justice for the victims.
“Fidel Castro helped the M-19 in many of its interventions in Colombia.
It must even be said that M-19 troops were trained in Cuba, which
separated the Cuban government from the Colombian government. Relations
were broken,” said Gustavo Petro, a former member of the terrorist group M-19, and today president of Colombia, in 2016.
Terrorism is a fundamental aspect of Castroism. Fidel Castro, and his
fellow revolutionaries, seized power in 1959 through domestic
terrorism. Throughout the 1950s, Castro’s July 26th Movement carried out
numerous bombings that terrorized and killed Cuban citizens.
The Cuban dictatorship has a track record of sponsoring international
terrorism over its entire 65 year rule. This 2024 short documentary “Terrorism: The Cuban Connection”
offers some highlights, and this CubaBrief will highlight a few
episodes that focus on the United States, Europe and the role played by
Cuban diplomats, resulting in their expulsion from France and the United
States.
The Failed 1962 Black Friday Plot
Elsa Montero Maldonado and Jose Gomez Abad, a husband and wife team,
Roberto Santiesteban Casanova, an attache at the Cuba Mission to the
United Nations in New York City, diplomats who in reality were State
Security agents, along with Antonio Sueiro and Jose Garcia Orellana,
plotted to murder large numbers of New Yorkers in a planned terrorist attack on the Friday after Thanksgiving in 1962, detonating 500 kilos of explosives inside Macy’s, Gimbel’s, Bloomingdale’s and Manhattan’s Grand Central Terminal.
Cuban diplomats Elsa Montera Maldonado and Jose Gomez Abad, a husband
and wife team at the Cuba Mission in NYC.
Havana would go on to redouble its efforts to improve its capacity to
promote and carry out terrorist attacks around the world. The
Tricontinental Conference, held in Havana from January 3-16, 1966,
and the establishment of the Organization for the Solidarity of the
Peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America OSPAAL sought to support and
train terrorist groups worldwide, including in the United States.
Havana would go on to have “successes”.
One of them was a young Venezuelan named after the Soviet Union’s
founding leader, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, also known as Vladimir Lenin.
Ilyich Ramírez Sánchez (age 17) attended the 1966 Tricontinental Conference. Afterwards, Ilyich spent the summer at Camp Matanzas,
a guerrilla warfare school run by the Cuban DGI. Following a string of
terrorist attacks across Europe, he picked the alias “Carlos.
Nan Robertson in a special to The New York Times on July 11, 1975 published the article “FRANCE EXPELLING 3 CUBAN OFFICIALS” that reports on the link between Cuban diplomats and Carlos the Jackal.
“France expelled three high‐ranking Cuban diplomats today
in connection with the worldwide search for a man called Carlos, who is
believed to be an important link in an international terrorist
network.” […]”The French Interior Ministry said that investigators were
convinced that the terrorist network had been helped significantly by
the intelligence services of “certain nations.”[…] French authorities
have also said that Carlos may have been directly involved with a siege
at the French Embassy in The Hague last September and a grenade attack
the same month on Le Drugstore on the Left Bank here, in which 3 persons
were killed and 22 wounded. France expelled three high‐ranking Cuban
diplomats on July 10, 1975. ”The Cubans, according to the French
Interior Ministry, were “constant visitors” to the Paris hideout of
Carlos”. The Cuban diplomats on whom expulsion orders were served today
were Raul Rodriguez Sainz, 32 years old, first secretary for cultural
affairs; Pedro Lara Zamora, 33, deputy cultural attache, and Ernesto
Reyes Herrera, 32, the chief of protocol. André Mousset, spokesman for
the Interior Ministry, added that the Carlos affair was looking more and
more like an “international terrorist plot.”
FALN Terrorists backed by Cuba, and the bombing campaign in New York City
Six months earlier on the other side of the Atlantic another group of
Puerto Rican terrorists linked to Havana carried out an act of terrorism
that claimed the lives of New Yorkers.
The FALN was responsible for the January 24, 1975 explosion at Fraunces Tavern, which killed
Alejandro Berger ( age 28), James Gezork (age 32), Frank Connor (age
33), Harold H. Sherburne (age 66) and wounded over 60 others.
Zach Dorfman’s June 8, 2017 article “How Fidel Castro Supported Terrorism in America” published in The Wall Street Journal
reveals: “the FALN was started in the mid-1960’s with a nucleus of
Puerto Rican terrorists that received advanced training in Cuba. . . .
After their advanced training in Cuba they returned to Puerto Rico and a
wave of bombings and incendiary incidents struck the [latter] island.
Within the last few years they have shifted their activities to the
mainland. . . . It is believed that they have maintained close links and
may in fact work closely with Cuban intelligence operatives.”
Furthermore Mr. Dorfman reported that “[a]ccording to court
documents, Filiberto Ojeda Ríos, who is believed to have helped co-found
the FALN, told an undercover NYPD officer in 1983 that he had received
explosives training in Cuba. And the FBI estimated that by 1973, roughly
135 Puerto Rican militants had received “extensive instruction in
guerilla war tactics, preparation of explosive artifacts, and
sophisticated methods of sabotage” from Fidel Castro’s intelligence
services.”
Cuban backed American terrorists carried out attack on the U.S. Capitol in the 1980s.
Windows blown out by bomb placed in the U.S. Capitol in 1983 to protest rout of Cubans in Grenada
The Castro regime aided and abetted American
terrorists that attacked and bombed the U.S. capitol, and then doubled
down when one of those terrorists died. Radio Havana Cuba, official
media of the Castro regime, published in 2010 an article titled “Political Activist Marilyn Buck Dies at 62” in which it referred to Marilyn Buck as an “activist and former political prisoner.” In reality she was a terrorist who bombed the U.S. Capitol in 1983 to protest the Grenada Invasion.
“At two minutes before 11 o’clock in the evening on
this day in 1983, a thunderous explosion tore through the second floor
of the U.S. Capitol’s Senate wing. Since the area was virtually deserted
at the time, there were no casualties. Minutes before the bomb went
off, a caller claiming to represent the “Armed Resistance Unit” warned a
Capitol switchboard operator that a bomb had been placed near the
chamber — purportedly in retaliation for the recent U.S. military
actions in Grenada and Lebanon. The force of the device, hidden under a
bench outside the Senate chamber, blew the hinges off the door to the
office of Sen. Robert Byrd (D-W.Va.), the minority leader. It also
damaged five paintings, particularly a stately portrait of Massachusetts
Sen. Daniel Webster. (The blast tore away Webster’s face and left it
scattered across the floor tiles in one-inch canvas shards. Senate
officials recovered the fragments from debris-filled trash bins. Over
the coming months, a conservator painstakingly restored the painting to a
credible, if somewhat diminished, version of the original.) The blast
also punched a hole in a partition that sent a shower of pulverized
brick, plaster and glass into the Republican cloakroom behind the
chamber. Although the explosion caused no structural damage to the
Capitol, it shattered mirrors, chandeliers and furniture. Officials
placed the damage at $250,000.”
“After a five-year investigation, in May 1988 FBI
agents arrested seven members of the ‘Resistance Conspiracy’: Marilyn
Jean Buck, Linda Sue Evans, Susan Rosenberg,
Timothy Blunk, Alan Berkman, Laura Whitehorn and Elizabeth Ann Duke.
They were charged with executing the Capitol bombing as well as
triggering similar blasts at Fort McNair and the Washington Navy Yard.”
Marilyn Buck pleaded guilty in 1988 to the 1983 bombing of the United
States Capitol. Her story is put into context in a long piece published
in Politico by William Rosenau titled “The Dark History of America’s First Female Terrorist Group,” which exposes connections to the Cuban dictatorship.
The WASP Network
In 1996 the Cuban Wasp Spy network located in South
Florida provided information to Havana that led to the shoot down of two
civilian planes in international airspace killing four engaged in the
search and rescue of rafters and boat people. This act of state
terrorism was widely condemned.
The WASP Network (La Red Avispa) was made up of over forty officers and agents,
four escaped to Cuba when the FBI began rounding them up in 1998. Ten
were captured, and five of them pleaded guilty and cooperated with the
prosecution and became unpersons in Cuba. The Wasp Network engaged in
espionage: targeted U.S. military facilities, planned to smuggle arms and explosives into the United States, infiltrated two non-violent exile groups,
and carried out numerous other activities to sow division, shape public
opinion, meddle in U.S. elections, and provided information for Operation Scorpion that led to the extrajudicial killings of Armando Alejandre, Carlos Costa, Mario de la Peña and Pablo Morales on February 24, 1996. Operation Scorpion was a Cuban intelligence operation
of the Castro regime that sought to destroy Brothers to the Rescue
using MiG fighters to shoot down their planes in an act of state
terrorism carried out over international airspace.
This network also gathered personal information
of American military personnel “compiling the names, home addresses,
and medical files of the U.S. Southern Command’s top officers and that
of hundreds of officers stationed at Boca Chica Naval Station in Key
West.”
The spies had received instructions from Havana to burn down an airport hangar, sabotage planes, first terrorize with messages that he was “nearing execution,” then send a mail bomb to kill a CIA agent living in Bal Harbour identified as Jesus Cruza Flor.
On September 12, 1998, the largest Cuban spy ring ever
uncovered in the United States, was broken up by the FBI. Ten suspects
were charged as Cuban spies. The Cuban dictatorship has spent decades
trying to whitewash this history.
WASP network spies captured in 1998.
Cuba was taken off the SSOT list in 2015 for political reasons, and returned to it on 2021 for continued bad action.
Cuba was taken off the list of state terror sponsors
in 2015 when the Obama Administration, responding to demands of Raul
Castro, conducted a politicized review to remove the offending state.
Six years later in January 2021, Cuba was returned to the list.
The U.S. State Department at the time cited the
following four reasons for re-designating the Cuban dictatorship as a
sponsor of terrorism.
1. “Cuba has refused Colombia’s
requests to extradite ten ELN leaders living in Havana after the group
claimed responsibility for the January 2019 bombing of a Bogota police
academy that killed 22 people and injured more than 87 others.”
2. “Cuba also harbors several U.S.
fugitives from justice wanted on or convicted of charges of political
violence, many of whom have resided in Cuba for decades. For example,
the Cuban regime has refused to return Joanne Chesimard, on the FBI’s
Most Wanted Terrorists List for executing New Jersey State Trooper
Werner Foerster in 1973; Ishmael LaBeet, convicted of killing eight
people in the U.S. Virgin Islands in 1972; Charles Lee Hill, charged
with killing New Mexico state policeman Robert Rosenbloom in 1971; and
others.”
3. “Cuba returns to the SST list
following its broken commitment to stop supporting terrorism as a
condition of its removal by the previous administration in 2015. On May
13, 2020, the State Department notified Congress that it had certified
Cuba under Section 40A(a) of the Arms Export Control Act as “not
cooperating fully” with U.S. counterterrorism efforts in 2019.”
4. “In addition to the support for
international terrorism that is the basis for today’s action, the Cuban
regime engages in a range of malign behavior across the region. The
Cuban intelligence and security apparatus has infiltrated Venezuela’s
security and military forces, assisting Nicholas Maduro to maintain his
stranglehold over his people while allowing terrorist organizations to
operate. The Cuban government’s support for FARC dissidents and the ELN
continues beyond Cuba’s borders as well, and the regime’s support of
Maduro has created a permissive environment for international terrorists
to live and thrive within Venezuela.”
Backing Hamas supporters and their violent protests in the United States
This CubaBrief is focusing on instances of terrorism
carried out in the United States by groups supported by the Cuban
dictatorship, and has not touched on Havana’s extensive involvement in
terrorism in Latin America and in the Middle East, but their support for
Iran, Hezbollah, and Hamas has had an impact in the United States.
Protests in some cases have turned into riots where, for example,
American flags were taken down from Union Station in Washington DC and
replaced with Palestinian flags, while Cuban flags were seen in the
crowd.
In a formal statement
released on October 7, 2023, the same day of the terror attacks, the
Cuban Foreign Ministry blamed Israel and its “accomplice,” the United
States, for the violence. In doing so, it continued to spread a false
narrative that originates in Soviet-era anti-Israel propaganda.In
this case Havana was blaming the victims of a terrorist attack that
murdered 1,200 and kidnapped hundreds of others perpetrated by their
longtime ally Hamas.
On October 8, 2023, one day after Hamas terrorists massacred 1,200 people in southern Israel, militant leftists organized a protest in Times Square
to celebrate the killings as an act of resistance and waved signs with
anti-Semitic slogans and images. The Center for a Free Cuba took notice of this protest at the time, and how official Cuban media was promoting it. On October 11, 2023, The People’s Forum (TPF) issued a statement defending their October 8th rally in Times Square, doubling down on their support for the terrorist attack.
The group’s
co-executive director, Manolo De Los Santos, is a longtime researcher at
the Marxist Tricontinental: Institute for Social Research and was
“based out of Cuba for many years,” where he “worked toward building
international networks of people’s movements and organizations,”
according to his biography at the anti-Israel group Black Alliance for
Peace. In July 2022, Cuba’s president, Miguel Díaz-Canel, received De
los Santos and executive director of Tricontinental: Institute for
Social Research, Vijay Prashad with the aim of “elaborating a new
consensus, based on theory and according to the different experiences of
social movements and countries, on the path of socialism.”
On January 24, 2024 Manolo De Los Santos spoke the quiet part out loud
at The People’s Forum in New York City: “When we finally deal that
final blow to destroy Israel. When the state of Israel is finally
destroyed and erased from history, that will be the single most
important blow we can give to destroying capitalism.”
Biden State Department’s wrong steps on Cuba
Despite this, the Biden State Department removed Cuba from the list of countries not cooperating in the fight against terrorism
on May 15, 2024. On the same day Joseph Connor, whose father Frank
Connor was murdered in a 1975 terrorist attack in New York City by a
Cuban backed group, wrote to Secretary Antony Blinken
requesting that one of the terrorists involved in the bombing, who is
currently harbored by Havana, be returned to the United States to face
justice. Four months later, and Mr. Connor has not received a response.
The reason given by Vedant Patel,
the principal deputy spokesperson at the State Department on May 16,
2024 “that the circumstances for Cuba’s certifications as not fully
cooperating country have changed from 2022 to 2023” does not stand up to
scrutiny. Patel cited “Cuba’s refusal to engage with Colombia on
extradition requests for National Liberation Army members supported
Cuba’s NFCC certification for 2022.”
What change took place? Not the behavior of the Cuban dictatorship.
The Colombian terrorists harbored by Havana were not extradited. The new duly elected president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, a past member of the terrorist group M-19
in Colombia with close ties to the Cuban dictatorship, ordered his
attorney general to suspend the arrest warrant “against 17 ELN
commanders, including those whose extradition Colombia had previously
requested from Cuba.” There is also a bit of historical irony. Cuba was first placed on the state sponsor of terrorism list in 1982
when Havana was implicated supplying weapons to the M19 terrorist group
from profits raised from trafficking narcotics. Patel also cited that
“the U.S. and Cuba resumed law enforcement cooperation in 2023,
including on counterterrorism.” First, the phrase “law-enforcement dialogue” is inaccurate.
In Cuba, there is no rule of law. “To keep power, the dictatorship
maintains a repressive security apparatus that murders nonviolent
dissidents extrajudicially. This is not ‘law enforcement.’ The Cuban
dictatorship is a transnational threat, and legitimizing it does not
enhance U.S. advocacy for human rights.”
What has that meant in practice?
Giving legitimacy to the Cuban dictatorship through
this sham “law enforcement cooperation” led Cuban officials meeting with
their American counterparts to accuse the United States of “supporting
people in Miami plotting ‘terrorist’ actions against Cuba.” Biden administration officials rejected these claims,
but the actions of Havana could not be described as a good faith
effort, or a reason to cite the dictatorship as fully cooperating in
anti-terrorism efforts. Much less grant them access to secure facilities
that are of great importance to America’s infrastructure.
Former top Cuban Communist Party official granted parole arrives in South Florida through Miami International Airport.
On August 16, 2024, Manuel Menéndez Castellanos, a one time top official in Cuba’s communist party in Cienfuegos, who represented the Cuban dictatorship in international forums,
and was given several awards by the regime, arrived in South Florida
through Miami International Airport. The former high ranking communist
official arrived in Miami through the Cuban Reunification Parole
Program.
U.S. Senators send letter to Secretary Blinken over the high
risk to national security posed by recent expansion of nonimmigrant
visas (NIV) to Communist Cuba
Despite this lapse, the Biden Administration announced that starting on August 19, 2024 would “expand its visa services to facilitate cultural and educational exchanges between” Cuba and the United States.
On September 5, 2024, Senator Rick Scott joined Senator Marco Rubio and Senator Ted Cruz “in sending a letter
to U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, raising concerns over the
high risk to national security posed by the Biden-Harris
administration’s recent expansion of nonimmigrant visas (NIV) to the
communist Cuban regime.” In this letter they point out concerns of this opening to Cuba,
a state sponsor of terror (SSOT). ” Given the risks associated with
allowing agents of an SSOT to enter the country, it is unclear how the
U.S. might benefit from these NIVs.” They also ask some critical questions
including, “Has the U.S. government expanded NIVs to the other
SSOTs—Iran, North Korea, and Syria? If not, does it plan to do so? Why
or why not?”
FALN placed more than 130 bombs in American cities — including one in New York on Jan. 24, 1975. The explosive went off in busy Fraunces Tavern during lunch hour. Four people died, including Frank Connor, a 33-year-old father. “I faced Lopez six years ago at his parole hearing ... If he had expressed any atonement, any sympathy or empathy ... we’d have recommended he be released. But he didn’t,” said Joe Connor, who was a 9-year-old when his father was killed. López got 10 years tacked onto his sentence when he and a fellow FALN member were caught plotting a prison break that included killing their guards.
According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation's Counterterrorism Division: "Terrorism is defined in the Code of Federal Regulations as “the unlawful use of force and violence against persons or property to intimidate or coerce a government, the civilian population, or any segment thereof, in furtherance of political or social objectives” By this definition Mr. López Rivera is a terrorist.
On Aug. 3, 1977, the FALN struck again in a coordinated attack in Midtown. An alert office worker at 342 Madison Ave., near 43rd St., noticed a suspicious package and evacuated the building. No one was hurt in the subsequent blast.Workers at the Mobil Building at 150 East 42nd St. weren't so lucky. An FALN bomb planted there killed 26-year-old Charles Steinberg. The building's ground-floor windows blew out and several New Yorkers were critically injured by a shower of glass. It was a bloody and chaotic mid-morning scene in the heart of the city. An NYPD cop described the sidewalk in front of the Mobil Building to a Daily News reporter as a "human mess." The FALN called in a dozen other bomb threats, forcing evacuations around the city. Mayor Abe Beame called the day's violent chaos an "outrageous act of terrorism." When López Rivera was arrested in 1981, the FBI found six pounds of dynamite and four blasting caps in his Chicago apartment along with numerous fake IDs.
In 1999 by the Committee on Government Reform conducted an investigation into President Clinton’s decision to offer clemency to sixteen FALN and Macheteros terrorists and offered the following report on Oscar Lopez-Rivera who while in prison planned a bloody escape that would have caused further loss of life:
An individual so "non-violent" that he wouldn’t renounce violence to get out of prison. In addition to crimes committed in furtherance of FALN goals, he plotted two escapes from federal prison. One was from Leavenworth Penitentiary and, according to a Victim Impact Statement, he "planned to blow up Fort Leavenworth with the most powerful plastic explosives known to the military, riddle guard towers with rounds from automatic weapons, and throw grenades in the path of those who pursued them. To achieve their goals, Lopez and Brown considered killing the inmates who threatened Richard Cobb, killing George Lebosky after they became suspicious of him, and killing firearms dealer Michael Neece to gain his weapons."
There is a moral chasm between an individual advocating the violent overthrow of a government and using the force of arms to lash out against civilians in order to generate fear to effect change and individuals exercising their fundamental human rights to achieve nonviolent change.
Frank Connor, a 33-year-old dad killed by FALN with his son Joe
Both are political prisoners but the first is a also a terrorist while the second is the antithesis of a terrorist and a prisoner of conscience. The terrorist uses terror to dominate by fear, murdering innocent civilians, while the person of conscience seeks to empower others by their example, ideas and arguments in a celebration of life.
“At this conference,Cuba and Latin American Marxist Leninist terrorist groups began their collaboration with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO), and other radical Arab groups in the training and arming of terrorists."
The Cuban dictatorship set about promoting terrorism as a legitimate tactic of revolutionary violence and published manuals on how to be more effective terrorists that still circulate today. In 1970 the Havana published the "Mini Manual for Revolutionaries" in the official Latin American Solidarity Organization (LASO) publication Tricontinental, written by Brazilian urban terrorist Carlos Marighella, which gives precise instructions in terror tactics, kidnappings, etc. and was translated into numerous languages and distributed worldwide by the Cuban dictatorship. There is a chapter on terrorism:
"Terrorism is an action, usually involving the placement of an explosive or fire bomb of great destructive power, which is capable of effecting irreparable loss against the enemy. Terrorism requires that the urban guerrilla should have adequate theoretical and practical knowledge of how to make explosives. The terrorist act, apart from the apparent ease with which it can be carried out, is no different from other guerrilla acts and actions whose success depends on planning and determination. It is an action which the urban guerrilla must execute with the greatest calmness and determination." ... "Terrorism is a weapon the revolutionary can never relinquish."
It should not be a surprise to anyone that President Obama would commute the sentence of an unrepentant terrorist because he has done it before. On December 15, 2014 he commuted the sentences of three of Castro's secret police who had planned terrorist attacks on U.S. soil and had been sentenced to life in prison. One of them, Gerardo Hernandez was sentenced to a double life sentence for his role in a murder conspiracy that cost the lives of three U.S. citizens and one resident on February 24, 1996 in the Brothers to the Rescue shootdown. Worse yet President Obama tried to downplay the crime as a "tragic circumstance" four days later on December 18, 2014.
Edmund Mahoney of the Hartford Courant interviewed a son who lost his father in New York City on January 24, 1975 in a bombing by the FALN, a terrorist organization with links to the Castro regime:
“In the midst of our global war on terrorism, simply put, how can Obama and this administration remove a state that sponsors terrorists from the State Sponsor of Terror list?” said Joseph Connor, whose father died in a 1975 bomb attack at Fraunces Tavern in New York by a Puerto Rican nationalist group supported by Cuba. “This action shows Obama’s utter disregard for Americans like my father, who was murdered by Castro’s clients and it tells the world we condone terrorism.”
This is a shameful legacy not only for President Obama but for all those blinded by their political agendas and ideological prejudices into campaigning for the release of an unrepentant terrorist.
Campaign that succeeded in freeing a Puerto Rican terrorist
Never forget this was a typical FALN operation of which Oscar López Rivera is a member:
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