“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.
The State Sponsors of Terrorism list came into existence in 1979, and Cuba was added to the list in 1982 due to its links to the M-19 terrorist group in Colombia, facilitating drug smuggling to the U.S., and providing arms.
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.
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| Cuban diplomats Elsa Montera Maldonado and Jose Gomez Abad, a husband and wife team at the Cuba Mission in NYC. |
Fortunately, the FBI discovered the plot and prevented what would have been a significant loss of life. Both Elsa Montero Maldonado and Jose Gomez Abad were expelled for their role in the planned terrorist attack. Roberto Santiesteban Casanova, Antonio Sueiro, and Jose Garcia Orellana were prosecuted, and later traded for Americans jailed in Cuba.
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| Three suspects, and their weapons stash. |
Carlos and the Tricontinental
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.”
The Puerto Rican terrorist group, Fuerzas Armadas de Liberación Nacional Puertorriqueña, (FALN), from the mid-1970s through the mid-1980s, carried out more than 130 bombings, including more in New York City.
Cuban backed American terrorists carried out attack on the U.S. Capitol in the 1980s.
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| 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.”
Two years earlier 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 during the armed robbery and subsequent escape.
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| Inside of the bombed Senate office. |
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.
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| 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.
On June 18, 2024 the Ways and Means Committee held a hearing on antisemitism on college campuses which denounced that Jewish students were being terrorized.
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?”
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