Cuba returned to list of State Sponsors of Terrorism. Remembering when pro-Castro terrorists bombed the U.S. Capitol in 1983

We remember. Recovering some facts from the memory hole.

Windows blown out by bomb placed in U.S. Capitol by Pro-Castro terrorists in 1983

Source: CubaBrief 

The State Department re-designating Cuba as a State Sponsor of Terrorism (SSOT) yesterday rectified an error made in 2015. Havana continues to “repeatedly provide support for acts of international terrorism” and has never stopped granting international terrorists safe haven in Cuba. 

Cuba continues to harbor dozens of wanted terrorists, among them the notorious cop-killer Joanne Chesimard. Havana provides a safe-haven for leaders of the Colombian terrorist group Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN) and maintains close ties with terror sponsor states North Korea, Iran, and Syria. 

The State Department's January 11, 2021 announcement highlights that “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.” 

Colombian terrorist group Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN)

Havana continues to provide command, control, Cuban military and security agents, to violently prop up the illegitimate Maduro dictatorship in Venezuela, and has expanded its presence in other leftist Latin American countries including, but not limited to, Nicaragua and Bolivia. 

The decision to remove Cuba from the SSOT list in 2015 was a politicized decision made in response to demands from the Castro regime as a pre-condition of re-establishing diplomatic relations later that same year. In the belief that the American people have a right to know what the Cuban Government already does, the Center for a Free Cuba has requested that the record of the 2009-2017 US-Cuba negotiations to reestablish diplomatic relations be declassified.

Partners in Narco-terrorism: Nicolas Maduro and Raul Castro

When it normalized relations with Cuba, the Obama administration hoped to see political and economic reforms instituted by the regime. Instead, repression and human rights violations increased, as recognized by Obama’s own former Secretary of State John Kerry.

 Worse yet, in 2016 U.S. diplomats stationed in Havana began to suffer brain injuries, and regime officials were unhelpful in finding the cause. The US National Academies of Sciences reported that the “sonic” attacks against American and Canadian diplomats were the result of a “directed, pulsed radio frequency energy.” Cuba continues to deny any responsibility or recognize that the attacks occurred despite its responsibility to protect them under the Vienna Convention. 

"The reasons for Cuba to be on the State Sponsors of Terrorism List remain, and have indeed expanded since the original designation in 1982," said Ambassador Otto J. Reich, president of the Center for a Free Cuba.

Damage inside the Capitol from the 1983 bombing

The Castro regime aided and abetted American terrorists that attacked and bombed the U.S. capitol, and 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, New York. 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.

Marilyn Buck also pleaded guilty in 1988 to the 1983 bombing of the US 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," and exposes links to Havana.

Marilyn Buck: U.S. terrorist