In its arsenal of aggressions against Cuba, the U.S. government has put into practice a hundred different forms of terrorism ranging from sabotage of civilian airplanes to biological warfare and economic blockade.
From that country, one of the largest and most dangerous terrorist networks in the world was created, made up of organizations that have carried out a sad corollary of crimes.
Among them was Omega 7, founded in the United States on September 11, 1974, an organization that perpetrated, between 1963 and 1981, more than 60 terrorist attacks against Cuban installations and commercial institutions.
On September 11, 1980, Omega 7 claimed responsibility for the assassination of Cuban diplomat Felix Garcia Rodriguez in Queens, New York.
Over more than six decades, 3,478 fatalities and 2,099 disabled people put names to the statistics of this war against Cuba.
Let us remember the attacks on fishing and merchant vessels, such as the one against the Spanish ship Sierra Aránzazu, which caused the death of the captain and two of the officers.
On the other hand, we cannot forget the biological warfare, aimed at destroying agriculture and damaging the health of Cubans.
In order to confront the violent actions organized from Washington, men and women born from the bowels of the people, run all the risks and make all the sacrifices.
On September 12, 1998, five Cubans who decided to dedicate their lives to the fight against terrorism in the city of Miami were arrested in the United States.
For that reason, Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino, Antonio Guerrero, Fernando González and René González served severe and unjust sentences for more than 16 years.
However, in spite of the high price in lives and material resources that this murderous policy has cost the Cuban people, Washington designed, since the first years of the Revolution, a strategy of discredit, with the objective of justifying the permanent siege and presenting the largest of the Antilles as a terrorist country.
The inclusion of the island on the U.S. State Department’s list of countries sponsoring terrorism is a measure that goes far beyond isolating an adversary of the White House.
Such a measure is part of the scourge they claim to fight. It cannot be seen separately from the blockade or the violent actions or cognitive warfare, it is part of a whole designed to bring a people to its knees.
In spite of everything, the largest of the Antilles, which is a signatory to 19 international conventions related to the fight against terrorism, condemns this scourge and will continue to honor the commitments assumed in this matter, a responsibility it elevated to constitutional rank in 2019.

The Ministry of Foreign Affairs has learned with deep concern the decision of a judge of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, issued on May 1, 2024, which acquitted Alexander Alazo Baró of the four charges against him, as a result of the terrorist attack perpetrated by him against the Cuban Embassy in the United States in the early morning of April 30, 2020, for which he alleged insanity conditions of the perpetrator.

Alazo, a Cuban-born individual who has lived in the United States since 2010, fired all 32 rounds from a magazine of a semi-automatic rifle ak-47 into Cuba’s diplomatic headquarters in Washington, causing extensive property damage to the exterior and interior of the building and endangering the lives of several people inside the building.

Alazo himself confessed that he intended to shoot whatever was in front of him, including human beings if they had been in his line of fire. This was a terrorist act in the capital city of the United States against a permanent diplomatic headquarters.

At the time of his arrest, Alazo’s regular association with the Doral Jesus Worship Center in Miami Dade, where people with known behavior in favor of aggression, hostility, violence and extremism against Cuba meet, was well known.

The terrorist was arrested immediately at the scene and the U.S. government charged him with four offenses under the U.S. Federal Code. However, it has been unable to qualify the action for what it is: a terrorist act.

The politicization by the United States of the attack perpetrated against the Cuban Embassy in Washington was evident from the very first moments. This is demonstrated by the lengthy process of analyzing proven facts.

Four years after the events and in a criminal process full of opacity, the judge accepted a joint report from the Prosecutor’s Office and the defense of the terrorist Alexander Alazo Baró, which presents the perpetrator as someone who, at the time of the events, was not in possession of his mental faculties and, therefore, declares him innocent.

This decision sends a dangerous message of impunity to those who intend to take violent actions against diplomatic headquarters in Washington.

On September 24, 2023, in the evening hours, an individual threw two Molotov cocktails over the perimeter fence of the Cuban Embassy in Washington and against the front facade of that facility. It is an event that occurred three years and five months after the attack perpetrated by Alazo. Even U.S. law enforcement authorities claim not to know the perpetrator or have details of what happened.

These terrorist acts are a direct result of the aggressive policy and discourse of the U.S. government against Cuba, of the permanent incitement to violence and hatred by U.S. politicians and anti-Cuban extremist groups.

The political intolerance of an empire that has witnessed a Revolution taking place under its nose has hardened to the extent that – after 62 years of Cuba’s heroic resistance – the most fallacious and absurd arguments are deployed to justify the hostility, including accusations linking Cuba to terrorism, a scourge that the island has in fact suffered at the hands of self-confessed terrorists to whom the U.S. government has provided financing, logistics and immunity. Is it really necessary to recount the criminal U.S. record against Cuba? Apparently another repetition is needed, although its promoters in the immoral north are well aware of the history.

INTENT ON DESTROYING THE REVOLUTION, AT ANY COST

One of the first terrorist attacks against the nascent Revolution occurred on October 21, 1959. On that day, a traitor pilot exiled in Miami, Pedro Luis Díaz Lanz, who had been an officer in the Cuban Air Force, flying a twin-engine B-25, bombed several Havana neighborhoods, causing 45 injuries and the death of two persons.

Diaz Lanz himself would later confirm his responsibility for the attack. With full impunity and protection from U.S. authorities, he departed from Pompano Beach, Florida, where no one created any obstacle to his plans.

Thus began the terrorist war against Cuba, sponsored by the U.S. government and conceived as state policy, fully documented and denounced by Cuba in international forums.

A wide variety of political, military, economic, biological, diplomatic, psychological, propaganda, espionage and sabotage methods have been utilized in the attacks. Armed gangs have also been organized and logistically supported, while desertion has been encouraged and plots hatched to assassinate leaders of the Revolution.

Numerous declassified secret documents provide evidence of these crimes, along with the millions of dollars approved annually for this purpose, an amount which is published in the media as just another line item in the government budget, behind the backs of taxpayers, who are largely unaware of the allocation’s final destination.

In this regard, the Cuban people’s demand for compensation from the United States government for damages states in its first Findings, “Hostile and aggressive actions carried out by the United States government against Cuba, since the triumph of the Revolution to date, have caused enormous material and human damage to the people, and incalculable suffering to the country’s citizens, hardships due to shortages of medicines, food and other items essential to life.”

The document reports that the loss of human lives has reached 3,478 and 2,099 individuals have been permanently disabled as a result of bodily injury.

One of the bloodiest attacks perpetrated by the CIA was the explosion of the steamship La Coubre, in the port of Havana, as legitimately purchased weapons and ammunition were being unloaded, March 4, 1960.

More than a hundred Cubans died in the sabotage, including longshoremen, port workers and members of the Rebel Army. While the lives of six French crew members were lost.

It should also be recalled that when Comadante en jefe Fidel Castro attended the Ibero-American Summit on the Venezuelan island of Margarita, the military wing of the counterrevolutionary organization Cuban American National Foundation attempted to assassinate him.

Several of its members were arrested and, found on board the yacht La Esperanza, registered in the name of Francisco “Pepe” Hernández, later president of the Foundation, was a 50 caliber rifle of his, capable of perforating armored vehicles. In December 1999, they were all acquitted.

Another terrorist attack that deeply touched the Cuban people was the mid-flight bombing of a Cubana Airlines plane over Barbados, in which 73 persons perished, including passengers and crew. The intellectual authors of this terrorist attack were Orlando Bosch Avila and Luis Posada Carriles. (Both later died as free men in the city of Miami.)

They were detained in Venezuela, until the Foundation financed Bosch’s freedom and facilitated the escape of Posada Carriles, who cynically acknowledged responsibility for the sabotage, while calmly walking the streets of Miami.

Referring to the sabotage, Fidel stated: “Surely U.S. citizens will understand the attack better if they compare the population of Cuba 25 years ago with that of the United States on September 11, 2001. The death of 73 persons on a Cuban plane downed in-flight is equivalent, given the United States’ population, to the mid-air destruction of seven U.S. airliners with more than 300 passengers each, on the same day, at the same time, by a terrorist conspiracy.”

In 1997, several bombs exploded in Havana hotels, and Cuba denounced the fact that the culprits were residents in the United States. The State Department responded that it would investigate if Cuba provided information.

The FBI was forwarded a fat, secret dossier from Cuban authorities, in which the name of Luis Posada Carriles appeared as the instigator of the attacks. But nothing was done to arrest the criminals. Instead, the information provided by the island’s government was used to pursue, arrest and prosecute Cubans in the U.S. conducting surveillance to protect their people from these terrorist groups

Three years later, in November of 2000, on the occasion of the People’s Summit at the University of Panama, which was held simultaneously with the 17th Summit of the Americas, Cuban State Security agencies uncovered a terrorist plot to assassinate Fidel.

Diplomat Carlos Rafael Zamora, a witness to the events, recalled: “The Cuban side gave the Panamanian side a list of terrorists, their aliases and the types of passports they used to enter the country. All the individuals who participated in planning of the attack were identified. I witnessed the conversations held with Panamanian authorities, in which we expressed the Cuban delegation’s concern regarding the presence of these terrorists and the threat they posed to the security of the Comandante en jefe and the delegation.”

Upon arrival in Panama, Fidel denounced the terrorists’ plans in a press conference and provided information that would allow for their arrest. Posada Carriles, using the alias of Franco Rodriguez Mena, was staying in room 310 at the Coral Suites Hotel in Panama City. He was detained there. Cuban agents neutralized the assassination attempt by four terrorists in the University’s principal auditorium, where they had hidden nine kilograms of C-4 explosive. Some 2,000 people would gather there to hear Fidel. It would have been a real massacre.

The government of President Mireya Moscoso, under national and international pressure, was obliged to prosecute the four implicated, but they were given purely symbolic sentences. Messages from the Foundation in Miami poured in calling for their release. Thus on August 26, 2004, just one day before Moscoso’s term as President came to an end, she pardoned them.

Posada Carriles took many secrets to the grave. But it is no secret at all that he was a life-long terrorist assassin in the service of the CIA.

One of the most outrageous elements of the Trump’s administration’s foreign policy was to add Cuba, once again, to the spurious unilateral State Department list of the countries they consider “state sponsors of terrorism.”

The immorality of the U.S. government is so great that the absurd accusation about Cuban support of terrorism has been passed from “one hand to another” as a political inheritance, fully aware of the dimensions of this colossal infamy, as befits the imperialists’ arrogance, to be recycled by the Biden administration and serve as a justification for more sanctions that will not take Cuba by surprise. They reflect the empire’s unchanged interest in forcing this heroic country to surrender.

It apparently does not matter that the failed attempt has been underway for more than six decades. What a fiasco.

The designation of Cuba on the list of sponsors of terrorism is even more insensitive and unjustified today, when Cuba is suffering the worst economic crisis in its contemporary history as a result of U.S. policy.

So warned an article published in The Hill newspaper, referring to the coercive measure reimposed three years ago by then President Donald Trump “as a farewell just days before leaving office,” which triggered a series of new sanctions against the island nation, the text stressed.

It said that last month members of Congress were furious to learn that, despite assurances to the contrary, President Joe Biden has not even begun the process of reviewing that decision. It was pointed out that the blockade against Cuba and the U.S. sanctions have deprived the island’s economy of more than 130 billion dollars.

This policy has also hindered civilians’ access to essential goods such as food, fuel and medicines, systematically undermining the fundamental human rights of the Cuban people.

In 2014,” he added, “President Barack Obama broke with half a century of systematic hostility and provided some relief to the Cuban economy, including the elimination of the designation that President Ronald Reagan (1981-1989) provided during the Cold War.

While Trump destroyed these fragile gains, many Cubans and Americans alike saw Biden’s election as an opportunity to return to the path laid out by his former running mate, he recalled.

But despite campaign promises, Biden has proven to be more Trump than Obama, and the list is a particularly egregious case in point, he emphasized.

In effect, the measure extends U.S. financial restrictions internationally, cutting the Cuban people off from the global financial system, considered the author of the article entitled Cuba’s inclusion on the list of State Sponsors of Terrorism has had detrimental consequences.

But the designation is not only deeply damaging. It is also unfounded, the columnist asserted.

In fact, senior officials in both Democratic and Republican administrations have described the designation as “bogus” and “absurd.” Colin Powell’s former chief of staff called it “a fiction we have created … to bolster the justification for the blockade,” he explained.

However, the Biden administration has maintained Trump’s baseless designation. It is unclear why.

And Democrats have little strategic justification for allowing a small group of Florida hardliners to hold their policy decisions hostage.

Meanwhile, nearly every country in the world opposes the blockade. Latin American leaders in particular have criticized U.S. policy toward Cuba, which is seen as a manifestation of the 200-year-old Monroe Doctrine.

The majority of voters, both Democrats and Republicans, want an end to the blockade.