A history of US terrorism against Cuba

Stalin

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Missing from the narrative is

"..The Cuban Embassy in the United States responded to the indictment by recalling that Cuba had formally denounced more than 25 territorial violations by Brothers to the Rescue between 1994 and 1996—protests that Washington systematically ignored.

Far from being a humanitarian organization, Brothers to the Rescue used its aircraft to conduct repeated hostile overflights of Cuban territory, on occasion buzzing Havana and dropping leaflets calling on Cubans to rise up against the government. Basulto, himself a veteran of the CIA-organized Bay of Pigs invasion, had bragged of being trained in terror techniques at the U.S. Army School of the Americas in Panama. He participated in the shelling of a Havana hotel from a boat and later provided CIA-directed support to the Contra terrorist movement in Nicaragua.

His group’s activities were a calculated provocation, designed to trigger a US military attack on Cuba. The shootdown was an act of self-defense against a sustained, US-backed campaign of aggression.

The Clinton administration did not retaliate militarily, but it reversed its opposition to the Helms-Burton bill, which imposed punishing new sanctions against foreign corporations doing business in Cuba and prohibited any lifting of the US embargo.


and of course..throw in the all bs about "300 drones"

comrade stalin
 
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It’s now 30 years since Cuban fighter jets shot down two unarmed Cessna planes belonging to the exile group Brothers to the Rescue in international airspace just north of Havana. Four people died. At the time, it was seen not only as an atrocity, but a terrible strategic error. Now the incident is at the heart of the US indictment of Castro.

What is less remembered is that it wasn’t a surprise. I covered the story from Miami, where Eloy Gutiérrez Menoyo – the first rebel leader to enter Havana under Fidel Castro but by then living in exile – told me: “Everybody here knew something was going to happen to the planes.”

Brothers to the Rescue was a group originally founded by a Bay of Pigs veteran José Basulto to spot Cuban refugees trying to reach the United States on makeshift rafts. By the mid-90s, it had turned to provocation by buzzing Cuba itself and dropping leaflets – something Fidel Castro himself said the US would never tolerate over its own capital, according to the book Back Channel to Cuba, by William LeoGrande and Peter Kornbluh.

“Their most provocative act in 1995 came on July 13, when Basulto’s Cessna Skymaster buzzed Havana, raining down thousands of religious medallions and leaflets reading ‘Brothers, Not Comrades’,” they wrote.

Despite pleas from the Cuban government, the US continued to tolerate the flights and eventually the Cuban leadership snapped. “Fidel was trying to find a diplomatic solution, he had sent several messages to Bill Clinton saying, ‘You have to stop this, we cannot stand it,’” said Carlos Alzugaray, who was Cuba’s ambassador to Brussels at the time.

The pressure the Cuban government was facing then, however, was nothing to what it is now.

Wednesday’s indictment follows weeks in which surveillance aircraft have circled the island, suspect intelligence reports have suggested that Cuba has drones and therefore poses a threat to the US, the CIA director landed in Havana to tell Cuban officials to stop cozying up to Russian and China, and the aircraft carrier group Nimitz entered the Caribbean.

In a speech directed to the Cuban people, Marco Rubio, the Cuban American US secretary of state, said: “You, who call the island your home, are going through unimaginable hardships. Today I want to tell you what we, in the US, are offering to help you not only alleviate the current crisis, but also to build a better future.”


cuba si yankees no

comrade stalin
moscow
 
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