TOMORROW will mark the 35th anniversary of the horrific bombing of a Cubana passenger aircraft off Barbados that killed all 73 people aboard in what has been documented as the single worst human tragedy in the history of the Caribbean to result from international terrorism.

That most gruesome act was linked to anti-Cuba operatives trained by the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

The Government of Cuba and its embassies in Barbados and Guyana will have varying activities to commemorate the victims of that unprecedented crime in Caribbean air space in which the collaborators involved those who had boarded the Cubana flight at Piarco International airport in Trinidad and Tobago.

With the explosive material well-hidden onboard the Cubana aircraft while it sat on the tarmac at Grantley Adams International Airport in Barbados waiting to resume its flight to Havana, the terrorists succeeded in making their escape on another aircraft and eventually ended up in Caracas, Venezuela where five leading suspects were subsequently identified.

Among the 73 victims of that terrorist bombing were 11 Guyanese and five North Koreans. All the others were Cubans, including their national fencing team.

A week of activities to mark the tragedy has been planned for Barbados. They include an official observance ceremony tomorrow at the monument to the victims. The monument was established on the sea front of Paynes Bay, in a major tourist area in the parish of St James, in 2005 and was formally unveiled in the presence of then Cuban President Fidel Castro and the Heads of Government of Caricom who were attending an annual summit. A second monument is currently under construction in Guyana.

Another significant event to commemorate the 35th anniversary is scheduled to take place on Friday in the form of a collaborative three-hour event planned by the Cuban embassy in Barbados and the Social Science Faculty of the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill campus.

It will include a panel discussion focused on the wider implications for security and development in the Caribbean as a consequence of the politics of the notorious terrorist act.

Masterminds

Among the masterminds behind the bombing plot were two Cuban émigrés who had obtained Venezuelan citizenship while they plotted terrorist activities in Havana, Santiago and other capitals.

They were identified as Orlando Bosch (who recently died in the USA where he had obtained a presidential pardon from the senior George Bush); and Luis Posada Carilles.

As if to show their contempt, or insensitivity, successive administrations in Washington refused demands from Cuban and Venezuelan authorities for the extradition of Bosch and Posada to face trials for their involvement in the Cubana tragedy.

That contempt was to be hilariously demonstrated in relation to Posada — while Bosch astutely kept a very low profile — with US immigration opting to put him on trial for “illegally” entering that “land of the free and home of the brave”, instead of having him indicted for mass murder.

That was some 25 years before the unprecedented horrendous terrorist bombing attacks on New York and Washington that killed approximately 3,000 people, most of whom were citizens of America, but also including scores of Caribbean nationals.

Ironically, and particularly for the administration of President Barack Obama — who came to power with his endearing “promises of change” from the old political culture of that superpower — it was the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) that at one stage felt compelled to publicly name Posada as a “terrorist”.

Utter contempt

In a document released from the US embassy in Venezuela, dated March 30, 2006 and sent to Posada, the US officially admitted for the first time that he was a terrorist “with a long history of criminal activity and violence in which innocent civilians were killed…”

From his own research some years later, the Jamaica-born Caribbean academic and writer, Dr Horace Campbell, author of Reclaiming Zimbabwe, and Rasta and Resistance: From Marcus Garvey to Walter Rodney, was to deem Luis Posada as “the Bin Laden of the Americas”, as he focused on international terrorism and US foreign policy objectives in the Western Hemisphere.

For the writer, Peter Kornbluh, in an article in The Nation (USA) in February 2011, Posada was “the godfather of anti-Castro Cuban violence over the last four decades…”

But amid the ruthless stubborness displayed by the White House and the US Justice Department to requests from Cuba and Venezuela for Posada’s extradition to face trial for mass murder, Posada, now 83, was acquitted by a US court on April 8 this year for — guess what? — illegally entering the USA where his family lives.

You talk about contempt for nations in this hemisphere by the USA? Think of the freedom given Posada and, much earlier, the presidential pardon granted his fellow terrorist, Orlando Bosch.