Concern about Cuban officials visiting MIA is well-founded | Opinion
The column by WLRN Americas Editor Tim Padgett in the May 26 edition of the Sun Sentinel (“What’s outrageous in Miami is the outrage — and TSA’s Cuba optics”) discusses identity politics and cultural sensitivity, but fails to address legitimate security concerns about the five-hour tour by Cuban officials to secure areas of Miami International Airport (MIA) on May 20, 2024.
Padgett left out important context. Leaked Cuban intelligence in 2018 showed that Cuban spies had stolen security codes and other confidential information from MIA.
Concern about Cuban diplomats touring security facilities at an American airport is not an example of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), but a sensible response.
Consider the following on the dictatorship currently ruling Cuba. The Castro brothers came to power through a campaign of urban terrorism carried out by the July 26th Movement in the 1950s against the dictatorship of Fulgencio Batista.
Throughout the 1950s, Castro’s July 26th Movement carried out multiple bombings, terrorizing and killing Cuban civilians. Raul Castro, considered by some as the father of the modern crime of skyjacking, plotted several skyjackings. One skyjacking resulted in the deaths of 17 civilians on November 1, 1958.
The many innocent victims and millions of property losses demonstrate without a doubt the mendacity of Fidel Castro’s claim that “the Cuban revolution never engaged in terrorism.”
Castroism views terrorism as a legitimate tactic to advance its objectives. Havana published the “Minimanual of the Urban Guerilla” by Brazilian militant communist Carlos Marighella. Translated into many languages, it contains a chapter on terrorism that states: “Terrorism is a weapon the revolutionary can never relinquish.”
In 2021 the State Department cited Havana’s “support for FARC dissidents and the ELN” and the creation of a “permissive environment for international terrorists to live and thrive within Venezuela” as one of the reasons for returning Cuba to the terror sponsor list. Today, the Cuban intelligence and security apparatus continues to infiltrate Venezuela’s security and military forces, and remains what OAS Secretary General Luis Almagro describes as an occupation army.
Cuba was first placed on the list of state terror sponsors on March 1, 1982. The U.S. State Department confirmed Havana was using a narcotics ring to funnel arms and cash to the Colombian terrorist group M-19.
Today, Havana has re-created this dynamic on a much larger scale in assisting in the creation of the Soles Cartel in Venezuela that has flooded the United States with narcotics and provided Caracas and Havana profits to destabilize the region.
It is a perverse irony that the election of former M-19 terrorist Gustavo Petro to the Colombian presidency, and his subsequent request to rescind extradition requests for ELN guerillas harbored by Cuba for a 2019 terrorist attack in Colombia is the main reason that the State Department is now saying that Havana is fully cooperating in anti-terrorism efforts.
Havana has collaborated with Iran for decades, and today continues to provide intelligence, coordinate funding efforts, and facilitate the travel of Tehran’s proxies Hamas and Hezbollah in Latin America.
Havana’s embrace of terrorism causes blowback. According to the dictatorship, the Oct. 6, 1976 bombing of Cubana airlines flight 455 that Padgett cites, caused the deaths of 73 passengers. Not mentioned is that the two persons credited by Havana for the terrorist attack had first been members of Castro’s July 26th Movement carrying out terrorism against Batista.
The Cuban dictatorship has carried out acts of state terrorism against Cuban nationals, including killing 37 men, women and children on July 13, 1994. The regime then defended and celebrated the men responsible for the massacre declaring their actions to be “exemplary.” They have not stopped. On Oct. 28, 2022, a Cuban coast guard ship purposefully rammed and sank a boat just north of Bahía Honda, killing seven refugees.
Padgett is wrong. This is not a question of slighting an ethnic group, or PTSD, but of lax protection of U.S. national security by Washington, allowing Cuban officials to visit secure areas of our ports and airports gathering intelligence that they can share with other terror states, and enemies of America — and that is an outrage.
John Suarez is executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba in Falls Church, Virginia.