Why Cuba Remains a State-Sponsor of Terror

February 21, 2011


An excerpt from Jose Cardenas' "It's not time to remove Cuba from the terror list" in Foreign Policy:

This is a regime that since even before it seized power has used terror as an instrument of both domestic and international policy to achieve its goals. At the height of the Castro regime's international influence in the late 1970s into the 1980s, Cuba helped to build up and unify at least 27 different terrorist groups in the Western Hemisphere, totaling about 25,000 armed and trained members by 1987.

Around the same time, the State and Defense Departments estimated that a minimum of 20,000 individuals from around the world, including more than 10,000 Latin Americans, had attended one or more of the more than fifty guerrilla or terrorist training courses offered in Cuban military facilities since Castro came to power (the most infamous of trainees being, of course, Carlos the Jackal).

Nor was the Castro regime content to victimize the unfortunate citizens of Latin America and Africa, as it aiding and abetting terrorist groups operating on our own soil, including the Weather Underground (of Bill Ayres fame) and the militant Puerto Rican group, the Macheteros. Victor Manuel Gerena, a mastermind of the Macheteros' 1983 robbery of a Well Fargo depot in Connecticut, has lived safely in Cuba for decades, joining U.S. fugitives Joanne Chesimard and Charlie Hill, who are wanted in the U.S. for the murders of U.S. police officers, as well as some 70 other fugitives from U.S. justice.

In addition, following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks in the United States, Cuban intelligence sent numerous fake tipsters into U.S. embassies abroad to sidetrack and impede U.S. counter-terrorism efforts. (Also, following 9/11, U.S. authorities rolled up the Cuban spy Ana Belen Montes at the Defense Intelligence Agency, not wanting to risk her information being passed on by Cuba to other U.S. enemies.)