16th October 2010
34 years after the barbaric Barbados bombing
Who remembers how St. Lucia featured?

Thirty four years ago, a major international criminal, murderous, terrorist act took place in Barbados. It was – perhaps, depending on who’s talking -- the first modern, truly terrorist act in the English-speaking Caribbean. The heartless bombing of a Cuban national airline left 73 people dead -- 57 Cubans, 11 Guyanese and 5 North Koreans. Their only crime was to have been on the airplane.
Nobody knew that terrorists had checked in luggage at Barbados’ then Seawell Airport with a bomb in a suitcase. No one realized (until it was too late) that the man who checked in the luggage hadn’t boarded the plane. But he didn’t – and everyone on board died as soon as the plane lifted off.
No one here knew St. Lucia would feature in the aftermath of the bombing. But our island featured for sure. However, it would seem that no one remembered – or cared enough to write anything about it in the local press.
I left St. Lucia for Barbados on the night of the 24th anniversary, somewhat disappointed that no one seemed to remember Caricom’s very first modern-day international terrorist act on October 6th 1976. While I was in Bridgetown, members of the resident diplomatic corps attended a wreath-laying memorial ceremony organized by the Cuban Ambassador at a memorial in St James dedicated to the Cubana airlines disaster.
The Cuban Ambassador to Barbados was accompanied by the Venezuelan Ambassador and the Barbados Foreign Affairs Minister at the ceremony, where the Cubans reiterated their call for the man who has been implicated in that terrorist act -- an adopted Venezuelan national by the name of Luis Posada Carilles, to be brought to justice, or submitted to Cuba for prosecution.
The Ambassador also reiterated Havana’s call for release of the five Cubans jailed in the US on terrorism charges after they offered to help the US identify and prosecute anti-Cuban terrorists in Miami whose ranks they had infiltrated. The Americans, rather that agree that terrorism against Cuba was being planned on American soil, instead accused the Cuban counter-terrorist officials (The Cuban Five) of spying in America – and jailed them.
Thirty Four years after the Barbados bombing, Cuba is still begging America to extradite or arrest Louis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch – the two men who were later revealed to have planted the bomb and who are walking free in Miami up to his day.
Carilles is a registered Venezuelan citizen and Caracas has also demanded his extradition to Venezuela, but even that is also being ignored. Carilles never gave up on his terrorism acts against Cuba. He boasted about Barbados and continued to plan acts of terror against Cuba. He was in fact implicated in another plot twenty-something years later – in the 1990s – when a series of bombs were planted at hotels in Havana.
Cuba is also reporting today that the US has also been rejecting offers to cooperate on counter-terrorism.
On the anniversary of the Barbados bombing this year, Cuba designated October 6 as “Victims of State Terrorism Day”. On that day too, President Raul Castro revealed that in 2001 and 2002 Havana offered to cooperate with Washington in the fight against terrorism, but received no response. He said this offer and request was repeated this year and there still has been no response from the Obama administration.