The U.S. Terrorized Cuba, Not the Other Way Around

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Editor's note: As President Obama begins his historic visit to Cuba, we are posting some of Truthdig Editor in Chief Robert Scheer's past writings about the U.S.' relations with and actions toward Cuba. This article was originally published in the Los Angeles Times on July 14, 1998.

When is it all right to blow up restaurants and kill tourists? Anytime, according to Luis Posada Carriles, who masterminded last year's attacks on Cuba's booming tourist industry, terrorizing disco dancers and diners alike.

In a startling revelation this week, the 70-year-old Posada revealed that key Cuban American lobbyists in this country financed his activities, in apparent violation of U.S. law, while the FBI and CIA looked the other way.

Once again, history won't keep its mouth shut. Little by little, the truth comes out, and our policy in Cuba gets exposed for the sham it is. For almost 40 years, we have isolated Cuba on the assumption that the tiny island is a center of terrorism in the hemisphere, and year after year we gain new evidence that it is the U.S. that has terrorized Cuba and not the other way around.

It's obvious from the Posada interview that terrorism is morally acceptable not only to Posada, who confessed to many of the bloody details of his 35 years of sabotage of civilian targets inside Cuba in a New York Times interview, but also to high U.S. government officials who trained this international killer and employed him in many nefarious operations.

The FBI and CIA also suppressed evidence of Posada's connection to the late Jorge Mas Canosa, the powerful Miami-based anti-Castro lobbyist whose campaign contributions and political clout with U.S. presidents has shaped U.S.-Cuba policy for decades.

Mas Canosa died last year, but his organization, the tax-exempt Cuban American National Foundation, begun in 1981 at the suggestion of the Reagan administration, continues to be one of the nation's most powerful lobbying organizations. His replacement as chairman of the foundation is also named by Posada in the Times interview as having financially supported his activities.

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