BIN LADEN AND FIDEL CASTRO

BIN LADEN AND FIDEL CASTRO

It now seems likely that the ultimate goal of the perpetrators of the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon was the assassination of president Bush. On the wake of John F. Kennedy assassination, Fidel Castro declared: "For revolutionaries it is sometimes necessary to kill, they have to kill in order to defend themselves." That is the false logic of a murderer. No one kills without a motive, a motive that he believes validates his crime.

When president Kennedy was trying to eliminate Castro, Castro warned Kennedy: "Let [the Americans] not think," he said in a speech in 1963, "that they can attack us and that we are not going to defend ourselves. All the damage they try to do to us we will endeavor to do to them." And a month later he repeated the threat: "We will defend ourselves, and we will defend ourselves by all possible means. And whatever harm they mean to inflict on us we will inflict on them." A few days before the Dallas tragedy he repeated the same threat at a reception held at the Brazilian Embassy, in Havana, during remarks to the ambassador and his guests. His words were reported in many U.S. newspapers. He declared that Cuba was "prepared to answer any attack in kind, and that U.S. leaders should think twice before aiding terrorists to eliminate Cuban leaders, because they themselves will then not be safe." The Miami Herald printed the story on its front page under the headline: “Bitter Attack on Kennedys. 'We'll Fight Back,' Fidel Warns U.S." While in New Orleans, Lee Harvey Oswald must have read Castro's words, and anxious to serve Castro's cause, he made good Castro's threat. To those who practice evil, Kennedy's murder was a just punishment. In the same spirit of vengeance, Saddam Hussein declare shortly after Bin Laden's attack: "The United States is now harvesting the thorns their leaders have sown all over the world.”

Those responsible for the attack and their associates (Afghanistan, Iraq and Castro) are now trying to put the blame on domestic terrorists; in Castro's words, "The United States is the country with the greatest number of terrorist organizations, a country that has hundreds of armed men predisposed to violence." It is the same argument he used after Kennedy was assassinated, when he tried to implicate his enemies: "In the United States," he said, "there are numerous reactionary currents, and an event like this could only benefit ultra-reactionary and ultra-rightist sectors."

In the slang of criminals the word "madrugar" (to rise early) means to get rid of someone, to kill him. A dead enemy is no longer a threat. Castro told Jean Paul Sartre when he visited Havana in 1961: "The extermination of an adversary and of his allies may be avoidable, but it is prudent to prepare for such an eventuality... We refuse to die on this island without raising a finger to defend ourselves or to return blows." Accordingly Castro asked chairman Khruschev during the Missile Crises to drop an atomic bomb on the United States to prevent an American invasion. In doing so, Castro was simply following Lenin's dictum: "Regardless of their nature, all actions aiding communism are moral, and everything standing in its way is immoral." In other words, the end justifies the means. The thousands of innocent people killed in the World Trade Center and at the Pentagon represent only collateral damage in light of the service rendered to the Islamic cause by castigating the United States.

It is a well-known fact that Castro's Cuba always has been a safe haven for terrorists, from the Black Panthers in the 60's to the Basque terrorists of E.T.A. today. In fact Article 12 of the Cuban Socialist Constitution of 1975 "recognizes the legitimacy of wars of national liberation, as well as armed resistance to aggression and conquest; and considers that its help to those under attack and to the people that struggle for their liberation constitutes its internationalist right and duty", as in the case of the Libyans, according to Castro; and also recognizes "the right of the people to repel imperialist and reactionary violence with revolutionary violence and to struggle by all means within their reach for the right to freely determine their own destiny and the economic and social system in which they choose to live in," as in the case, according to Castro, of the Palestinians. Article 13 of the Constitution guarantees refuge to terrorists: "The Republic of Cuba grants asylum to those persecuted because of their struggle for the democratic rights of the majorities; for the national liberation; against imperialism, fascism, colonialism and neocolonialism," as in the case of so-called national liberation fronts in Central and South America.

According to president Bush, the United States should not only punish those directly involved in terrorist acts but also those aiding and abetting terrorists. And here is where Castro's Cuba is liable and Castro knows it. With wrath and worry in his face, Castro, in a recent speech, asked the American government to remain calm and to act with restraint, and not to be carried away by anger or hate, that is to say, to leave him alone, and to leave alone his friends and allies, and to let his powerful lobby in this country continue its work of concealing his wrongdoing and hiding his criminal activities.