By Earl Bousquet

October 6 marked the 48th anniversary of the terrorist bombing in 1976 of a Cuban airline in Barbados that killed 57 mainly Cuban but also Guyanese and North Korean passengers, including athletes returning home from an international sporting event.

It was the first such deadly act of terrorism in the English-speaking Caribbean and while the perpetrators were always known, neither of the two terrorists have been made to face justice for their crimes, instead being allowed to walk and talk freely in the US and boast about their dastardly criminal act.

That act against a Cuban airline in the Eastern Caribbean was part of a series of similar terrorist acts against Cuba at home, including bombings of hotels in Havana in the 1980s.

Cuba’s intelligence services infiltrated the terrorist groups in the USA and exposed their plots for further terrorist acts against Cuba, including assassination attempts, but five among the Cuban agents uncovering the terrorist plots were instead arrested and jailed by and in the US.

The three decades since the 1990s have seen the US and the world’s most powerful Western nations engage in what victims of their interventions in Africa and the Arab world will describe as ‘state terrorism’, but in the post-9/11 era (since 2001) the US has drawn-up its own list of states in the developing world that it’s branded ‘state sponsors of terrorism’, including Cuba -a victim of state-sponsored terrorism for as long as the 1959 revolution has lasted (over six decades).

It took over four-and-a-half decades for October 6 to be jointly designated as Cuba-Caricom Day Against Terrorism in 2022 and the second observance took place in Bridgetown and Havana last week, with global interest in the fact that terrorism has been present in the English-speaking Caribbean for close to 50 years.

But even after 63 years of relentless sanctions that have subjected successive generations of millions of Cubans to inhuman conditions enforced by cowboy-style laws aimed at driving Cuba and Cubans into the dust, from legislation demanding compensation for companies nationalized to punishment of any company or country that trades with Cuba using US currency and ensuring the nation cannot purchase or import medicines or food.

On October 6 this year, Venezuelans -still facing close to 1,000 US-led sanctions after the July 28, 2024 elections- joined millions the world over to demand not only the lifting of sanctions against Cuba and removing it from the US ‘terrorist state’ list, but also voiced their protests by taking to the streets to condemn the genocide in Gaza and Lebanon and against the efforts to widen the war across the region.

Notwithstanding nuclear possibilities and more mass deaths in what’s already the worst massacre of a people by a lawless state in human history since (and worse in scale than World War II), the genocide continues in the Middle East while the West continues to support an unwinnable war in Ukraine.

The Al Aksa Flood multi-pronged (air, sea and land) Hamas attack on the equivalent of a Jewish Christmas morning was the worst Israel ever suffered after seven decades of the equivalent of exacting state-sponsored terror against Palestinians and refusal to allow for establishment of a Palestinian State, even though the majority of the world’s nations support it.

Over 75% of Gaza destroyed is destroyed and now Israel is being accused of also committing Ecocide through the damage to agriculture by 85,000 tonnes of explosives supplied mainly by the US and UK, but also by NATO, which have reduced Gaza to rubble, killing (at least officially) 41,965 Palestinians in Gaza (including 400 footballers), 36 hospitals and 98% of health facilities destroyed, 93 schools bombed to smithereens, 93% of schools and 68 university-level educational facilities blasted to bits, over 600 mosques bombed beyond repair, 67% of water and sanitation facilities destroyed, entire cities flattened, 68% of roads into gravel, over 50 sports facilities destroyed, with 222 United Nations Staff killed alongside hundreds of Palestinian health workers and close to 200 journalists and other media workers and some of their families killed (the largest in any conflict, as well as 742 Palestinians killed and 11,000 detained in the occupied West Bank, while Israeli settlers continue to steal Palestinian families’ lands despite the world opposing this continuing practice.

Lebanon today is feeling the wrath of Israeli state terrorism, massacring over 2,000 while injuring thousands more and displacing hundreds of thousands in both Gaza and Lebanon in pursuit of Hamas and Hezbollah fighters.

Gaza is destroyed and Lebanon is facing a similar existential fate with Israel insisting it will exterminate Hamas and Hezbollah, but while both may have been wakened by assassination of leadership, they both remain formidable people-based forces that simply cannot be eliminated.

At the same time too, Israel continues blaming the victims for their deaths and destruction of their homes, caring not about children and journalists being targeted and killed by its soldiers, only caring about dropping 20,000-pound so-called ‘bunker buster’ bombs in Gaza and Lebanon that take civilian lives by the dozens and hundreds, quickly amounting to thousands over weeks.

In the year since October 7, Israel was accused and found guilty by the International Court of Justice of genocide and the International Criminal Court (ICC) issued an arrest warrant for the Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu.

But despite that, the US and UK in particular, plus European and NATO nations and member-states, all continue providing the arms Israel is using to bomb Gaza, Lebanon and Yemen into smithereens, supporting the false claim that Hamas and Hezbollah are simply terrorist groups and the myth that they can be eliminated to the last man or woman.

In the week leading to the October 7 anniversary, Israel’s Prime Minister told and showed the world that his administration has no intention of ending the war or starting a ceasefire, that it will continue bombing everywhere it wishes before the November elections in the US.

In that sense, more bombings can be expected against Gaza and Lebanon -and all eyes will remain on what Iran will do if or when Israel decides to attack Tehran in the name of defense, given the Ayatollah’s declaration that the period of strategic patience is over.