For more than 40 years, the Cuban people has been the victim of countless terrorist actions and attacks encouraged from abroad, involving substantial material and human losses and causing untold suffering to Cuban citizens. The economic cost to the nation of the series of acts of sabotage, and even biological assaults, has also been extremely high.

The terrorist actions have aimed at reversing —by creating a climate of fear, instability and uncertainty— the political and social choices freely made by the Cuban people in full exercise of their right to self-determination. US territory has been used on a systematic, long-term basis to plan, fund, recruit for, train for and support terrorist operations against the Cuban people.

The forms of terrorism employed against Cuba have included: sabotage or destruction of economic and civil targets on the island; attacks on coastal installations, merchant shipping and fishing vessels; attacks on Cuban installations, property and personnel on foreign soil, including embassies, airline offices and aircraft; assassination attempts on its leaders; introduction of germs and pests into cattle-raising and other agricultural areas; introduction of strains of human diseases among others.

The at least 681 acts of terrorism and aggression against the Cuban people which have been proven and documented have resulted in the deaths of 3,478 Cubans and the maiming of another 2,099. It is worth noting that there is no sign of a let-up with the passing years: there were 68 attacks during the 1990s and 39 during the last five years.

The victims of terrorist operations have not been confined to the Cuban population. A total of 190 attacks have targeted people or property of other nations based on US soil. Dozens of attacks on the property of foreign firms that trade with Cuba have also been targeted, as have representative offices of nations that maintain links with Cuba.

Terrorist activity increased significantly and became a routine tool of the policy of hostility to Cuba after 1961, as part of the 'Program of Covert Action against the Castro Regime' approved on 17th March 1960 by the then president Dwight D Eisenhower and implemented by his successor, John F Kennedy. Among other things, the Plan authorized the setting up of a secret intelligence organization inside Cuba and allocated funds for the purpose to the CIA.

18th January 1962 marked the approval of the "Cuba Project ", a programme of 32 covert acts of aggression to be carried out by the departments and agencies participating in the so-called "Operation Mongoose".

Apart from the hundreds of operations undertaken directly by the US government's Special Services, a catalogue of terrorist attacks and similar actions, too numerous to be enumerated in this document, were executed (or thwarted in their preparatory stages) under the aegis of organizations based on US territory and composed of terrorists of Cuban origin, including many trained earlier by the CIA or units of the US Army.

In 1960, various terrorist attacks were carried out on public premises including cinemas, theatres, schools and businesses, with the aim of creating a climate of terror among the population. The vilest and bloodiest of that year's actions was the blowing up, on 4th March, of La Coubre, a French steamer, in Havana harbour, during the unloading of munitions for the Cuban Army purchased in Belgium. The toll was 101 dead, a number of French citizens among these, over 200 injured and many missing.

Other, no less murderous attacks, took place that year in Havana, including the following:

On 21st January - the dropping of four 100-pound bombs on the urban areas of Regla and Cojímar

On 11th February - the dropping of ignited phosphorus on the population of El Cano

In October and December - machine-gun attacks in the Río Cristal, Rancho Boyeros and Arroyo Arenas localities.

Notable among the attacks on economically-significant targets during 1960 was the bombing on 18th February of the España sugar refinery. The aircraft used was destroyed in the air by one of its own bombs. The American pilot, Robert Ellis Frost, was accompanied by Onelio Santana Roque, former member of the forces of repression deployed by the Batista regime. According to the plane's flight plan, it took off from Tamiami airport in Florida. Other documents found with the body of the American showed that he had participated in three earlier air raids on Cuba and was to collect $1,500 for that day's mission.

It is significant that the majority of the best-known representatives of the anti-Cuba 'exile' community were directly involved in or carried out terrorist actions against Cuba during the 1960s. The Revolución newspaper of 30th December 1960 reported a raid on a bomb-making factory and the arrest of 17 terrorists who, acting on instructions from the US Embassy in Havana, had been placing tobacco tins containing plastic explosives, in retail establishments. The Cuban terrorists involved included two individuals now calling themselves "peaceful political opponents": none other than the "journalist and publicist" Carlos Alberto Montaner (ringleader of the Madrid anti-Cuba mob) and "His Excellency the (US) Ambassador for Human Rights", Armando Valladares, bogus writer-paralytic, who was seen getting up from his wheelchair and running 400 feet of track on television. The former was not prosecuted at the time, being under age; he got asylum in a Latin American embassy and left the country.

The terrorists stepped up their campaign during 1961. Operations included burning plantations during the sugar-cane harvest, sabotaging factories and attacking farmsteads. 281 Cubans died, mostly innocent farmers, women and children, as well as members of the militia and young volunteer participants in the nationwide literacy campaign launched that year.

An infamous milestone in this period was the blowing up on 13th April 1961 of the country's largest department store, El Encanto, in downtown Havana. An employee, Fe del Valle, was killed, the building was totally destroyed and a large number of Cuban homes were placed in danger.

The same month was that of the Bay of Pigs invasion by a force of some 1,500 mercenaries organized, trained, equipped, funded and transported by Washington. The frustrated plan envisaged the landing of American troops, who contemplated the defeat of the mercenaries from inside their ships.

Many of those mercenaries also participated in other terrorist operations in the dirty war on Cuba and still swell the ranks of currently-active anti-Cuba terrorist organizations. Many others became paid agents of the CIA, hired to undertake covert operations in Latin America and elsewhere involving terrorism, political assassination, trafficking in arms and narcotics, and dirty wars (such as that waged against the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua). Another significant element were instructed in the art of disguising themselves as "peaceful political exiles" opposed to the Cuban regime. A large number of these formed themselves into the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF). While publicly standing aside from terrorist violence, this organization has never abandoned its true mission and has organized, maintained and bankrolled terrorist operations that included those in the 1990s by Central American mercenaries against Cuban tourist facilities.

Banditry

Another form of terrorism practiced against Cuba was bandidismo, a term coined by the people reflecting the murders and other crimes committed by the 299 terrorist bands that roamed throughout Cuba between 1959 and 1965, armed, supported and led from Washington. Its eyrie was in the Escambray mountains in central Cuba. The bands' operations left 500 dead, mostly innocent farmers and other agricultural workers, and a legacy of bitter memories.

Remembered by Cubans with especial sadness are the murders on 5th January 1961 of Conrado Benítez, a schoolteacher, and Eliodoro Rodríguez, a small farmer; in October, of Delfín Sen Cedré, another schoolteacher; on 26th November, of Manuel Ascunce Domenech, also a schoolteacher, and small farmer Pedro Lantigua. These crimes were designed to defeat the national literacy campaign.

Adolescents and children were also murdered during this period, in an attempt to terrorize the farming community into abandoning its support for the Revolution. Among these crimes were the murders of several children in the Bolondrón district: Yolanda and Fermín, 11 and 13 years old, Albinio Sánchez Rodríguez, 10, and Reinaldo Núñez Bueno, 22 months.

A large number of now declassified documents reveal the historical link between Washington and the gangs that operated inside Cuba. In October 1961, CIA Inspector General Lyman Kirkpatrick submitted a secret report that mentions "Operation Silence", a covert exercise instructed by the US government involving 12 deliveries of arms, munitions and explosives by the CIA to these bands operating in our country.

The same document also mentions a huge centre established by the CIA in Florida as a base for covert operations against Cuba, concerning which Kirkpatrick comments that it had been expanded from 40 to a force of 588 between January 1960 and 16th April 1961, making it one of the largest of such centres operated by the secret services.

Aircraft hijacking was another form of terrorist action promulgated by the CIA in its programme to overthrow the Cuban Revolution, marking the appearance of a new kind of terrorist. Between 1959 and 2001, a total of 51 Cuban aircraft were seized. Almost all were en route to the United States and the vast majority have never been returned. Among the deceased or injured victims of these actions were pilots, guards and passengers. Several planes were badly damaged or destroyed in the course of thwarted attempts.

By way of example, the following events took place on 27th March 1966: armed with a gun, a terrorist attempted to divert a Cubana de Aviación IL-18 airplane with 97 people aboard including 14 children, to a country where his kind could be sure of a hero's welcome —the United States. When the attempt failed, due to brave and decisive action by the pilot, who refused to change course and landed the plane at Havana International Airport, the hijacker murdered the pilot and the guard and seriously wounded the co-pilot.

Torturers and other lieutenants of the Batista dictatorship and other criminals who fled Cuba in 1959 were among those recruited in the early 1970s to form new terrorist organizations. Terrorism continued to prove a lucrative business for the Cuban American mob, as it basked in a climate of official tolerance and complicity on the part of the US authorities.

Organizations like Alpha 66 and CORU operating out of Florida and New Jersey were responsible for many of the acts of terrorism suffered by the Cuban people in the 1970s and 80s.

On 12th October 1971, a treacherous attack took place on the village of Boca de Samá on the northern coast of the former Oriente province. This cowardly act against a small Cuban village caused two deaths as well as injuring a number of villagers, including two children.

Another feature of this period was terrorism in the form of paramilitary attacks on Cuban merchant and fishing vessels. On 4th October 1973, two fishing vessels (Cayo Largo 17 and Cayo Largo 34) were attacked by two gunboats manned by terrorists. Fisherman Robert Torna Mirabal was killed, while the rest of the crews were abandoned to their fate in rubber dinghies, without food or water.

6th October 1976 was the day of the most atrocious act of terrorism committed in this period: the blowing up in flight of a Cubana de Aviación airliner with 73 persons aboard, including 57 Cubans, 11 young people from Guyana (6 selected for medical training in Cuba) and 5 North Koreans. There were no survivors.

This attack was committed by two Venezuelan mercenaries, hired by two of the most notorious Cuban-born terrorists: Orlando Bosch Ávila (author of 321 terrorist operations), who despite Department of Justice's opinions to the contrary, received special authorization from President Bush (father) to reside in the United States and has lived in Miami since 1990; and Luis Posada Carriles, currently imprisoned in Panamá for an attempt of the life of Cuba's head of state. Both had been working for the CIA since 1960, specializing in sophisticated sabotage techniques of all kinds. These two terrorists belonged then to the CORU organization, set up in June 1976 by Bosch himself and unifying a number of terrorist organizations. CORU engaged in an escalating series of terrorist outrages not only against Cuba but also 24 other countries in Europe, Latin America and Central America.

While acts of terrorism continued on Cuban soil, the theatre of certain of such operations extended to the United States, where the targets were interests based there of nations that maintained trading and other relations with Cuba, as well as Cuban diplomatic officials at the Mission to the UN, private US institutions and even Cuban émigrés opposed to the Cuban American mob's terrorist policy.

The US public thus experienced at first hand, with horror, the terrorism that its leaders had been practising against a small neighbouring country since 1959.

The US authorities responded predictably by arresting a few terrorists and trying to break up certain groups that were acting independently and on their own account. Several groups avoided the net by such ruses as publicly announcing their disbandment, changing their names, temporarily suspending operations or even switching their bases to other states.

The terrorist groups that followed the code of conduct set by the US authorities and confined their attacks to Cuba were tolerated however.

The following are examples of acts of terrorism against Cuba perpetrated on US soil:

On 5th June 1976, the Cuban mission to the UN was bombed, causing substantial damage.

In 1977, two Cuban émigrés (Carlos Muñiz Varela and José Eulalio Negrín) were murdered because of their sympathetic attitude to dialogue with Cuba.

In March 1980, a large bomb was placed in the car of Cuba's Permanent Representative to the UN, in New York; on 11th September in the same year, a member of the mission, the diplomat Félix García, was murdered.

Bio-terrorism

One of the most callous forms of terrorism used against the Cubans has been bio-terrorism. In 1971, agents affiliated to Cuban American terrorist groups brought in the African swine fever virus. The resulting outbreak obliged the Cuban health authorities to slaughter some 500,000 pigs in order to prevent a nationwide epidemic. This was the first appearance of the disease in the western hemisphere.

Bio-terrorism was not confined to the farming sector, but was used also directly against people.

In May 1981, cases of infection by the Dengue-2 virus, common name Haemorrhagic Dengue, began to be reported; the viral strain was genetically dissimilar to that which was circulating in other Caribbean countries and was genetically related to laboratory strains that are developed exclusively in American facilities. Within a few weeks, a disease that had never been seen in Cuba had reached epidemic proportions, with 344,203 cases. Deaths from the disease totalled 158, including 101 children.

Investigations involving in-depth studies showed that the epidemic was deliberately started in Cuba by terrorist agents working for the US government. According to statements by American expert Col. Phillip Russell at the XIV Congreso Internacional Del Océano Pacífico (International Congress of the Pacific Ocean), only US specialists in biological warfare had obtained a variety of the Aedes aegypti mosquito, which is clearly associated with transmission of the Dengue-2 virus.

At the 1984 trial in the United States of Eduardo Arocena, ringleader of the 'Omega 7' terrorist group, the defendant confessed to having introduced germs into Cuba and admitted that the Haemorrhagic Dengue virus had been brought to Cuba by groups based on US soil.

Days before the outbreak in Cuba, the US Army vaccinated all its personnel at the Guantánamo Naval Base, with a vaccine that included protection against Dengue-2. The military enclave completely escaped an infection which reached all other parts of the country, without exception.

It was only by virtue of massive efforts by the people and Government of Cuba that a catastrophe involving the deaths of tens of thousands, mostly children, was avoided. In a little over four months, we defeated an epidemic that many experts predicted would need years to be eradicated. The cost to the economy was also considerable.

Changes in the international situation prompted changes in the types and incidence of terrorism against Cuba. Towards the end of the Bush Sr. administration, the more reactionary elements of the Cuban exile community in Florida and elsewhere in the US agitated for an escalation of terrorist action in their war on Cuba. This created the impetus for a variety of acts of terrorism perpetrated during the two terms of the Clinton mandate.

The Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), financier of the political campaigns of various figures including US presidents, started organizing and funding anti-Cuba terrorism in 1992. Various terrorists were recruited in Central America to the service of the CANF. At its behest and funded by Foundation, these individuals were to bomb Cuban tourist-industry targets for financial reward. In 1997, they set off seven bombs in hotels and other tourist facilities. In one of the attacks, a young Italian visitor, Fabio Di Celmo, was killed. The aim was clear: destroy the Cuban tourist trade, which by then was the mainstay of the national economy.

There has been no let up in terrorist action against Cuba. In the period 6th August 2002 - 10th April 2003 alone, there were 11 acts of terrorism, mostly hijackings of planes and vessels to the United States. All were violent, involving the use of daggers, similar weapons and even firearms to threaten crews and passengers.

The hijackers tried in Cuba received severe sentences, a fate which was not generally shared by those brought before the US courts.

The Cuban people and government, who have sustained an exemplary fight against international terrorism in all its forms and manifestations for decades, are determined to continue this battle, based on the conviction that every act of terrorism is evil and must be combated.

Cuba believes that all forms of terrorism affect the life, health, property and safety of innocent people, violate the sovereignty and territorial integrity of nations, threaten to disrupt the stability of national institutions, cause serious damage to the industrial bases and economic activity of nations and exacerbate instability at international level, creating new areas of tension and provoking, on occasion, international conflicts.

Cuba accordingly advocates genuinely effective international cooperation aimed at preventing and combating all terrorist actions, eliminating the causes of these, ensuring the arrest, prosecution and extradition of their perpetrators, organizers and sponsors, as well as those that support or finance them. Such cooperation, however, must enjoy international legitimacy and a basis of unconditional respect for international law, the UN Charter and the international instruments on human rights.

As a token of our international commitment to the war on terrorism, Cuba has signed or adhered to the 12 international conventions and protocols on terrorism. In December 2001, it introduced a Law (No.93) Against Acts of Terrorism —a comprehensive, modern and rigorous code to address this scourge.

It is wrong to speak of "good" terrorism and "bad" terrorism. Neither are there different terrorisms according to who criminally attacks whom. The Cuban people demand justice and an end to the impunity of terrorist groups that act against Cuba from their bases on US soil.