"The CIA’s Guilt in the Crime of the Cuban Plane in Barbados" is the title of a repeated accusation by a Cuban expert regarding the Central Intelligence Agency's role in the sabotage that cost the lives of 73 people 50 years ago.

"I will never stop writing about this horrendous event that still fills us with sadness and indignation, nor will I cease to denounce the CIA as one of its main perpetrators," warned Manuel Hevia Frasquieri (1946–2022), former Director of the Historical Research Center of Cuban State Security.

In a comprehensive article published in 2021 that remains fully relevant today, the Doctor of Legal Sciences recalled the speech delivered by Commander in Chief Fidel Castro on October 15, 1976, during a mass gathering at the Plaza de la Revolución to deliver the eulogy for the October 6 attack.

He recalled that on that mournful day, Fidel revealed to the world the text of a secret CIA message sent to one of its mercenaries in Cuba three days after the attack, asking:

"What is the official and private reaction to bomb attacks against Cuban offices abroad? What are they going to do to avoid and prevent them? Who is suspected of being responsible?"

Faced with such questions, Fidel asked: "Why did the CIA want to know what measures would be taken to avoid and prevent terrorist acts?"

"At first we had doubts whether the CIA had directly organized the sabotage or carefully crafted it through its cover organizations made up of Cuban counterrevolutionaries; now we lean decisively toward the first thesis. The CIA had a direct hand in the destruction of the Cubana plane in Barbados."

He noted that the leader of the Cuban Revolution was entirely correct, as the crime fit with precision into the chain of events during that tragic year marked by aggressive acts and terrorist attacks against Cuba abroad by paid mercenaries acting on CIA mandates.

He added that years later, it became known that in June 1976, the main anti-Cuban terrorist organizations operating from the United States were summoned to the city of Bonao in the Dominican Republic to expand international terrorism against Cuba, continuing:

A new grouping named the Coordination of United Revolutionary Organizations (CORU) integrated traditional fascist groups, several directed by the CIA itself, including Acción Cubana, the 2506 Brigade, the Cuban Liberation Front, Alpha 66, Abdala, and the Cuban Nationalist Movement.

Terrorist Orlando Bosch Ávila was placed in charge by designation, with CORU serving as the public face. Evidence points to the presence of his associate Luis Posada Carriles in Santo Domingo at that time, closely linked to the most violent acts.

The details of this meeting were known in depth by the FBI and the CIA, whose undercover agents were present and learned months before the Barbados crime of these terrorist groups' intentions to blow up a Cuban airliner in mid-flight.

Various authors agree that the meeting was a CIA maneuver to push the actions of these aggressive groups out of U.S. territory, as their terrorist acts and personal attacks had created severe instability, causing the deaths of American citizens and extensive material losses in that country.

A veteran officer from the Miami Police Antiterrorism Division declared years later: "...the Cubans carried out the formation of CORU at the request of the CIA... the United States supported the meeting to get them all moving in the same direction again, under U.S. control."

"The basic signal was go ahead and do whatever you wish, outside of U.S. territory..."

A more detailed overview of this brutality is provided by historical research from the Historical Research Center of Cuban State Security.

In January 1975, an explosion caused four deaths and two injuries in Puerto Rico; a month later, a bomb was deactivated at Colombian airline offices in the same territory; and in March, two devices detonated at a tourism office selling tickets to Cuba in Panama and at the Costa Rican consulate in Los Angeles, California.

In May and July, two bombs exploded at the Venezuelan and Costa Rican embassies in Washington, and in July, a Puerto Rican vessel was sabotaged in San Juan, Puerto Rico.

In October, two more bombs exploded in Miami, while on December 29, a similar device detonated in the baggage area of the Dominican airline at LaGuardia Airport in New York, causing 13 deaths and 75 injuries—an unprecedented terrorist act in recent years in that country.

Following the Bonao meeting, the FBI and the CIA learned through their agents of comments made by Orlando Bosch during a gathering with other Cuban terrorists, in which he expressed a willingness to do "something more" against Cuba.

They then decided to assassinate Orlando Letelier, former minister of the Chilean Popular Unity government, who was murdered on a public street on September 26, 1976, in Washington by Cuban terrorists and agents of dictator Augusto Pinochet's Chilean DINA.

According to declassified documents, terrorist and CIA agent Luis Posada Carriles remarked on another occasion that "they would bring down a Cuban plane" and that "Bosch had the details."

That conversation took place just days before the horrendous crime without the CIA or FBI taking any action to monitor those plans or prevent such a monstrous event.

Nearly forty years later, in June 2015, new evidence of CIA complicity in these events came to light, as detailed by the Historical Research Center of Cuban State Security.

Translated by Sergio A. Paneque Díaz / CubaSí Translation Staff