February 24, 1996 and the War Against Terror

FrontPageMagazine.com, February 27, 2002

FEBRUARY 24, which came last Sunday, is an important day in Cuban and American history.  It is a day of glory and massacre.

On February 24, 1895, the Second War of Independence commenced in Cuba. (The First War of Independence was from 1868-1878, also known as the Ten Years

War.)  Patriots such as Jose Marti and Antonio Maceo returned to their homeland “to achieve the absolute independence of the island of Cuba,” as the Cuban Revolutionary Party formed by Marti declared in its 1892 platform.

Maceo and Marti did not intend to inflict a new despotism after Spanish withdrawal.  “The Cuban Revolutionary Party,” its platform stated, “does not plan to take to Cuba a victorious group of people who consider the island their prey and dominion.”  Maceo wrote in 1884, “I have no other aspiration than to see my country sovereign and free.  With natural sovereignty we shall obtain our natural rights, calm dignity, and the representation of a free and independent people.”

Neither Marti nor Maceo lived to see Cuba throw off the Spanish yoke; Marti died on May 19, 1895, Maceo on December 7, 1896.  It is unlikely they would have applauded the Sovietization of Cuba, Fidel Castro’s cult of personality, his massive sponsorship of terrorism, or his perversion of their humane aspirations to justify totalitarian cruelty.  Cubans have been persecuted for citing Marti’s thought in criticism of Castro, for instance, “Every time a person is deprived of the right to think I feel a child of mine has been murdered.”

One hundred and one years after the Second War of Independence began, Communist Cuba attacked America in an atrocity differing only in degree from September 11.

On February 24, 1996, members of the Brothers to the Rescue left Opa-Locka Airport near Miami.  In their civilian aircrafts armed only with food and water, the Brothers would seek to aid rafters fleeing totalitarianism as they had done approximately two thousand times before.

Infuriated by the Brothers’ humanitarianism, Castro decided this would be their last mission and ordered their deaths.  As he admitted in a March 11, 1996 interview with Time magazine, “We [Castro and his brother, Raul] gave the order to the head of the air force.”

Only one Brother, Jose Basulto, survived the attack in international airspace. Communication between Castro’s aerial assassins and Havana’s military control tower revealed the following:

Military Control: Authorized to destroy.

MIG-29: Understood, I had already received it. Leave us alone for a minute.

Military Control: Don’t lose him.

MIG-29:  First shot.

MIG-29:  We blew his balls off!  We blew his balls off!

MIG-29:  Wait, look and see where he went down.

MIG-29:  Yes! Yes! Sh*t, we hit him!

MIG-29:  Mark the place where we took him down.

MIG-29: We’re on top of him. He won’t give us any more f*cking trouble.

Military Control: Congratulations to the pair of you.

Three of the four victims were American citizens: Armando Alejandre, Jr. was a Vietnam veteran, Carlos Costa aspired to a career in aviation, and Mario de la Peña was a senior at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University.  The Brothers had rescued the fourth victim, American resident Pablo Morales, in 1992.

Remembrance of the massacre is forbidden in Cuba.  A regime-orchestrated mob attacked prisoner of conscience Dr. Oscar Elias Biscet and Migdalia Rosado when they memorialized the Brothers in February 1999, followed by imprisonment for over two weeks.  (Two years ago this month, Dr. Biscet was sentenced after a sham trial to three years in prison.)

Whereas Castro had previously perpetrated terrorism against America through surrogates such as the Black Panthers and the Puerto Rican FALN, on this occasion he cut out the middlemen.  The Clinton Administration responded to Castro’s murder of American citizens with manly words and miniscule action.

Regrettably President Bush did not include Cuba as part of the “axis of evil” in his State of the Union address.  Given Castro’s preeminent proximity to America among sponsors of terrorism and his murderous aggression against Americans, there is a strategic and moral imperative to rectify this enormity.  February 24 and September 11 stem from the same ideology of savagery, and the former’s perpetrator is a menace in our own hemisphere.

It is not too late to avenge the victims of February 24.

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Myles Kantor is a columnist for FrontPageMagazine.com and Director of the Center for Free Emigration, a human rights organization dedicated to the abolition of state enslavement.  His e-mail address is kantor@FreeEmigration.com.