“Injustice is relatively easy to bear; it is justice that hurts.” —H.L. Mencken
Last month Fidel Castro took great (and uncharacteristic) umbrage at the Obama administration. “Angry Cuba demands [emphasis mine] removal from U.S. terrorism list,” ran a Reuters headline.
"We categorically reject this new hostile action by the government of the United States against Cuba," snapped Josefina Vidal Ferreiro in an AP article, reacting to the new U.S. airport security measures after the foiled Christmas bombing. Senora Vidal serves as head of the Cuban Foreign Ministry's “Office of North American Affairs.” “These new security controls are discriminatory and selective!” she snarled.
Perhaps she also meant they might be “effective,” - against herself. Don't look for this revelation in the AP, Reuters, CNN or from any “news” agency that has earned a coveted Havana Bureau from Cuba's Stalinist regime, but this very Josefina Vidal was expelled from the U.S. in 2003 for espionage. At the time she served as a “diplomat” in New York as “First Secretary” of Castro's mission to the U.N., an outfit with an absolutely engrossing history.
On Nov. 17, 1962, J. Edgar Hoover's FBI cracked a plot by Cuban agents that targeted Macy's, Gimbel's, Bloomingdale's and Manhattan's Grand Central Terminal with a dozen incendiary devices and 500 kilos of TNT. The massive attack was set for the following week, the day after Thanksgiving.
Castro planned his Manhattan attack short weeks after Nikita Khrushchev foiled his plans for an even bigger one. "Say hello to my little friends!" Castro had dreamed of yelling at the hated Yankees in October of 1962, right before he imagined mushroom clouds appearing. But for the prudence of the Butcher of Budapest, Castro might have pulled it off. "If the missiles had remained," Fidel's sidekick Che Guevara confided to The London Daily Worker in November 1962 regarding the Cuban Missile Crisis, "We would have used them against the very heart of the U.S., including New York."
In his diaries, Nikita Khrushchev hints that Fidel and Che's mass murder fantasy (these maniacs might get their fingers near the buttons!) was a bigger factor in his decision to yank the missiles from Cuba than JFK's so-called blockade.
At any rate, in the nick of time on Nov. 19th 1962, J. Edgar Hoover's FBI foiled Castro's TNT bomb plot, arrested the conspirators and prevented the slaughter of thousands of New York holiday shoppers. A little perspective: for the March 2004 Madrid subway blasts, all 10 of them that killed and maimed almost 2,000 people, Muslim terrorists used a grand total of 100 kilos of TNT. Castro and Che's agents planned to set off five times that explosive power in the some of the biggest department stores on earth, stores that would have been packed to suffocation and pulsing with holiday cheer on the year's biggest shopping day.
The chief plotter was Roberto Santiesteban, chief aide to Cuba's U.N. ambassador, Carlos Lechuga. Under him were Elsa and Jose Gomez Abad, also employed by Cuba's diplomatic mission at the U.N. The rest of the plotters belonged to The Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Had those detonators gone off, 9-11's death toll would have almost certainly taken seconds.
In 2003, the U.S. expelled 14 Cuban "diplomats." All worked at the United Nations. The recently piqued and much quoted (but never questioned) by the worldwide MSM, Josefina Vidal Ferreiro, was among the booted.
When wallowing in largesse from his Soviet sugar-daddy, (which is to say, before the U.S. “embargo,” became an obsession with his agents, on the payroll and off) Castro regarded a listing on the U.S. State Dept's. “State Sponsors of Terrorism” as a badge of honor, a designation to flaunt.
"The U.S. is the great enemy of mankind!" raved Che Guevara in his message to Havana's Tri-Continental Conference in 1966. "Against those hyenas there is no option but extermination. We will bring the war to the imperialist enemies' very home, to his places of work and recreation. The imperialist enemy must feel like a hunted animal wherever he moves. Thus we'll destroy him! We must keep our hatred against them alive and fan it to paroxysms!"
Among the many future luminaries who attended Havana's Tri-Continental Conference was a young Ilich Ramírez Sánchez, also known as "Carlos the Jackal," known in the 1970s as "The World's Most Wanted Terrorist." In 1967 Ramirez Sanchez was an eager recruit into Cuba's "guerrilla" (terror) training camps started by Che in 1959. "I'm proud of the path of Osama bin Laden," Ramirez told the London-based pan-Arab daily Al-Hayat in an interview from a French prison in 2002. "Bin Laden has followed a trail I myself blazed...I followed news of the September 11 attacks on the United States non-stop from the beginning. I can't describe that wonderful feeling of relief."
A young fellow named Abu Ammar also attended Havana's Tri-Continental Conference. He would later be known as Yasir Arafat.
Be it known that these star-struck and attentive worthies cheered Ernesto "Che" Guevara's prescription for America almost half a century before Osama Bin Laden, Mullah Omar and Al-Zarqawi appeared on our radar screens.
"Thanks to Fidel Castro" boasted Colombia's FARC (Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia) commander Tiro-Fijo in a 2002 interview, "we are now a powerful army, not a hit and run band." FARC is designated by the U.S. State Dept. as a “Foreign Terrorist Organization,” and is widely regarded as the most murderous in the Western Hemisphere, responsible for tens of thousands of killings in the past two decades. So there.
Julia Sweig, who serves as the Nelson and David Rockefeller Senior Fellow for Latin America Studies and Director for Latin America Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations and is an MSM darling on all matters Cuban, thanks both the expelled Castroite espionage agent Josefina Vidal and the expelled Castroite terrorist plotter Jose Gomez Abad (of the 1962 New York terrorist bomb plot) in the acknowledgement of her book. The “edgy” and “feisty” Stephen Colbert, interviewing Ms. Sweig, did not mention this thoroughly fascinating issue.