by
Nobody would dare fly from a foreign country into U.S.
airspace to try to drop leaflets over Washington. NORAD (North
American Aerospace Defense) would be ready for a shootdown. But
for a period of months, Jose Basulto, leader of Brothers to the
Rescue, flew from the United States to drop leaflets over Cuba. On
July 13, 1995, he also bombarded Havana with religious medals that
could have injured people below. Playing games with Cuba's defense
forces. Keeping Cuba on alert for what he might drop next.
Cuba requested that the United States stop the provocation
flights. How long could Cuba allow this continuing violation of
Cuban airspace? After all, Basulto is a veteran of the Bay of Pigs
who has committed terrorist attacks like shooting up a hotel, a
theater, and a residential section in Havana in August 1962,
killing 20 people.
Cuba never knows what such terrorist pilots intend to do. In
February 1959, less than a month after the revolutionary army
marched into Havana, a U.S. citizen was arrested after flying a
small plane into Cuba with the aim of assassinating Fidel Castro.
That year alone planes landed to unload invaders along with arms
and ammunition, bombed sugar mills, killed and wounded people on
the streets of Havana, strafed a train full of passengers. In 1960
there were constant bombing raids, primarily on sugar mills but
also on Havana, in addition to regular surveillance flights.
On April 15, 1961, B-26 bombers began "softening-up" attacks
against Cuba before the Bay of Pigs invasion by sea. The CIA
wanted the bombers to look like Cuban planes flown by Cubans so one
pilot flew a B-26 to Miami and posed as a defector, a cover quickly
blown. But defeat at the Bay of Pigs did not bring an end to the
terror caused by pilots from the United States. On January 3,
1962, Cuba protested 119 violations of its territory, 76 by planes
based at the Guantanamo Naval Base.
The CIA's Operation Mongoose, launched in November 1961,
brought more aerial bombardment, weapon drops, sabotage of crops
and industry, occasional landings along the coast, and
assassinations. Cuba was under a state of siege that has continued
to the present day, a war of terror waged from the territory of the
U.S. government that is protected by the mightiest armed forces the
world has ever known.
In the 1950s, President Eisenhower told Admiral Arthur M.
Radford, then chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in a secret
meeting: "If planes were flying 20 to 50 miles from our shores, we
would be very likely to shoot them down if they came in closer,
whether through error or not." But the United States Armed Forces
have bombed country after country without our citizenry ever
knowing what it meant to experience the terror of planes wiping out
civilians as if they were meaningless.
On September 11, 2001, that changed. Our own commercial
airliners became terrorist weapons. NORAD's F-16s and F-15s
scrambled into the skies but not in time to stop the attacks at the
Twin Towers and the Pentagon. One airliner, Flight 93, remained,
heading south toward Washington's forbidden zone above the White
House, the Capitol and the Washington Monument. A Secret Service
official came on the radios of three F-16s, code-named Huntress:
"I want you to protect the White House at all costs."
It turned out that they did not have to make the decision for
a shootdown of a domestic passenger jet because those passengers,
having learned about the attacks on the Twin Towers, heroically
thwarted the terrorists' plan for Flight 93.
But now the rules are clear. On high alert, NORAD's planes
can be authorized to shoot down any private or commercial airliner
that does not follow specific rules. Any deviation from assigned
flight paths is suspect. Any failure to respond to commands could
mean a shootdown. Now the United States itself must regard every
airplane differently, somewhat the way that Cuba is forced to be on
alert. Cuba, however, has never authorized shooting down a
passenger jet even though it has known the horror of having one of
its own passenger jets blown out of the sky, killing all 73 people
aboard, on October 6, 1976. The mastermind of that terrorist
attack, far from being hunted down by U.S. armed forces, walks the
streets of Miami today.
By February 1996, with Basulto continuing his violations of
Cuban airspace, the Cuban government had warned that it would be
forced to end this kind of threat. Basulto continued his terrorist
campaign. On February 24, Cuban MiGs shot down two Brothers to the
Rescue planes while a third, flown by Basulto, escaped. In June
1996 the International Civil Aviation Organization [ICAO] issued
its report on the shootdown, concluding that Basulto's plane
penetrated Cuban airspace on February 24, 1996.
If that event occurred now, after September 11, 2001,
Congress and the President would perhaps not be able to blame such
a shootdown for the passage of a horrendously oppressive law like
Helms-Burton. Finally, the people of our own country may be able
to understand what the citizens of other countries feel when
threatened from the air. Helms-Burton was going to be passed
anyway--minus Title III, which, in any event, is so outrageous that
it hasn't been enforced. How shameful that we as a people have
allowed Cuba's defense against terrorists to be used as
justification for a terrorist law aimed at starving the Cuban
people into submission.
© 2001 by Jane Franklin