America’s Long History of Supporting Cuban Exile Terrorists

Shakur was a former member of the Black Panther Party and Black Liberation Army (BLA) when the FBI illegally persecuted black activists with its infamous program, COINTELPRO. She was arrested several times for various charges without convictions. That changed in 1973 when she was convicted in a highly contentious murder case.

Shakur, and two other BLA members, were pulled over by New Jersey State Troopers, supposedly for a broken taillight. The police searched the driver, Sundiata Acoli, and found a gun in his pocket. Both men grappled for the weapon which led to a shootout that led to bullet wounds for everyone on the scene and the deaths of New Jersey Trooper, Werner Forester, and Assata Shakur’s companion, Zayd Shakur (rapper Tupac Shakur’s father).

Werner Forester was shot with two bullets from Acoli’s gun and two bullets from his gun. The prosecution contended that Assata Shakur murdered Forester execution-style with his weapon at point-blank range. However, forensic evidence proved that she didn’t shoot a gun. Her fingerprints weren’t on the weapon, nor was any gunpowder residue on her hands. The evidence shows that she was shot in the back while her hands were in the air.

Despite the evidence, an all-white jury convicted her on two counts of murder (including her fellow BLA member, Zayd Shakur) and six counts of assault. That was in large part due to the heavy media coverage of her arrest and her trial’s venue being moved to a different jurisdiction where 80% of residents believed that she was guilty. She was sentenced to 33 years in prison.

Shakur later escaped prison and eventually fled to Cuba where she was granted political asylum. That’s where she remains today. In a symbolic move, the FBI added Assata Shakur to the Most Wanted Terrorists list on the 40^th anniversary of these murders. Shakur was the first female on the list. She remains on the list today with a $1 million reward; whereas Sundiata Acoli was released on parole in 2022.

It must be noted that Cuba’s government is currently harboring a few fugitives of terrorism-related crimes and it refuses to extradite them to the U.S. But there’s much more context needed to evaluate this issue.

There should be a high bar for labeling a country as a state-sponsor of terrorism. For America to give another country this label, it should have a moral high ground to stand on. And that’s not the case. America is exponentially more guilty of this crime.

For decades, several Cuban-American exiles, who were trained/financed by the CIA, committed hundreds, possibly thousands, of terrorist acts against the Cuban government, Cuban civilians/infrastructure, the civilians/infrastructure of countries that have relations with Cuba, and Cuban-Americans who simply didn’t agree with their hardline stance against Castro.

Cuba has faced an unfathomable level of terrorism over the decades. It’s difficult to track the exact scale, but according to the government of Cuba, terrorism against its citizens has resulted in 3,478 deaths and 2,099 disabled persons. The U.S. government has protected so many of these terrorists from prosecution/incarceration. You could argue that America belongs on its own list of state sponsors of terrorism.

Terrorists Live Freely on U.S. Soil

The majority of Americans oppose our country’s hardline policies against the Cuban government. But keep in mind, Florida is a swing state and politicians from both major parties have routinely placated a large voting bloc of Cuban-Americans who want maximum pressure applied to the island. Albeit, there’s been a shift as the younger generation of Cuban Americans have more moderate goals.

In 2017, then-President Trump made an appearance in the Little Havana section of Miami to announce a reversal of some of Obama’s steps toward relations with Cuba. (Cuba was removed from the state sponsor of terrorism list in 2015.) Trump made this announcement at the Manuel Artime Theater in Miami. The city of Miami ironically gave that name to the theatre in 1982, the same year the State Department first designated Cuba as a state sponsor of terror.

The Cuban-American exile leader in Miami, Manuel Artime, was a long-time CIA asset who supported the Contras and helped finance the Watergate burglars’ defense fund. Artime led Brigade 2506 in its infamous attack at the Bay of Pigs. Castro released the Bay of Pigs captives in 1962 in exchange for $53 million in economic aid. Upon return to the U.S., Artime and many other Bay of Pigs veterans promptly returned to continue committing acts of sabotage and terrorism against Cuba.

CIA operatives began planning assassination attempts within the first year, 1959, of Castro’s revolutionary government. President Eisenhower formally authorized the CIA’s program in March 1960, signing “A PROGRAM OF COVERT ACTION AGAINST THE CASTRO REGIME.” These attempts began with a plot to poison Castro with his favorite brand of cigar.

Having a common enemy can make strange bedfellows. The CIA partnered in assassination plots with multiple members of the mafia who were motivated because Castro had shut down Cuba’s casinos and ruined their cash cows.

This anti-Castro aggression increased under JFK. The CIA established a covert station, JM/WAVE, on the University of Miami campus. The U.S. government was so dedicated to overthrowing Castro that up to 400 CIA agents worked there making it the second largest station in the world, behind only Langley. A few thousand Cuban exiles were financed/trained through hundreds of South Florida front companies…