Vol. 73/No. 48      December 14, 2009

BOCA DE SAMÁ, Cuba—Thirty-eight years after a CIA-organized terror squad launched a deadly attack here, residents of this coastal village continue to speak out against Washington’s ongoing acts of aggression targeting the Cuban people and their revolution.

Nancy Pavón was 15 years old when she was seriously wounded in the 1971 assault. She told the story of what happened at a November 22 meeting here with three dozen visitors taking part in an international conference on the campaign to free five Cuban revolutionaries unjustly imprisoned in the United States. Another 20 or so townspeople also took part.

“Our five heroes are in prison because they were trying to prevent acts of terrorism like this one,” Pavón said.

She was referring to Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino, Antonio Guerrero, Fernando González, and René González, who in the 1990s entered counterrevolutionary groups in South Florida to inform the Cuban government of plans for similar attacks against the Cuban people. In 1998 the U.S. government arrested and framed the Cuban Five, as they are known internationally, on charges of “conspiracy to commit espionage,” “conspiracy to commit murder,” and other counts. Serving sentences ranging from 15 years to two life sentences plus 15 years, the five have now been locked up for more than 11 years.

The visit to Boca de Samá was part of the Fifth International Colloquium for the Release of the Cuban Five and Against Terrorism, held November 19-22 in the eastern city of Holguín, about 40 miles from here. Nearly 200 people from 45 countries attended that gathering, which was sponsored by the Cuban Institute for Friendship with the Peoples (ICAP). (See article on the Holguín conference in last week’s issue.)

On the final day of the conference, delegates divided up into smaller groups to visit different towns throughout Holguín Province to exchange experiences with local residents about the worldwide fight to free the five Cubans.

CIA-organized assault
Pavón recounted what happened on the night of Oct. 12, 1971. Some eight to 10 heavily armed counterrevolutionaries landed on the shores of the fishing village of 85 inhabitants, located at the mouth of the Samá River on Cuba’s northern coast. Members of the revolutionary militia rushed to the scene, Pavón said. The attackers fired on the militia members with automatic weapons, killing two, Ramón Siam and Lidio Rivaflecha, and seriously wounding another.

The counterrevolutionaries escaped by motorboat, leaving behind a crate of firebombs they had not had time to use. From the mother ship off the coast, they shelled the village, damaging houses and wounding several residents. Among them were Nancy Pavón and her 13-year-old sister Angela, whose home was hit by mortar fire. Nancy was so badly injured that doctors had to amputate her foot, and she later required multiple operations. Because of that, she recalled, she was unable to wear her new pair of shoes to her quinceañera (15th birthday) celebration.

Cuban working people and their leadership mobilized in response to the murderous assault. Local residents recalled how they organized a rally in support of the revolution, addressed by Juan Almeida and Armando Hart, central leaders of the Cuban Revolution.

Nancy Pavón was joined at the meeting by her mother and by her sisters Angela and Xiomara. Speaking to the audience, Xiomara, who at the time of the attack was returning from a brigade of volunteer coffee pickers, said, “The U.S. government is not capable of understanding us. We continue to remain firm, defending our country.”

Rodolfo Dávalos, author of United States vs. The Cuban Five: A Judicial Coverup, also spoke, noting that two CIA-trained outfits, Alpha 66 and the Cuban Liberation Front, each claimed credit for the terror attack.

‘Freeing our five brothers is our fight’
Griselda Rivaflecha, daughter of Lidio Rivaflecha, and Yudirka Siam, daughter of Ramón Siam, were young children when their fathers were murdered. They recounted how the terror attack changed their lives—both the tragedy for their families and their lifelong determination to win justice.

Yudirka Siam, who works as a bookkeeper at an elementary school in the area, said her father was 24 when he was killed. “He was training as a border guard,” she said. “He was a revolutionary. I grew up following his example.”

She added, “We will keep fighting for justice. Today the U.S. government is holding our five brothers in prison, and we are fighting for their freedom.”

Rivaflecha and Siam were joined on the speakers platform by Irma Sehwerert, mother of René González, and Odalys Pérez, whose father Wilfredo Pérez was the pilot of a Cuban airplane that was downed over Barbados in 1976 when U.S.-trained counterrevolutionaries detonated a bomb they had placed on board. All 73 passengers and crew members were killed. Pérez noted that the U.S. government has not prosecuted those responsible for the deaths, including Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada Carriles, who still walk the streets of Miami.

Among those who spoke in the discussion period was Ninoska Coronado Lira, from Tarija, Bolivia, who together with her mother Hortensia Lira was participating in the Holguín conference on the Cuban Five. She explained that she is the daughter of Benjamín Coronado, one of the Bolivian combatants who were part of the 1966-67 guerrilla column led by Ernesto Che Guevara in Bolivia. Coronado, who used Benjamín as his nom de guerre, was the first combatant to die in that military campaign.

Changes brought by revolution
Afterward, a visit to the history museum in Boca de Samá was organized with the assistance of local historian Yurisay Pérez. The museum documents the history of the area, from the original Taíno Indian communities to today. The exhibits illustrated the fight against Spanish colonial rule in that region, and how after independence the area became the property of the United Fruit Company, which owned the large banana plantations there. The displays also depicted how in that region the Rebel Army’s Second Eastern Front, commanded by Raúl Castro, led the 1956-58 revolutionary war against the Batista dictatorship.

Yurisay Pérez noted that the Cuban Revolution had brought many changes to Boca de Samá since 1971, when it was a cluster of 16 houses with no reliable source of electricity or other basic facilities. Today, while still a small community of 150 inhabitants, all homes have electricity and running water, and there is an elementary school, a doctor’s office, a cultural center, and the history museum.

Nancy Pavón told the visitors that she and many other Boca de Samá residents have joined the international campaign for the release of the Cuban Five. Following a recent Cuban radio broadcast of an interview with Pavón that Ramón Labañino listened to from his prison cell, he sent her a message saying that if the actions of the Cuban Five helped prevent a single other human being from being injured as she was, their efforts were worth it.
 
 
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