Bacteriological War against Cuba in Time of Pandemic

On June 1st, 1964, Commander-in-Chief Fidel Castro publicly denounced the use by the U.S. administration of bacteriological warfare against the Cuban people, which the United States denied and began the tradition of ignoring and trying to disqualify those allegations.

Fidel highlighted what would be the beginning of more than half a century of bacteriological attacks during all the North American administrations that targeted the leader of the Revolution, other high-rank leaders, as well as Cuba’s people and economy, at the cost of the lives of many Cubans and millionaire losses in means and resources.

Important aspects of the bacteriological war campaign against Cuba, the longest in history, were known when the results of the Union Senate Commission that investigated illegal actions of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 1975 and others documents were declassified. These documents would give the historical reason to the complaints about these events that Fidel started back in 1964, when he alerted about the irrigation of suspicious substances in the fields.

Two years prior the denunciation, the Cuban leader himself began to be a CIA target, only declassified by the United States in 1975, to contaminate a diving suit he was supposed to wear, with the tuberculosis bacteria and with the mycetoma fungus that causes death by necropsy that gradually decomposes the victim's tissues until he dies under terrible agony.

There was also the attempt to send him contaminated tobacco with a deadly bacterium and poison him with cyanide tablets expressly manufactured to leave no traces.

After the defeat of Playa Girón, Washington planned to take revenge and create the conditions to directly invade the island under the so-called Operation Mongoose, made public many years later and which included "destroying crops with biological or chemical weapons, and changing the regime before the next congressional elections in November 1962. "

To continue with this plan, practically all crops were contaminated and all of the livestock and poultry production were subject to pests and diseases prepared in the CIA labs.

In the 1970’s and 1980’s the population was mainly affected by hemorrhagic conjunctivitis, dysentery, and dengue serotype 02, which caused 158 deaths, including children, in the 1980’s, the worst damage inflicted on the Cuban people by the North American biological terrorism.

After the vanishing of the USSR and the socialist field, the U.S. special services and the Cuban-American right thought the time had come to aggravate hunger and despair in the difficult economic situation the country was going through, and they continued with their efforts to contaminate crops, animals, and an outbreak of dengue hemorrhagic fever was registered in Santiago de Cuba, among other actions.

Our country is facing, like most of humanity, Covid-19, considered the most dangerous pandemic in recent centuries, and under those conditions the United States carries out actions aimed especially at preventing the country from acquiring medicines and supplies like artificial respirators in Switzerland, essential for the survival of seriously ill patients.

Thus, the White House makes the current health situation its unexpected ally to carry on, in other ways and forms its war against Cuba, causing death and suffering to the Cuban people indirectly, by doing everything in their power to prevent Cuba from accessing to basic resources to save lives.

Translated by Amilkal Labañino / CubaSí Translation Staff