Guyana initially welcomed the Barbados Government’s commitment to “a vigorous investigation” of the “act of terrorism” in the Cubana Airliner bombing and to ensuring “that this evil would be wiped off the face of the earth,” but days later slammed the island’s defiant decision to refuse jurisdiction for the crime.
Prime Minister Forbes Burnham fumed over the October 16, 1976 confirmation “that the Barbados Government and Court had no jurisdiction in this matter’ and incredulously disputed the “doubt in their minds as to whether the plane came down in the territorial waters of Barbados” or in international territory.
“I used to be a lawyer of some passing competence, and I find it a little difficult to understand how there can be any question of a point, one and a half miles from the shore, not being within the territorial waters. But perhaps we went to different schools and used different units of measurement,” he mused. The airliner crashed into the Caribbean Sea – killing all 73 passengers after devastating twin bombs detonated – just off pretty Paradise Beach, Barbados. The flight had originated in Guyana with stops in Port of Spain and Bridgetown on its way to Kingston and Havana.
In a fiery address to restive crowds at a Mass Rally at the Square of The Revolution, on Sunday, October 17, Burnham raged at the tepid response of fellow British-educated lawyer turned leader, Prime Minister Tom Adams “our Caricom brother” and urged Barbados “our fellow West Indian country” to quickly take action against the pair of men implicated in the tragedy, Venezuelans Hernan Ricardo Lozano alias ‘Jose Vasquez Garcia’ and Freddy Lugo who were held in Trinidad at the time.
Noting he had been advised by “the best legal brains in Guyana” that the two perpetrators “can be tried before a Barbados Court” the Guyanese leader, a skilled orator, quipped, “I am no longer a lawyer for they say who is his own lawyer has a fool for a client.”
“We are not interested in niggling objections and fancy and theoretical legalisms. We are interested in justice. We are interested in seeing these two men brought before a competent court to answer for their misdeeds, to answer for the murder of our 11 Guyanese comrades.”
While “I would eschew criticism of a friendly Government, I still say from the advice at my disposal that the Barbados Government has a moral duty imposed upon it to apply for the extradition of these two murderers from Trinidad.
And I am further advised, only this morning, that the Government of Trinidad and Tobago is prepared to respond favourably to an application for extradition by Barbados,” he declared to the anti-US/CIA placard-bearing crowds.
“I appeal to the Government of Barbados (GOB) to see that justice is done. What interest has the GOB got in not pursuing justice?” Burnham queried, “I am quite sure it has nothing to do with the first page of the (seized) diary of Freddy Lugo which has the name (of) Joe Leo, an FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigations) official who purports to be Legal Counselor, or Legal Attache in the American Embassy in Caracas.”
Lozano and Lugo eventually confessed to Trinidadian authorities they had planted the timed, concealed bombs and divulged that they were acting under direct orders of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) trained operative, hardline militant Luis Posada Carriles and his fellow dangerous Cuban exile, Orlando Bosch.
After much heated discussions among high level representatives from Guyana, Trinidad, Barbados, Cuba and Venezuela at a critical closed-door caucus in Port-of-Spain, it was finally agreed that Lozano and Lugo would be extradited to Caracas and the Venezuelans would assume complete jurisdiction.
Guyana’s Foreign Affairs Minister, Fred Wills, another towering intellectual and British trained lawyer, turned consummate international diplomat, blamed the Cubana deaths on “the struggle” being “waged in Guyana and other like-minded territories to rid ourselves of economic domination and to transform our economies.” In a national broadcast days before Burnham’s big speech, careful Wills did not name the US but pointed to the “sustained hostility of those who are intent on maintaining old positions of domination and privilege” and who will “do everything possible to prevent” bringing the perpetrators “to justice.”
The Minister hailed Adams’ statement to the United Nations (UN) that week in which he committed his Government to “the pursuit of a vigorous investigation of this act of terrorism and to action, which would ensure that this evil would be wiped off the face of the earth.” Wills evoked striking poetic imagery reciting Claude McKay’s immortal 1919 sonnet “If we must die” to end his talk.
But just days on, an angry Burnham came out swinging, lashing out at the United States (US) for harbouring “Cuban counter-revolutionaries” since 1959 and encouraging attacks against diplomats, citizens, property and friends of the island, dismissing American “talk about self-determination, non-interference in the domestic affairs of countries” as “so much hogwash.”
“They will not interfere if they are sure that you will be a good boy, that you will be an Uncle Tom” the PM sneered, in an apparent sly, unflattering reference to his Barbadian counterpart. “Will you be hewers of wood and drawers of water or will you choose to be men in your own country?” he exhorted spellbound listeners, maintaining that the bombing “was intended to be a warning to Guyana” and “part of a general policy and threat to isolate Guyana and Cuba from the rest of the Caribbean.”
Barbados was unamused especially after the country’s esteemed first Prime Minister, Errol Barrow, Burnham’s legal and political contemporary and a founding father of the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) emerged from “self-imposed post-defeat obscurity,” to allege in a television interview that the GOB seemed to be “awaiting United States Government instruction” on how to proceed. Beaten in the 1976 elections, Barrow was at the time Leader of the Opposition. While he, as well, expressed grave concerns about “destabilization” he disagreed with Burnham about the location of the crash as “not relevant.”
Backed by an indignant and patriotic press, Prime Minister Adams “sarcastically” thanked Barrow for putting Burnham’s remarks about the disaster’s distance from Barbadian shores into perspective and denied that his administration was awaiting instructions from anyone, one declassified US State Department document shows.
“Although the GOB obviously still wishes to avoid the bother, expense and danger of bringing the suspects to trial here, it seems increasingly likely that they will be forced into doing so. However we expect they will attempt to cling to their ‘More facts before action’ line for as long as possible, and they might delay requesting extradition until after the Judicial Inquiry being conducted here has concluded its work,” the cable said. The public hearing, to which the US was invited, launched on October 28. Citing the ex-PM’s claims of “destabilization” as “disturbing” given that Barrow commands “a significant part of the local population” the US Bridgetown Embassy official surmised the “expression of disbelief by even some of those close to him” may cause the remarks “to fall on deaf ears.”
Three days prior, Guyana’s forceful firebrand was in full flow. “But are we men, or are we mice?” the Guyana PM thundered in his long Rally presentation launched off by Martin Carter’s powerful poem “Death of a Comrade” which Burnham recited flawlessly in its entirety. “Death must not find us thinking that we die” he intoned. A prolific reader, who only slept a few hours each night, he delivered a strong speech sprinkled with varied literary, Biblical and combustible Cold War jargon that incensed the Americans especially Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger. The Guyanese chief famously called out the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and openly blamed their backing of Cuban exiles for the atrocity.
Criticising the “doubting Thomases” and others “whom we have taken out of colonialism but out of whom we cannot take colonialism” who dared to scoff at claims of destabilization, Burnham described the airline’s downing in the paraphrased passion of Shakespeare’s Henry V: “We have it before us. The blast of war blows in our ears and we must now imitate the action of the tiger, stiffening our sinews and summoning up the blood.”
“There is need for us to deal firmly with any who would check our revolution,” the PM railed, admonishing the rally’s attendees, “You may want – some of you – to turn back. But, tell me, which country has ever turned back and survived with dignity?” asserting, “I am convinced that I speak for a majority of the people of Guyana – we would rather die on our feet than live on our knees beneath any imperialists.” He cunningly hailed the Cubans for “their minds, their conviction and their commitment” charging his countrymen “Let us see (this) in Guyana!”
“How can a country with the resources of the United States of America so impose upon our credulity as to ask us to believe that it cannot infiltrate these Cuban emigre organisations to whose members, until recently at least, it has given succor, support and hospitality?” a skeptical Burnham questioned. “Has the United States of America become so impotent that it could not get Bosch from the Dominican Republic (or) from Nicaragua?” where he was hiding.
In Port-of-Spain, the Barbadian Deputy Prime Minister, Bernard St. John was likewise recalcitrant: “If Mr. Barrow has any evidence to show a bomb was planted on that plane while it was in Barbados, then I invite him to go immediately to the nearest Police Station …and give…the information he has.” Shortly after a trip to the US and Canada, External Affairs Minister, Henry Forde reaffirmed that the GOB’s foreign policy was dictated by the island’s needs, not by the Americans, Burnham nor Barrow.
Following the end of the five-country TT pow-wow to iron out the fate of Lozano and Lugo, PM Adams rejected Burnham’s jurisdiction calls, categorically denied the US had applied any pressure to his Government and announced in his official update to the Barbadian people that the Cubana Flight 455 debris was definitely not in the country’s territorial waters but outside – roughly five miles from soft, sandy shore.
ID reads again, Martin Carter’s classic elegy “Death of a Comrade” handwritten in 1952 for his fine friend, the trade unionist Ivan Edwards, who drowned while swimming in a beautiful blue stretch off Barbados. In 1978, Carter, 51, was brutally beaten by goons when he dared to join a street demonstration against Burnham’s party, the People’s National Congress and their refusal to hold free and fair elections.
