Orin Gordon
The final insult for the family of Jacqueline Williams is that Dr Luis Posada Carriles, one of the men convicted of the airplane bombing that took her life 50 years ago, died on her birthday, May 23, in 2018. Carriles, a Cuban-born resident of Venezuela and the United States at various times, was 90 on the day that he died in a Miami elderly care home.
Had she still been alive, Jacqueline would have turned 60 that same day, would have been 68 today, and likely retired from medical practice. Instead, she died on October 6, 1976, in the bombing of Cubana Airlines flight CU455 by anti-Castro terrorists.
The 18-year-old had been on her way to Cuba to take up a scholarship in medicine – one of several bright young Guyanese scholarship winners, just out of high school. Cuba held academic and professional promise. Twenty-four members of the Cuban Fencing team were also on that flight. Many were teenagers, and they’d just done a clean sweep of the Central American and Caribbean Championships in Venezuela. Incalculable Olympic promise. Gone.
In all, there were 73 souls on board the aircraft. The stops were Timehri (now Cheddi Jagan) in Guyana, Piarco in Trinidad, and Seawell (now Grantley Adams) in Barbados. Norman Manley in Jamaica was the last scheduled stop before Havana.
CU455 never made it back to base. About 10 minutes after takeoff from Barbados, two bombs planted on the airplane exploded at different times. Everyone died. Forty-eight passengers and 25 crew members. Fifty-seven Cuban passengers and crew, 11 Guyanese and five North Koreans.
The North Koreans were four government officials and one cameraman—part of what the governments described as a “formal friendship tour” of Latin America. Part of what animated the terrorists (as staunchly anti-communist as they were anti-Castro) was the relationship between Havana and Pyongyang, and their presidents, Fidel Castro and Kim Il Sung.
The explosions and the plane’s plunge into the sea were seen from several parts of Barbados, late that Wednesday evening close to sunset … the not-too-bright but not-yet-dark conditions that camera operators love. It was seen most clearly from Paynes Bay, off the west coast of the island. There’s a monument there. Every year, relatives of the victims take part in a remembrance service in their honour, and Jacqueline’s sisters and brother made the trip to Barbados for the service. We spoke with them. We can’t tell everyone’s story, but we can tell hers.
The men alleged to have plotted the bombing were indicted in Venezuela ten months later —in August 1977. The two most prominent of them were Posada and Orlando Bosch, both part of an anti-Castro militant umbrella group, CORU. Trinidad and Tobago police arrested two other operatives, Freddy Lugo and Hernan Lozano, shortly after the explosions. The two Venezuelan men had boarded the plane in Trinidad, checked their luggage through to Havana, and left the plane in Barbados. They flew back to Trinidad. Lugo and Lozano implicated Posada and Bosch, and their testimony was the basis of the 1977 indictments. They were later deported to Venezuela, because all four men were residents or nationals of that country.
Judicial proceedings in Venezuela were in military and civilian courts, and although the plotters were sentenced and served time in jail, both courts dropped the ball on properly rendering justice. With the help of right-leaning US legislators like the staunchly anti-Castro Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Bosch ended up in the United States and was pardoned in 1990 by President George HW Bush.
Posada escaped first to Panama, and ended up in the US, where an immigration judge ruled that he couldn’t be deported to Venezuela, because he faced torture. Despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary and the demonstrated involvement of CORU in a string of other bombings, Posada has consistently denied involvement in the bombing of CU455.
He and Bosch were both medical professionals. Posada studied medicine, and Bosch was a paediatrician. The first piece of grim irony is that some of the young people on the plane were going to study medicine. The other is that—leaving aside Posada’s denials—they shattered a core pillar of medical ethics. In Latin, it is “primum non nocere.” First, do no harm.
Jacqueline and the loss of Caribbean innocence
The Anglophone Caribbean lost its innocence in 1976, when anti-Castro militants bombed a Cubana Airlines plane and killed 73 people on October 6 that year. Caribbean citizens killed, from bombs planted at Caribbean airports, which led to a plane blown up over the Caribbean Sea.
Three months earlier, July 1976, we’d read about and heard of the raid on Entebbe – Operation Thunderbolt. Israeli forces staged a commando raid at Entebbe Airport in Uganda to rescue hostages taken in the hijacking of an Air France plane by Palestinian militants.
They seized control of a plane flying from Tel Aviv to Paris and diverted it south to Uganda. Israeli passengers were separated and held in a terminal. The rescue, later to be made into a movie, was led by special forces officer Yoni Netanyahu, the eldest brother of Benjamin Netanyahu, the current Prime Minister of Israel.
We were aware of terrorism in other parts of the world, but were mostly detached from the actuality of it. However, Cuba and Cubans were a regular target of anti-Castro/anti-Communist militants.
The Cuban ambassador’s view
The mild-mannered Cuban Ambassador to T&T, Gustavo Veliz de Olivarez, becomes animated when describing attacks on Cuba.
“Cuba has been the victim of more than six decades of terrorist attacks, with a reported toll of more than 3,400 people killed and 2,099 injured”, he said in a strongly worded statement.
“Cuba currently faces what it describes as a “genocidal plan to bring the Cuban people to their knees through hunger.”
Veliz accuses the CIA of deliberately introducing hemorrhagic dengue to Cuba. It affected more than 300,000 people and killed 158. He concludes: “Cuba further alleges that some of those responsible received protection or support from individuals and organisations connected to the CIA and other U.S. government institutions.”
It should be pointed out that the US has itself accused Cuba of fermenting Communist-led militarism. My job, in saying this, is to supply balance and context. None of it seeks to explain away decades of terror attacks on Cuba and Cuban targets by CORU and other groups.
For much of time, the Caribbean felt detached from them. That detachment ended 50 years ago, when terrorism truly came home.
Jacqueline’s story
One home that it visited was the family home of Jacqueline Williams in Georgetown, Guyana. Jacqueline was one of the 73 killed on CU455. Family and one of her closest friends in Barbados for the Paynes Bay memorial service gathered to talk to me by WhatsApp last week. Sisters Yvette Williams-Harris, Anneta Williams-Arno, Adelle Williams-Sewell, brother Mattoo Williams and school friend Christine Jones.
Jacqueline, 18, was a slight 5’2”. In photos they shared with me, her big afro made her look even more petite, but they described a (little) big sister with a strong personality. She’d recently graduated from Bishop’s High School, one of Guyana’s leading schools.
School leavers did national service, paramilitary training that equipped them with skills for the defence of the homeland, should the need arise.
Jacqueline had been away from her family at a remote national service camp for three months. They’d had precious little time with her before she had to leave for Cuba. Yvette picks up the story.
“On October 6th we set off from Georgetown to Timehri airport. My cousin Diane was driving, and my mother and I went along to see Jacqueline off. My mother was apprehensive about her going off to Cuba and even at the last minute urged her to not go. I was (back in Georgetown) with my sister Anneta when we heard the news that Cubana 455 had crashed into the Caribbean Sea a few minutes after takeoff. There are no words for this incredible event. My father (George Williams, on secondment to St Lucia) immediately travelled to Guyana. On his stopover in Barbados, he visited the Paynes Bay site and remarkably found a French vocabulary book that belonged to Jacqueline, washed up on the beach.”
Fifty years is a long time. How often do they think of her? All the time. Jacqueline – who had a liking for music, languages and art – is survived by her art, which is enjoyed and appreciated by the nieces and nephews she never met.
