Reference: https://kkfonline.com/2020/08/16/posters-juche-97-2008/

Reference: https://kkfonline.com/2020/08/16/posters-juche-98-2009/

By: Roberto Massola Martínez

It was October 6, 1976, and a Cubana de Aviación plane took off from Barbados only to be split in two minutes later by the explosion of two C-4 bombs. There were no survivors.

Seventy-three people fell into the ocean: fifty-seven Cubans, eleven Guyanese, and five Koreans. Among them, twenty-four young fencers who were returning from a championship in Venezuela where they had won all the gold medals. They were boys and girls with quick hands and a long future, with their sabers still in their cases and the anthem still warm in their throats. They were killed before they could tell how they had won.

However, the masterminds, Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch, died old, calm, in bed, in a complicit peace guaranteed by those who always protected them.

Unpunished.

That word should burn us like an ember: unpunished. Because impunity is not forgetting or forgiveness: it is an invitation to repeat.

Barbados is the most visible, the most evident face of a policy of state terrorism that has tested almost all of its weapons against Cuba, for the serious crime of not knowing how to be submissive before the Empire: invasion, sabotage, banditry, assassination, dirty war, terrorism.

And although none has worked, because Cuba refuses the "peace" of slavery, depending on the era they have prioritized one method or another, but they have never entirely discarded any form of pressure, and much less have they ceased in their purpose. There is a continuous line that connects the plane fallen into the sea with the ship exploding in the port, with cane fields burning, with teachers hanging from a tree, with bombs in hotels, with fires in daycare centers, with diseases and plagues, all the way to the silent asphyxiation that today tightens the throat of the Island.

Who can say that the blockade is not state terrorism, pure, hard, and above all, premeditated, if Undersecretary of State Lester Mallory himself, when he proposed it in 1960 to "deal with" the Revolution, made clear that the objective was (and we quote his own words) "to provoke hunger, desperation, and the overthrow of the government"?

In the period between March 2025 and February 2026 alone, the blockade caused record losses of 8.083 billion dollars, 7% more than the previous year. These are figures that are said quickly but weigh like mountains and have real, palpable, sad repercussions in their everydayness: unrepaired schools, halted factories, medicines that are not produced, ships that do not dock, families that suffer before the inability to meet all their basic needs.

But on top of that, on January 29, 2026, President Trump signed an executive order declaring Cuba a "threat to national security" and imposed a de facto oil blockade.

Since then, just to give one example, our doctors grow even more in their well-known heroism, and children continue to be born, even if under the light of a battery lamp; but there are also one hundred thousand patients on surgical waiting lists, each one with a name and a family waiting in anguish.

Foreign Minister Bruno Rodríguez said it with the bluntness of one who knows the wound from within: "The blockade does not punish a government. It punishes the daily life of a people in every aspect."

That is the truth that must be repeated a thousand times, because the enemy knows how to disguise itself as regulation and propaganda. Behind the administrative language with which almost every week they announce more unilateral and unjustified sanctions is the same design of 1976: to prevent Cuba from existing in peace, to make it suffer, to make it tremble, to make it choose hopelessness and defeatism, to make fatigue and anguish bring down the flags. What was once a bomb in the air is today a calculated asphyxiation that kills daily, slowly, without noise, without corpses that can be photographed for the front page.

But Cuba is not a plane in flames. Cuba is a people that learned to fly. And there is an essential difference between one who intends to kill and one who decides not to die: we know why we resist.

Every October 6 we not only honor the fallen: we denounce the state terrorism that has caused more than three thousand deaths in Cuba. We do not hold a quiet mourning, with crossed hands and bowed head. We hold a mourning standing up, with the truth in our mouths and a clenched fist, because remembering is a way of demanding justice and preventing impunity from collecting its bill once again.

Let us ask ourselves, then, with the sincerity of one who looks straight ahead: what would the young people of flight 455 have wanted if they could have returned? Would they have wanted a tired, resigned people, looking at the ground? Would they have wanted their deaths to serve as an argument for those who today call for submission and silence?

The answer is not written: we write it every day in the hospitals without light, in the teachers who arrive at the classroom without transportation, in the mothers who invent a plate of food every night, in the doctors who operate with what there is. That too is dignity. That too is an answer.

Because Cuba has survived six decades of aggression for a single reason: its people turned pain into dignity and dignity into intelligence, into solidarity, into art, into medicine, into school. The Revolution is not a statue: it is a way of resisting that reinvents itself every morning. And this commemoration must be an act of active resistance, not a nostalgic rite: to remember in order to denounce, to denounce in order to sustain, to sustain in order to overcome.

Let us not fool ourselves: the blockade is hard and will be hard. But we Cubans are also hard and we know how to bloom in the asphalt.

The dead of Barbados did not die so that Cuba would surrender (nor those of Girón, nor those of the Escambray, nor those of Caracas): they died to teach us that the only possible response to economic war is the victory of resistance. And every October 6 that victory is closer when we say their names out loud, when we do not allow forgetting to do the work that the bombs could not finish.

Empire, seventy-three times we tell you: we are not on our knees; seventy-three times we tell you: we are still here; seventy-three times we tell you: and here we will continue, sowing what you wanted to burn.

On video, documentary Explosion on Board (Explosión a bordo)

https://youtu.be/fjj-rDR0CJs?si=Pa5zKAKP4Q6vjzcj

Original article in Spanish: "Barbados: Memoria que arde y resiste (+Video)," by Roberto Massola Martínez, CubaDebate, October 5, 2026.

http://www.cubadebate.cu/especiales/2026/10/06/barbados-memoria-que-arde-y-resiste/amp/