Trying to forget our history

Oct 07, 2014 Editorial

Yesterday was a memorable day in the history of Guyana but from the amount of attention people paid to it one would never believe that this time in 1976 the nation was shocked and the international police were looking for four men.
At the same time, Guyana lost some of its brightest brains, young people who had been proceeding to Cuba to pursue medicine and other skills that the country needed and which Cuba so willingly imparted. Thirteen Guyanese boarded Cuban airline Flight 455 at what is now the Cheddi Jagan International Airport. Two of them were diplomats heading to take up their posts and one was a little girl.
The flight landed at the Grantley Adams International Airport before proceeding to Jamaica and finally Cuba. It lifted off from the Barbados airport and somewhere between three miles and 12 miles later it exploded. In addition to the Guyanese there were North Koreans and Cubans. No one survived.
That Wednesday was a black day for Guyana and the Caribbean. It also signaled what some now describe as the advent of global terrorism. The people on board that flight had done nothing to the terrorists who planted the bomb but the architects of the explosion wanted to hit Cuba. They did because after that explosion Cubana flights to the region died, not right away, but soon after.
Hernan Ricardo and Freddy Lugo, two Venezuelan mercenaries, placed the bomb on the airplane during a journey from Trinidad Tobago to Barbados. Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch, were the intellectual perpetrators of terrorist crime. They too were arrested and subjected to a “plagued tortuous process of irregularities in the midst of colossal pressures.” Eventually they were sentenced to long jail terms.
If that was the end of the story one would have said that justice was served but there were those who supported the terrorists. They helped two of them to escape from jail and they killed the daughter of the judge who imposed the lengthy jail sentence.
President Forbes Burnham insisted that the explosion occurred in Barbados territorial waters, a claim that Barbados denied because it wanted nothing to do with the legal process. In fact, it was as if Barbados was saying that it did not want to get into anybody’s wars. Some say that Barbados took that position because the United States was being blamed for the attack and the Caribbean country did not want to offend the US.
At the time there was talk about where the men should be tried. Burnham said that Guyanese were killed and that Guyana had every right to try them. Greater powers ignored him. He vowed that the Guyanese would not be forgotten but with each passing year it would seem that Burnham’s vow has become a fading dream.
Guyana talked about a monument to the victims. Mayor Hamilton Green attempted to construct one on Camp Street at the junction of Lamaha Street. The government claimed that the site would be a traffic hazard and that a monument would be erected in the compound of the University of Guyana. No monument has been constructed and one wonders about the commitment of the government to recognize those Guyanese who died in the service of their country.
It has been 38 years since that disaster and while many Guyanese do not even know of the disaster, those old enough still shed tears for their relatives whom they will never see again. Over the past few years the Cuban Embassy in Guyana has been commemorating what has become known as the Cubana Air Disaster. This provides Guyanese an opportunity to recognize and to honour those who died on October 6, 1976. But what is the nation doing?
The United States which sustained a terrorist attack on September 11, 2001 remembers that occasion. It has even rebuilt a monument at the site when two aircrafts crashed into the then twin towers and killed more than 3,000 people. There is another monument in Philadelphia where the passengers on one aircraft that was heading to another national target brought down the plane. They sacrificed their lives. The Americans do not forget.

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