Blood in the Caribbean Sea

Sep 06, 2025 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – In 1976, the Caribbean Sea was stained with the blood of innocents, when the Cubana Airliner was blown out of the sky just off Barbados. All seventy-three passengers and crew perished—students, athletes, children—among them eleven young Guyanese on their way to Cuba to pursue scholarships. The bombs were planted by anti-Castro terrorists with a safehouse in Miami and protectors in Washington. The fingerprints of the CIA were everywhere.

Forbes Burnham, Prime Minister of Guyana, took the deaths of the Guyanese personally, as any leader with a spine would. He demanded justice. When a senior U.S. diplomat, summoned back to Washington because of Burnham caustic criticisms, called upon him to say farewell, Burnham dispensed with the tea and biscuits. He asked the diplomat to tell his government to kill the men who planted the bombs. The diplomat replied, “Americans don’t do things that way.”

Burnham, never one to miss an opening for contempt, bellowed back: “You have done it before!”

And indeed, they had. From Guatemala to Chile, Vietnam to Angola, America had killed when it suited America. Murder, dressed up as foreign policy, executed with precision. The Cubana bombing revealed what the Caribbean had always known but seldom dared to say: that for Washington, Caribbean lives were expendable ballast in the great war against communism.

Nearly fifty years later, the story writes itself again, only now the handwriting is sloppier, the arrogance less disguised. A U.S. naval flotilla, dispatched ostensibly to combat narco-trafficking, roams the Caribbean Sea. The flotilla looks less like a customs patrol and more like an invasion fleet. Its presence is widely seen as a rehearsal for regime change in Venezuela.

This past week, one of its vessels blew up a small boat allegedly transporting narcotics. Eleven people died. No interception, no attempt at capture, no effort to even pretend at due process. Just fire from the sky, a charred vessel, and bodies sinking into the Caribbean’s blue grave.

The justification? An American official explained that interception at sea was not effective in that it did not stem from the drug trade. Henceforth, the policy would be to blow the vessels up. In other words, summary execution on the high seas. No trial, no charge, not even the courtesy of a warning shot. America now reserves the right to act as judge, jury, and executioner anywhere its ships prowl. It is a licence for murder written on the waves of the Caribbean Sea. It is also a violation of international humanitarian law.

The silence from regional leaders is as deafening as it is shameful. Two of them, before the bombing even occurred, had already prostrated themselves in public, declaring support for the flotilla’s presence in the region. Perhaps they thought a pat on the head from Washington was worth the indignity of looking like colonial administrators rather than sovereign leaders.

Since the killing of eleven people at sea, not one regional leader has raised a voice in condemnation. Not one has reminded Washington that the Caribbean is not a free-fire zone. Not one has had the courage of a Burnham or Jagan to condemn the cold-blooded assassination in Caribbean waters.

A lot has changed since 1976. Back then, the Caribbean was a place where leaders found the courage to talk back. Now it is a place where silence passes for diplomacy and obedience masquerades as pragmatism. Our governments tremble at the thought of offending the empire, so they swallow the insult.

Meanwhile, the Americans have openly abandoned even the pretense of law. Once, their Coast Guard intercepted suspicious vessels, boarded them, confiscated drugs, and arrested smugglers. It was an ugly business, but at least it was within the boundaries of what international law pretended to recognize. That charade is now discarded. Now the Caribbean is presented with a new doctrine. It is called interdiction by explosion.

And here lies the bitterest irony. Our own governments have signed Shiprider Agreements with the United States—legal instruments that give Washington the right of “hot pursuit” into our territorial waters. We signed them with the belief, or at least the hope, that America would use them responsibly to chase, to board, to seize, not to annihilate.

But if America has declared that interception is futile, that its preferred method is to blow boats out of the water, then the Shiprider Agreements amount to nothing more than signed death warrants. They give the Americans an open licence to kill in our waters, while we provide the paper and the pen.

What does “hot pursuit” mean now? It means that an American ship, chasing a suspect vessel, no longer bothers to overtake and intercept. It fires missiles. It reduces men to fish food and cargo to ashes.  The Shiprider agreements are now rendered useless.

The blood spilled in 1976 was the work of covert action. Washington at least had the decency then to keep its fingerprints half-hidden, to maintain the fiction that the empire was not complicit. In 2026, the blood is spilled openly, brazenly, without apology, under the stars and stripes. And our leaders, who once demanded justice, now shuffle their feet and avert their gaze.

It is time, long past time, to tear up the Shiprider Agreements. To refuse complicity in America’s new maritime death squad. To say, in voices unafraid, that the Caribbean Sea is not a killing field for empire. If Burnham could thunder against Washington in 1976, what excuse do today’s leaders have for their cowardly silence in 2025?

The Americans have done it before. The Americans are doing it again. The only question is whether the Caribbean still possesses the courage to say so.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this newspaper.)                       

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• blood, Caribbean Sea, Cubana Airliner, Peeping Tom

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