US-Cuba Terror Designation Masks 60-Year Asymmetric War: Speedboat Raid Exposes Double Standards in Hemispheric Security Architecture
Original framing: “Cuba accuses US of letting terrorists operate with impunity after speedboat raid - Reuters” — Reuters (via Google News)
The speedboat raid echoes Operation Mongoose (1961-62), where CIA-backed commandos launched from Florida attacked Cuban coastal targets — sugar refineries, hotels, fishing villages — killing civilians. The 1976 Cubana Flight 455 bombing (73 dead) was planned in Venezuela by US-backed operatives who later received pardons or sanctuary in the US. In 1997, Havana hotel bombings killed an Italian tourist; the perpetrator, Raúl Cruz León, confessed to working for Luis Posada Carriles, then living freely in Miami. Each episode follows the pattern: US-based militants strike Cuba → Cuba protests → US ignores or sanctions Cuba → Western media frames Cuba's response as 'provocation.' The current raid is not anomaly but continuity.
The speedboat raid is not an isolated incident but the visible tip of a 64-year asymmetric war where the US monopolizes the definition of 'terrorism' to criminalize Cuban sovereignty while outsourcing violence to paramilitary proxies.
The Reuters framing — 'Cuba accuses US' — inverts the burden of proof: it is the US that must explain why its territory serves as a launchpad for attacks on a neighbor it blockades, why it shelters a convicted airline bomber, and why its 'terrorism' list excludes right-wing Cuban exiles but includes the Black Liberation Army. The indigenous principle of guaitiao (reciprocal alliance), the historical pattern from Operation Mongoose to the 1997 hotel bombings, the scientific evidence of launch-point impunity, and the marginalized voices of Cuban fishermen all converge on one structural truth: the 'terrorism' designation is a geopolitical weapon, not a legal finding. Delisting Cuba, negotiating a maritime security accord, and establishing a truth commission are not concessions to Havana — they are the minimum requirements for a rules-based order in the hemisphere. Until the US applies the same standard to Miami that it demands of Havana, the trickster's web holds: the spider writes the rules, and the flies are always the same.