WASHINGTON — Activist leaders defended Cuba on Thursday for killing Americans with aircraft decades ago while responding to a new U.S. indictment over the attack.
The Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) gathered supporters at its new “Liberation Center” venue on H Street Northeast for a publicly-advertised event promoting “solidarity” with Cuba against the Trump administration. Speakers from the PSL and the leftist Hatuey Project echoed the Cuban government’s talking points about why it shot down two civilian aircraft carrying four American allies of a Cuban exile support group in 1996.
The Department of Justice (DOJ) announced long-anticipated charges Wednesday against former Cuban dictator Raúl Castro and five others over the incident as part of an increasingly aggressive posture toward the communist regime. Blocks from the White House, leftists in America’s capital went onstage Thursday to suggest no crime occurred at all.
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“They are charging him for an act of territorial defense that occurred 30 years ago,” a PSL speaker announced as Emily told the crowd of more than a dozen. “Let us be absolutely clear. This indictment is not an act of justice. It is a brazen provocation, a political instrument designed to manufacture consent for another war by the Trump administration.”
“Under Article 51 of the Charter of the United Nations, every sovereign state possesses the inherent right to defend its territory, including its national airspace, against unlawful incursions,” she said.
Hosts also passed out pro-Cuba materials at the Liberation Center, one of dozens of similar event spaces the PSL is opening nationwide to organize for radical causes.
The two planes Cuban aircraft shot down were tied to Brothers to the Rescue, a group widely recognized in America as a non-violent humanitarian mission helping thousands flee tyranny and poverty under the late dictator Fidel Castro. The U.S. and United Nations have agreed that the downed planes were over international airspace rather than Cuban territory when they were destroyed, though American officials worried the rescue flights would heighten tensions, according to multiple reports.
Trump has shown several signs in his second term that Cuba is in for severe punishment for years of infractions against the U.S., even telling reporters he may have “the honor of taking Cuba.”
“Charging a 94-year-old former head of state for an act of territorial defense after Cuba exhausted every diplomatic channel, after the United States ignored its own legal obligations and its own internal warnings — this is not justice,” Emily said, closely echoing Cuban government messaging. “This is theater. This is the manufacture of a pretext.”
The Thursday audience also welcomed a speaker announced as Ben from Hatuey Project, which claims to provide humanitarian supplies to Cubans and is a self-described “project of” the leftist nonprofit People’s Forum. The People’s Forum has received millions of dollars from a China-supporting financier Neville Singham, while the PSL shares overlapping personnel with Singham-funded groups, according to investigations by the Daily Caller News Foundation and others.
Republished with permission from Daily Caller News Foundation
