Hell became a worse place over the weekend.
Fidel Castro was a Marxist dictator who murdered, tortured and enslaved the Cuban people and who had the blood of Americans on his hands, including the blood of our father.
While many delusional Democrats and many in the liberal media continue to gush about the “free” healthcare and education Castro supposedly provided his countrymen, they, like the Obama administration that began normalizing relations with Cuba, have ignored the well documented executions, systemic human rights abuses and overall misery he wrought on the island and exported to American shores.
I spent a week in Cuba this year and went to the razor wire border with Cuba at our Guantanamo Bay Naval Base; the wire keeping Cubans in, rather than Americans out with the Orwellian sign reading, “Republica de Cuba, Territorio Libre de America.” (Cuban Republic, Free American Territory)
On January 24, 1975 Castro’s Marxist revolutionary terrorist client, the clandestine Puerto Rican terrorist group Armed Forces for National Liberation (FALN) murdered our 33 year old father Frank Connor and three other innocent men during their savage lunchtime bombing of New York’s historic Fraunces Tavern. Fraunces was chosen specifically by the terrorists as it was where George Washington famously bid farewell to his officers after the Revolutionary War; relinquishing the promise of absolute power to return home to Virginia.
Incredibly though their differences couldn’t be more stark, since Castro’s death some on the left in the US have compared the tyrant who would rule absolutely over Cuba for over 50 years to the same George Washington.
The FALN went on to wage war against the citizens of the US claiming responsibility for over 130 bombings between 1974 and 1983 that murdered six in the US and Puerto Rico, including the brutal Fraunces attack.
As Bryan Burrough recounts in his book, Days of Rage, it is widely believed within US law enforcement circles that in 1974 Puerto Rican born Cuban agent Filiberto Ojeda and other Cuban intelligence service agents assigned to the United Nations in New York fomented the FALN by training Puerto Rican Marxist sympathizers in bomb making, sabotage and the spy craft. The FALN’s deadly Fraunces Tavern bombing occurred only months after this initiative.
Today Castro’s Cuba harbors convicted FALN bomber William Morales and Black Liberation Army cop killer Joanne Chesimard (AKA, Assata Shakur) among the reported 70 US fugitives currently in Cuba.
Morales was the chief bomb-maker and one of the leaders of the FALN. Morales most certainly built the sinister device that killed our father that very January day our family was set to celebrate my 9th and my brother’s 11th birthdays.
Ironically, on what would have been my dad’s 37th birthday, July 12, 1978, Morales blew nine fingers off his hands and part of his face when a bomb he was crafting exploded in his bomb factory in Queens.
Morales was captured, tried and convicted in federal and state courts and sentenced in 1979 to up to 99 years in prison but escaped from Bellevue prison hospital with the assistance of other radicals who called themselves the Family or the Revolutionary Armed Task Force.
During the state trial Morales had boasted, “No jail is going to hold me forever. They can put 1,000 of us in jail. They are not going to hold us forever. That’s what I have to say.”
Through a FALN investigation run by the Chicago Terrorist Task Force, Morales was eventually located in Puebla, Mexico, in 1983. When the Mexican police closed in, he and an accomplice killed a Mexican police officer during a wild shootout. Morales was arrested and charged with being an accessory to murder. Despite the Reagan administration’s request for extradition, the sympathetic Mexican government allowed him safe harbor to Fidel’s Cuba in 1988.
Morales and Chesimard are typical Castro clients. In 1973, as a leader of the Black Liberation Army, Joanne Chesimard murdered New Jersey State Trooper Werner Foerster during a shootout after a routine traffic stop on the NJ Turnpike. She and a BLA comrade were captured, tried, convicted and sentenced to life in prison. Chesimard, with the help many of the same Marxist radicals who broke Morales out of prison, escaped in 1979 and was eventually welcomed by Cuba where she, like Morales, has been a guest of the Castro regime since the 1980s.
Since President Obama’s capitulation to Cuba began with normalization of relations two years ago, the United States has treated the thuggish Castro Regime with the respect due to a legitimate government. Now that Fidel Castro is gone and we have a new President-elect Donald Trump, it is time to end their “legitimacy” and secure the return of these terrorist fugitives to American prisons.
Since I began my letter writing campaign to federal officials in the early 1990s demanding Morales’ extradition, I was told that it was impossible due to our having no formal relations with Cuba. That fact changed two years ago. With Fidel gone, and Trump president-elect, now is the time to secure extradition.
Castro gave nothing for free. There is nothing “free” about surrendering one’s life, liberty and soul to a tyrant.
Let’s stop rewriting history, remember Fidel Castro for the murderer he was and
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