Massacre in the Caribbean Sea
Speech delivered by Hon, Moses Nagamootoo, Prime Minister and First Vice-President of the Cooperative Republic of Guyana at Cubana air disaster monument, University of Guyana campus, October 6, 2018
MASSACRE IN THE CARIBBEAN SEA
“We have an explosion on board… We have fire abroad”.
Those were among the last words from Captain Wilfredo Perez as he radioed to the control tower at the then Seawell Airport in Barbados.
Those last words were conclusive testimony that Cubana Air Flight CU455 did not go down as the result of an accident. They were an indictment of the terrorists who had planted bombs on board the Cubana passenger aircraft on that fateful and tragic October 6, 1976.
The aircraft had left Guyana, and was en route to Cuba with stops in Trinidad, Barbados and Jamaica. But minutes after take-off from Barbados, it went down in the Caribbean Sea. All 73 persons on board were killed. There were 57 Cubans, 5 Koreans and 11 Guyanese on board.
The Guyanese were :-
Eric Norton, 18 years old;
Ann Nelson, 18;
Seshnarine Kumar, 18;
Jacqueline Williams, 19; and
Rawle Thomas, 18 – all students on their way to study in Cuba, with relatives Violet Thomas and Rita Thomas.
9 year-old Sabrina Harripaul; Margaret Bradshaw, and Gordon Sobha, an Economist.
Our entire nation would remember the shock and horror of that day. We would continue to collectively share the grief and loss over the calculated mass murder, the massacre, of our Guyanese compatriots, citizens of the Republic of Cuba and the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea.
As we collectively mourned our dead, I vividly recall Fidel Castro, then President of Cuba, saying, “when our grief is multiplied, injustice trembles”.
