Unseen Cuba: First aerial photographs reveal island's spectacular beauty

[Judi Lynn]

4. Since the revolution they have been visited by attacks on the country

by Cuban "exiles," etc., and low flying airplanes spraying chemicals on the country which spread disease, killed their crops, decimated their livestock, as has been recorded over the years, even in a murder trial in New York City for Eduardo Arocena, on trial for the murder of a Cuban U.N. diplomat at a stoplight in New York City. Arocena testified that he had done work for the U.S. CIA, had taken chemical weapons into Cuba for the CIA to be used against the Cuban people.

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During his trial Arocena testified he had been asked to deliver by hand biological warfare vials to Cuba. There are numerous references available which can be tracked down, and this is only one thread of a much larger topic of US/Cuban "exile"/CIA terrorism against Cubans for decades:

Terrorist Arocena's wife meets Senator Joe Lieberman

On September 11, 1974, Cuban-American Eduardo Arocena (known as "Omar&quot
and three other men established Omega 7 to carry out terrorist activities
against Cuba. They assassinated people who promoted dialogue with Cuba,
including Eulalio José Negrín in New Jersey and Carlos Muñiz Varela in
Puerto Rico. They set off numerous bombs for years. For example on
September 11-12, 1981, Omega 7 claimed responsibility for bomb blasts that
destroyed the Mexican consulate in Miami and damaged the one in New York
City because Mexico had not broken relations with Cuba.

They seemed to like to commit terrorism especially on September 11,
perhaps because that is the date of the overthrow of the Allende government
in Chile in 1973. (Omega 7 was involved in the murders of Orlando Letelier
and Ronni Moffett.)

On September 11, 1980, Arocena shot to death Cuban diplomat Félix
García Rodríguez who had stopped for a red light in Queens, forcing the FBI
(who had trained Omega 7) to arrest some Omega 7 members because of the
international outcry from other UN diplomats.

Arocena carried out at least one biological weapon attack, most likely
dengue fever; he testified in his murder trial that he took “some germs” to
Cuba. He said he thought the germs were to be used against Soviet people in
Cuba and was disappointed to learn that they were used against Cubans.

On September 22, 1984, Arocena was found guilty of the assassination of
Félix García and the attempted assassination of Cuban Ambassador to the
United Nations Raúl Roa Kourí. The federal jury in New York City found him
guilty of 25 of the 26 charges against him, including 20 bombings, perjury
(lying to a federal grand jury when he denied involvement in the 1979 murder
of Eulalio José Negrín), and financing his operations by being an enforcer
for a Florida drug trafficker. Then a federal jury in Miami found him
guilty of all 23 weapons and conspiracy charges against him. In a second
federal trial in Miami, the jury convicted him of all 24 counts involving
seven bombings in Miami from 1979 until 1983.

~snip~

In the trial held in the United States in 1984 against Eduardo Arocena, a
ringleader of the terrorist organization Omega-7, he publicly confessed to having
introduced germs into Cuba and admitted that hemorrhagic dengue fever had been
introduced in the island through related groups of Cuban origin, based in the
United States.
(snip)

There is a mountain of evidence, background information and facts that cannot
possibly be ignored.

What is beyond question is that, in just a few weeks, the hemorrhagic dengue
epidemic in Cuba --where it had never existed-- had affected a total of 344,203
people, a figure with no known precedent in any other country of the world. There
was another truly record case when 11,400 new patients were reported in a single
day on July 6, 1981.

A total of 116,143 cases were hospitalized. About 24,000 patients suffered from
hemorrhaging and 10,224 suffered some degree of dengue-induced shock. One
hundred and fifty-eight people died as a result of the epidemic, including 101
children.

The whole country and all its resources were mobilized to fight the epidemic. The
vector's presence was strongly and simultaneously controlled in all of Cuba's towns
and cities, using all possible means and with products and equipment urgently
bought from anywhere, including the United States. A request was made to the United
States through the Pan-American Health Organization and finally, in the month of
August, an important larvicide could be bought. Chemicals and equipment were
brought in, often by plane and sometimes from countries as far away as Japan, whose
factories sold Cuba thousands of individual motor fumigators. Malathion had to be
brought from Europe at a transportation fee of 5,000 dollars a ton, that is, three
and a half times the cost of the product.

In addition to the existing hospital network, dozens of boarding schools were
turned into hospitals in order to isolate every new patient reported, without
exception. At the same time, intensive-care units were built and equipped in all of
the country's children hospitals.

This is how the last infected case was reported on October 10, 1981.

If it had not been for this enormous effort, tens of thousands of people, the vast
majority of them children, would have died. An epidemic that many experts had
forecast would take years to eradicate was defeated in little more than four
months. The adverse economic impact was also considerable.

More, from previous D.U. posts:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=405x33420