Today is the 40th anniversary of the bombing of Cubana Flight 455.
ON OCTOBER 6, 1976, an innocent five-year-old Cuban boy, standing close to his mother in their home, overheard someone telling her about reports that a Cubana plane had crashed in the Caribbean Sea.
Something in his mother’s reaction ignited a sense that something had gone terribly wrong, and small as he was, Camilio Rojo immediately gleaned that the news his mother had just received was devastating.
Rojo’s mother knew her husband was on that Cubana plane, and it was not long before her worst fears were confirmed.
She learnt she was just one of scores of relatives in the Caribbean and in North Korea whose loved ones were among the 68 passengers and five crew who lost their lives in the terrorist bombing that brought down Cubana Flight 455 in the waters off Barbados’ West Coast, just 11 minutes after it had taken off from Seawell Airport.
Camilio Rojo is now 45 and still haunted by the circumstances of his father’s death. For 40 years, he has longed to leave Cuba to come to Barbados to see the place where his father died.
Today he gets that opportunity to gaze across the Caribbean Sea along the West Coast and conjure up images of the crash and finally get an idea of the place where his father lost his life.
Rojo also believes he will finally get the closure he has been seeking for 40 years, when he stands at the commemorative monument erected in Paynes Bay, St James, as a memorial to the 57 Cubans, 11 Guyanese and five North Koreans who perished in the crash, and participates in the memorial ceremony.
Duty of care
The Clement Payne Movement, the Cuban Embassy, the Barbadian/Cuban Friendship Association, Pan African Coalition of Organisations and the International Network in Defence of Humanity have indicated that they owed Rojo and all the other relatives of the Cubana victims no less.
The Paynes Bay monument is a memorial for which the Cuban has expressed deep appreciation to Barbados, “a memorial to commemorate the crime against Cuba”, as he described it.
Cuban Camilio Rojo (right) and a member of the Cuban Five, Fernando Gonzalez, poring over newspaper reports of the 1976 Cubana bombing at a book and photo exhibition at the Clement Payne Cultural Centre on Tuesday.
“In 1976 I was five years old. This visit to Barbados has been in my mind for many, many years. I have been trying to have it for many, many years, but now I am here,” an emotional Rojo told an audience at the Clement Payne Cultural Centre on Crumpton Street, The City, on Tuesday.
Speaking in Spanish, slowly and deliberately, with assistance from a fellow Cuban translating, he said: “First of all, it is sad to be in the place where my father died. Second, because my father remains my guardian. He lies at the bottom of the sea.”
Rojo is anxious to meet and talk with Barbadians who witnessed or who can offer any information on the tragedy.
“I would like to talk to those people because you will consider that if I was five years old when this happened, now I have grown up and I am 45, I need to talk to those who were there and who have seen all that happened.
“In the name of my family, I would like to say thank you to the Barbados people for that beautiful monument.” (GC)
