By Lyn Neeley
May 27, 2026
Portland, Oregon — Onyesonwu Chatoyer was the featured speaker at a forum sponsored by Portland State University’s Cuba Solidarity Club on May 21. Chatoyer is the co-chair of the National Network on Cuba, editor of Hood Communist and an organizer with the Venceremos Brigade.
In a fiery talk, Chatoyer described the long history of U.S. terrorist attacks on Cuba and explained reasons why the Cuban people have not abandoned their revolution: “The U.S. blockade of Cuba, over six decades old, is intended to cut Cuba off from the global community. They are not just targeting communists; they have been intentionally targeting civilians from the beginning. But the Cuban people will never willingly go back to colonization.”
The U.S., aligned with right-wing Cubans, has backed and funded terrorist attacks on Cuba, “hired mercenaries to set bombs off in Cuba and assassinated Cuban political leaders inside the U.S.” Chatoyer referred to the Belly of the Beast documentary “Hardliner on the Hudson” to describe former Senator Robert Menendez’s association with the Cuban-American terrorist groups Omega 7 and Alpha 66 during the 1970s and 1980s.
These groups waged war against Fidel Castro from their base in New Jersey, attacking embassies in New York City. They blew up businesses and gunned down Cuban Americans believed to be doing business with the Cuban government. Many of them had been trained by the CIA to use explosives for the (failed) Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961.
Chatoyer described a number of U.S. terrorist attacks on Cuba: the invasion by a CIA-sponsored paramilitary group of Cuban exiles of Cuba’s Playa Girón (Bay of Pigs); the 1976 bombing of a Cuban civilian aircraft by CIA operatives that killed 73 people aboard (not all were Cuban); the 1981 release of the dengue virus, which caused an outbreak of over 300,000 cases and killed 200 Cubans, including 30 children; and the 1993 release of a virus that killed millions of Cuban citrus trees. Yet, Chatoyer said, the U.S. placed Cuba on the “State Sponsor of Terrorism” list in 1982.
For years a right-wing Cuban-American group, Brothers to the Rescue, flew U.S. Air Force planes over Cuba and dropped anti-Cuban propaganda over Havana. Cuba appealed to the U.S. government for years to stop the planes from violating Cuban airspace. But the U.S. did nothing.
On May 20, the U.S. indicted 94-year-old Raul Castro for his alleged role in shooting down two of the planes on Feb. 24, 1996, that were only 12 miles from Cuba. Chatoyer posed the question, “What would the U.S. do if another country flew over Washington?”
Blockade imposes oil shortages
Presently, Cuba has run out of oil due to the total blockade imposed by the U.S. Chatoyer said: “The U.S. is moving resources, like the USS Nimitz aircraft carrier, towards Cuba using the Venezuela model. Several unmanned U.S. drones are flying over Cuba surrounding Havana, just as they did in Venezuela right before they kidnapped [President Nicolás] Maduro and Cilia Flores.”
CIA Director John Ratcliffe met with Cuban officials in Havana last week accompanied by paramilitary leaders involved in killing Cubans during Maduro’s kidnapping. Ratcliffe said the U.S. is “prepared to seriously engage on economic and security issues, but only if Cuba makes fundamental changes.” (apnews.com, May 14)
Chatoyer said despite these years of terrorist actions by the U.S, “the Cuban people have organized themselves to resist U.S. imperialism and have continued to survive by building socialism. Organized neighborhood Committees in Defense of the Revolution are still working to defend their revolution.”
Cuba recently completed a process that turns Cuba’s own crude oil into usable diesel, naphtha and fuel oil. Chatoyer called this a “milestone that reflects years of research and socialist science and a shift toward greater energy independence.”
Chatoyer ended her presentation saying: “Cuba has been a model worth defending and an example that we must live up to. The time to act is now. We are starting to feel what the rest of the world has been experiencing living under imperialism.
“The U.S. is attacking Cuba, because Cuba beat them, challenged the U.S. narrative of invincibility. And because Cuba is a country of largely Brown people, most of African descent, who built a revolutionary socialist project 90 miles off the coast of the U.S. Everybody is telling us that Europeans are the best, and here’s these Africans beating them. … They can’t take it! … They can’t take it!
“We need to organize for a week of actions against the U.S. war on Cuba from June 28 to July 4. We are also calling for rapid response actions, a mass mobilization all over the world in case of a U.S. military attack on Cuba. We need everybody to take to the streets to oppose this U.S. government.
“Every victory against imperialism, in Cuba, Iran, Palestine, all over the planet is a victory for all of us!”
