Flags Fly in Cuba against Terrorism
One hundred black flags with a white star in the middle are flying in the wind in front of the US Interest Section in Havana, in denunciation of terrorism against Cuba and the thousands of victims it has caused.

The flags were raised Monday evening at a solemn ceremony which was presided over by President Fidel Castro at the Jose Marti Anti-imperialist Tribune and attended by relatives of terrorism victims, representatives of social and religious organizations and government and party officials.

After the ceremony, a group of the relatives began a 24 hour vigil to recall the death of 3,478 Cubans who have been victims of continued terrorist policy from successive US administrations against the revolutionary process on this Island.

They were all wearing black T-shirts as a sign of mourning and carried the photos of their lost family members.

Among them were the closest relatives of those who fell back in the 1961 Bay of Pig invasion and others who were killed in the mid-air bombing of a Cubana Air plane off the coast of Barbados, in which the entire national youth fencing team perished.

Some of the victim´s relatives took the floor to denounce the hypocrisy of the Bush administration in its advocated war against terrorism, while at the same time sheltering confessed criminals.

"The world is witnessing the clearest conduct of double standard of a Goverment that on one side frenziedly condemns terrorism and, on the other, incarcerates five Cubans precisely for fighting that scourge, while protecting the Western Hemisphere´s worst terrorist," Carlos Alberto Cremata told the audience.

Cremata, president of the Committee for Victims of the Crime of Barbados, recalled that this year Cubans will be remembering the 30th anniversary of that abhorrent action, masterminded by Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch.

For her part, the mother of one of the five Cubans unjustly jailed in the US, Irma Sehweret, charged Bush and US security services for protecting terrorists in South Florida.

Gerardo Hernández, Antonio Guerrero, Fernando González, Ramón Labañino and René González, were arrested in Miami in 1998 and sentenced to harsh prison terms of 15 years and double life imprisonment in a politically biased trial in that city.

The Cuban Five, as they are known in international campaigns for their release, had penetrated organizations of extreme groups of Cuban-American that organize and launch terrorist actions against the Island.