Menu

03/04/13 - Cuba-L Document (Albuquerque) - "PUBLICATION RESTRICTED 150 YEARS," The French Secret File of the CIA attack on La Coubre

JEAN-GUY ALLARD

. THE complete file of the investigation of the French CGT shipping company
into the sabotage of the La Coubre vessel, responsibility for which is
attributed to the CIA, is being held in the strongbox of a French maritime
foundation, with a 150-year restriction on its release set by the legal
counsel of the vessel's last owners.

The file, whose existence was unknown until recently, lay for close to 50
years in the enormous collection of records belonging to the Compagnie
Générale Transatlantique (CGT), also known as French Line, the owner of La
Coubre when the tragedy struck in Havana on March 4, 1960.

In 1973, the CGT joined the Compagnie Générale Maritime, a state enterprise
which was later privatized and handed over to a consortium currently known
as CMA CGM. In 1995, the legal ownership and management of CGT's archives
was entrusted to a foundation whose 16-member executive included two CMA
CGM representatives.

With the aim of conserving French maritime resources, this foundation, the
Association French Lines, manages a historical research service for a
number of shipping enterprises, in its headquarters located on Lucien
Corbeaux Street in the port city of Le Havre.

Of the 30,000-plus files in the foundation's archives, 79 contain
references to La Coubre. One, numbered 22091, placed in the collection in
1997, has the following description: "La Coubre. Explosion in Havana,
repairs, photographs, press articles, list of the missing persons, report
to the executive committee, insurance terms, correspondence."

The content of this file would seem to be of greatest interest, given its
information on details of the act of terrorism in Havana that have never
been made public. It came from the Legal Office of the defunct CGT and is
marked "Classified," with the surprising prohibition "PUBLICATION
RESTRICTED 150 YEARS."

The existence of such a dossier of information about La Coubre crime
certainly constitutes one more mysterious element in the web of enigmas
surrounding the most significant act of terrorism of the century in the
Americas.

Dating back 51 years, on March 4, 1960, the sabotage of La Coubre to 100
deaths, among them six French members of the ship's crew, more than 200
injured and many victims whose bodies were never found. The material damage
was estimated then at approximately $17 million.

On many occasions, Cuba has charged the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)
with responsibility for the explosion aboard La Coubre in the port of
Havana.

In the hours following the explosion, the Cuban leader Fidel Castro
presided over a historic event in Plaza de la Revolución, in which he
stated his conviction that the hand of the CIA, which had already shown
itself highly aggressive toward Cuba, was behind the crime.

Named April 16, 1948 by the Canadian Vickers Ltd of Montreal, Canada
shipyard, from October 11, 1951, La Coubre had been navigating between
France, the French West Indies, Central America and the United States.

On August 22, 1960, La Coubre was towed from the port of by the Dutch ship
Ooostzee to Rouen, France, where Chantiers de Normandie rebuilt the
destroyed section. The ship went back into service April 1, 1961. La Coubre
was successively renamed Barbara, Notios Hellas, and Agia Marina before
finally being sold for scrap at the end of 1979 to a Spanish enterprise in
Gandia (Valencia), which demolished it.

More than 50 years later, the U.S. government is still refusing to turn
over documents related to La Coubre from its secret archives.

"It is not possible to have ignored circumstances in which a number of U.S.
nationals were involved," affirms Dr. José Luis Méndez Méndez, an eminent
historian of terrorism against Cuba, citing a long list of suspicious
elements linking the United States to the events.

"This crime had to have been officially investigated," he stated.

The 22 French survivors of La Coubre were later repatriated by ship. Six
French seamen lost their lives in the criminal explosion. First Lieutenant
François Artola, pilot Jean Buron and sailors Lucien Aloi, André Picard,
Jean Gendron and Alain Moura died, victims of this cynical act of
aggression. .

Source: Granma International, March 7, 2011