(Editor’s note: One of the key planners of the Cubana Air bombing of 1976, Luis Posada Carriles, died in Miami, Florida yesterday at the age of 90. The crash killed 73 persons, including 11 Guyanese and Carriles and others escaped justice. Today we reprint a column by Indranie Deolall on the bombing and its victims.)
I raced home from school late one hot afternoon to find my aged mother strangely in tears, sadly listening to our faded transistor radio permanently perched on the matching bright blue formica dining table that shimmered with flecks of gold and silver, like an early, starry night sky. As darkness fell and details trickled in, I desperately tried to visualise the deadly crash of Cubana Flight 455.
But it took the sombre black and white newspaper photographs, especially of Sabrina Harripaul, like me, nine years old and wearing two long black plaits, to forever stamp the atrocity of the Caribbean’s first major terror attack into my growing consciousness.
