"Happy Thanksgiving!" from Fidel

By Humberto FontovaFrontPageMagazine.com Thursday, November 27, 2008 Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving, is traditionally the busiest shopping day of the year. Macy’s, for instance, usually serves a minimum of 50,000 shoppers on that one day. But as this week’s revelations of a terrorism plot targeting New York City’s subway system remind us, the holiday bustle is also an opportunity for those seeking to inflict mass casualties. That thought may well have been on the mind of Fidel Castro, when he planned a colossal terrorist attack on Manhattan on the Friday after Thanksgiving in 1962. On November 17, 1962, J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI cracked a terrorist plot (though the term "terrorist" was not used at the time) by Cuban agents who were using their cover as members of the Cuban mission to the United Nations to target Macy's, Gimbel's, Bloomindales and Manhattan's Grand Central Station with a dozen bombs and 1,102 pounds of trinitrotoluene (TNT). This massive conflagration was set to go off the following week, the day after Thanksgiving. To put the plot in perspective, consider that for the March 2004 Madrid subway blasts, in which almost 2,000 people were killed and maimed, the terrorists used a grand total of 220 pounds of TNT. Fidel Castro's agents planned to set off five times that explosive power in the world’s three biggest department stores, all packed to suffocation and pulsing with holiday cheer on the year's biggest shopping day. Thousands of New Yorkers, including women and children, were to be incinerated on Castro’s orders. This was not Castro’s first attempt to annihilate the city. He had planned the attack on Manhattan just weeks after Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had foiled his plans for an even bigger one during the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. But for Khrushchev’s prudence, Castro might have pulled it off. “If the missiles had remained,” Fidel’s sidekick Che Guevara confided to the London Daily Worker in November 1962, regarding the Cuban missile crisis, “we would have used them against the very heart of the U.S., including New York.” Khrushchev himself admitted that Fidel and Che's genocidal scheming was a bigger factor in his decision to withdraw the missiles from Cuba than President John F. Kennedy's bluster and his threatened “blockade.” Nice little article, click on the title for the rest.