CubaBrief: Munich at 54 – Will Cuba apologize for training Palestinian terrorists?

Havana’s promotion of terrorism stretches back over six and a half decades, and has an international reach with historic impacts such as the 1972 Munich massacre. It changed the security around Olympics forever, and the events of that day are still remembered annually.

One Day in September is a 1999 Oscar-winning documentary directed by Kevin Macdonald about the Black September terrorist attack at the 1972 Munich Olympics. It chronicles how Palestinian militants took 11 Israeli athletes hostage, the botched rescue attempt, and the tragic outcome, featuring archival footage, survivor interviews, and rare testimony from one of the attackers. It is now available online.

On September 5, 1972 the Black September faction of the Palestine Liberation Organization carried out a massacre of Israeli athletes taken hostage by them when negotiations to exchange them for the release of Palestinian and German terrorists held in Israel and Germany.

The terrorists scaled a fence into the Olympic Village and forced their way into the Israeli team’s apartments at the Olympic Village located at Connollystraße 31.

Connollystrasse housing where Palestinian terrorists shot dead 2 Israelis on Sept. 5, 1972 and held hostages.

Eleven Israeli hostages, three terrorists, and one police officer were killed; three terrorists were arrested. The Notes from the Cuban Exile sub-stack has a chronology of what took place, followed by more on Havana’s training Palestinian terrorists.

The eleven Israelis killed were: Moshe Weinberg, Josef Romano, David Berger, Ze’ev Friedman, Yossef Gutfreund, Eliezer Halfin, Amitzur Shapira, Kehat Shorr, Mark Slavin, André Spitzer, Yakov Springer, and the police officer killed was Anton Fliegerbauer.

Fifty years later in 2022, Germany formally apologized for failing to protect the Israeli athletes, but it was not Germany who trained and assisted the terrorists who carried out the attack.