Unsolved Mystery: The Bombing of Cuba’s Embassy in Washington, DC

Despite video and other evidence, Secret Service investigators have yet to solve the case amid worries of Trump launching covert action against Cuba

Shortly after 8 p.m. on the evening of Sept. 24, 2023, a young man in dark clothing hurled two Molotov cocktails over the guardrail fence in front of the Cuban Embassy in Washington D.C. and then promptly fled the scene.

Cuba’s president, Miguel Diaz-Canel, immediately branded the incident a “terrorist attack.”  President Biden’s national security advisor, Jake Sullivan, condemned it and promised a “timely investigation.” But nearly 18 months later, an investigation by the Secret Service— which is responsible for protecting foreign embassies on American soil— appears to have gone nowhere. No arrests have been made and no suspects identified.

Even more frustrating, from the Cuban perspective: Barely a week after the Molotov cocktail incident, federal prosecutors released from prison Alexander Alazo, a Cuban-American who had been convicted and sentenced for opening fire on the same Cuban Embassy, shooting 32 bullets at the building with an assault-type rifle in the early morning hours of April 30, 2020.  (Alazo had pleaded not guilty to the armed assault charges for reasons of insanity and prosecutors concluded, after four and a half years in prison, he was no longer a threat to public safety.) 

Violent attacks against foreign embassies and diplomats have a long and ugly history in Washington, D.C., most notoriously in 1976, when a car bomb on Washington’s Embassy Row— planted by an agent of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet with the help of anti-Castro terrorists—killed former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier and an associate, Ronnie Karpen Moffitt.

The more recent attacks on the Cuban Embassy—a stately, century-old building on the edge of Washington’s trendy Adams Morgan neighborhood—are not nearly so horrific. There were relatively few embassy personnel in the building when they took place and nobody was injured, although the damage from Alazo’s shooting spree was described in court papers as serious and extensive.  (The damage from the Molotov cocktail incident was relatively minor to the front wall of the Embassy, Cuban officials tell me.) 

Still, the two incidents harken back to a time more than half a century ago when terrorism by Cuban exile groups based in the U.S. was rampant. And the lack of progress and the apparently less than aggressive U.S. government investigation has become one more irritant in the fraught U.S.-Cuba relationship.  Since President Trump was sworn in and Marco Rubio was confirmed as Secretary of State, relations have taken a dramatic turn for the worse, raising the inevitable questions of whether a revival of covert operations, even including regime change, might be in the cards.

Fruitless Dialogue

Lianys Torres Rivera, Cuba’s ambassador, told me in a recent interview that Cuban officials held three meetings with Secret Service agents in the aftermath of the 2023 attack in which they turned over the debris from the Molotov cocktails and provided footage from the embassy’s video cameras. It showed a shadowy suspect had cased the building earlier in the evening and then returned an hour later to ignite and hurl his explosives. 

In November, 2023, Secret Service officials reported to the Cubans they had recovered DNA samples and fingerprints of a possible perpetrator, she said. The two sides met again the following April.  

But since then, radio silence. The Cubans haven’t heard anything from the Secret Service for nearly a year. “We haven’t had any relevant information,” Ambassador Torres said. Her immediate boss, Johana Tablada, the deputy director of U.S. affairs for the Cuban Foreign Ministry, was even more blunt. “The message is, against Cuba, you can do whatever you want,” she recently said on Cuban television. (The Secret Service did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

A Cuban embassy video captured the darkly clothed bombing suspect lurking outsde the fence (right middle)

Events since Tablada made her remarks have only underscored the point. It may seem like eons, but it was barely 10 years ago when President Obama reversed decades of Cold War policies and reopened relations with the Communist regime, followed by  a sensational visit to the island in 2016 when he attended a baseball game with Raul Castro, then Cuba’s president.  But Trump, in his first term — with a big boost from Rubio, then chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee— slammed the door shut, largely depopulating the reopened U.S. Embassy, purportedly because of concerns about so-called Havana Syndrome microwave attacks that were endangering the health of U.S. diplomats and spies. (Most U.S. intelligence agencies, including the CIA, have since concluded that it was “very unlikely” the health issues of U.S. government employees were caused by attacks by a foreign adversary and no evidence has pointed to Cuban complicity.) 

Biden largely maintained Trump’s policies, including the longstanding U.S. embargo, imposed on the island in the 1960s,  although in his final weeks Biden took some modest steps, removing Cuba from the State Department list of state sponsors of terrorism. 

It didn’t last long. Trump, on his first day in office in January, restored Cuba to the terrorism list. Then Rubio was sworn in and promptly issued  new decisions “restoring a tough U.S. Cuba policy” which imposed yet more restrictions on the island, including a revived “restricted list” that barred  financial transactions with any companies linked to Cuba’s military or intelligence services. 

For Rubio—whose family left the island during the 1950s, before the 1959 revolution that brought Fidel Castro to power—the country remains an authoritarian Communist stronghold that has cozied up to Russia and China and done nothing to extend political and economic freedoms to its long suffering people. “The State Department promotes accountability for the Cuban regime for oppressing its people and rejects Cuba’s malign interference across the Americas and throughout the world,” he said in his statement on the new policy. 

Violence Afoot?      

But for the Cubans, the moves are a harsh and crippling throwback to another era  with one ultimate purpose: regime change. “The final goal of returning us back to the [terror] list and other measures  will be to  punish Cuba economically” for the purpose of “creating a social irritation and thus the destabilization of Cuba,” Ambassador Torres Rivera told SpyTalk. 

She isn’t the only one. 

“The regime-changers in power smell blood given Cuba’s dire economic situation,” said Peter Kornbluh, the Cuba analyst for the National Security Archive, a non-profit research organization that promotes transparency in U.S. national security policy.  “They will attempt to bring down the hammer on Cuba.” 

And what might that mean in practice? Kornbluh, a scholar of U.S.-Cuba relations who co-authored the book Back Channel to Cuba, foresees a return to covert operations by U.S. intelligence agencies to destabilize the island and finally achieve Rubio’s ultimate policy goal—the downfall of the regime. 

While such ops—including multiple assassination attempts aimed at Fidel Castro—were apparently phased out after the 1960’s, there is some evidence they were back on the table during Trump’s first term.  As part of an operation to take down Venezuela’s leftist president Nicolas Maduro, according to one report, the White House pushed the CIA to immobilize tankers transporting oil from Venezuela to Cuba. 

The CIA balked. But they may not this time if an emboldened Trump gives the order, says Kornbluh.

“It’s a return to 60 years of failed policies,” he said.