Spanish ship headed for Cuba sunk by CIA

CARIBBEAN SEA (Central America) – The Sierra Aránzazu, a Spanish merchant ship belonging to the Marítima del Norte company and carrying foodstuffs, cloths and a large variety of work tools, was attacked on September 13, 1964, by two launches commanded by members of the Movimiento de Recuperación Revolucionaria [MRR], one of many anti- Castro groups financed by the CIA during the Cold War, and only one year after a rigorous trade embargo was started against the island. For ten minutes that night, the Sierra Aránzazu was shelled incessantly by machine guns and small cannons fired from the launches, destroying the ship’s bridge and chimney and causing a fire that spread quickly throughout.

Several of the ship’s twenty crewmen were killed right then or died later on aboard one of the two lifeboats, including her captain and second and third officers.

Files closed

The sons of several of the men who perished in the attack have for years trying to  find out in detail what happened that night and who was responsible, given the peaceful nature of the expedition. But they kept coming up against unavailable information, particularly from the CIA, as well as from the files on the attack by the Franco regime (together with Masons and homosexuals, Communists were Franco’s greatest fears).

Tomás Vaquero, whose father was one of the victims, managed to gain access to declassified documents from the American intelligence agency. Among many other things, he discovered that the Spanish government at the time – under Franco, of course – claimed that the Sierra Aránzazu had been confused with the ship Sierra Maestra, the Castro regime’s flagship, and five times larger than the Sierra Aránzazu. “They also reported that it was evening, which added to the confusion in the similarity of the ships’ names, he says. In any case, the Sierra Maestra had crossed the Panama Canal a week earlier, headed for China – “which the Americans knew perfectly well,” he adds.

CIA controlled the radio

More significantly, Vaquero found that the communication system among the launches had been supplied by the CIA – and it had control of it.

Hurricane Ethel was approaching, too, forcing the Sierra Aránzazu to change course and enter Cuba from South of the Bahamas. Plus, an American coastguard plane had flown very low over her several times just a few hours before the attack, according to material gathered by merchant seaman and investigator of marine tragedies, Manuel Rodríguez Aguilar.

A salient point that caught the investigators when they checked the pertinent folders (strangely, the same folder that contains documents regarding the assassination of President Kennedy), was the amount of premeditation, of preparation, for the attack.

One cable received from a CIA informant operating under the ‘code name’ Withheld (no doubt an error in transcription as the real name was almost certainly withheld) mentions a meeting in Paris with the person who ‘arranged’ the attack on the Spanish merchantman, to pay the radio operator ‘who furnished the lunches with the [Spanish ship’s] exact location’. It adds that the ‘radio man told the Spanish police the whole story’.

The Compañía Marítima del Norte was the only Spanish shipping company that continued to transport foodstuffs and other basic items to the island for a long time during the embargo (which still continues 50 years later), despite opposition from the Franco regime and, naturally, the USA.