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

Michael Isikoff
Mar 13, 2025

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.)

More:
https://www.plenglish.com/news/2023/09/26/cuba-urges-to-consider-attack-on-embassy-as-terrorism/