A 42 year old man, currently a Texas resident, has been apprehended and charged with firing an AK rifle at the Cuban Embassy in Washington D.C.
Alexander Alazo is said to have fired about 30 rounds, a magazine, at the embassy at around 2am. The incident is being investigated as a hate crime, although it is unknown what type of hate crime. This may more accurately be terrorism by technicality if Alazo’s attack was directed at the Cuban government and was not racially motivated. The fact that the target was an embassy speaks to this being terrorism, not a hate crime.
Should it be punished? Yes. But we murky the waters with enough already to let this incident slip by mislabeled, if it is. Again, I say this looks politically motivated and if Alazo has any familial tie to Cuba it may well be. He also just might hate communists or the Castros and got it in his head to go do something stupid about it. He also might genuinely be a racist, but attacking an embassy is a strange manifestation of that when Caribbean Islanders and Hispanics can be found much closer to Texas than the Cuban Embassy in D.C. Or Florida, where he lived too.
This just smells like terrorism to me, an embassy is a representation of a foreign government. Poorly planned lone wolf terrorism, the equivalent of gangster style drive by on a house where you aren’t even sure who is home or what the objective of it really is so you’re just gonna dump the magazine at the place and drive on having delivered your ‘message’ of whatever it was.
Maybe Alazo will be forthcoming with a motive. If this was political that is more likely since the attack is then a statement of protest in some way.
