RIGHTS-CUBA: Lawsuit Seeks Damages for 40 Years of US Hostility

By Patricia Grogg Reprint | | Print |

Patricia Grogg

HAVANA, Jun 2 1999 (IPS) - Cuba’s leading social organisations are demanding 181.1 billion dollars in reparations from the United States for the victims of nearly 40 years of “hostile acts.”

The claimants, who filed the lawsuit before a court in Havana this week, are demanding that Washington pay damages for the deaths of 3,478 Cuban citizens and the disabilities of 2,099, who they described as “victims of the aggressive (U.S.) policy” toward Cuba.

“All the hostile and aggressive actions carried out by the United States against Cuba, from the very triumph of the revolution (in 1959) up to the present, have caused enormous material and human losses,” stated the claimants in the bulky file of documents handed over to the court.

The list of deaths included people killed in the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion organised by the United States and Cubans opposed to the government of Fidel Castro, or deaths caused by Dengue fever, allegedly introduced into Cuba by the United States.

The social organisations that brought the suit were Cuba’s central trade union, the National Association of Small Farmers, Federation of Cuban Women, Federation of University Students, Federation of Secondary School Students, Jose Marti Pioneers Organisation, Committees for Defence of the Revolution and Association of Combatants of the Cuban Revolution.

All of the groups – known locally as non-governmental or social organisations – support the Cuban government.

The details of the initiative were published in a special supplement of Tuesday’s edition of ‘Granma’. The newspaper of the governing Communist Party wrote that the Havana court had notified the party being sued.

The president of the provincial court, Jose Pavon, told Cuban TV that the U.S. government had 20 days to respond to the charges. But he added that the legal proceedings would continue even if no response was forthcoming.

Diplomatic sources consulted by IPS said that although international law stipulated that states could be held accountable in such cases, the lawsuit could end up being limited to “a symbolic sentence.”

Back in March, a judge in the U.S. state of Florida brought telephone communications between the two countries to the verge of collapse after ordering the suspension of payments for telecoms services to Cuba.

U.S. magistrate Lawrence King was acting on behalf of the families of the pilots killed when the Cuban air force shot down two small planes flown by the Cuban exile group Brothers to the Rescue on Feb 24, 1996. The judge demanded that the Cuban government pay the pilots’ families 187,627,911 dollars in reparations.

Cuban authorities argued that the shootdown of the airplanes was “provoked by innumerable violations” of Cuba’s air space.

The lawsuit brought this week in Cuba refers to the “immense costs in economic and human resources” that Cuba has had to pay over the past four decades to prepare for and ward off “the danger of a direct armed attack by the United States.”

The U.S. “aggressions” denounced in the suit include the aborted 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion, U.S. support for armed anti- government groups in the 1960s, the supposed introduction of epidemics and plagues, and innumerable attempts on President Castro’s life.

The document states that as part of its political strategy, Washington has done its utmost to encourage Cubans to defect to the United States, not only as “an instrument of ideological struggle,” but also to fuel unrest and social instability.

The suit against the United States coincided this week with a new round of talks in New York on migration, the only issue that has brought Havana and Washington to the negotiating table over the past 40 years.

In New York, U.S. and Cuban officials are assessing compliance with the bilateral accords on migration signed in September 1994 and May 1995 to regulate the flow of Cuban emigrants toward the United States.