CUBA-U.S.: Havana Seeks General Assembly Meeting on Shootdown

By Farhan Haq Reprint | | Print |

UNITED NATIONS, Feb 28 1996 (IPS) - Cuba is prepared to explain the shooting down of two U.S. planes before the U.N. General Assembly, Cuban Foreign Minister Roberto Robaina announced here Tuesday.

The foreign minister refused to meet with the Security Council since that body had chosen to adopt a statement deploring the shootdown before his arrival.

“They knew I was arriving today, but by all means, they had to finish by last night,” Robaina said. He contended that he had obtained a visa to enter the United States from Denmark only after the 15-member Security Council decided by consensus to deplore the shootdown early Tuesday morning.

“It is very hard for me to understand what ‘security’ is offered by the Council” when it is influenced by one key member — the United States, Robaina said. Instead, Havana will seek to explain why it shot down the civilian Cessna planes at a special General Assembly session of all 185 U.N. members.

Robaina said he had asked General Assembly President Diogo Freitas do Amaral “to reconvene the General Assembly for Cuba to be able to explain to the United Nations in general, and to the world in general” what happened during the shooting of the planes Saturday.

Robaina also met with representatives of the Non-Aligned Movement and Latin American U.N. member-states to press Havana’s case. He accused the group that sent the planes — the Miami-based Cuban exile group, ‘Brothers to the Rescue’ — of involvement in attempts to destabilise Cuba and of previous violations of Cuba’s territorial sovereignty.

The United States has conceded some of the Cuban accusations, admitting that Brothers to the Rescue has violated Cuban airspace in the past. But it continued to press the point that Havana committed a crime in murdering people aboard a civilian plane and must face the consequences.

“The United States is not condoning illegal actions,” U.S. Ambassador Madeleine Albright said of Brothers to the Rescue’s incursions into Cuba. “We are looking at how these people are operating,” she said, noting the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is monitoring the group.

But she added that the Cuban MiG fighter planes which shot down the two Cessnas should have used legal means to turn away the planes once they entered Cuba’s air defence zone, south of the 24th parallel.

A U.S-prepared transcript of radio transmissions between Havana’s air traffic controllers and the MiGs purportedly shows the pilots knew in advance that one of the planes shot was a “white and blue small aircraft, at a low altitude” — in other words, a clearly-marked civilian rather than military plane.

The U.S. transcript, which U.S. officials would not explain how they acquired but claim is accurate, also recounts that the MiG pilots asked for authorisation to destroy the Cessnas in vulgar terms.

“I was struck by the joy of these pilots in committing cold- blooded murder,” Albright said.

She said she was pleased by the Council’s non-binding statement, which deplored the act and called for an investigation by the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO). But the statement, which met with resistance from China and Russia, deleted tough language the U.S. wanted, and does not indicate any penalties for Cuba.

Cuban spokesman Edgardo Valdes-Lopez told IPS that the issue, however, was not the relative language of the statement, but that it was passed before Robaina had a chance to speak.

“They were in a rush to pass judgment before they could hear both sides,” he said of the Council. As a result, he argued, Havana would object to what it saw as the biased proceedings of the Council under the guidance of this month’s president, and longtime Cuban foe, the United States.

Washington and Havana also used the United Nations as a sounding board as they traded accusations over other aspects of the affair.

Cuba, citing a purported defector from Brothers to the Rescue, contended that U.S. intelligence agencies helped train the group, whose founder, Jose Basulto, is a veteran of the failed 1961 ‘Bay of Pigs’ invasion of Cuba.

But a U.S. spokesman, speaking on condition of anonymity, said of Brothers to the Rescue, “This organisation has no affiliation with the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency).”

For many diplomats here, the saddest thing about the war of words is that the Saturday shootdown and U.S. response have ended an apparent warming of U.S.-Cuban relations. The two nations signed an accord regulating migration between them in 1994, and had expanded news and phone links.

But on Monday, with a U.S. election looming, President Bill Clinton announced tough sanctions against Cuba, which has faced a U.S. embargo since 1961. He cut off charter flights between the two countries and restricted the movements of Cuban diplomats to a 25-mile radius around New York.

“We watched the development (of U.S.-Cuban ties) everday become softer,” Venezuelan Foreign Minister Miguel Angel Borelli Rivas said Tuesday. But the shootdown, he said, damaged that softening.

“We are a good neighbour of both parts, and we really deplore this interruption (in the thaw),” Borelli added.