CUBA: Exile Organisations Plan Further Provocative Action

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Jul 12 1996 (IPS) - Danger could return to the skies and seas of Cuba this Saturday, when a fleet of Cuban exiles will sail to the island’s territorial limits to perform a memorial service for 41 drowned exiles.

Ramon Saul Sanchez, leader of the Cuban exiles Democratic Movement, closed the announcement threatening a possible confrontation, saying “the members of the flotilla will decide themselves whether or not to enter the 12 mile exclusion zone which Cuba recognises as Cuba.”

President of Cuban parliament, Ricardo Alarcon, classified the statment as “announced provocation” calling on the International Civil Aviation Organisation to impede the planned incursion.

The Democratic Movement, an organisation based in the US city of Miami announced on Jun 14 they would be carrying out a service in homage to the 41 Cubans who died on a tug which sank in the bay of Havana two years ago Saturday.

The people on board had been attempting to emigrate illegally to the United States when other tugs intervened to prevent them doing so.

At the time, the Cuban authorities described the incident as “an accident” and “negligence due to the poor state of repair of the tug,” while ultra-right expatriates in Miami preferred the term “mass murder.”

Several Miami based exile organisations will participate in the homage to the drowned just off the Cuban coast.

The National Cuban-American Foundation (FNCA), the Democratic Movement and the Brothers to the Rescue are the main agitators in a campaign which called for civil disobedience against the Fidel Castro regime in Cuba last year.

The plans have gone ahead against the will of Havana, and, taking the only action left open to it, the nation has invited the international press to view the action from the deck of a naval warship in order to give a clear report of events.

A similar incursion of Cuban-Americans provoked the shooting down of two civilian aircraft owned by Brothers to the Rescue on Feb 24, an event which caused great conflict between Cuba and the United States.

This “airplane crisis,” which is still awaiting a verdict from the United Nations Security Council, led to US President Bill Clinton signing the Helms-Burton bill, a proposal which will sanction other nations or companies carrying out business with the nation.

Relations between Washington and Havana took “another step backwards” this month, when the White House totally denied that a US government plane had violated Cuban airspace on June 25.

In a letter sent to the UN Security Council, the Cuban government said this is not the first time this had happened, adding that the incident had forced a commercial US plane and a Salvadoran transport vessel to deviate from their flightpaths.

The violations of Cuban airspace, which until now have only included US registered civilian units, would take on a new perspective if official aircraft were also found to be doing the same.

To complicate an already difficult situation even further, a man who hijacked a Cuban plane could be offered political asylum in the United States in violation of the migration agreements signed by the two countries.

According to official sources, a passenger, identified as Lieutenant Colonel Jose Fernandez Pupo in the United States, forced a plane from the National Air Services Company to land in the Guantanamo naval base, a US enclave on the island.

The migration agreement signed in Sept 1994 stipulated the adoption of measures to impede the use of violence, and the forced divertion of planes and seagoing vessels by Cubans interested in reaching US soil.

According to a similar agreement, dating from May 1995, prior to the repatriation of all the Cuban boat people, “emigrants who illegally enter the Guantanamo Naval Base will also be returned to Cuba.”

However, a White House representative said Monday that Washington could go ahead with repatriation, decide to process the hijacker in the United States, or even offer him political asylum.

The official Communist Party newspaper ‘Granma,’ labelled the FNCA, the wealthiest and most powerful of the exile groups, as “stirrers” for requesting political asylum for the hijacker.

The group circular claims this organisation is also responsible for many other “provocative airbourne acts against the island.”

The FNCA is seen as the main force behind Brothers to the Rescue and other groups of exiles in official Cuban circles, and its leader Jorge Mass Canosa is thought to be behind the “continual violations of (the island’s) air and maritime space.”