POLITICS-CUBA: Espionage, New Obstacle to Rapprochement with US

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Sep 16 1998 (IPS) - The alleged Cuban espionage ring uncovered in the United States could run the stuttering reconciliation progress onto the hard shoulder.

Analysts on the island say the claims presented by the US Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) could have consequences similar to those of the 1996 ‘airplane crisis.’

“The facts are totally different, but the conditions in which they took place are just too similar,” a professor from Havana University who asked to remain anonymous told IPS.

On February 24, 1996, aircraft controlled by the Fidel Castro administration shot down two civilian vessels owned by the Cuban exile organisation ‘Brothers to the Rescue,’ which made frequent leafletting forays into Cuban air space to air drop propaganda.

This Monday, a federal court in the State of Florida accused two women and eight men – all Cubans resident in the United States, of transmitting information on US military installations and Anti-Castro groups to Cuba.

According to the report, their main concerns included the US Southern Command, the activities of ‘Brothers to the Rescue’ and two more exile groups: ‘the Democracy Movement’ and ‘the National Cuban-American Foundation.’

When it took place, the ‘airplane crisis’ re-froze the tentative thaw between Havana and Washington which started with the signing of bilateral migration agreements in September 1994 and May 1995.

In late 1995, President Bill Clinton brought in a programme establishing increased contact between academics and experts in the two countries as a way of a campaign to strengthen Cuban civil society and the movement toward democracy.

This exchange included visits to the island from delegations of retired military personnel, businesspeople and members of congress, and was so successful that there was widespread talk of an approaching end to the blockade in early 1996.

But the situation turned tail with the ‘airplane crisis.’ Clinton approved the Helms-Burton law, reinforcing economic sanctions, and suspended flights between the two countries and the sending of remittances.

Two years later, Havana and Washington are once again on the road to rapprochement, partly due to the call made by Pope John Paul II to ease up on Cuba during his visit here in January this year.

Although some serious restrictions are still in place, Clinton approved the reestablishment of direct flights, sending of remittances and the possiblity of licensed exports of medicines and medical equipment to the island.

Academics from both sides now meet to sketch out possible post- blockade scenarios, Cuban musicians are triumphing in the United States, an exile theatre group and a US ballet company announced their wish to perform in Havana and US scientists are trying to import a Cuban vaccine.

In the US press and academic media, the validity of the blockade as a weapon to undermine the socialist regime is coming increasingly under fire, forty years on.

And in April, a report from the Defence Intelligence Agency, a Pentagon dependency, concluded “Cuba does not form a significant military threat to the United States or other countries of the region.”

However, this document did mention the danger of mass emigration from the island, the possible development of biological weaponse and the use of the island as an operations base for intelligence activities against the United States.

Even so, the report destroyed all justification of the “Pro- Castro threat” seriously weakening one of the mainstay arguments supporting continuation of the embargo slapped on the island by Washington in 1962.

The FBI dismantling of the spy ring, which US investigations claim was made up of Cuban intelligence service agents, contradicts the Pentagon conclusions and feeds the thesis that Cuba still forms a threat.

One of the firmest defenders of the hardline policy against the island, Republican Congressman Lincoln Diaz-Balart, says this arrest “shows the true nature of the terrorist state of Havana.”

Meanwhile, a Catholic priest in Havana says “every time the ground is prepared for improved relations between Cuban and the United States, something happens to send everything back to square one.”

The Cuban suspects face charges of “conspiracy and fraud against the government,” violation of a law demanding the registration of “agents from a foreign country” and “the sending of information related to defence affairs to a foreign government.”

While the scandal has been overlooked by the Cuban press, news has been passed on by the few people with access to the Internet and those who listen to US radio emissions from Miami.

As is usual in these cases, now everyone is waiting for an editorial in an official Communist Party newspaper or comments from Castro himself, who only days ago admitted “the United States won the Cold War” to the CNN cable news channel.

“I neither confirm nor deny, I am simply listening in order to give my opinion later. One warning though, this type of campaign, manoeuvre, orchestration, or wild claim, is the specialty of the North American press,” says Cuba’s Foreign Minister Roberto Robaina.

“When the time comes, Cuba will say what it has to say. This is not the first time accusations have been made. Talking of information, there have been hundreds accused by them of being spys,” he stated.

This would be the first time the US Authorities dismember a network of Cuban spies within their territory, although Havana has shown evidence of intelligence activities there in the past.

In July 1987, the Castro Government revealed it had maintained 24 Cuban couter-espionage infiltrators within the US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), one of them for more than 20 years.

Cuba states its espionage activities are aimed toward detecting possible attacks on its high-ranking government officials, the sabotage of economic enclaves and any type of hostile action organised by anti-Castro groups in exile.