POLITICS-CUBA: Worried about Drugs

By Patricia Grogg Reprint | | Print |

Patricia Grogg

HAVANA, Oct 2 1998 (IPS) - Cuba’s fight against drug trafficking has become a national security issue given the island’s closeness to the United States, the world’s largest market for drugs.

Experts say, however, that Havana’s anti-drug policy should be seen in a much broader context than that of the strained relations between Cuba and Washington.

“When Cuba says drugs are an epidemic, unlike the United States it is not thinking about the problem from a political and repressive point of view, but rather as one of many problems the world is facing,” says Cuban academic Luis Suarez. “In addition to other factors, this is a national security problem for the country,” he adds.

The fulfilment of international anti-drug agreements is of “strategic importance” for Cuba, says Suarez, executive secretary of the Coordinating Center for the Development of Socio- Juridical Research, which is linked to the Justice Ministry.

On Jul. 13, 1989, the Cuban government applied the death penalty – by firing squad – to General Arnaldo Ochoa and three other high-ranking officials of the Army and the Ministry of Home Affairs who had been found guilty of involvement in drug trafficking and other crimes.

The four men endangered “not only the reputation, but the security of our country as well”, Granma, the official newspaper of the Communist Party, said at the time.

Beyond the dramatic internal repercussions that the case had – especially since Ochoa had been a hero of the Cuban revolution – Havana was convinced that Washington was cooking up something very serious against the island. “The enemy (the U.S.) was offered on a silver platter the opportunity to gather evidence to discredit Cuba,” President Fidel Castro said at the time.

Those fears were fuelled by the invasion of Panama in December 1989 and the arrest and transfer to the United States of then president Gen. Manuel Antonio Noriega, who was tried and sentenced to 40 years in jail on charges of drug trafficking.

Suarez’s theory is that the U.S. government wanted to catch Ochoa or one of his accomplices in the act, because it had evidence that it did not share with Cuba. “They were trying to pin the same accusations on Cuba that they did on Panama,” Suarez speculates.

Geographically, the Cuban archipelago is located in a key area for the illicit traffic in drugs between South America and the United States. “The big problem that has emerged in the past several years is that Cuba could serve as a springboard for illegal drug trafficking,” says Ariel Francais, resident coordinator of the United Nations system in Havana.

There are still many airplanes “that arrive illegally and drop their cargo of drugs into the ocean, where they are picked up by speedboats coming mainly from Florida,” the U.S. peninsula located just north of Cuba, explains Francais.

“With the growth of tourism, drug traffickers have now begun to use air transport to send drugs to Europe,” he added. “These are people who come into Cuba posing as tourists, meet other people, and then leave the country with the drugs.”

UN sources and Cuban experts agree that drugs are not a social problem in Cuba. There is strong political will here to prevent drug abuse and the use of the island as a transit point, they say. This will is reflected in the significant increase in the number of drug traffickers arrested and drugs confiscated, both at Cuban airports and in the island’s territorial waters.

Between 1994 and the first semester of 1998, the Cuban authorities captured more than 31 tonnes of drugs, mostly marijuana and cocaine, almost all of it U.S.-bound. Officials of the National Anti-Drug Division of the National Revolutionary Police (PNR) said 188 foreigners were arrested during the same period while trying to use Cuba as a transit point.

“We can say that more than 90 percent of the drugs that land on our coasts is confiscated and burnt by the authorities,” Justice Minister Roberto Diaz Sotolongo told a recent meeting at the United Nations.

According to Francais, the fight against drug trafficking is an area in which there has always been cooperation between Cuba and the United States, “in terms of intelligence and exchange of information”.

Since 1990, Cuba has signed bilateral conventions with 18 countries and maintained close collaboration with Britain to fight drug trafficking. It is also negotiating 25 more anti-drug accords. However, there are no such agreements between Havana and Washington.

Cuba has signed the three main international anti-drug conventions now in force: one on controlled substances (1961), one on psychotropic substances (1971), and the 1988 Vienna Convention.

According to UN estimates, drug trafficking grosses 400 billion dollars a year, representing eight percent of global trade.

In 1994, it made more than the combined earnings from the international trade in iron, steel and automobiles, and more or less equalled earnings from the global trade in textiles, according to the UN.