COMMUNICATIONS-CUBA: US Threatened with Suspended Service

By Patricia Grogg Reprint | | Print |

Patricia Grogg

HAVANA, Feb 22 1999 (IPS) - Telephone communication between Cuba and the United States will be practically cut off Thursday, if overdue payments to the island blocked by a US judge are not handed over.

ETECSA a joint Cuban-Italian venture warned it was considering “the need to suspend the telephone service” with the United States if its US counterparts do not pay December’s dues.

An article printed by the Cuban state press Saturday said the deadline issued to the US companies AT&T, MCI, LDDS, IDB and WILTEL is zero hours Thursday February 25.

Only circuits assigned to their compatriots SPRINT and Puerto Rico’s TLDI will remain in action as they have, “kept meeting their obligations,” said the official information.

Payment was temporarily frozen by order of US Federal judge James Lawrence King, who in 1997 granted compensation of 187.6 million dollars to relatives of three of the four pilots shot down by the Cuban air force on February 24, 1996.

Relatives of pilots Armando Alejandre, Carlos Costa and Mario de la Pena are trying to extract these damages from Cuban State funtd frozen under the embargo Washington imposed on Cuba and from the overdue payment for telephone services.

The family of the fourth pilot killed, Pablo Morales, were not include as he did not have US nationality. The vessels downed had been launched by “Brothers to the Rescue,” a group of Cuban exiles.

On Tuesday, King once again postponed a ruling on the issue, “whereby he continued to retain payment,” stated the Cuban press.

ETECSA’s decision to interrupt the service due to US failure to comply is fully backed by the Cuban government.

However, ETESCA clearly stated it really would rather not “suspend telephone communications which are so important for the family and emotional links of people resident in both countries” trapped in a conflict which has already lasted more than 40 years.

Academic studies in the Caribbean country state there are around 1.2 million Cubans settled in the United States, 60 percent of them in southern Florida.

Data unconfirmed in Havana said Cuba has received around 75 million dollars per year from telephone calls from the United States since the lines were reopened in 1992.

The US embargo on the island has also frozen some 145 million dollars belonging to the Cuban State in US banks.

The Fidel Castro administration “deplores this new step in US hostility to Cuba which, in practice, suppresses one of the few exceptions to the complete blockade policy imposed for the last 40 years,” concluded the article.

Cuba this week approved heavy penal legislation to protect itself from what it calls “the constant aggression” of the United States.

The authorities classed two new laws passed Tuesday in Parliament as “the fair and necessary weapons.” One of these regulations punishes parties “favouring the application” of the US blockade and the “economic war against Cuba.”

The so-called law of “Protection of national independence and the national economy of Cuba” strongly penalises anyone supplying the US government with information which could be used in favour of the blockde, the economic war on Cuba or subversion.

The US economic embargo has cost the Cuban health system some 1.2 billion dollars in the last eight years, said Health Minister Carlos Dotres.

Cuba and the United States broke off diplomatic relations on January 3, 1960, although both governments agreed to open offices for their interests in the other on May 30, 1977.