By Dalia Acosta
HAVANA, Feb 18 2003 (IPS)

A Colombian national found guilty of attempting to set up a base for international drug trafficking operations in Cuba received a life sentence, and another Colombian and a Bahamian citizen were given 23 and 25 years, respectively, on similar charges.

The sentences handed down to Colombians Rafael Miguel Bustamante and Mauricio Francisco Noguera, and to Robert Lewis of the Bahamas, were reported Tuesday by an editorial in Granma, the official newspaper of Cuba’s ruling Communist Party, although the trial took place last week.

”This is meant to send an exemplary message,” a lawyer who spoke on condition of anonymity told IPS. ”The government wants to make it clear that it will be implacable with the people involved in narcotrafficking cases, whether they are Cubans or foreigners.”

The trial coincided with a major government offensive launched in January against the sale and consumption of drugs in Cuba, which officials consider an ”incipient” but growing problem. The crackdown has focused on other illegal activities as well.

Bustamante was arrested on Mar. 6, 2002 in Havana, where according to official sources he was attempting to establish a base of operations while masquerading as a businessman under a false identity.

The Colombian trafficker, who was sought by counter-drug police forces from several countries, had made five trips to Havana since 1998 and smuggled drugs to the United States from Cuba.

Cuba’s law enforcement agencies began to track him in January 2002 after receiving information through ”mechanisms of cooperation with several counter-drug services” which indicated that Bustamante was in Cuba, according to the Foreign Relations Ministry.

The Colombian national is also wanted for escaping a federal prison in the United States in 1992, while he was serving a six- year sentence for money laundering and cocaine smuggling.

Since then he has been involved in the trafficking of drugs, mainly cocaine, from Colombia to U.S. and European markets, using different routes through the Caribbean. In 1998 he moved to Jamaica, according to Granma.

The U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) had been trying to capture him for years for his alleged involvement in smuggling drugs into the United States, the world’s biggest market for narcotics.

Bustamante’s Bahamian partner, Robert Lewis, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for ”continuous involvement in the crime of international trafficking of drugs.”

For his part, Mauricio Francisco Noguera was given 23 years in prison for serving as a link between ”Colombian criminal organisations and other narcotraffickers in the United States, Jamaica and Panama,” Granma reported.

Another 146 foreign nationals are in prison in Cuba serving sentences or awaiting trial on drug trafficking charges, according to a Jan. 10 editorial in Granma, which said a total of 252 foreigners were arrested for drug smuggling between January 1995 and November 2002.

In January 2002, Cuba granted the extradition of U.S. citizen Jesse James Bell, as requested by the United States. Bell, who was wanted on 15 drug-related charges, was arrested as he attempted to leave this Caribbean island nation under a false identity.

But the Cuban government underlined that the decision to hand over Bell was ”exceptional,” and analysts ruled out the possibility that Bustamante would be extradited to the United States.

Drug trafficking has been a touchy issue in this socialist nation since a group of 14 armed forces officers and Interior Ministry officials were accused of ties with the international drug trade in 1989.

After the trial, four former military officers, including General Arnaldo Ochoa, who had been decorated as a ”Hero of the Republic of Cuba”, and Colonel Antonio de la Guardia, were executed by firing squad.

Cuba’s criminal code provides for penalties including capital punishment for the crimes of production, sale, demand, trafficking, distribution and possession of illegal drugs.

The death penalty is applicable in cases involving public officials or agents found guilty of using state resources to facilitate crime or of participating in criminal activity linked to the international trafficking of drugs.

For years, Cuba has been used as a transshipment point for drugs trafficked from the developing South to the markets of the industrialised North, although ”it is still a minor bridge, compared to many other Caribbean islands,” Aldo Lale-Demoz, the head of the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (ODC) in Latin America and the Caribbean, told IPS.

During the second regional conference on drug control in the Caribbean, which took place in Havana last month, Lale-Demoz reported that the drug trade in the Caribbean generated some 3.3 billion dollars in annual profits, equivalent to 3.1 percent of the region’s combined Gross Domestic Product.

An estimated 40 percent of the illegal drugs that enter the United States are shipped through the Caribbean, as well as two- thirds of the cocaine trafficked to Europe, according to the UN agency.

Official sources reported that Cuba intercepted 40 trafficking operations at sea in the 1990s, confiscating a total of eight tons of cocaine, more than seven tons of marijuana, 12 kgs of hashish and 23 kgs of hash oil, which were heading towards the U.S. market.

In that same period, 115 people were arrested in Cuban airports as they attempted to smuggle drugs to Europe, and around 400 kgs of cocaine, 300 kgs of marijuana, 12.8 kgs of hashish, 6.9 kgs of hash oil and 3.6 kgs of heroin were seized.

A Jan. 21 decree-law signed by President Fidel Castro penalised drug consumption, which up to then was treated as a public health problem. Drug use, which was rare in the past, has grown in Cuba due to the boom in foreign tourism and the increasing influx of dollars in the past few years.

The new law is aimed at preventing the expansion of drug- related ”corruption or other illicit behaviour.” It provides for the seizure of homes or businesses in which ”illicit drugs are produced, trafficked, purchased, stored, consumed or concealed.”

The Cuban police continued this month to crack down on the sale and consumption of drugs, in Havana and nationwide, according to people who have observed the stepped-up police activity.

The agents ”know where they’re going. They know where to look, and who is who,” said María Angélica Fernández, a retiree who lives in central Havana, where security forces have reportedly carried out a number of raids.

The results of the searches, which since mid-January have involved the deployment of large numbers of agents and the cordoning off of entire blocks, have not been reported, and the government’s silence has fuelled all kinds of rumours.

”Whole families have been found to be involved in the drug trade, and children have been used to transport drugs,” said Fernández.

The crackdown is also focusing on other illegal activities, like gambling, the black market sale of products manufactured in clandestine factories, and the holding of parties in private ”discotheques”.

”They say the police have dismantled hundreds of clandestine factories where rum, beer, soft drinks, deodorant, crackers and I don’t know what else were being produced,” said Fernández.

The Central de Trabajadores de Cuba (CTC) central trade union urged its members to intensify their ”revolutionary vigilance” in the workplace against all kinds of illegal activities.

The Committees in Defence of the Revolution (CDRs), which emerged in the early years of the Castro regime after the triumph of the 1959 revolution, and currently group around eight million of Cuba’s 11.2 million people, also called on their members to stay on guard against any illegal activity in their neighbourhoods.

Another target of the police operations against illegal activity and unauthorised private enterprise are those who lease rooms to foreign tourists without paying taxes or registering their guests with the immigration office.

Authorities have also been cracking down on video-rental outfits and the stalls of street vendors, the number of which have diminished over the past month.

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