Yahoo! June 23, 2000
Ex-CIA Agent Resurfaces in Cuba
By Nicole Winfield, Associated Press Writer.
HAVANA, 23 (AP) - Former CIA agent Philip Agee, a longtime friend of communist Cuba who exposed purported CIA operatives in his infamous book, has resurfaced in Havana, where he has launched what he says is the first independent American business in 40 years.
With European investors and the state-run travel agent as his partner, Agee has opened a travel Web site designed specifically to bring American tourists to the island - even if it means violating the U.S. trade embargo.
The site, cubalinda.com, offers package tours within Cuba and other help with Cuban tourism that is largely off limits to Americans because of U.S. law.
``I would like to see people ignore the law,'' Agee said at a press conference Thursday. ``The idea is to disdain this law to the point that our grandfathers disdained Prohibition.''
Agee has long enraged supporters of U.S. sanctions on Cuba by his support of Fidel Castro's revolution and campaign to end the nearly four-decade-old embargo, which limits American tourists from spending money on the island - effectively barring them from visiting.
He has also been accused of receiving up to $1 million in payments from the Cuban intelligence service. He has denied the accusations, which were first made by a high-ranking Cuban intelligence officer and defector in a 1992 Los Angeles Times report.
Agee, 65, quit the CIA in 1969 after 12 years with the agency, working mostly in Latin America during the years that leftist movements were gaining prominence and sympathizers.
His 1975 book ``Inside the Company: CIA Diary'' cited alleged CIA misdeeds against leftists in Latin America that included a 22-page list of purported agency operatives.
Barbara Bush, the wife of former president George Bush - himself a onetime CIA chief - in her autobiography accused the book of exposing a CIA station chief, Richard S. Welch, who was later killed by leftist terrorists in Athens in 1975. Agee, who denied any involvement in the death, sued her
for defamation and she revised the book to settle the case.
Agee's U.S. passport was revoked in 1979. U.S. officials said he had threatened national security.
After years of living in Hamburg, Germany - occasionally underground, fearing CIA retribution - Agee has decided to make Havana his home and the seat of his new business.
American companies have been barred from doing business with Cuba since the embargo was imposed in the 1960s to put pressure on Castro.
``I don't have a license. I don't have permission. I haven't asked and I'm not going to because it's a question of principle,'' Agee said.
A spokesman at the U.S. Treasury Department in Washington said officials were unaware of Agee's plans and had no comment Thursday.
Agee said he received funding for the tourism project from European investors, but declined to say how much or even who they are.
``They are not especially interested in advertising the fact that they're involved with me here,'' Agee said, acknowledging his own infamy.
The Web site, which has been partially running since February, on Friday is to launch its first major promotion targeted at Americans - a weeklong tour during carnival festivities in July and August.
Prices start at around $600 inclusive - although not including airfare, which must be arranged separately and through a third country unless the visitor receives a Treasury Department license, he said.
The tours must be pre-paid over the Internet to a European bank account run by the company - a rare concession to U.S. law in that the money isn't directly deposited in a Cuban account.
Agee said he has received no word from the U.S. government about his dealings. But he has received threatening e-mails from people he believes are anti-Castro Cuban-American exiles in Miami, who are opposed to any dealings with Cuba.
``It's always nice to know that your enemy, or that your unfriendly side, knows that you're in business,'' he said.
On the Net: http://www.cubalinda.com
Japan Starting Flights to Cuba
HAVANA, 22 (AP) - In the latest indication of Cuba's growing tourism sector, Japan Airlines plans to send five flights of Japanese visitors to the Caribbean island in August, the official news agency reported Thursday.
Prensa Latina didn't say whether the flights were a one-time promotion or would be followed by regular charter or scheduled service from Japan.
Cuba projects close to 2 million tourists this year, up from 1.6 million last year. Tourism produced $1.3 billion in foreign currency earnings in 1999, 53 percent of the total.
Cuba Sends Scraps of U.S. Spy Plane to French Museum
ROUEN, France 22 (Reuters) - A French museum on Thursday displayed pieces of a U.S. U2 spy plane shot down over Cuba at the height of the 1962 missile crisis.
The twisted scraps of metal -- part of a wing and two pieces of the cockpit -- were donated by the Cuban government which was keen that they be on show in the West, said Jacques Belin, director of the Memorial Museum in the Normandy town of Caen.
The pieces will go on public show in 2002 in a Cold War wing to be opened at the museum which was originally devoted to World War Two. Caen is the biggest town near the D-Day beaches where allied forces landed on June 6, 1944.
U.S. Major Rudolph Anderson was killed when Cuban forces shot down his U2 with a Soviet-made SAM missile on October 27, 1962, during a standoff that had the world on the brink of nuclear war until Moscow backed off on a move to install nuclear missiles in Cuba.
The Caen museum is also to put on show a piece of the Berlin Wall, a MIG-21 bought from the Czech Republic, and a Trabant, the primitive car that became a symbol of former East Germany.
Castro Says Socialism Will Continue
By Nicole Winfield, Associated Press Writer.
HAVANA, 22 (AP) - President Fidel Castro said in an interview published Thursday that he isn't worried about Cuba's transition after he dies, because the socialist revolution will continue even without him since he is just a ``common man.''
``In Cuba, there is no personality cult,'' Castro said in the interview with Federico Mayor of Spain, the former director-general of UNESCO, which was published in its entirety in the official daily Granma.
``When a true revolution has been consolidated, and the spread of its ideas and consciousness has begun to bear fruit, no one - no matter how important his personal contribution - is indispensable,'' Castro said.
The 73-year-old Cuban leader has in the past endorsed his brother, Raul Castro, as his successor. Raul Castro, 69, is the No. 2 man in both Cuba's Communist Party and the government's ruling Council of State, as well as head of the armed forces.
Castro didn't mention his brother in the interview, but said the question of succession - the topic of endless speculation in Cuba and abroad - wasn't really an issue.
``I wasn't a head of state as much as a very common man,'' Castro said. ``I didn't inherit any title, nor am I king.''
The socialist transition, he said, has been going on for more than 40 years and will continue because there is a party ``with much moral prestige and authority. What should I be worried about?''
In the interview, Castro also touched on a host of issues, including the Elian Gonzalez case, the U.S. election campaign, the problems confronting poor countries and the U.S. trade embargo against the Caribbean island.
Mayor interviewed Castro in January in Havana for a book he is writing. Granma published what it said was the transcription of the interview on Thursday.
When asked whether the United States was trying to influence Cuban politics through the trade embargo, Castro responded: ``They didn't try to influence the revolution, but rather destroy it.''
On Hillary Rodham Clinton's Senate campaign in New York, Castro said her aides sometimes give her bad advice. He noted she had said she hoped Elian's father could be persuaded to stay in the United States with his 6-year-old son and termed the suggestion ``a grave and gratuitous offense'' to
Cuba.
When asked why, if the revolution had been so successful, so many Cubans had left the island, Castro blamed U.S. laws that allow Cubans to receive residency if they reach American soil.
``If Mexico and the rest of Latin America and the Caribbean had received such privileges over the past 35 years, more than half of the population of the United States would be Latin American and Caribbean,'' Castro said.
At the end of the interview, Castro was asked whether he would remain a myth in death as he has been in life.
``That's not me,'' Castro said. ``It's the governments of the United States that has converted me into what you call a myth, and if I have been one in life it's also thanks to their failures to deprive me of it (life).''
Genetic Engineering News Reports Cuba Targets Biotechnology as a Future Growth Industry
Thursday June 22, 7:22 pm Eastern Time. Company Press Release
LARCHMONT, N.Y.--(BW HealthWire)--June 22, 2000--Cuban biotech products and services could eventually vie with tourism, sugar and cigars as a major generator of export earnings and as a catalyst for joint venture products, reports Genetic Engineering News (GEN) (www.genengnews.com). Since the
early 1990s there has been strong support for the development of biotechnology with a Cuban government investment of almost $1 billion, according to the June 15, 2000, issue of GEN.
``Cuba is trying to jump start new biotech projects and joint ventures and expand the commercialization of a host of products, R&D efforts and clinical trials,'' says John Sterling, managing editor of GEN. ``However, due to the trade embargo with the United States, virtually all the R&D
and business activities take place between biotechnologists in Cuba and those in Europe or Canada.''
For example, York Medical, which is based in Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, has licensed an anticancer drug from the Cuban National Institute of Oncology and Radiobiology (INOR) and is testing it at the Institute. In all, the company has licensed three anticancer therapeutic drugs, a cancer
vaccine and a topical antifungal.
Thousands of scientists working at some 38 institutes located in West Havana, known as the ``Scientific Pole,'' have developed a range of new vaccines and drugs. These include products for treatment of cancers of the lung, head, neck, breast and ovaries, with some in multinational clinical
trials. In development are chemotherapeutics derived from snake venoms and marine sources.
The Cuban Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology (CIGB) has formed a marketing subsidiary, Heber Biotec S.A., which reported sales of $45 million in 1999 with operations in 38 countries. Lead products include a recombinant hepatitis B vaccine, recombinant alpha 2b interferon,
streptokinase, interferon gamma, an epidermal growth factor and a recombinant vaccine against ticks. Pipeline products include novel human and animal vaccines, pharmaceuticals, transgenic plants and genetically modified fish.
The impact of the U.S. trade embargo on Cuba can be vividly seen in the case of Cuba's Finlay Institute. Scientists there have developed an anti-meningococcus vaccine effective against meningitis B. The product is being exported to 12 countries, including Brazil and China. Two years ago,
SmithKline Beecham (NYSE:SBH - news) requested permission from the U.S. government to allow the Cuban meningitis drug to be brought into the country for testing and use. However, the importation of the vaccine continues to be delayed despite the support of Secretary of State Madeleine Albright and
the approval by the U.S. Treasury Department in 1999, which granted SmithKline Beecham permission to create a joint venture with Finlay.
Genetic Engineering News is published 21 times a year by Mary Ann Liebert, Inc. For a copy of the magazine, please call 914-834-3100, ext. 623, or email: ebicovny@liebertpub.com.
Genetic Engineering News
John Sterling, 914/834-3880
Cuban Doctors' Fate Decided After Zimbabwe Poll
By Manoah Esipisu
HARARE, Zimbabwe (Reuters) - The fate of two Cuban doctors who tried to defect while on a medical mission in Zimbabwe will be decided only after elections in the African country this weekend, a senior diplomat said Thursday.
Leonel Cordova Rodriguez, 31, and Noris Pena Martinez, 25, have spent nearly a month in a Harare prison.
``Realistically, this will be a political decision and the key figures involved are too engrossed in the election campaigns,'' one Western diplomat in Harare told Reuters.
Zimbabwe votes this weekend in the most crucial election since independence from Britain 20 years ago, and President Robert Mugabe's ruling ZANU-PF party for the first time faces a credible and united opposition.
Another factor is Mugabe's relationship with Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
``A Cuban defection inside Zimbabwe is highly embarrassing for Mugabe who is a close friend of Castro. Effectively, the doctors' fate is really in his hands,'' the diplomat said.
The Zimbabwean government and the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) are still in talks to send the doctors to a third country. They want to go to Canada, but Ottawa has declined to comment.
Washington has said it will allow them to come to the United States and last week accused Zimbabwe of breaking the Geneva convention and international law by holding them.
The plight of Cordova and Pena has drawn international concern since they sought refuge in the Canadian Embassy on May 23 seeking political asylum.
Zimbabwean security agents arrested them the next day and tried to send them back to Cuba. But an Air France crew in Johannesburg, South Africa, refused to carry them any further after they managed to slip a note to the pilot saying they had been kidnapped after they denounced Castro.
South African authorities sent them back to Harare where they have been held since.
``Not Exactly Five-Star Hotels''
The doctors have not been charged. The government says they are being held in prison because it cannot find alternative accommodation in Harare.
``As you may understand, the prisons are not exactly five-star hotels,'' said a police official said. ``It is particularly difficult for them, professionals that have not committed a crime. It is not a life they obviously expected.''
A doctor who recently visited the Cubans said they were in good physical health. But he added: ``You can expect they have suffered severe trauma and psychological disturbances.''
The Cuban government has condemned Pena and Cordova for their ``shameful and immoral conduct'' but said they would not be persecuted if they returned to Cuba.
The two were sent to Zimbabwe in February in a group of 150 doctors under a Cuban effort to help underdeveloped countries.
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Copyright © 2000 The Associated Press.
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