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January 11, 2006

Alleged spy couple did not recruit

The Cuban government may have asked a Florida International University couple to recruit South Florida youths for their alleged spying on the exile community, but law-enforcement officials say no evidence shows the husband-and-wife team actually did any recruiting.

By Noah Bierman and Jay Weaver, nbierman@MiamiHerald.com. Posted on Wed, Jan. 11, 2006.

The most provocative piece of this week's federal case against a pair of Florida International University employees claims the Cuban government directed the couple to recruit young Americans to spy for Fidel Castro.

But three U.S. government sources say they have no evidence Elsa and Carlos M. Alvarez accomplished that part of their mission. The husband and wife confessed last summer that they were asked to become recruiters, but their known help to Castro was limited to collecting information about exile groups, the sources said.

Moreover, the indictment against the FIU couple does not accuse them of any recruiting activity despite widespread speculation among exile leaders and some media reports.

As an academic, Carlos Alvarez had many opportunities to travel legally to Cuba, with and without FIU affiliation. Sometimes Alvarez brought young people; sometimes he did not.

''There was never any kind of recruitment,'' said Uvi Shabbel, a 42-year-old Pembroke Pines resident who went on an exchange trip with Alvarez in 2000.

Shabbel said she was among six FIU graduates then in their 30s who went to Cuba on a two-week trip Alvarez organized with Puentes Cubanos (Cuban Bridges), that paired young American professionals with their counterparts in Cuba.

Shabbel's mother, FIU researcher Uva de Aragón, was also an organizer, as was Cuban Bridges founder Silvia Wilhelm.

The Ford Foundation paid the bill and FIU sponsored the visa, Shabbel said.

''The purpose was to kind of put us in a room at the University of Havana to talk about what are our similarities and what are our differences,'' said Shabbel, who was born in the United States to Cuban parents.

Shabbel said the program linked people with similar jobs so they could compare their lifestyles more closely. Shabbel, a teacher, linked with a Cuban teacher.

She called the experience -- which also included touring Old Havana and other popular sites -- life-changing because she could see and touch her ancestral homeland for the first time and better understand her identity. Alvarez moderated the discussions and helped students translate for each other if they had trouble expressing their ideas, Shabbel said. Outside the classroom, the Cuban students were more candid about the many ironies they faced living on the restrictive and impoverished island, she said.

LOW PROFILE

Wilhelm, of Cuban Bridges, said Monday that Alvarez traveled several times with her group. But many like Wilhelm, who favor reconciliation with Cuba, were quiet about Alvarez on Tuesday as hard-liners leveled criticism on Miami's Cuban radio shows.

FIU President Modesto ''Mitch'' Maidique was also keeping a low profile. A long-time friend of the Alvarez family, he attended the couple's bond hearing Monday, but has not granted interviews.

FIU officials are scouring travel records to determine how many times Alvarez, 61, traveled to Cuba with the school. FIU's main Cuba think tank -- the Cuban Research Institute -- lists Alvarez on five Cuba trips between 1993 and 2003 under its license. None of those trips included students, according to Damián Fernández, the institute's director.

Alvarez, a professor since 1974, may also have traveled with FIU's education department, where he has tenure. Carlos' wife Elsa Alvarez, 55, is a counselor in the school's psychological services department. Prosecutors say they have no evidence she has been to Cuba since 1991. The Alvarezes -- in jail without bond since Friday -- are now on paid leave from their FIU jobs. The university has hired former U.S. attorney Roberto Martinez to deal with the ramifications of the Alvarez case.

U.S. Treasury Department guidelines allow researchers to travel to Cuba without special licenses. All they have to do is sign an affidavit with the airline or travel agency before each trip.

TRIPS WERE 'PRETEXT'

Federal agents say all of Alvarez's trips were covers for his life as a spy. For these post-1991 ''exchange trips,'' certain ''handlers'' from Cuban intelligence served as tour guides, Assistant U.S. Attorney Brian Frazier said at Monday's bond hearing.

Frazier called the trips a ''pretext'' for exchanging information about South Florida's exile community with Castro intelligence agents. Most of the alleged spying was on exile political leaders -- the Brothers to the Rescue, the Cuban American National Foundation and other anti-Castro groups in Miami.

No U.S. government or military information was sent to Cuban officials, law-enforcement officials said.

According to law-enforcement officials, no other suspects are expected to be indicted along with the FIU couple. They are charged on one count of failing to register as foreign agents with the U.S. government, which carries up to 10 years in prison.

Miami Herald staff writer Alfonso Chardy contributed to this report.

Rare unease in Cuba on survival of revolution

Cuban government officials appear suddenly aware of their own -- and the socialist revolution's -- mortality, and they are talking about it openly.

By Frances Robles. frobles@MiamiHerald.com. Posted on Sun, Jan. 08, 2006.

First, Fidel Castro used a loaded word seldom heard in Cuban government speeches: ''self-destruct.'' Then Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez Roque made a rare reference to a future without Castro: a "void nobody can fill.''

And now experts are asking: Is the Cuban government for the first time undergoing an unprecedented introspection -- one that perhaps acknowledges a fragile socialist grip on the island?

In recent weeks, the Cuban government has made a series of rare public comments urging Cubans to embrace the revolution -- or risk its future. Having just celebrated the revolution's 47th anniversary, Cuban government officials are openly worrying that the generation of disaffected youth that grew up with scarcity and hard times since the early 1990s will be the very catalyst that destroys Castro's legacy.

And they're scrambling to stop it.

''This country can self-destruct,'' Castro warned during a five-hour speech Nov. 17. "This revolution can destroy itself, but they can never destroy us; we can destroy ourselves, and it would be our fault.''

Castro's comments came as he announced a new push against corruption. He blasted thieves who live off stolen government goods, like gasoline, and said that since the crackdown, gas stations have begun to collect twice the normal revenue. His tirade against fraud came with the message that the looting of state coffers deepens class distinctions and jeopardizes the revolution.

In the following weeks, he announced economic changes, including salary hikes and electricity rate increases aimed at the ''new rich'' who damage socialism's credibility.

Castro, experts say, seems to be acknowledging his own system's failures.

Castro's comments were followed by a Dec. 23 speech at a National Assembly session by Pérez Roque, a former Castro aide who represents the younger generation of Cuban officials. Referring several times to Castro's Nov. 17 speech, he said that 1.5 million Cuban adults were about 10 years old in 1990, when Cuba began to feel in earnest the impact of the collapse of the Soviet Union and its massive subsidies.

Those children are now grown-ups who take cheap housing and free medical care and education for granted, Pérez Roque said, and never witnessed Cuba's prerevolution poverty.

''The fact that we have resisted all these years as we have resisted and battled, doesn't in itself guarantee we will be victorious in the future,'' Pérez Roque said, according to a transcript on the Foreign Ministry website. "I think we should pay all our attention to the call made by Fidel, that phrase never said publicly in the history of the revolution: This revolution can be reversible, and not by our enemies who have tried everything possible, but by our own mistakes.''

Experts agree that Pérez Roque's comments are important.

''I am surprised this kind of stuff is spoken of this openly,'' said Mark Falcoff, author of Cuba, The Day After. "It suggests two things: Castro's health may be as bad as the CIA says it is, and the [communist] party leadership recognizes they are going to have a rough time when he's not there.''

Two days before Castro's November speech, The Miami Herald reported that the CIA was convinced that the Cuban leader has Parkinson's disease and that the agency had briefed lawmakers on its findings.

Falcoff said the recent comments are particularly important because they contradict the standard rhetoric in Cuban government circles that the revolution has been ''institutionalized.'' The government, he said, is admitting it failed to capture its young.

''Nothing that happens in Cuba is an accident, above all anything these people say and say publicly,'' said María Dolores Espino, an expert on Cuba at St. Thomas University. "They are positioning themselves for the aftermath. Castro wants the survival of the revolution to be his legacy, and they are preparing for that.''

Socialist party recognizes fragile grip

Cuban government officials appear suddenly aware of their own -- and the socialist revolution's -- mortality, and they are talking about it openly.

By Frances Robles.frobles@MiamiHerald.com. Posted on Sun, Jan. 08, 2006

First, Fidel Castro used a loaded word seldom heard in Cuban government speeches: "self-destruct.''

Then Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez Roque made a rare reference to a future without Castro: a "void nobody can fill.''

And now experts are asking: Is the Cuban government for the first time undergoing an unprecedented introspection -- one that perhaps acknowledges a fragile socialist grip on the island?

And they're scrambling to stop it.

Castro's comments came as he announced a new push against corruption. He blasted thieves who live off stolen government goods, such as gasoline, and said that since the crackdown, gas stations have begun to collect twice the normal revenue. His tirade against fraud came with the message that the looting of state coffers deepens class distinctions and jeopardizes the revolution.

In the following weeks, he announced economic changes, including salary hikes and electricity rate increases aimed at the ''new rich'' who damage socialism's credibility.

HIS OWN FAILURES

Castro, experts say, seems to be acknowledging his own system's failures.

Those children are now grown-ups who take cheap housing and free medical care and education for granted, Pérez Roque said, and never witnessed Cuba's prerevolution poverty.

Experts agree that Pérez Roque's comments are important.

'ROUGH TIME'

Two days before Castro's November speech, The Miami Herald reported that the CIA was convinced that the Cuban leader has Parkinson's disease and that the agency had briefed lawmakers on its findings.

UNINSPIRED YOUTH

Film: Cuban secret service organized JFK's murder

A Cuban secret service agent claims in a German film that his colleagues chose Lee Harvey Oswald to assassinate President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

By Hugh Williamson, Financial Times. Posted on Sat, Jan. 07, 2006.

BERLIN - Hoping to scoop the world on one of America's supreme historical puzzles, Germany's leading television broadcaster has claimed in a documentary film that it was the Cuban secret service that organized the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

The 90-minute film, Rendezvous with Death, features an interview with Oscar Marino, a former agent of the Cuban G2 secret service, who says he knew before the assassination in November 1963 that Lee Harvey Oswald -- Kennedy's killer -- had been picked by his colleagues to do the job.

''He offered to kill Kennedy, and we used him to do this,'' Marino says during the film, made by Wilfried Huismann, a prize-winning German director.

Marino claims that Oswald, a Communist who lived in the Soviet Union for three years, was identified to Cuba by the Russian KGB secret service.

In Havana, the official Granma newspaper Friday dismissed the documentary's claim, saying it was the latest chapter in the long history of efforts "to annihilate the Cuban revolution.''

A Cuban involvement is one of the dozens of conspiracy theories that have long surrounded the JFK assassination. The Warren Commission concluded that Oswald acted alone.

Huismann, who worked on the project with Gus Russo, the Baltimore-based author of a book on Fidel Castro, told the Financial Times his exclusive interview with Marino provided ''decisive new evidence'' beyond the dozens of existing inquiries, books and films on the subject.

He admitted many Americans were ''very skeptical'' that he had solved the Kennedy assassination puzzle, but argued that his research focus on Mexico City -- which Oswald visited two months before the assassination in Dallas -- was his breakthrough. He interviewed Marino in the city, Huismann said, and gained exclusive access to parts of the country's secret service archive.

''I ask skeptical Kennedy assassination specialists - have you ever done research on the case in Mexico? Most, if not all, have not,'' he said.

Marino knew before the killing that Oswald had been recruited in Mexico City in September 1963 to do the killing, according to the filmmaker. In addition, in late 1962 the Cuban spy saw a list of about 100 foreign agents financed by the Cuban secret service. ''Oswald was on the list,'' Huismann said. The G2 decided to have Kennedy killed because it believed the U.S. government planned to kill Castro, according to the film.

Another key witness in the film is Lawrence Keenan, a retired FBI agent, who was sent to Mexico after the assassination to investigate Oswald's activities and says he was withdrawn after only a short time.

The more likely true location of Castro's house was marked by someone using the name of ''Luisdo,'' who also marked many other places on the satellite map of Cuba, many of them with military significance.

He seems to be something of an expert on military aircraft, because he tries to correct what he calls mistakes by other readers in the identification of planes at military airports.

''Luisdo'' corrected an error in the identification of the military airstrip at Ciudad Libertad, known as Camp Columbia before Castro seized power in 1959. He also identified some parked planes as MiG-23s, MiG-21s or MiG-17s -- even though the satellite photo shows only fuzzy outlines of airplanes.

What he does not explain is how he learned all this.

''I can't say,'' Luisdo writes.

Google Earth is one of the latest and most successful products from Google, a company that has soared to the top listings in the New York Stock Exchange.

The company has described the site as a satellite imagery-based mapping product that combines 3D buildings and terrain with mapping capability and Google-styled searches. The program enables users to ''fly'' from space to street level views, and to find geographic information.

The program easily identifies streets and even houses, although the images of smaller objects like cars and pedestrians grow increasingly fuzzy.

Google Earth already has created controversy in some countries, mainly in the Middle East, which fear that their military secrets and even the palaces of their rulers will be exposed to the public.

Google rejects that criticism, saying the photographs are at least six months old and in any case can be easily obtained directly from commercial satellite services.

Viewers who place their comments on the photos must first register in ''the Google community,'' but there's no independent check on their information. None of the people mentioned in this article included their e-mail addresses or telephone numbers and could not be contacted.

In addition to pinpointing Castro's apparent house, Google Earth allows viewers to identify many other places in Havana and elsewhere in Cuba, including government ministries, museums, hotels and tourist spots.

MONUMENTAL GAFFES

But some mistakes appear, some of them monumental.

A large, five-pointed building in the town of Tarará east of Havana is marked as looking ''somehow satanic,'' or a possible ''battery of SAM-7 antiaircraft missiles.'' In fact, it's an abandoned amusement park.

And the landing strip at the Ciudad Libertad military base in Havana is marked as the capital's José Martí International Airport. That airport is actually in the city's southern outskirts.

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