By Juan O. Tamayo . jtamayo@herald.com. Published Wednesday, April 12, 2000, in the Miami Herald
Relatives will still seek award
Cuba will resume permitting direct U.S.-Cuba telephone calls, starting early today, after relatives of three Brothers to the Rescue pilots killed in 1996 stopped blocking U.S. phone payments to Havana. The dispute had cut off direct calls for 14 months.
``Slowly and in accordance with its technical-organizational abilities, the ETECSA [telephone] company will proceed to reestablish the circuits blocked for lack of payment, Cuba's Granma newspaper reported Tuesday.
The change may make it slightly easier to call Cuba, but will not significantly improve the quality or lower the cost of the calls, or end the bitter legal struggle to make Cuba pay for killing the Miami aviators.
``To the consumer, it should not mean any significant change, said Enrique Lopez, whose Coral Gables telecommunications consulting firm has worked on several U.S.-Cuba telephone issues.
ETECSA officials informed U.S. telephone carriers that it would allow direct-dial calls again as of midnight Tuesday, though the process could take up to 48 hours to complete, an AT&T official said.
A joint Italian-Cuban venture, ETECSA cut off nearly all direct calls to and from the United States on Feb. 24, 1999, after a U.S. judge in Miami garnished about $6 million owed to Havana by five U.S. telephone carriers.
Few callers noticed a change because AT&T, MCI, LDDS, IDB and WilTel, which run most of the 1,020 circuits connecting Cuba and the United States, swiftly rerouted calls through third countries such as Canada and Mexico.
Rates on U.S. telephone calls to Cuba, ranging from a low of 62 U.S. cents per minute to as high as $3, did not rise after the shift to indirect calls and will not drop with the change back to direct calls.
``AT&T was sometimes losing money because of rerouting, but chose to keep its rates steady to keep its consumer cases, an industry official said.
Sprint, which operates 120 U.S.-Cuba circuits, most of them devoted to data transfer, was never served with garnishment papers. It paid its bills to Havana and continued to route calls directly to Cuba during the past 14 months.
U.S. Judge James Lawrence King initially blocked the phone payments to ETECSA as part of his $187 million award against the Cuban government for the fatal downing of the Brothers to the Rescue pilots in 1996 by Cuban air force jets.
But a federal appeals court in Atlanta overruled his order in August, saying that ETECSA was not part of the Cuban government. Miami lawyers dropped the last of the motions in the case against ETECSA on March 14.
``That allowed the U.S. firms to pay their pending debts, Granma reported Tuesday.
Attorney Ron Kleinman stressed, however, that relatives of the dead pilots have not given up on their fight to collect on King's ruling.
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