By I.J. Toby Westerman . Thursday June 22 2000. WorldNetDaily.com.
The government of Fidel Castro commemorated the 47th anniversary of the execution of atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg by reading aloud a letter addressed "to the Cuban people" from the Rosenbergs' sons.
Castro read Robert and David Meeropol's letter before a crowd assembled at the only memorial in the world -- located in Cuba -- dedicated to the Rosenbergs, according to official Cuban sources.
In their letter, the brothers compared events of their parents' famous spy case to the case of Elian Gonzalez, and demanded the return of the 6-year-old to Cuba.
The Meeropol brothers stated in their letter that the same "political forces" responsible for their parents' execution were preventing Elian's return to Cuba. They compared their own experience during the spy trial to that of Elian, stating that they "were just kids at the time of
their parents' execution -- just like Elian."
The account of the ceremony for the Rosenbergs and the letter from their sons was reported by Radio Habana Cuba, the official broadcasting service of the Cuban government.
In the words of the broadcast, the Rosenbergs were victims of "anti-Semitism" and "political oppression," and "the same power structures that murdered the Rosenbergs are the same political forces responsible for the Cuban Adjustment Act, which keeps Elian in the U.S.
against his father's wishes."
The Meeropol brothers also wrote that their parents' courage was like that shown by the Cuban people in withstanding the 40-year U.S. embargo against the island.
The ceremony ended with "the affirmation that it is not time to cry for the death of the Rosenbergs, but rather, to celebrate their resistance and bravery," according to the broadcast.
Julius and Ethel Rosenberg were convicted of stealing secrets of the atomic bomb for the Soviet Union. They were convicted, in part, upon the testimony of members of the spy ring Julius had recruited, including the testimony of his brother-in-law, David Greenglass.
Ironically, Greenglass worked at the U.S. atomic research facility at Los Alamos, which at present is the site of continuing investigations regarding major security lapses.
Of all those implicated in the espionage investigation, only the Rosenbergs remained uncooperative. They were convicted, sentenced to death, and executed on June 19, 1953.
The activity of the Rosenbergs was also documented in the Venona project. According to the National Security Administration, Venona was a super-secret counterintelligence operation initiated in 1943 that sought to intercept and decode Soviet intelligence activity during the decade of the 1940s.
The documents were first released in 1995.
Julius' KGB code name was "Antenna," and later, "Liberal."
According to a National Security Administration statement regarding the Rosenberg case, "a number of code names of persons associated with atomic espionage remain unidentified to this day."
In addition to the memorial for the Rosenbergs, the Castro government has erected a monument to the late Ernesto Che Guevara and his fellow guerrilla fighters, slain in 1967 while attempting to overthrow the government of Bolivia. The Cuban government continues to send forensic experts to
Bolivia to locate, unearth and bring back to Cuba the remains of the fallen communist insurgents.
Editor's note: WND's multi-lingual reporter Toby Westerman specializes in monitoring global shortwave broadcasts and reading foreign-language news journals for information not readily available from the domestic press. Each month, Westerman presents a special in-depth report in WorldNetDaily's
monthly magazine, WorldNet. Readers may subscribe to WorldNet through WND's online store.
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