CUBANET ... CUBANEWS

April 27, 2001



Cuban American foundation to get retraction from Washington group

By Madeline Baró Diaz . Miami Bureau. Posted April 27 2001 in The Sun-Sentinel

MIAMI -- A Washington group will retract a statement made about the Cuban American National Foundation as part of the settlement of a defamation lawsuit.

The Center for International Policy will mail the retraction to everyone who received the brochure with the offending statement and will publish the retraction in today's Miami Herald. The lawsuit was filed in 1998 and settled in March.

The brochure, announcing a Miami conference in 1998 presented by the Center for International Policy, said that CANF had "suffered a number of indictments for violation of neutrality laws and involvement in planned terrorist acts." It was meant to refer to men linked to the foundation who were indicted in an alleged plot to kill Cuban President Fidel Castro, not the foundation itself. The men were all acquitted.

Wayne Smith, the Cuba policy analyst who was named in the lawsuit along with the group's executive director, said he was not personally to blame for the error.

"There was a mistake in editing," he said. "The center accepted that and has reached a settlement."

The two groups are on opposite sides of the Cuba debate. The CANF favors the embargo against Cuba while the Center for International Policy advocates other approaches in U.S.-Cuba policy.

"We take our reputation very seriously," said Mariela Ferretti, spokeswoman for CANF. "It's one thing for Fidel Castro to stand in Cuba and slander the foundation but it's another thing when you live in a democracy such as this and there's laws to protect you from these types of actions."

The foundation sued Smith before for defamation over his comments in a TV documentary. The foundation won a $40,000 verdict from a Miami jury, but the award was erased on appeal in 1999.

This report was supplemented with Sun-Sentinel wire services.

Madeline Baró Diaz can be reached at mbaro@sun-sentinel.com or 305-810-5007.

Copyright 2001, Sun-Sentinel Co. & South Florida Interactive, Inc.

"He's done some good things for his people," Powell said Thursday of the communist tyrant who has crushed human rights on his island prison for four decades.

"He is no longer the threat he was," Powell said in response to grilling at a House Appropriations subcommittee hearing by Rep. Jose E. Serrano, D-N.Y., who attacked America's policy on Havana.

Powell seemed to be giving his opinion rather than signaling a change in U.S. policy.

In 1961, with hopes fading that Castro was a republican reformer, the United States ended relations with Havana and has condemned it yearly as a sponsor of terrorism.

"That policy makes no sense. It is a country that has not done any harm to us," Serrano claimed - despite the terrorism sponsored by Castro. "Why China and why not Cuba?"

Under Castro, Cuba exports doctors, not revolution, Serrano said, according to the Associated Press.

Powell said Castro was stuck in the past. "He hasn't changed his views in any way." In China, Russia and Vietnam, "you can see leaders who the world is changing."

Don't Offend China

Powell, known as the most liberal member of President Bush's foreign-policy team, also took a mild view of China despite its recent hostile acts toward America. "We are not looking for an enemy. We don't need an enemy.

"We are trying to get back on a more stable relations with China." He did allow, "We will meet any danger which comes our way," he said.

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