Miami Herald, March
27, 2001
Charge imposed by Havana brings cuts in circuits
Dispute restricts calls to Cuba
By Yves Colon . ycolon@herald.com . Posted at 6:27 a.m. EST
Tuesday, March 27, 2001
An escalating dispute between the Cuban government and U.S. long-distance
carriers has made it increasingly difficult to call the island over the past few
days.
Long-distance carriers say they can't pay a telephone surcharge imposed by
Cuba without violating U.S. trade sanctions. Cuba, in turn, has responded by
reducing the number of incoming lines, causing frustration in South Florida and
other communities where Cuban Americans call the island frequently.
"We've been hearing that it's getting more difficult to get through,''
said Joe Garcia, executive director of the Cuban American National Foundation,
who called it a case of "Fidel Castro playing with people's emotions.''
Normally, there are 1,022 telephone circuits between the United States and
Cuba. It was unclear Monday how many of those circuits remained open, but U.S.
phone company officials said the number had been greatly reduced.
"It used to be that you had to dial five times and eventually, you
would get through,'' said Gustavo Alfonso, a spokesman for AT&T in Miami. "Now
you have to try a lot harder.''
After President Castro's government cut direct phone links with the United
States in mid-December last year, phone companies like AT&T routed the calls
through third countries. Now, those third countries are pulling out of the deal
because they can't collect a 10 percent surcharge imposed by Cuba in order to
place the call.
'DIFFICULT SITUATION'
"We can't pay them beyond what had been established as the rate we pay
them,'' Alfonso said. "We cannot go beyond that. It's a very difficult
situation.''
Several phone companies that provide service to Cuba, including AT&T and
Sprint, cannot pay the surcharge without violating laws administered by the
Office of Foreign Assets Control, a branch of the U.S. Treasury that enforces
economic and trade sanctions against targeted countries.
Luis Fernández, a spokesman for the Cuban Interests Section in
Washington, said the phone lines will be reopened when the United States "pays
all the funds that belong to the Cuban people and were stolen by the U.S.
government.''
"As soon as they pay all these things, no problem, then we'll open the
lines,'' Fernández said. "The only possible negotiation is for them
to pay these funds.''
The funds in question are $58 million in damages a Miami judge awarded to
families of Brothers to the Rescue pilots shot down by Cuban MiGs in February
1996. The money was taken from frozen Cuban assets in U.S. banks.
Cuba earns about $80 million a year from the phone traffic, and Castro's
government wants the additional $30 million surcharge to make up, in part, for
the $58 million judgment.
After Cuba cut off most of the circuits on Dec. 15, the majority of calls
were routed through third countries such as Canada and Italy, using carriers in
those countries. An Italian phone company owns a large share of the Cuban
telephone system.
TRAFFIC MEASURED
As Cuba warned it would do, government officials have measured the level of
incoming traffic on lines from those third countries over the past three months
with the level during the same period one year earlier.
Wherever they found that the number of calls had increased dramatically,
they have assumed that the increase was attributed to the United States, tacking
on the 10 percent surcharge.
These third-country phone companies in turn have tried to pass along the
surcharge to American carriers by charging a higher rate for the calls. But the
law forbids U.S. carriers to pay.
"It's making it very difficult,'' Alfonso said.
In February 1999, Cuba cut its phone circuits over the same issue: frozen
funds held in U.S. banks. The Cuban phone company suspended service with U.S.
long-distance carriers because they withheld $19 million due Cuba. The companies
were ordered to hold the money while the families of Brothers to the Rescue
pilots tried to collect $187 million in damages. Payments from the U.S.
companies to Cuba were re-authorized by the federal government that March, and
Cuba reopened its phone circuits to the United States.
Meanwhile, Cuban Americans are getting increasingly frustrated at being cut
off from relatives on the island. Alfonso compares this latest episode between
Cuba and the United States to chest-thumping games.
"I don't know who's going to blink first,'' he said. "We don't
know where this is heading, we really don't.'
Cuba spy trial defense targets exile militants
Strategy: Threat justified spying
By Gail Epstein Nieves . gepstein@herald.com . Published
Tuesday, March 27, 2001
In 1993 and 1994, law officers stopped Orlando Suárez and his buddies
from Alpha 66 -- the oldest Cuban exile paramilitary organization in Miami --
and found their boats crammed with machine guns, ammunition and other weapons.
Suárez, 69, testified in the Cuban spy trial Monday that those "military
preparations'' reflected the real Alpha 66 -- a group of people who trained "like
in a camp with weapons'' but did so as "a way to remain active. It's
nothing to do with sabotage anywhere.''
FBI Agent George Kiszynski had a different take. For some 17 years, he
investigated Alpha 66 and other anti-Castro militants for alleged weapons
smuggling into Cuba and other potential federal violations.
In a new phase of the defense, lawyer Joaquín Méndez on Monday
switched the spotlight from Brothers to the Rescue, a pilot rescue group, to
Miami's militant exile organizations, some of which have been linked to violent
acts against Cuban hotels and other tourist spots.
DEFENSE STRATEGY
The defense strategy: to highlight repeated U.S.-launched terror attacks
against Cuban territory that were pursued unsuccessfully, or not at all, by U.S.
prosecutors and to justify infiltration of exile groups as a way to protect
Cuban soil and people from attack.
The five accused spies on trial do not deny being agents of the Cuban
government. But they say their targets were exile groups -- not military bases
as the government charges.
Outside the jury's presence, the lead prosecutor told the judge the defense
strategy smacks of vigilantism and is akin to "running a Charles Bronson
movie in this courtroom.'' The judge disagreed.
Jurors heard testimony about four incidents between 1993 and 1997 in which
exiles linked to Alpha 66 were stopped in their boats in the Keys or Puerto Rico
and found to have weapons on board.
Alpha 66 supports the overthrow of Fidel Castro, Cuba's leader, and a banner
over the door at the group's Little Havana headquarters says, "Irregular
Warfare in Cuba the Only Solution.''
Suárez, a witness who belonged to Alpha 66 for about six years, was
among nine members prosecuted for federal weapons violations in the 1993 case,
which started May 20 that year with arrests at the Sunshine Key marina. Found on
board: machine guns, semiautomatic rifles, ammunition, knives, hand grenades and
a grenade launcher.
All nine men were acquitted.
Méndez was prepared to call two other co-defendants from the 1993
case as witnesses. But lead prosecutor Caroline Heck Miller warned outside the
jury's presence that the men's testimony could lead to racketeering conspiracy
charges if they deliver incriminating testimony for the defense.
Méndez called it an empty threat because the men have been acquitted
and some of the incidents happened eight years ago. He said their testimony
helps form his defense.
"These individuals are involved in a long-term pattern of incursions
against the Cuban government,'' Heck responded.
FIFTH AMENDMENT
The issue came up when Miller argued some Alpha 66 members may claim their
Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination even though Méndez said
his questioning would avoid that possibility.
If the government plans to prosecute now, Méndez protested, "I
think we have to wonder what they've been doing for six years.''
Méndez said military exiles regularly conducted armed missions "with
impunity. It's a revolving door, nothing happens, and that's why these people
[the co-defendants] are here keeping an eye on them [militant exiles].''
The witnesses with possible Fifth Amendment claims were postponed to give
U.S. District Judge Joan Lenard time to consider the arguments.
Customs Agent Marco Rocco testified that in a separate incident in October
1997, after he helped search a weapons-laden boat in Puerto Rico, exile Angel
Alfonso told him the weapons "would be used to kill Fidel Castro.''
In December 1999, a federal jury acquitted Alfonso and four other Cuban
exiles accused of plotting to kill Castro. Charges were dropped against two
other exiles and a Miami firm.
No longer a battered foe
By Liz Balmaseda . Copyright 2001 Miami Herald . Published
Monday, March 26, 2001
She spoke in a little-girl voice, her lyrical verse falling upon a hushed
and packed salon Friday night on Southwest Eighth Street.
But the voice of exiled poet María Elena Cruz Varela carries the
strength of an army.
It's a voice so fearless and powerful that it earned Cruz Varela confinement
in Cuba's political prisons for nearly two years. And, in 1992, as her brave,
condemned words echoed miles outside Cuba, hers was a voice that earned a
nomination for the Nobel Peace Prize.
The nomination, submitted by the former Costa Rican president and Nobel
winner Oscar Arias, came in a swell of recognition for the horrors that Cruz
Varela endured for her writings and democratic convictions.
Nearly a decade later, she watches in amazement as her chief torturer, Fidel
Castro, is nominated for the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize by some fool in Norway's
parliament.
The reasons that Castro should get tossed out of the running are told by the
numbers of dissidents executed, persecuted, jailed and forced into exile. Cruz
Varela is one of those reasons.
She watches in amazement as her chief torturer is nominated for the Nobel
Peace Prize.
One fall day in 1991, a mob of state security agents stormed her home and
dragged her into the street. They beat her and attempted to force her crumpled
writings down her throat.
She still recalls the government-sponsored thugs. "Make her mouth
bleed!'' they taunted.
For as much as they tried, they couldn't force Cruz Varela to swallow her
words. Later, her jailers tortured her in ways she still cannot fully describe.
But they could not silence her; her 1992 book of poems, The Exhausted Angel, was
translated into 27 languages.
The poet born on a farm prophetically named Laberinto -- Labyrinth -- had
clamored for democratic reforms. Given the violence of her captors, an outsider
might have concluded that she had possessed large quantities of explosives
instead of poems.
Even now, seven years since leaving Cuba, Cruz Varela's flashbacks verify
the violent core of Castro's government.
As I listened to the visiting writer recite her poems before a warm Miami
audience last week, stressing her art over her politics, I could tell Cruz
Varela had evolved in leaps of grace. Her recent years living in Madrid have not
only invigorated her work, they have helped to heal her emotional wounds.
She had feared she would never regain her inspiration.
"All of my words -- all of them -- had stayed behind in Cuba,'' she
recalled.
But the embrace and fortunate long memory of human rights advocates brought
back all her words and multiplied them.
Now it's not a battered foe that stands in contrast to Castro.
"I'm not a victim of Fidel Castro,'' she said, "I'm simply a
person who tried to exercise freedom.''
But clearly there are those, like this Norwegian politician, who wouldn't
understand such a concept.
Cruz Varela calls Castro's nomination "a joke, the product of his own
circuitous lobbying efforts.''
It is, she believes, a desperate attempt to steal the thunder generated by
Julian Schnabel's film Before Night Falls, the story of the late writer Reinaldo
Arenas' struggles against brutality and homophobia in Castro's Cuba.
"The film is opening the world's eyes to Castro's true nature. And,
being the rabid, celebrity whore that he is, he decided he needed to make a
splashy move, crazy as it may be,'' she concludes in a thin voice that drifts
and lingers at once.
lbalmaseda@herald.com
Guevara's captor decries execution
By Mar Marin . EFE. Published Sunday, March 25, 2001
MEXICO CITY -- Retired Gen. Gary Prado, Bolivia's new ambassador to Mexico
and commander of the army battalion that captured Ché Guevara in 1967,
said killing the Cuban guerrilla leader was "a historic mistake'' and
claimed he would never have pulled the trigger if ordered to do so.
Prado's appointment as ambassador has sparked protests from the Mexican
left, which holds him responsible for the execution of Guevara, who was captured
while leading a band of Marxist guerrillas battling Bolivia's government.
In a wide-ranging interview on the subject, Prado called the decision by
Bolivia's top military commanders to execute Guevara "a historic mistake,''
one that he would have resisted. But, Prado said, he was out on patrol when the
order was given.
Guevara, one of the principal leaders of the guerrilla forces that brought
Fidel Castro to power, left Cuba in 1965, intent on ramrodding other Third World
revolutions. After an unsuccessful attempt in Africa, he moved to Bolivia.
CLUE FROM PRESS
The Bolivian army wasn't even certain Guevara was still in the country until
reading articles by French intellectual Regis Debray, who had interviewed him in
the jungle, Prado said.
The army quickly assembled a task force and cornered Guevara and his small
band of guerrillas near La Higuera, Bolivia, on Oct. 8, 1967.
The rebels were surrounded at the gorge of the Yura River, outside the
village. Guevara, who was wounded in the leg, did not resist when he and some of
his men were taken by surprise as they attempted to flee, Yura said.
After his capture, Guevara appeared "depressed and downhearted. He kept
repeating that his struggle was over,'' Prado said. But a few hours later "we
talked about his diary; he smoked his pipe and seemed to cheer up,'' Prado
added.
What surprised him most that night, Prado said, was Guevara's ignorance
about Bolivian reality.
Guevara "admitted that he was unaware of conditions in Bolivia,'' Prado
recalled, adding he was convinced that was one reason the Cuban revolutionary's
efforts failed.
"Bolivian peasants had land and distrusted the bearded foreigners more
than they did the army, so they gave us information that led to his capture,''
Prado insisted.
As they talked that night, Prado had no idea that Guevara would be executed
the next day, he said. Neither did Guevara.
"He asked me what his trial would be like, whether it would be a
court-martial and where it would be held,'' recalled Prado.
ABSENT DURING KILLING
But, Prado said, when he returned from a patrol the next day, he learned
Guevara had been shot hours earlier on orders of the high command. He covered
Guevara's head with a handkerchief "to keep his face from becoming
deformed,'' Prado said.
Killing the revolutionary was "a historic mistake'' on the part of the
Bolivian government, headed by then-President René Barrientos, "who
feared the international repercussions of a trial and thought there was no
appropriate place in Bolivia to confine Ché,'' Prado continued.
"I don't understand the reasons that led to his killing,'' Prado said.
The government "should have consulted those of us who were involved''
before taking action, he said.
A former presidential advisor, cabinet minister and ambassador to Great
Britain, Prado complained about being primarily associated with Ché's
capture, saying, "I have done much more important things than capture
Che.''
Copyright 2001 Miami Herald | 