Published Wednesday, November 7, 2001 in
The Miami Herald
Harvard scholar and former New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said
that everyone is entitled to his own opinion but not his own facts. Not a bad
concept to keep in mind now that Cuban government officials claim that the
reason for including Cuba on the list of terrorist nations is total nonsense;
that the inclusion of Castro's Cuba among Iraq, Libya, Iran and other unsavory
characters is motivated by U.S. domestic politics.
Sixteen anti-embargo activists, including Princeton professor Alejandro
Portes and John Hopkins University visiting professor Wayne Smith agreed,
charging that Castro is on the terrorist list due to the unwillingness of the
United States to offend elements of the Cuban-American community.
Is Castro's Cuba a terrorist state?
Biological weapons are of no minor concern for Americans today. Castro's
bankrupt regime has spent more than $1 billion to set up a scientific
infrastructure that, former Secretary of Defense William Cohen said in 1998,
could support an offensive biological-warfare program. In 1995 the U.S. Office
of Technological Assessment included Cuba among 17 countries believed to possess
biological weapons.
Last year Ken Alibeck, former deputy director of Biopreparat, the Soviet
Union's biological-weapons program, revealed that a few years after Castro's
visit to the Soviet Union in 1981, Cuba had one of the most sophisticated
genetic-engineering labs in the world.
A few days ago the University of Miami School of International Studies
released a report, Castro and Terrorism: A Chronology. It says that:
Castro refused to join the other Ibero-American heads of state in
condemning ETA terrorism at the 2000 Ibero-American Summit in Panama and slammed
Mexico for its support of the summit's statement against terrorism.
This summer Colombian officials arrested IRA members Niall Connolly, Martin
McCauley and James Monaghan and accused them of training the Revolutionary Armed
Forces of Colombia (FARC). Connolly had been living in Cuba as the
representative of the IRA for Latin America.
Argentine-born Cuban intelligence agent Jorge Massetti helped funnel Cuban
funds to finance Puerto Rican terrorists belonging to the Machetero group. The
Macheteros hijacked a Wells Fargo truck in Connecticut in September 1983 and
stole $7.2 million.
Illich Ramírez Sánchez, known as Carlos the Jackal and
responsible for numerous terrorist acts in Europe in the 1960s and '70s trained
in Cuba.
Black Panther leaders in the 1960s received weapons training in Havana.
Does any of that have anything to do with the influence of Cuban Americans?
Were exiles responsible for the expulsion of Castro's diplomats from Paris and
London who were linked to Carlos the Jackal? Do exiles explain why Castro
supported Puerto Rico's Macheteros, charged with terrorist acts there and on the
mainland? Were exiles responsible for his training of the Faribundo Marti Front,
El Salvador's terrorist group, or for Uruguay's Tupamaros, known for targeting
Americans?
One day the archives of Cuba's intelligence service will be opened just like
the KGB's and East Germany's Stasi's. Then details will be known, as well as the
names and activities of Castro's "agents of influence'' in the United
States. But if history is any indication, they will say they fell for the
romance of the revolution, that they could not have imagined such a regime and
such a tyrant. They will go on with their lives, just like the old Stalinists
who saw no difference between Stalin's Russia and Great Britain and who claimed,
while it mattered, that Stalin's terror was simply an invention of the Russian
exiles in Paris.
Frank Calzón is executive director of the
Center for a Free Cuba in Washington,
D.C.
Copyright 2001 Miami Herald
Related links
Secretary Cohen forwards Cuban threat assessment to Congress / US
Department of Defense
Defense Secretary's letter to Thurmond on Cuban threat /
usinfo.state.gov
Cuba:
possible threat to the national security of the United States through
non-conventional military methods | 
