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NewsMax.com.
Wednesday April 24, 2002; 3:38 p.m. EDT
Recent news out of Havana suggests that Fidel Castro may have had the
ability to blackmail U.S. officials - right up to and possibly including
President Clinton himself - during the Elian Gonzalez standoff.
Borrowing a page from Sexgate taper Linda Tripp, it seems Castro has been
recording his phone calls with foreign government officials.
Mexican President Vincente Fox learned this the hard way on Monday, when the
Cuban dictator released tapes of Fox asking him to leave last month's conference
in Monterrey, Mexico early out of deference to President Bush.
With Castro's assurance that the conversations would remain secret, Fox
publicly denied he'd made any such request.
Whoops! Fidel's confidentiality promise evaporated the minute it no longer
served his purpose - leaving President Fox with international egg on his face.
The Vincente tapes now have officials from both governments threatening to cut
off relations.
The obvious question raised by this incident: Is Fox the only foreign
government official with whom Castro hit the record button? Not likely.
Could the hundreds of conversations between Clinton Justice Department
lawyers haggling with Cuban officials over Elian's fate have been likewise
captured for posterity? Probably, along with any calls President Clinton may
have made directly to Castro.
Might the president - or his chief Elian negotiator Greg Craig, who also
served as Clinton's Monicagate impeachment lawyer - let slip anything untoward?
An ethnic slur? A tidbit about selling Elian out? Or maybe, in a moment of
mutual machismo with the Cuban womanizer, a boast about other Monicas?
It's always been something of a mystery as to why the Clinton administration
was willing to go to the wall to return little Elian to Castro's gulag
posthaste.
The move ultimately cost Clinton his defacto third term, when Miami's Cuban
community turned their back on his hoped for successor, Al Gore - robbing Gore
of thousands of tie-breaking votes in the 2000 presidential election.
The answer to why Clinton threw his legacy away over Elian may ultimately
reside in Fidel's audio library. | 
