|
Yahoo!
October 21, 2002
Cuba expresses respect for U.S. spy
By Anita Snow, Associated Press Writer. Fri Oct 18, 4:07 PM
ET
HAVANA (AP) - In Cuba's first comments about a U.S. intelligence analyst who
confessed to spying for the communist island for 16 years, Foreign Minister
Felipe Perez Roque on Friday expressed "profound respect and admiration"
for the convicted spy.
Ana Belen Montes was sentenced Wednesday to 25 years in prison on espionage
charges.
Answering questions on a live Internet forum, Perez Roque said he hoped
someday "it will be unnecessary for men and women of the moral stature of
Ana Belen Montes and of the five Cuban heroes — also unjustly imprisoned in
the United States — to sacrifice their lives, their families and their
personal interests."
The five Cubans Perez Roque referred to were sentenced in Miami last year on
espionage charges. Cuba has lionized them as heroes, saying they were merely
trying to gather information to protect the island against terrorist attacks by
exiles in South Florida.
At her sentencing hearing on Wednesday, Montes decried American policies
toward Fidel Castro's government as "cruel and unfair."
Montes, 45, had worked at the Defense Intelligence Agency as one of the
Pentagon's most senior experts on Cuba's military.
"I felt morally obligated to help the island defend itself from our
efforts to impose our values and our political system on it," Montes told
the judge.
Perez Roque wrote Friday on the Cuban government Web site that he felt "profound
respect and admiration for Ms. Ana Belen Montes."
"Her actions were moved by ethics and by an admirable sense of justice,"
he said.
In accepting Montes' sentence under a plea agreement this week, U.S.
prosecutors accused her of giving Cuba secrets so sensitive they could not be
described publicly.
Court records said Montes provided documents that revealed the identity of
four American undercover agents, details about U.S. surveillance of Cuban
weapons, and information about a December 1996 war games exercise in the
Atlantic.
American prosecutors believed Montes wasn't motivated by money because she
received only nominal amounts to cover expenses. During Friday's Internet forum,
Perez Roque said Cuba had not paid Belen for her services.
Montes pleaded guilty in March to conspiracy to commit espionage, admitting
that she revealed to Cuba the identities of four agents. The four are said to be
alive and not in prison, but little more is publicly known about them.
Montes, of Puerto Rican descent, was believed to have been recruited by
Cuban intelligence when she worked in the Freedom of Information office at the
Justice Department between 1979 and 1985.
She later moved to the Defense Intelligence Agency where, by 1992, she was
among its top Cuba analysts.
Cuba's tobacco region struggling
By Juan Zamorano, Associated Press Writer Fri Oct 18, 2:16
PM ET
SAN LUIS, Cuba (AP) - The island's western tobacco-growing region is
struggling to recover after two recent hurricanes flattened many buildings used
to cure tobacco for Cuba's world-famous cigars before the start of the annual
growing season.
Hurricanes Isidore and Lili "wiped us out," septuagenerian tobacco
worker Agustin Carpio said this week in this rural community in the hard-hit
western province of Pinar del Rio, about 100 miles west of Havana.
"It not only affected the tobacco curing houses, but also yucca, rice
and coconut palms," he said.
Still Carpio, and other veteran tobacco workers who have fought scores of
similar battles during their long years nurturing the bushy plants used for the
world's finest smoke say the region and the industry will recover.
While 10,000 of more than 14,500 curing houses used for drying the leaves
were damaged or destroyed, most leaves were moved to safer storage before the
storms struck, the veteran growers said. Tobacco leaves must be dried for
several months in curing houses of weathered wooden planks and zinc sheeting
before being handcrafted into cigars.
"The effect is minimal," said Felipe Cabrera, of the San Luis
tobacco company here. Less than 1 percent of the tobacco harvested in this
community last spring was soaked by rain, he said.
And because tobacco growing season had not begun, no major harm was done to
crops, except for about 5 percent of seedlings to be used for planting, said
83-year-old Alejandro Robaina, the island's best-known tobacco producer.
Tobacco planting is expected to begin in late November as scheduled, added
Robaina. The harvest is gathered just once a year, in March or April.
"The government has put provided all of its resources to ensure
production is not delayed," Robaina said as he calmly smoked a cigar at his
home here.
The weather "will always create difficulties, but we are going ahead
with the production," said Robaina, a man so respected in the tobacco
industry that a brand of cigar carries his name.
Hurricane Isidore battered the western region with heavy rains and winds
when it crossed the island on Sept. 24. Hurricane Lili delivered similar
punishment on Oct. 2.
"Most installations where the (harvested) tobacco was being kept was
not in the zone of influence," Habanos SA, the company that markets Cuban
cigars abroad, said this week. Habanos SA is a mixed enterprise, run by the
Cuban government with money invested by a French and Spanish company: the two
top international markets for this island's cigars.
Cuba's tobacco crop annually produces more than 100 million cigars for
export.
Fidel Castro's government has sent hundreds of workers here from neighboring
provinces to help build new curing houses for the upcoming tobacco growing
season.
Carpio, who lives a few minutes from Robaina, this week was dealing with the
reconstruction of his curing houses. Both curing houses were flattened, but only
the newer is worth trying to save, he says.
"At my age I shouldn't be doing this," said Carpio, now in his
seventies. "I have a house and a certain amount of money. But this is my
life and I want to keep going." | 
