Carlos Wotzkow with the collaboration of Jaums Sutton.
Monday, Sept. 9, 2002, NewsMax.com.
"We believe the fundamental risk is the more than 100 varieties of
birds migrating each year from the North and they can transmit the virus to
Cuba," Granma Digital, official Cuban newspaper.
Everyone should know that the newspaper Granma would take up this topic
only in order to make us think what they want us to think.
As I told U.S. intelligence officials in August of 2001, "You see
things from the perspective of an elephant that is being bitten by an ant. You
don't realize that a mound of ants can eat an elephant." (1)
Despite the risk of opening myself up to ridicule once again, I will
state the facts as I know them about Cuba's biological attack on the U.S.
The facts begin in 1980 at the Institute of Zoology in Havana, where I
worked as a research assistant from 1980 to 1982. Statements of those in
charge insinuated (you can understand why they couldn't just make
straightforward statements) that the institute was a front for a platform for
covert bacteriological warfare. (2)
Credibility, specifically mine, immediately comes into question after
making a statement like the one I just made. When I revealed this information
to U.S. authorities in 1992 (3),
they suggested I could have made it all up to impress them and gain
sympathies for asylum in the U.S.
But I have now been living in Switzerland for 10 years, quite established
with a wife and five children. So can we move on to the much more important
issue of morals? No country deserves the heinous things directed at the U.S.
by Cuba. Especially a country that has been as supportive as the U.S. has
been for the Cuban people.
But on to the terrestrial side of the story. Fidel Castro made weekly visits
to the Zoology Institute. Not visits accompanied, reality-TV-style, by video
cameras, Granma and international reporters staple tools of his
ever-present efforts to promote his public image. These were secret weekly
visits with no public record.
Is this whole theory of using migratory birds to deliver disease to the U.S.
just my personal paranoia? Granma just confirmed it in its digital edition of
Aug. 23, 2002, by presenting the same paranoia.
Here is the process simple and scientific which I first
described in my book published in 1998:
- Catch birds that are in the process of migrating. When one has a U.S. band
on it, carefully remove the band and mail it to the organization that installed
it, with an explanation of where the bird was found, and you will receive a
history of that bird, including when and where it was banded. This is standard
practice in the field of ornithology.
- If other members of the flock are captured at the same time, it is
scientifically safe to assume that they all came from the same place. That's
what birds do. They start out together, fly together, stop to rest together and
can be caught together.
- Continue catching birds until you catch some that prove, by the band
information received from the U.S., that they are from the area of the U.S. you
are interested in. This step is important, as you will see in step 7.
- Keep the birds safe and healthy until it is the season for them to migrate
north.
- Inject them with the West Nile virus.
- Release them.
- This step isn't really a step, because the birds do the work. They fly to
their place of birth. Not to the closest land to the north. Not willy-nilly.
Back to the precise area they are from, unless something physically prevents
them from going where they are programmed to go. That is a scientific fact known
since the beginning of banding. Thus, they are like a missile guided by nature.
- Another non-step, because the birds and mosquitoes do the rest. But you
already know this step.
It really is simple if you do the research first and choose the right
disease transmitted by the right mosquitoes and the right type of birds that are
migratory and like mosquito-infested areas.
You have to consider things like the incubation period and symptom level of
the disease (if it makes the birds too sick to fly before they can get home,
it's the wrong disease). You have to consider how long it takes the birds to fly
the distance to the area they were banded (if it's too far based on the
incubation period and symptom level, it's no good).
It takes time to plan out and test and try all the things necessary to know
what birds to choose and what disease to use. Use birds from an area of the U.S.
that no one would associate with Cuba, like New York. It could easily take, say,
20 years to do the research and have the first guided missiles make their
arrival known. Like from 1980 to 1999. I saw them working on it in 1980, and
1999 is when the first cases were detected in New York.
Cuba has the time, and the motivation.
A later step is the one where the birds migrate back to Cuba and infect
mosquitoes and people, but no plan is perfect. And anyway, if you are clever,
you can blame this step on the U.S. Blame the U.S. for the West Nile virus'
boomerang arrival in the population of Cuba: If only the U.S. had done the right
thing by properly taking care of it, etc., etc.
Granma and the other official sources work so well for those in Cuba and
those on the outside who don't seek more information. Reading Granma presents a
perfect keyhole that reveals only the portion of the room that Castro has
carefully placed in view.
The keyhole blocks the view of the victims of encephalitis in Cuba that
began with a teen-ager in 1991. Perhaps 20 percent of the injected birds
released to migrate to the U.S. were unable to make the strenuous trip because
of their inactivity in captivity, thus exposing Cuban mosquitoes to the infected
birds.
Despite thousands of cases of encephalitis in Cuba, the precise diagnosis
has never been made clear by the Cuban government. There has been no official
connection made to the mortal viral pathogen of Baghdad known as the West Nile
virus, nor its connection to the Cuba-Iraq connection made so public with
Castro's visit to the Middle East prior to Sept. 11, 2001.
An interesting little irony of all this is that, I believe, the mosquitoes
may very well be out of circulation, due to the change of seasons, sufficiently
long enough before the migration return to Cuba begins. The infected birds will
be dead or too weak for the migration. Meaning only healthy birds will be
migrating back to Cuba.
Notes
1. Aug. 5, 2001, Miami, Fla., meeting
with special agents John A. Bellamy and J. Brooks Broadus, of the Federal
Bureau of Investigation. Return
2. Those in charge of the Institute of
Zoology included Fernando Gonzalez, Noel Gonzalez Gotera, Hiram Gonzalez,
Agustin Egurrola, Inez Garcia and Marbelia Rosabal. Return
3. I assume that the gentlemen who
introduced to me as "Mr. Williams" in the U.S. Embassy in
Switzerland in August 1992, while introducing himself as a special agent of
American intelligence, was actually of the Central Intelligence Agency or the
National Security Agency. Return
© Carlos Wotzkow, 2002
Carlos Wotzkow is an ornithologist and a writer, author
of the books "Natumaleza Cubana" (1998) and "Covering and
Discovering" (2001) with Agustin Blazquez, and of dozens of articles in
favor of nature and human rights in Cuba. His articles are distributed
monthly in magazines and via the Internet. He has lived in exile in
Switzerland since 1992, in Bienne since 1994.
You may reach Mr. Wotzkow at
Gundlachi@hotmail.com
Natumaleza Cubana
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