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Jose Antonio Jimenez. .C The Associated Press. Yahoo!
MEXICO CITY (AP) - A feud between Mexico's Foreign Secretary Jorge Castaneda
and Cuban President Fidel Castro has spilled over into a spat between
Castaneda's ministry and his own embassy in Havana.
On Tuesday, a ministry official accused Mexican Ambassador to Cuba Ricardo
Pascoe of about $86,000 in financial irregularities.
Pascoe "is not a big fish, but he is a little, Caribbean-colored
fish,'' the ministry operations manager, Mauricio Toussaint, quipped in a news
conference.
Most of the complaints, such as the "duplicated payments'' Toussaint
reported, appeared to be practices that are common among foreign offices in
Cuba. Many companies pay Cuban employees a small amount to supplement the meager
salary Cuba provides, between $20 to $40 a month.
In Havana, Pascoe denied the accusations and said he was considering legal
action. He said the claims were politically motivated.
Pascoe, a member of the opposition Revolutionary Democratic Party, said
government auditors had not previously announced any problems.
"The fact that the results of a supposed audit are being made public
without informing the interested party is approaching criminal and defamatory
conduct,'' he said.
Pascoe has irritated Castaneda with statements that have not echoed the
country's official policy at a time when Mexican-Cuban relations are more
strained than they have been in decades.
Even though President Vicente Fox has promised to maintain close ties with
Cuba, he irked Castro by naming Castaneda as foreign minister.
Castaneda, whose earlier books about Cuba irritated officials on the island,
has accused some critics of caring more about Cuba than about Mexico's
relationship with the United States.
Both Castaneda and Pascoe came out of Mexico's socialist left. But while
Castaneda has embraced close ties with the United States and infuriated his
former colleagues on the left, Pascoe has tried to maintain his leftist
credentials.
The feud erupted when Toussaint told a news conference last week that
Pascoe's accounting was under investigation.
Pascoe held a subsequent news conference to deny any wrongdoing. He said he
had requested an audit, which turned up an immigrant trafficking network and led
to the transfer of two consular officials to Mexico City, where they continued
working.
He said a second government audit was a "threat,'' but declined to
provide specifics, insisting he had no plans to resign.
Toussaint on Tuesday said Pascoe "had put the honor of the foreign
ministry in doubt.''
He complained that Pascoe had traveled out of Cuba without permission from
Mexico City several times, had bought goods on the black market - a common
practice in scarcity-plagued Cuba - and had shifted $2,000 from office accounts
to his entertainment budget.
Toussaint said an investigation could lead to Pascoe's removal.
Mexico is the only Latin American country that never broke relations with
Cuba after Castro's 1959 revolution. | 
