USA Today. 09/05/00- Updated 07:14 PM ET.
NEW YORK (AP) — With much security but little fanfare, Cuban President Fidel Castro arrived in the United States on Tuesday for the first time in five years for this week's U.N. Millennium Summit.
Castro was seen arriving in a black limousine at the Cuban Mission in midtown Manhattan shortly after 1 p.m. where he is to stay during the three-day summit.
Cuban officials said Castro immediately went into a meeting with Malaysian Prime Minister Mahathir Mohamad. He then went to China's U.N. mission nearby for a meeting with Chinese President Jiang Zemin. No details of either meeting were immediately available.
Castro's arrival had not been announced and there were no protesters stationed nearby.
But elsewhere in Manhattan, a prominent Cuban-American exile, Jose Basulto, met with FBI officials to file a report on the 1996 shootdown of two unarmed civilian airplanes belonging to Basulto's Miami-based Brothers to the Rescue organization.
Basulto was in a separate aircraft that wasn't hit by Cuban MiGs in the shootdown, but four people on board the two aircraft were killed.
''Our purpose is to file a report that lets the authorities know the perpetrator of the crime is now here in the city of New York,'' said Basulto's attorney, Robert Villasante.
He said there wasn't anything preventing U.S. authorities from detaining and interrogating Castro and then determining that the Cuban leader doesn't enjoy diplomatic immunity.
Castro arrived in the United States three months after winning a major victory over his political enemies in this country with the return of 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez to Cuba.
Elian was the subject of a protracted custody fight between his relatives in Miami, who fought to keep him in the United States, and his father and grandparents, who battled to have him returned to Cuba.
The United States was obliged to grant Castro a visa under a 1947 U.N. rule that requires the host country to grant visas to officials attending U.N. meetings. Castro last spoke in New York at the 50th anniversary of the United Nations in 1995.
Nevertheless, Sen. Jesse Helms, a Republican, demanded Friday that neither Castro nor any other high-ranking Cuban official be allowed in the country for the summit.
New York Mayor Rudolph Guiliani criticized Castro in a speech to the Cuban American National Foundation in Miami on Thursday, saying ''a dictator (like Fidel Castro) who oppresses people is someone who should be ostracized by the United States.''
Giuliani snubbed the Cuban president in 1995 when he visited New York City, excluding him from a dinner and concert. During that trip, Castro blasted unilateral trade embargoes, such as the U.S. sanctions against his country.
His schedule for this trip has not been announced.
This is Castro's fifth visit to the United States since the Cuban revolution in 1959.
Castro's best-known American visit was in 1960, when he arrived as a 35-year-old revolutionary leader in power just one year. Castro stayed at a hotel in Harlem, and Soviet Premier Nikita Khruschev dropped by to introduce himself.
Copyright 2000 Associated Press.
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