Miami Herald.
February 5, 2001
Czech fails in bid for Castro to free pair
From Herald Wire Services. Published Sunday, February 4,
2001, in the Miami Herald
HAVANA -- A top-level Czech envoy failed on Saturday to win freedom for his
two compatriots jailed in Cuba on charges of subversive activities.
Czech Senate President Petr Pithart told reporters he was unable to secure
the release of former Czech finance minister Ivan Pilip and 1989 Velvet
Revolution-era student leader Jan Bubenik in his six-hour talks with Cuban
leader Fidel Castro.
Pithart said he was returning home to the Czech Republic.
"However, I believe my mission was successful,'' the lawmaker said
shortly after the talks ended.
He said Havana and Prague "were interested in resolving the issue as
soon as possible'' and expressed confidence Bubenik and Pilip would be set free
"in a reasonable amount of time.''
Pilip, 37, and Bubenik, 32, were arrested Jan. 12.
The Cuban government has charged them with subversion, saying they were
holding "meetings of a conspiratorial nature with members of subversive
Cuban groups'' and that they are U.S. agents.
Pithart went into his closed-door meeting with Castro at an undisclosed
location at about 1 p.m., according to a Czech Embassy official.
The Senate president, who was invited to Cuba by Castro, was able to see
Pilip and Bubenik on Tuesday and Thursday.
Pithart has been in Cuba since Monday, trying to win freedom for the two
detainees.
Earlier Saturday, Castro asked that the Czech Republic offer an official
apology over the matter.
Czech President Vaclav Havel has refused to apologize,
Offer an apology to our country . . . there must be an excuse.'
FIDEL CASTRO
in remarks on Czech dispute
but Castro suggested such action would help solve the dispute.
"Offer an apology to our country . . . there must be an excuse,''
Castro said during a six-hour speech at the end of a congress on the effects of
globalization on developing countries.
"We are telling the truth and we have the proof,'' he insisted.
U.S. entertainer cleared to make music in Cuba
The Baltimore Sun. Published Saturday, February 3, 2001, in
the Miami Herald
WASHINGTON -- Ry Cooder, the musician who was once fined by the U.S.
government for traveling to Cuba without permission to collaborate with the
acclaimed musicians known as the Buena Vista Social Club, is back in Cuba
recording music.
And this time, thanks to last-minute intervention from top Clinton
administration officials, he's legal.
Cooder, who with his Cuban colleagues won a Grammy award in 1998, received
U.S. permission to make new recordings in Cuba after then-Secretary of State
Madeleine Albright and Samuel Berger, the Clinton administration's national
security advisor, weighed in on his behalf in the last days of the
administration, U.S. officials say.
Cooder, who encountered trouble last year in obtaining a license from the
Treasury Department for a new trip to Cuba, in September gave $10,000 to Hillary
Rodham Clinton's senatorial campaign. On Jan. 17, three days before President
Clinton left office, he was granted the license.
Spokesmen for Sen. Clinton and former administration officials said there
was no connection between Cooder's campaign contributions and the Treasury
Department's approval of a new Cooder trip.
"She was not involved in this matter,'' said Karen Dunn, a spokeswoman
for Sen. Clinton.
Cooder's California-based lawyer also denied a link, saying the musician
supported Hillary Clinton generally as a candidate and expected no personal gain
from the contribution.
"Ry's made donations to a number of politicians and done it over a
number of years,'' said the lawyer, Candice Hanson. "Hillary Clinton -- I
bet she doesn't know who Ry Cooder is. As far as I know, she doesn't have
anything to do with this.''
Cooder has contributed to the campaigns of California's Democratic senators
Barbara Boxer and Dianne Feinstein.
More than a year ago, the Treasury Department fined Cooder $25,000 for
failing to obtain a license for his first recording trip to Cuba in 1996, which
resulted in the Grammy-winning Buena Vista Social Club album.
In August, the government said it would approve Cooder's application so long
as he earned no money from any new Cuban projects, according to Hanson and a
congressional official.
Cooder rejected that offer. He reapplied for a travel permit Nov. 7.
Observer tells of fatal shoot down at trial
Emotions rise as victims' names read
By Gail Epstein Nieves. gepstein@herald.com. Published
Saturday, February 3, 2001, in the Miami Herald
Sitting in the witness stand, Arnaldo Iglesias paused, choked back tears and
slowly read aloud from four death certificates:
Carlos Alberto Costa, 29.
Pablo Morales, 29.
Mario de la Peña, 24.
Armando Alejandre, 45.
All four men were Brothers to the Rescue fliers who perished in columns of
smoke over the Florida Straits, as Iglesias watched from the window of another
Cessna on that day of the fatal shoot down, Feb. 24, 1996.
Friday was the Cuban spy trial's most emotional session yet. From each death
certificate, Iglesias read with a husky voice the added clerical notation: "Body
destroyed by explosion from missile fired by Cuban MiG and not recovered.''
"Did you ever see Carlos Costa again?'' prosecutor John Kastrenakes
asked Iglesias.
Kastrenakes pressed on: Did you ever again see Pablo Morales? Mario de la Peña?
Armando Alejandre?
"No,'' Iglesias answered four times, hushing the courtroom into
silence.
Iglesias, 62, a data administrator for La Liga Contra El Cancer, the League
Against Cancer, bent over in the witness box and wiped his eyes. His wife Mirta
cried silently in the audience. Relatives of the slain men sat stone-faced but
later, in an elevator, Costa's mother's eyes filled with tears.
Iglesias testified that he flew as an observer on more than 100
search-and-rescue flights starting in the early 1990s and eventually became
secretary of Brothers to the Rescue.
By early 1996, after rafter traffic had slowed to a trickle, Iglesias and
the Brothers co-founders -- José Basulto and Billy Schuss -- developed
plans to drop human-rights leaflets onto Cuba from international airspace
outside Cuba's 12-mile territorial limit.
After consulting a meteorologist about winds and weather, Iglesias said he
made two leafletting trips on Jan. 9, 1996, and Jan. 13, 1996. First he threw
out a "few thousand'' leaflets. The second time he dropped some 250,000.
Basulto, Schuss and Juan Pablo Roque -- later revealed as a Cuban spy --
also made the first trip, he said.
On Feb. 24, 1996, Brothers decided to make another search-and-rescue
mission, Iglesias testified. In one Cessna flew Costa, the group's chief pilot,
with Morales. In the second Cessna flew de la Peña and Alejandre. In the
third Cessna, the lead aircraft, flew Basulto, Iglesias and observers Sylvia and
Andres Iriondo.
Iglesias said he "had some reservations'' about the plan because it was
his first flight since his controversial leafletting activities. No more
leafletting was planned for that day, he said. Nor was there any plan to enter
Cuban airspace.
The aircraft took off late from Opa-locka airport and headed south. As
Basulto approached the 24th parallel -- an imaginary dividing line in the
Florida Straits marking the boundary of the airspace controlled by Miami FAA
from the airspace controlled by Havana Center -- Basulto announced himself to
Havana, Iglesias said.
Havana's air tower responded. "They expressed we were in danger
crossing the 24th parallel,'' Iglesias testified. But Basulto kept flying.
Brothers pilot Guillermo Lares testified earlier that Brothers pilots had
heard that warning many times before.
But since the 24th parallel is still almost 40 miles north of Cuban
airspace, Basulto and other pilots had a legal right to be there, Lares said.
Iglesias testified that Costa and de la Peña also announced to Havana
Center as they crossed the 24th parallel. Iglesias said he then took over the
controls of Basulto's plane and started turning east.
Suddenly, to the north, Iglesias saw a Cuban MiG. He maintained radio
contact with Costa for several minutes. Then, "in the distance, we could
see a column of smoke.''
Two of his friends had vanished.
For six more minutes, Iglesias said, he had radio communication with de la
Peña.
Then, he saw "like a ball of fire and another column of smoke.''
Two more friends were gone.
Iglesias is scheduled to continue his testimony on Monday.
The human drama in the courtroom was matched by a tense legal battle that
could have lasting implications for the government's case.
Outside the jury's presence, U.S. District Judge Joan Lenard told
prosecutors she has "serious questions'' about whether they can offer
Iglesias' testimony to authenticate a tape made by Basulto during the shoot
down.
The contents of the tape were not revealed. But in tapes previously made
public, the Cuban MiG-29 pilot who fired could be heard exclaiming, "We hit
him. Cojones. We hit him. . . . This one won't mess around anymore.''
To get the Basulto tape in, Kastrenakes could be forced to call Basulto as a
government witness -- a move he apparently was trying to avoid.
Defense attorney Paul McKenna has said his client, Gerardo Hernández,
is a scapegoat in the shoot down and that Basulto is really to blame.
Of the five accused spies on trial, Hernández faces the most serious
charge: conspiracy to commit murder in the shoot down.
An outsider in Miami and Havana
By Kevin Baxter. kbaxter@herald.com. Published Sunday,
February 4, 2001, in the Miami Herald
Cuba on My Mind: Journeys to a Severed Nation.
Román
de le Campa.
Verso. 182 pages. $23.
Román de la Campa has written a tidy little book that, like its
author, can't quite figure out what it wants to be. Its subtitle suggests a
travelogue detailing a return to the homeland de la Campa knew only partially
before fleeing it as a boy. But instead, the first third of the book focuses
mostly on his struggles to find his way in the strange new land of the United
States, lost and lonely, under the auspices of Operation Peter Pan.
De la Campa also spends considerable time ruminating over the many chasms --
political, economic, philosophical and cultural -- separating Havana and Miami.
Indeed, divisions between the island and the diaspora almost four decades after
de la Campa's middle-class family left Cuba appear consuming.
But the fact that Havana and Miami's exile community have their differences
is hardly news, and de la Campa's analysis offers nothing original. The slim
volume eventually takes us back to Cuba -- de la Campa was one of the first
exiles to return to the island in 1977, and he has made repeated trips since --
but even those journeys appear to have inspired little original thought. De la
Campa finds the revolution dogmatic; he tells us that intellectuals enjoy only
limited freedom, that the infrastructure is collapsing and that the official
sanctioning of a parallel economy in dollars has produced many unexpected
problems. Anyone even moderately versed in the details of Cuban society has been
over this material many times.
De la Campa is hardly the first exile to have sided with the revolution only
to grow disillusioned over time. Nor is he the first to view as an honor his
outsider status in both Miami and Havana. But had he provided something new -- a
fresh insight, a novel argument, an unexplored avenue -- he might have helped
answer the riddle of contemporary Cuba. Instead, he only footnotes many of his
most compelling points, boosting his arguments with sources who previously had
drawn the same conclusions.
What we're left with is the unshakable feeling that Cuba on My Mind is less
an attempt to inform the reader than de la Campa's effort to address his
identity. Is he Cuban? Cuban American? Certainly he's a product of the
revolution, but in what way?
In the end, it's obvious de la Campa is not of Miami or Cuba but from
somewhere in between. This is the most profound discovery in the book and a
revelation sure to have wide resonance among others in the same predicament. And
for many readers, that alone will make this book worthwhile.
Kevin Baxter is The Herald's arts editor.
Castro's new grudge
The following are excerpts from newspaper editorials regarding Cuba's
arrest of two Czech activists:
Published Saturday, February 3, 2001, in the Miami Herald
The Los Angeles Times:
Two prominent Czech activists became targets of Fidel Castro's wrath [last]
month after they visited Cuban journalist Antonio Femenías and
human-rights activist Roberto Valdivia. That contact could cost them up to 20
years in prison. So much for the hand of international friendship when politics
are involved.
Ivan Pilip, a Czech parliament member and former finance minister, and Jan
Bubenik, a one-time student leader, have been charged with "counterrevolutionary
plotting on behalf of United States interests.'' The men were arrested in
central Cuba, where they had met with the two Cuban dissidents.
Pilip and Bubenik have gotten squeezed between Czech President Vaclav Havel,
who led his country away from communism, and Castro, a hero of the movement.
What once was a warm relationship between Prague and Havana cooled with the
demise of communism and last year turned icy when the Czechs co-sponsored a U.N.
resolution accusing Cuba of human-rights violations.
The Cuban caudillo will gain nothing by these arrests and stands to lose
ground with countries that so far have been patient with his dictatorial
policies.
The New York Times:
When the Velvet Revolution arrived in Czechoslovakia in 1989, Jan Bubenik, a
student leader, must have been convinced he would henceforth be safe from arrest
for anti-communist rebellion. Twelve years later, however, Bubenik and his
colleague Ivan Pilip are in jail for counterrevolutionary activities -- in Cuba.
The arrests seem to be in retaliation for the Czech Republic's criticism of
Cuba's human-rights abuses.
Havana seems likely to bring the two men to trial because the Czech Republic
sponsored a resolution censuring Cuba at the annual meeting of the U.N. Human
Rights Commission. It is easy to see why the resolution was justified.
The Prague Post:
[It's interesting that] Castro's apparently willing to open what has been
called a Third Front -- a challenge to the evolving Central European order that
has recently seen former communist states like the Czech Republic, Poland and
Hungary join NATO.
For Castro, rooted in the Soviet system, this is heresy of a high order. So
was the idea that a former dissident and determined anti-communist like Vaclav
Havel could become president of a nation, Czechoslovakia, that for years
furnished Havana with weapons and industrial assistance.
When Havel's Czechoslovakia first assailed human-rights violations in Cuba
in 1990, signing a stern U.N. document, Castro was enraged. He called the move "mean
and shameful.''
Pedro de la Hoz, writing in party organ Granma, recently spoke of Havel in
unusually coarse terms. "[The West] fabricated Vaclav Havel in a very
similar way to the way they try to fabricate dissidents in other countries, such
as our own, where people with no talent, with absolutely great mediocrity, try
to pass as poets.''
Not surprisingly, Havel says he takes the "accusations against'' Pilip
and Bubenik "personally because I used to hear such unfounded statements
for 30 years.'' It is an ugly grudge match.
Copyright 2001 Miami Herald | 