The Miami Herald.
July 10, 2001.
Foundation pursues goal: the prosecution of Castro
Head-of-state immunity issue an obstacle for expensive effort
By Carol Rosenberg. crosenberg@herald.com. Published Tuesday, July 10, 2001
From Chile to Costa Rica, from Miami to Madrid, the Cuban American National
Foundation is engaged in a costly, mostly behind-the-scenes, campaign to find a
prosecutor to level criminal charges against Fidel Castro.
"This is our No. 1 issue today and we really expect this Bush
administration to do it,'' said CANF legal counsel George J. Fowler III, who has
been pressing Attorney General John Ashcroft. "We cannot have dictators
willy-nilly doing what they want -- and then answering, 'I'm head of state.' ''
It may be a long shot. Some international law experts say the Cuban leader
is protected from arrest and trial under the widely held principle of
head-of-state immunity.
SPY CASE
But recent events -- notably last month's federal conviction of five Cuban
spies for Havana -- have revived interest in the effort, which the lobby
launched in late 1998 in light of Spain's bid to bring Chile's Augusto Pinochet
to justice.
So far, the group has spent about $700,000 on the five-nation effort, said
President Francisco "Pepe'' Hernández.
The strategy is this: Identify unprosecuted murders and other violence tied
to leftist guerrilla groups in Latin America and have lawyers take depositions,
press investigations and brief prosecutors on possible Cuban links that could
lead to the strongman himself, Castro.
1989 ATTACK
In Buenos Aires, for example, Hernández said foundation-paid lawyers
are pressing prosecutors to delve into the 1989 attack on the Argentine military
barracks of La Tablada. A guerrilla group called All for the Fatherland Movement
claimed responsibility for the attack, which killed 39 people, 28 of them
rebels. But, Hernández said, foundation officials believe that the trail
leads back to Cuban training and, perhaps, patronage.
At the same time, he said the foundation is keenly interested in the efforts
of former Cuban intelligence operative Jorge Masetti, an Argentine now living in
Miami, to get Chile to charge Fernando Flores Ibarra. Flores Ibarra, a Castro
friend and ally from the early days of the revolution, prosecuted cases that led
to the 1961-64 firing squad executions of members of the Fulgencio Batista
regime, then later anti-Revolutionaries. He acquired the infamous nickname,
Charco de sangre (Pool of Blood) and has visited Chile from time to time.
In Costa Rica, meantime, the foundation is offering legal expertise to the
journalists' union in their ongoing effort to bring someone to justice for the
1984 bombing of a press conference by the contra leader Eden Pastor, known as
Commander Zero. The bombing of a one-hut guerrilla base called La Penca killed
three journalists, including American Linda Frazier, 38, and has been blamed
through the years on the CIA or Sandinistas, although Masetti and others have
alleged a Cuban link too.
DOWNED PLANES
"Of course during all this time,'' Hernández said, "we have
been working on the indictment of Castro in the United States,'' as the
mastermind of the Feb. 24, 1996, shoot-down by Cuban MiG fighter-jets of two
Brothers to the Rescue planes. Four men were killed.
What might all this accomplish?
Fowler, a Havana-born, New Orleans-based attorney who specializes in
international law, said any eventual indictment would require the United States
to ultimately invade Cuba and capture Castro. Hernández said he opposes a
full-blown military invasion and that the Bush administration could resist any
inevitable pressure from Miami's Cuban-American community to invade.
A Bay of Pigs veteran, Hernández said he would support a covert
operation to snatch the Cuban leader. But he said the real impact of court
proceedings would certainly isolate Castro. Charges brought in a court, he said,
would contribute to the "international criminalization of the record of the
Castro regime, and specifically the figure of Fidel Castro.''
Castro, for his part, has dismissed such efforts as a bid to harm Cuba's
revolution.
"If a judge or authority from Spain or any other NATO ally were to ever
attempt to have me arrested, using arbitrary extraterritorial powers and
violating rights that are sacred to me, he should know beforehand that there
will be a fight, no matter where they try to do it,'' he said April 28. "For
I do believe in the extraterritoriality of the honor and dignity of man.''
FEAR OF ARREST
Absent Castro's capture, Hernández said, such charges put any
would-be successors on notice that they, too, could be held accountable for the
Castro regime's human rights record. In the meantime, he predicted, a federal
indictment would likely force Castro to stop traveling, for fear of arrest.
Foundation directors seized on the strategy soon after London police placed
Pinochet under house arrest in October 1998 in response to two Spanish judges'
warrants for his extradition to face trial for the slayings of Spanish citizens
in Chile from 1973 to 1983. Privately, some Cuban Americans admired the Chilean
strongman's iron-fisted crackdown on leftists in Chile. But they also envied how
Spain had succeeded in demonizing Pinochet internationally.
A STOP IN MADRID
So their first stop was Madrid. Cuban exiles filed a case in a Spanish court
against Castro, his brother Raul and other officials for 300 cases of torture,
murder and other crimes.
A Madrid court swiftly rejected that bid and, while foundation lawyers are
appealing in Spain, Hernández said they learned from Madrid to build
their cases on local citizen victims, rather than Cubans.
Hence, he said, their Buenos Aires case is based on the fact that the dead
were Argentine citizens in the suicide-style bombing attack on the barracks. And
in Costa Rica, while the target was a Nicaraguan contra leader, the dead
included two local journalists.
U.S. CITIZENS
And here, three out of four of the volunteers killed while flying on
Brothers to the Rescue Cessnas were U.S. citizens.
Ronald W. Kleinman, an attorney with Greenberg Traurig who represented three
of the Brothers families in their $187.6 million 1997 civil suit against the
Cuban government, called the CANF campaign a long shot.
"Unfortunately, there is no chance this is going to happen,'' he said,
describing scant international sentiment that Castro is a war criminal. "How
many countries actually view Fidel as a bad guy?''
Beyond that, Kleinman said, nations the world over recognize the "ancient
and unbroken practice'' of head-of-state immunity. "I don't believe there's
a country in the world that does not recognize [Castro] as head of state.''
Lawyers sought to get that immunity for Manuel Antonio Noriega, convicted of
narco-trafficking in a U.S. District Court in Miami in 1992 and now jailed in a
South Dade federal correctional facility. Technically, Noriega was not the head
of state but the strongman, head of the armed forces whom Panamanian President
Eric Arturo Delvalle had tried to fire.
U.S. forces invaded Panama and captured Noriega during the administration of
President Bush's father. The foundation is now campaigning with the new Bush
administration's Justice Department, whose chief of the Terror and Violent Crime
Section, James S. Reynolds, wrote Fowler on May 31 that lawyers were awaiting
the outcome of the South Florida spy trial.
"Let me assure you, however, that we remain committed to the pursuit of
this case, and we are prepared to review any additional evidence that may exist
concerning this matter,'' Reynolds replied to a CANF appeal to Ashcroft to
indict Castro.
"Personally, I would like to see Castro charged. But where are you
going to do it?'' said retired U.S. diplomat Richard Krieger of Boynton Beach,
whose International Educational Missions Inc. advocates the expulsion of former
Latin American torturers now living in the United States.
Krieger cited the suit now under way in Belgium by 28 Palestinian and
Lebanese survivors of Beirut's 1982 Sabra and Chatilla massacre. It alleges that
Israel Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is guilty of crimes against humanity for his
role as Israeli defense minister at the time of the killings -- by Christian
Phalange militiamen.
Belgian judges are now deciding whether Sharon should face charges for the
episode. An Israeli inquiry declared Sharon indirectly responsible for the
killings; he made a political comeback that elected him prime minister on Feb.
6.
Elián González makes rare public appearance at children's
rally
HAVANA -- (AP) -- The most famous boy in Cuba, 7-year-old Elián González,
made a rare public appearance on Tuesday at the closing ceremony of a meeting of
the island's communist group for schoolchildren.
"Socialist children,'' thousands of boys and girls in school uniforms
sang at the beginning of the morning gathering of the Pioneers Congress. "Steadfast!
Steadfast!''
Elián was smiling as he walked into the amphitheater with his father
Juan Miguel González and younger half-brother Hianny, now 2.
They watched a series of children in colorful costumes sing, dance and
perform skits from the front row before the stage built outside the U.S.
Interests Section - the American mission here - during González's battle
for his son's return from the United States last year.
Farther down the row sat Cuban leader Fidel Castro, who embraced González's
fight for his son and made it a national cause that eventually captured the
world's attention.
Neither Castro's nor Elián's attendance was announced in advance.
The Cuban government organized hundreds of rallies, marches and other
gatherings across the island over seven months last year to demand Elián's
repatriation, insisting that he had been "kidnapped'' by the Miami
relatives fighting to keep him in the United States.
González returned with Elián to Cuba a year ago last month
after winning a child custody battle that went all the way to the U.S. Supreme
Court.
Castro's government promised to protect the motherless boy's privacy after
his return and the child has been rarely seen in public since then.
Elián's mother and 10 others died in late November 1999 when their
boat capsized during an attempt to immigrate from Cuba to the United States by
sea. Elián was rescued by two men on a fishing trip off the coast of
Florida after they found him floating on an inner tube.
The resulting custody battle divided Cubans on both sides of the Florida
straits, pitting the communist government against its ideological enemies in
Miami's Cuban exile community.
Havana backed González's argument for his right to custody as Elián's
sole surviving parent.
Elián's Miami relatives and the anti-Castro exiles who backed them
argued that Elián would have a better life and more opportunities off the
communist island.
Copyright 2001 Miami Herald | 
