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Ex-intelligence officials, others with influence get foreign jobs
By Juan O. Tamayo. Jtamayo@herald.com. Posted on Tue, Aug.
20, 2002. The Miami Herald.
Communist Cuba is exporting ''business managers'' to work for capitalist
firms abroad, and that is only one of the intriguing angles in the tale of a
little-known government agency in Havana, Cubatecnica.
Most of the approximately 400 Cubans contracted by
Cubatecnica to work abroad
are former top intelligence officials or relatives of senior government
officials who obtained their jobs through thinly veiled blackmail, current and
former agency employees say.
A former Interior Ministry colonel is running a warehouse in Panama, an
electronic eavesdropping expert works as an accountant in Madrid, and the son of
a Cuban Revolution hero is fixing computers in Venezuela, the sources said.
Cuba is well known for sending thousands of doctors, teachers and sports
coaches to work abroad under government contracts, helping other nations while
bringing in hard currency desperately needed by the communist government.
Yet far less is known about the Cubatecnica program, which contracts
mid-level business managers, accountants and computer technicians to work for
capitalist enterprises abroad.
That program's roots go back to 1991, when Cuba opened itself to foreign
investors following the collapse of the Soviet Union but found that the foreign
firms wanted to hire Cuban staffers for their Havana offices.
Cuban officials made sure the first jobs went to former officials of the
Interior Ministry, in charge of domestic security, who had been purged in 1990
following the execution of several ministry officials and army Gen. Arnaldo
Ochoa on charges of drug smuggling.
''Fidel Castro was afraid of these subversive capitalists, so the government
allowed them to hire those purged interior ministry people -- fired but still
trusted,'' said one current Cubatecnica employee.
They were highly lucrative jobs -- paying up to $600 a month in a country
where the average monthly salary was $13 -- and soon began attracting the
trusted sons and daughters of senior government officials.
''We were hired because we knew people in high places,'' said a former
Cubatecnica worker who claimed to have attended high school with two of Castro's
sons. Like the other agency workers interviewed, he asked for anonymity, fearing
retaliation.
THINGS CHANGE
But by the second half of the 1990s, many of the Cubans working for foreign
firms in Havana were getting into trouble -- sometimes paying bribes to
government officials to win contracts or sidestep the bureaucracy, sometimes
procuring girlfriends and drugs for their bosses.
It was about that time that the Cuban employees began asking their bosses to
find them work abroad, and that Cubatecnica emerged as the government's official
broker between the Cuban workers and the capitalist firms abroad.
Some of the Cubans told their bosses that they wanted the higher salaries
they could earn overseas. Others claimed that police were investigating them for
corruption and needed ''to refresh themselves'' abroad, said the Cubatecnica
workers.
A few others boldly told their prospective employers that they would work
abroad for them without salaries, according to two former Cubatecnica workers,
implying that Cuba's intelligence agencies would take care of their living
expenses.
'In all these cases, there was the unspoken blackmail that the Cuban workers
knew a lot about the companies' dirty business in Cuba and would cause problems
if they did not get out,'' one former Cubatecnica worker said.
JOB COORDINATOR
Cubatecnica, created in the 1970s to handle the contracts of thousands of
Cubans sent to work in factories in communist Eastern Europe, brokered the new
contracts and now has an estimated 400 workers in Mexico, Spain, Panama, Chile,
Venezuela, Italy, Canada and France. Herald calls to Cubatecnica in Havana went
unanswered.
Cubatecnica's hires must report to the Cuban Intelligence Directorate's
offices in their respective embassies, known as Centers, on their contacts with
local political figures, according to the contractors.
''They all have families in Cuba, so they have to pay their tithe, drop a
little information here and there,'' said Norberto Fuentes, a Miami author once
close to Cuban intelligence.
Under their Cubatecnica contracts, half their official salaries must be
returned to the Cuban government, although many of the contractors also receive
under-the-table payments from their foreign employers, the Cubans explained.
MONEY FOREMOST
In fact, they added, most of the Cubatecnica contractors are today less
interested in intelligence work than in making money, so they can enjoy their
lives abroad and send remittances to relatives on the island.
''The intelligence angle is not that important anymore,'' said Fuentes. "Those
purged Interior Ministry officers have now created their own separate business
aristocracy, and the state security is not the monolith it once was.''
One Cuban who broke with Cubatecnica but stayed abroad working as a computer
repairman said: "I have a car, an apartment. I send money to my family and
can visit Cuba anytime I want to.
"That's the capitalist dream, no?'' | 
