CUBA NEWS
March 12, 2004

CUBA NEWS
The Miami Herald

Poll: Hard line on Cuba endures

A new Cuban exile group enters the debate on Cuba's future with a poll showing that Cuban Americans retain hard-line attitudes on Fidel Castro.

By Oscar Corral, ocorral@herald.com. Posted on Thu, Mar. 11, 2004.

As controversy over U.S. policy toward Cuba intensifies, two wealthy, conservative Cuban exiles have formed a new group and conducted a poll to help influence the debate.

Miami car dealer Gus Machado and Leopoldo Fernandez Pujals, a Cuban exile who built a pizza empire in Spain, have enlisted the aid of Washington lawyer Mauricio Claver-Carone to represent their group, Cuba Democracy Advocates.

Its first major action: hiring Miami-based Campaign Data Inc. to survey 600 Cuban-American registered voters in Miami-Dade and Broward counties.

Their poll, conducted from Feb. 16-24 and released Wednesday, shows that Cuban Americans maintain hard-line attitudes toward Fidel Castro and want to continue the U.S. embargo.

It also found that there is little support for Cuban dissident Oswaldo Payá's Varela Project, and that many younger Cuban Americans -- nearly 46 percent of the respondents between 18 and 39 years old -- say the United States should take military action against Castro.

The margin of error was plus or minus three to five percentage points.

The poll's conclusions are at odds with those of similar polls conducted during the last two years that show Cuban Americans moving away from hard-line positions.

The survey's questions have drawn criticism. One independent polling expert said they were asked in an unbalanced way likely to draw a predetermined response.

DIFFERENT DIALOGUE

The group's leaders defend its methodology, saying they were only providing accurate information to participants.

''What's happening in the community is quite fascinating,'' said Claver-Carone, who is lobbying Congress full time for the group. "It's a very interesting period where we are having a different kind of dialogue more directed at the future of Cuba.

"The Varela Project is part of the Miami debate, and part of a debate on a future transition in Cuba.''

The Varela Project, led by Payá, has focused on gathering tens of thousands of signatures on the island during the past two years to petition the Cuban government to respect human rights and allow basic civil liberties. It has been flatly rejected and condemned by the Cuban government.

Payá seeks change by targeting a loophole in the communist constitution that says the Cuban people can petition for change.

QUESTION ON VARELA

Pollsters asked respondents this question about Varela: "The Varela Project accepts the continuation of the current Cuban constitution and the Communist Party as the only political party in Cuba. Knowing this, do you support the Varela Project?''

Most people, about 66 percent, said they do not support Varela, while only 16 percent said they support it. Nearly 18 percent said they had no opinion.

A separate poll conducted late last year for the Cuba Study Group showed very different results. In that poll, conducted by Sergio Bendixen, Cuban-American voters were asked simply, "What is your opinion of the Varela Project?''

A majority of those respondents, about 59 percent, thought it was good, while 25 percent said it was bad.

The Cuba Study Group, which is also made up of prominent Cuban exiles, is a strong supporter of Payá and the Varela Project.

The independent expert asked by The Herald to review several of Cuba Democracy Advocates' questions said they were unbalanced.

''The very one-sided way in which the questions are asked really leads the respondent to an answer,'' said Mark Schulman, past president of the American Association for Public Opinion Research. "I can say that this particular survey is useless in determining attitudes toward Cuban policy.''

But Claver-Carone said the survey merely provided accurate information about Castro's Cuba that other polls did not.

Professor Dario Moreno of Florida International University, who wrote the poll questions with input from members of Cuba Democracy Advocates, said the Varela Project question ''is probably leading,'' but defended the questions and the results of the poll.

He said the group disclosed the wording of the questions so people can make up their own minds about its validity.

''To argue that there has been a change in attitudes in the Cuban-American community is really making a huge leap of faith,'' he said.

At a time when plans are being drawn up in both Washington and Miami for a post-Castro transition in Cuba, the Varela Project has become one of the most intensely debated efforts among exiles to bring about change in Cuba.

''My own sense is that there is enormous support for the Varela Project,'' said Carlos Saladrigas, chairman of the Cuba Study Group. "I'm not questioning the validity of the numbers, but I don't think [the new poll] undermines the support that exists in the community for Varela.''

Herald database editor Tim Henderson contributed to this report.

Cuban spies' trial flawed, lawyers say

Federal prosecutors tell an appellate panel that five convicted Cuban agents received a fair trial; defense attorneys say that wasn't possible in Miami.

By Larry Lebowitz. llebowitz@herald.com. Posted on Thu, Mar. 11, 2004

Lawyers for five Cuban spies argued Wednesday that they were unfairly convicted in a flawed 2001 trial that never should have been held in an anti-Castro hotbed like Miami.

Federal prosecutors countered the trial was fair, the judge gave the defense plenty of chances to seek a new venue and the life sentences handed down to three of the spies were justified.

At the center of the debate was the Feb. 24, 1996, shooting down of two Brothers to the Rescue planes by Cuban Air Force MiGs. Exiles say the incident occurred over international waters, while Cuban officials contend the exile group's planes crossed into Cuban airspace.

The three-judge panel of the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals asked pointed questions about the government's evidence underlying the murder conspiracy conviction of spy ringleader Gerardo Hernández. Defense attorneys contend no evidence directly links Hernández, a career agent with the Cuban Directorate of Intelligence, to the shoot-down.

Appeals Judge Stanley Birch asked what was the proof Hernández "was going to know that it would be a murderous shoot-down as opposed to one justified by [Cuban] sovereignty.''

WARNINGS

Federal prosecutor Caroline Heck Miller responded that the Cuban government had told Hernández in coded radio messages that a ''confrontation'' was imminent and to make sure his operatives stayed off the Brothers' planes in the days before the fatal attack.

But Hernández ''had no control over what they told him,'' Birch shot back.

Judge Phyllis Kravitch noted that the conviction required a plot to down planes in international airspace -- not over the communist island. Her point: The Castro government had been warning the United States and the rest of the international community that the Brothers group, which mainly searched for Cuban rafters, had made 25 incursions into Cuban airspace in the 20 months before the shoot-down.

The case has few legal precedents and it may be a while before the appeals court issues a ruling.

If the defense succeeds in vacating the murder conspiracy conviction against Hernández, it could have an effect on the life sentences handed down against codefendants Antonio Guerrero and Ramón Labañino. All three were convicted of espionage conspiracy and their life sentences were based, in large part, on the murder evidence.

Federal public defender Richard Klugh argued there was no evidence the espionage created an ''exceptionally grave danger'' to U.S. national security interests. ''It was nothing more than a flea on a pimple of the United States,'' he said.

Heck Miller acknowledged that the spies never obtained classified documents -- but it wasn't for a lack of effort.

Ring members, some using fake identities, tried to spy on U.S. military installations and Cuban exile groups to feed military and political information back to Havana and discredit the exile community.

CHANCE OF RETURN

If the appeals court overturns the murder conspiracy count, Hernández, Guerrero and Labañino could face considerably less prison time at a resentencing hearing -- and perhaps a chance of returning to Cuba one day, said Hernández trial attorney Paul McKenna.

''There's no way [the U.S] is even going to consider a trade as long as murder is hanging over this proceeding,'' McKenna said after the hearing. "But if we can get rid of that stigma, we might be able to trade them someday.''

The change-of-venue issue was raised by attorneys for all five spies. Attorney Leonard Weinglass said the trial should never have been permitted in a community with more than 500,000 residents who left their homeland because of the Castro regime.

Heck Miller countered that U.S. District Judge Joan A. Lenard, who presided over the trial, gave defense attorneys ample chances to argue their change of venue motions and gave them extra chances that effectively removed all Cuban Americans from the jury.


The defense attorneys repeatedly praised the jury during the trial, she said.

''That happiness persisted until the convictions took place,'' Heck Miller said.

The spies have been turned into national heroes in Cuba, their faces splashed on billboards, and are the subject of a government-sponsored international campaign to sway support against the U.S.

Kin of terrorism acts in Cuba go to Panama for exile plot trial

Andrea Rodriguez, Associated Press

HAVANA - Family members of victims killed in terrorist attacks against Cuba over four decades planned to travel to Panama to watch the man they blame for the loss of their loved ones go on trial for plotting to kill President Fidel Castro.

Luis Posada Carriles and three other Cuban exiles go on trial Monday on charges of conspiring to kill Castro during an international summit in 2000 in Panama.

"If God exists, if justice exists, I ask (that they be condemned)," Justino di Celmo told a news conference Thursday. Di Celmo is the father of a 32-year-old Italian businessman killed in a 1997 bomb explosion in a Havana hotel.

In an interview with The New York Times in 1998, Posada admitted he was behind that and several other bombings on the island and expressed no remorse for the young Italian's death.

Violent attacks against the island, often launched by Cuban exiles, began soon after the 1959 revolution that brought Castro to power. Some of the four men going on trial in Panama for the alleged plot against Castro have allegedly been linked to some of the earlier attacks.

Posada was arrested in Panama in November 2000 along with fellow Cuban exiles Gaspar Jimenez Escobedo, Guillermo Novo Sampol and Pedro Remon Rodriguez after Castro publicly announced that someone was plotting to kill him.

The defendants have denied any involvement in a plot to kill Castro, and Panamanian courts ruled there wasn't enough evidence to try the Cubans for attempted murder.

But a Panama judge ordered the men to stand trial on charges of conspiracy, possessing explosives and endangering public safety. Panamanian authorities found explosives hidden outside Panama City and say they have evidence linking the explosives to Posada and the others.

On Thursday, relatives of the victims of the earlier terrorist attacks signed a declaration titled "Open Letter to the People of Panama," demanding a fair and impartial trial.

"We're not being driven by a spirit of revenge, we're just demanding that justice be imparted," said Carlos Cremata, whose father was among 73 people killed in 1976 bombing of a Cubana airliner.

Posada was twice acquitted of that action, but spent nine years in a Venezuelan prison before escaping in 1985.

The king is dead; long live memories of the Cuba frita

By Enrique Fernandez, efernandez@herald.com.

The king of the Cuban hamburger died a couple of years ago, leaving the throne to the self-proclaimed El Rey de las Fritas, an eatery on Little Havana's Calle Ocho.

The late king was Octavio Soler, a bohemian and, as his oldest friend called him at his funeral service, a bon vivant. The kind of guy -- if there is such a kind, for I suspect he was an original -- who was sleeping in his Volvo because he'd run out of cash to pay the rent and who owned a wine collection he didn't drink because he was a health nut. The notion of selling the wine to pay the rent never crossed his mind.

His calling was film and video (countless clips for major Latin talent like Rubén Blades and Celia Cruz), at which he was both brilliant and unable to make a real living. But to me he was the one and only Rey de las Fritas. He brought to the making of these savory, diminutive cousins of the American hamburger a quality that is essential for true gourmandise: obsession.

And not just to fritas. When we both lived in New York, he would travel to a Cuban coffee shop at the very top of Manhattan for a Cuban sandwich because the meats there were sliced paper-thin by hand, the only way to do it, he insisted. He was right.

PAPER CHASE

For his fritas, which he made at home for friends, he would go to Union City, N.J., the Little Havana of the Northeast, to get the right buns and, very importantly, the right kind of paper to wrap them in.

Octavio was duplicating, down to the finest detail, the fritas he remembered, with his prodigious memory for minutiae, from his Havana childhood. I, too, suffer from the sickness of obsession and from a memory that fails me at retrieving life-support data but accesses the most useless arcana. And I can vouch that his fritas (which he kept making when he, like I, moved to Miami) were the real thing.

Fritas are -- were, for all Cuban street food has passed on the island or has been transformed in exile -- small ground beef patties, heavily seasoned, turned red with a generous dose of paprika, fried on a hot griddle, served on a suitably small bun that has been smeared with . . . in my childhood I thought it was ketchup but Octavio showed me it was tomato paste . . . and filled, right on top of the patty, with fried shoestring potatoes no thicker than angel hair. On Havana streets, they were sold from carts equipped with small, propane-fueled stoves.

They were delicious. And, like so much funky street food, they could be deadly -- the last stomach ache of my Havana childhood came from a wonderfully greasy frita.

''The secret of a great frita,'' Octavio would reveal to anyone who asked, "is to use the cheapest, greasiest ground beef.''

(All cooks have secrets they do not reveal, or more plainly, all cooks tell lies. Octavio's was his insistence that his shoestring potatoes were home fried, that he had a special appliance for making them, when, in fact, they were out of a store-bought can, like those at any Cuban coffee shop.)

Until I met Octavio in the New York of the '80s, I had not tasted fritas since that last, unkind, Havana encounter. I ate burgers.

Fast-food was just starting up when I arrived in the land of no-fritas, and I had my share of their version, including a peculiar one sold at a chain from my Gulf Coast teens called Beef or Biff Burger that dipped the cooked patty in barbecue sauce. Weird.

At drive-in joints, I feasted on ''hamburger all the way,'' which did not mean unnatural acts with ground beef but a burger with all the possible sauces and trimmings. I eventually rejected these industrial products and prided myself in degustations of upscale burgers, the thick, grill-marked, medium-rare kind one got at better restaurants.

And so it went, until I met Octavio in New York and my childhood rushed back to me, Proust-like, with the taste of his obsessively authentic fritas.

CLOSE ENOUGH

But he's gone. So it's El Rey de las Fritas for me. I don't dare eat them anywhere else for, knowing how far Miami Cuban food has strayed from my memory of the real thing, I fear the deep depression that accompanies gastronomic disappointment. El Rey is close enough.

Until the day it all comes back to my hometown, the day when . . . you know. Then I will go back too, if only to tell my island compatriots the tale of the man who kept the flame, the virtual propane flame, alive in exile. Not the king; I take that back. Let the crown rest on the Calle Ocho shop. Not the king but the hero. El héroe de las fritas.

PLACE: El Rey de las Fritas.
PRICE: Fritas $2.25-$2.50.
CALLE OCHO: 1177 SW Eighth St., Miami; 305-858-4223; 8 a.m.-10:30 p.m. daily.
BIRD ROAD: 9343 SW 40th St.; 305-223-9944; 7 a.m.-11 p.m. daily.
HIALEAH: 421 W. 29th. St.; 305-863-0880; 7 a.m.-11 p.m. daily.


 

 


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