| CUBA
NEWS
The
Miami Herald
Post-Castro Cuba will be 'a big mess,'
speaker says
A top-ranking senator
on the Finance Committee has ended a deadlock
with the Treasury Department over U.S. exporters'
agricultural sales to Cuba.
By Pablo Bachelet, pbachelet@herald.com.
Posted on Sun, Jul. 31, 2005.
WASHINGTON - A top senator ended a seven-month
standoff on Treasury Department nominees
last week after the Bush administration
clarified new rules that the lawmaker said
made it harder for U.S. companies to sell
food to Cuba.
''I pushed the Treasury Department hard
so that ag exporters could continue to sell
their products to Cuba,'' Sen. Max Bauchus,
the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance
Committee, said in a statement on Friday.
"I'm optimistic that this clarification
will provide U.S. ag exporters in Montana
and elsewhere with another option to restart
ag sales to Cuba.''
Agricultural sales to Cuba fell by about
25 percent in the first five months of the
year compared with the same period in 2004
after the Treasury Department ruled in February
that Cuba had to pay U.S. companies before
the shipment left a U.S. port, instead of
after docking in Havana.
Bauchus says the new requirement -- an
interpretation of ''cash in advance'' regulations
governing sales to Cuba -- was especially
difficult for small exporters.
Under the deal, the payment will still
have to be made before the boat leaves a
U.S. port, but Treasury clarified that it
can be held in a foreign bank that acts
as a seller's agent until the shipment reaches
Cuba.
The change doesn't amount to much because
companies were already using foreign banks
to trade with Cuba, said John S. Kavulich,
a senior policy advisor for the U.S.-Cuba
Trade and Economic Council, Inc., a New
York-based institution that monitors trade.
''It is always useful when the Treasury
Department puts something in writing,''
he said.
Castro's sister wins suit
Fidel Castro's sister
has won a libel suit she filed over a book
written by the dictator's daughter. She
says it defamed her family.
By Frances Robles. frobles@herald.com.
Posted on Sat, Aug. 06, 2005
Fidel Castro's sister Juanita is feeling
vindicated, even if her relief required
a libel suit against his daughter that dragged
on for seven years and cost more than $100,000.
Juanita Castro sees the fortune she spent
suing her niece, Alina Fernández
Revuelta, as the best money she's ever spent
-- an investment in family honor.
''People who were eating off Fidel's plate
yesterday come here and want money and power,
so they say whatever they want, even if
it's not true,'' said Juanita, who owns
a Miami pharmacy. ``They can do whatever
way they want, but not by offending my parents.
``My parents are sacred.''
Juanita recently won a 1998 lawsuit she
filed in Spain against Fernández,
the ruler's illegitimate daughter, who used
a wig and fake Spanish passport to defect
to Madrid. Fernández published her
memoirs four years later.
Juanita says she tossed ''Alina: The Memoirs
of Fidel Castro's Rebel Daughter'' to the
floor in a fit of fury after reading just
a few pages.
Her ire was directed at the passages about
Angel Castro and Lina Ruz, the parents of
Fidel and Juanita. Fernández describes
her grandfather as a murderous thief and
her abuela as a mixed-race sorceress. Lina's
father? She says he was a Turk who stole
from the blind.
Angel, she wrote, was a chieftain in a
lost corner of Cuba, who when he met Lina
''tore the clothes off a little girl with
his kind claws.'' He found obedient and
cheap labor by recruiting peasants from
his hometown region of Galicia, Spain.
''He would promise to take care of their
savings, making them buy from his own store,''
Fernández wrote. ``And later, when
they had served their contracts, he took
them to an isolated place and killed them.''
$45,000 JUDGMENT
The passages make up a tiny portion of
the 251-page tome, but a Barcelona court
ruled they libeled the Castro family. The
court ordered Fernández and Plaza
& Janes, the Barcelona Random House
division that published the book, to pay
about $45,000.
They will also have to publicly retract
what they printed, pull existing copies
off the shelves and cease publication. The
ruling was mostly moot: The book was already
out of print. An English version, published
under the title Castro's Daughter: An Exile's
Memoir of Cuba, lacks the offending passages.
The Spanish Supreme Court refused to hear
an appeal, meaning the verdict is final.
''This is very unexpected,'' said Fernández,
who hosts a radio show on WQBA. 'But I guess
you never know where peoples' -- judges'
-- sympathies lay.''
Fernández said she learned of the
three-month-old verdict from the Herald.
Court records show her lawyers never showed
up at the 2002 Supreme Court hearing.
A Random House spokesman in New York said
the publishing house would have no comment.
In Barcelona, the entire Plaza & Janes
management staff took August off and is
unavailable for comment, a secretary said.
Fernández said she's not sure how
many books were sold, but that the suit
stopped a second printing. She wound up
paying lawyers to defend a book that cost
her more money than it made.
But she defends her autobiography, saying
the Angel Castro lore was well known in
Cuba.
''I was guided by bibliographies and witnesses,''
she said. ``This is what happens when you
are honest.''
There is no shortage of books about Fidel
Castro, and a number of them touch on the
dubious origins of the family riches. Juanita
blasts historians -- who she dubs ''copiers''
-- as lazy hacks who repeated unverified
misinformation. If she had sued them all,
she said, she'd be a millionaire.
UNFLATTERING WORDS
Biographers describe Angel Castro as an
illiterate mercenary who first came to Cuba
as a calvary quartermaster for the Spanish
colonial army, paid by a rich man to take
his place on the frontlines.
After the war, Angel settled in Birán,
in the eastern province of Oriente, established
a large rural estate and dabbled in various
business ventures that made him rich. His
first marriage ended in divorce and he married
Lina, a family servant roughly half his
age, after the future Cuban leader was born.
Several biographers say he was most known
for riding his horse under the light of
the moon, so he could expand his territories
by moving the fences around his property.
His neighbors were the United Fruit Co.,
and he is alleged to have painted their
tractors and taken them for himself.
''He was very, very successful,'' said
Brian Latell, a retired CIA analyst on Cuba.
``Birán was a wild west frontier
kind of place in the 1920s and 30s. There
were outlaws roaming the hills.''
The elder Castro, he said, was known for
importing peasant workers from Haiti. And
he was tough.
''He had extraordinary leadership skills
just like his two sons, Fidel and Raúl,''
said Latell, whose book After Fidel will
be published in October. ``He had an extraordinary
ability to get other men under his leadership
to work.''
`A COW THIEF'
Other authors were less tactful.
''What Alina wrote was nothing,'' said
Carlos Franqui, a former Castro ally who
has authored several books about him. ``He
was considered a cow thief who mistreated
workers, particularly Haitians, and didn't
follow the law. He bribed people. Those
kinds of things have been published all
over the world.
``This is not a ghost story.''
Longtime exile leader José Ignacio
Rasco, a classmate of Fidel Castro's, agrees.
He said Angel Castro was known for paying
employees with coupons redeemable at his
company store. ''He was a gangster with
a machete,'' Rasco said.
But several experts, even Franqui, stressed
that the elder Castro was also a product
of his time, an era when there were no labor
unions and owners mistreated workers.
Juanita Castro stresses that none of the
hundreds of historians who have pored over
her family's story went as far as accusing
her dad of murder.
She is determined to see the public retraction,
even if she has to pay for a full page ad
herself.
''Part of my family was responsible for
a lot of suffering in Cuba -- you can't
change that,'' she said. ``But nobody has
the right to offend Fidel's family. Insult
Fidel -- there's plenty to say.''
Herald translator Renato Perez contributed
to this report.
1,524 Cubans interdicted since Jan.
1
More Cuban migrants -- 1,524
-- have been stopped at sea by the U.S.
Coast Guard so far this year than during
any of the last 10 years.
By Alfonso Chardy, achardy@herald.com.
Posted on Fri, Aug. 05, 2005.
The U.S. Coast Guard has intercepted 1,524
Cuban migrants at sea so far this year --
more than the total for any single year
since more than 37,000 migrants rode the
waves to South Florida in the 1994 rafter
exodus.
U.S. officials are not worried. They say
the increase in the number of Cuban migrants
stopped at sea is relatively small -- only
25 more people so far this year than during
all of last year.
Last year's figure of 1,499 was the largest
yearlong tally since 1994.
The trend suggests that the 2005 total
will be considerably higher by year's end
than for 2004.
''We have seen an increase in Cuban migrants
this year, but there is no indication of
a mass migration,'' said Coast Guard spokesman
Petty Officer Ryan Doss. ``It's up, but
it's still a low number.''
Figures for Cuban migrant interdictions
compiled in fiscal year format -- Oct. 1
to Sept. 30 -- appear more impressive: 2,027
so far this fiscal year compared to 1,225
in fiscal year 2004. By July 29 of the 2004
fiscal year, 1,068 Cuban migrants had been
intercepted.
Cubans stopped at sea are generally returned
home by the Coast Guard, a result of U.S.
accords with Cuba following the rafter exodus.
Some Cuban migrants stopped at sea are taken
to the U.S. naval base at Guantánamo
Bay for resettlement in third countries.
Cubans who evade Coast Guard interdiction
and reach U.S. shores are generally allowed
to stay in the United States.
Figures listing the number of Cuban migrant
landings in South Florida this year were
not immediately available.
More than 150 Cuban migrants landed in
the Florida Keys during July, according
to Border Patrol information released July
27.
Figures compiled by the Border Patrol for
fiscal year 2004 show a total of 955 Cuban
migrants arriving in South Florida, compared
to 1,072 in fiscal year 2003.
Some Cuban smugglers may have shifted tactics,
transporting migrants to the west coast
of Florida instead of traditional drop-off
points along the east coast.
Nineteen migrants possibly smuggled from
Cuba landed July 26 on Sanibel Island on
the Gulf Coast.
While Cuban migrant interdiction is up,
the number of migrants from other countries
stopped at sea is down.
For example, 847 Haitians have been intercepted
so far this year, compared to 3,078 last
year.
Agricultural sales to Cuba clarified
A top-ranking senator
on the Finance Committee has ended a deadlock
with the Treasury Department over U.S. exporters'
agricultural sales to Cuba.
By Pablo Bachelet, pbachelet@herald.com.
Posted on Sun, Jul. 31, 2005.
WASHINGTON - A top senator ended a seven-month
standoff on Treasury Department nominees
last week after the Bush administration
clarified new rules that the lawmaker said
made it harder for U.S. companies to sell
food to Cuba.
''I pushed the Treasury Department hard
so that ag exporters could continue to sell
their products to Cuba,'' Sen. Max Bauchus,
the ranking Democrat on the Senate Finance
Committee, said in a statement on Friday.
"I'm optimistic that this clarification
will provide U.S. ag exporters in Montana
and elsewhere with another option to restart
ag sales to Cuba.''
Agricultural sales to Cuba fell by about
25 percent in the first five months of the
year compared with the same period in 2004
after the Treasury Department ruled in February
that Cuba had to pay U.S. companies before
the shipment left a U.S. port, instead of
after docking in Havana.
Bauchus says the new requirement -- an
interpretation of ''cash in advance'' regulations
governing sales to Cuba -- was especially
difficult for small exporters.
Under the deal, the payment will still
have to be made before the boat leaves a
U.S. port, but Treasury clarified that it
can be held in a foreign bank that acts
as a seller's agent until the shipment reaches
Cuba.
The change doesn't amount to much because
companies were already using foreign banks
to trade with Cuba, said John S. Kavulich,
a senior policy advisor for the U.S.-Cuba
Trade and Economic Council, Inc., a New
York-based institution that monitors trade.
''It is always useful when the Treasury
Department puts something in writing,''
he said.
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