Files show orders to discredit pilots

Published Thursday, December 21, 2000, in the Miami Herald

Papers: Spies planned sabotage

Files show orders to discredit pilots  
BY GAIL EPSTEIN NIEVES
gepstein@herald.com

Even before Cuban MiGs shot down two Brothers to the Rescue planes in 1996, killing four men, Fidel Castro's intelligence bosses apparently targeted the Miami pilot group for sabotage and dissension, according to court documents in the Cuban spy trial.

Declassified communications from Cuban intelligence, read to jurors Wednesday, showed that accused spy and pilot Rene Gonzalez -- one of five men on trial -- was directed to burn the hangar and planes of the ``counter-revolutionary organization'' and to make it look like an ``accident, negligence or self damage.''

``Rumors will leak that [Brothers leader Jose] Basulto and his people caused the damage themselves to collect the insurance and get more money from their contributors,'' said the undated message, whose author was not revealed.

Operation Picada, or bite, as the anti-Brothers campaign was named, was one of dozens of missions allegedly linked to the five alleged spies now on trial in federal court. Picada also means nose dive.

Jurors also heard about orders from Cuban intelligence for someone to mail an ``alleged book bomb'' -- complete with ``plastique,'' or plastic explosives -- to a Miami-based CIA agent. Other missions sought to discredit the Cuban American National Foundation and Miami's Cuban exile community at large.

The communications were contained on nearly 1,000 encrypted computer disks confiscated during FBI searches of the defendants' South Florida apartments. Further testimony about the messages is expected when the trial resumes Jan. 3.

Developers of Operation Picada also directed Gonzalez -- a pilot for Brothers to the Rescue and alleged double agent -- to disable the group's ground antennae and transmission equipment ``making it seem like negligence.'' The orders were directed to ``Castor,'' one of Gonzalez's cover names, according to the government.

``Castor'' also was requested to ``inform us ahead of time'' of who was flying Brothers planes and when, and to try to hide material in Brothers planes.

The documents mirror suspicions voiced previously by Basulto, who has speculated that Brothers planes were ``sabotaged'' several times: cut cables in an airplane's control panel, a weight attached to the propeller of Basulto's plane, metal particles in the oil drum of another aircraft.

Basulto has said that Gonzalez was the first person at the Brothers' Opa-locka hangar after the 1996 tragedy. Gonzalez came to the United States in 1990 in a hijacked crop duster. He is accused of infiltrating exile groups and posing as an FBI informant.

Cuban intelligence bosses also tried to ``discredit'' the Cuban American National Foundation with Operation Finado, or deceased, according to other documents read to jurors.

CANF met in July 1998 to choose a successor to chairman Jorge Mas Canosa, who had died. The communications show that U.S.-based Cuban agents were directed to mail disparaging, anonymous flyers on possible candidates to some 40 people and media outlets.

``Who are you voting for as Chairman of the CANF?'' the flyer was to start.

It listed disparaging accusations against Jorge Mas Santos, Dr. Alberto Hernandez, Pepe Hernandez, Diego Suarez and Domingo Moreira Jr., and ended, ``Who should you vote for? Vote for the Finado.''

The five co-defendants -- accused members of the so-called Wasp Network -- were arrested Sept. 12, 1998, in the culmination of a major counterespionage investigation.

Lead defendant Gerardo Hernandez faces the most serious charge: conspiracy to murder the four Brothers fliers, allegedly by providing Cuban authorities the flight plan of two Brothers planes while instructing other spies to shun the doomed flight.

Though all of the accused spies acknowledge working on orders from Havana, they deny ever obtaining classified information or intending to harm U.S. interests.

Rather, they say they worked from a defensive posture, trying to identify the exiles presumably responsible for a series of bombings at tourist sites in Cuba and to find out if the United States had plans to invade the island. 

Copyright 2000 Miami Herald

The 1983 Wells Fargo Bank Robbery in West Hartford Connecticut and the Cuban Connection

Hartford Courant, November 7, 1999

The Untold Tale Of Victor Gerena

By EDMUND MAHONY
This story ran in The Courant November 7, 1999

LAREDO, Texas - For the glory of the Puerto Rican motherland, for the approval of his mother, for an injection of meaning into his meaningless life, Victor Gerena went and robbed $7.1 million from the Wells Fargo depot in West Hartford - more cash than anyone in U.S. history had ever stolen. 


He handed it over to Los Macheteros, the violent Puerto Rican radicals hoping to finance the revolution that would win their island's independence. In return, certainly Gerena could expect a substantial reward.

He would be legend among Latin America's anti-imperialists. He would at long last please his mother, Gloria, the ardent independentista who had been so proud of her eldest son's early success and so disappointed by the listlessness that followed. Perhaps even Fidel Castro himself, whose Cuban government nurtured Los Macheteros and helped pull off the robbery, would show his appreciation. Life could be a Caribbean idyll - sweet rum and sugary beaches.

But Gerena was so wrong.

Days after his brazen September 1983 heist, he was lumbering south in a tired old motor home - south around New York City and along the Appalachians, across the Mississippi River, south into Texas.

When the dusty border town of Laredo shimmered above the baked scrub, Gerena found himself hiding in what would become a crude metaphor for the rest of his life - a coffin-like compartment behind a false wall, more than $2 million of his stolen cash stacked close around him like bricks.

It was inside this self-made tomb of money that Gerena was shuttled across the new bridge connecting the United States with Mexico. Below, the Rio Grande in early autumn was a muddy, yellow creek. Mexican customs officers lounged in the shade and waved the boxy, white motor home on toward the bucket-of-blood brothels that fill Nuevo Laredo.

When the camper stopped, finally, it was outside a private apartment in Mexico City. There, the Cubans forged Gerena a set of Argentine identity papers. A passport was hand-delivered by Jose Antonio Arbesu, a diplomat and intelligence officer who would later lead the Cuban mission in Washington, D.C.

Gerena boarded a commercial flight to Havana. Just over $2 million, the first installment from the Wells Fargo robbery, flew in Cuba's ''diplomatic pouch.'' As far as the police hunting him around the world were concerned, Gerena vanished into thin air.

In fact, he vanished into a prison of history and politics and personalities far beyond his control. Less than a year after his escape, FBI tapes show, Gerena was a lonely exile on an isolated, impoverished island, pining for the girlfriend he left back home in Connecticut.

''For you and me, Cuba is an abstraction. For him it's not,'' a member of Los Macheteros said, arguing to his comrades that Gerena's fiancee, Ana Soto, should be allowed to join him. ''He knows 10 times better than you what's involved because of the length of time he's been living there. . . . He knows Cuba. You don't.''

* * * Today, Soto is a vastly different woman from the one Gerena was supposed to marry four days after the robbery 16 years ago. She's been in and out of prison on drug charges. She never made it to Cuba, having failed to pass certain ''political and revolutionary tests'' required by the doctrinaire Macheteros.

Like Gerena's mother and former girlfriends in the Hartford area, she hasn't spoken publicly of her exiled lover.
Indeed, Gerena, who is paradoxically the most and least important Machetero, was largely forgotten by the press and public until last summer. That's when President Clinton surprised just about everyone with an offer of early release from prison to 16 members of violent Puerto Rican independence groups - groups that have been killing, maiming and blowing up U.S. targets for 30 years.

The clemency became a predictable Washington controversy: It was a shameful ploy to win Puerto Ricans to Hillary Rodham Clinton's U.S. Senate campaign; or it was simply a reckless encouragement of potential terrorists. Most of the imprisoned nationalists didn't wait to find out. They dropped any pretense of indecision and snatched at the offer when it was threatened by opposition in Congress and in law enforcement.

But during all the discussion, what has always been the central element of the U.S. fight against the violent Puerto Rican independence movement has rarely been mentioned: Since Cuban President Fidel Castro took power, the independentistas have operated as an adjunct of the Cuban diplomatic-intelligence establishment.

Although the Wells Fargo robbery has been parenthetically referenced in the clemency debate, nothing is ever said of the Cuban fingerprints on the crime. Nor has anyone noted its role in Castro's revolutionary aspirations throughout Latin America.

Interviews with law enforcement agents, and a review of the FBI tapes, congressional hearing transcripts and other government documents, make it abundantly clear: Los Macheteros were trained, supported and at least minimally financed by the Cuban government.

After the robbery, an element within the FBI even argued for the indictment on robbery-conspiracy charges of some of the same senior Cuban officials who were guiding insurgencies in El Salvador, Nicaragua and elsewhere in Latin America. For reasons that are unclear, the Cubans were not indicted.

The current clemency controversy, now the subject of a congressional hearing in Washington, is just another echo of the United States' decades-old wrangling with Cuba. And the Wells Fargo incident, seen through the prism of time, is one more blip on a timeline of events going back to the radical Puerto Rican nationalists' attempted assassination of President Truman in 1950.

In fact, the fresh details and historical context of the robbery story offer a primer on left-wing, anti-colonialist, Cuban-instigated international intrigue in the latter half of this century.

The story encompasses the student radicalism on mainland and Puerto Rican college campuses in the 1960s. And it reveals Hartford as an epicenter of mainland nationalist activity during the 1970s and into the early '80s, with remnants of that era still apparent today. Edwin Vargas, who headed the Puerto Rican Socialist Party in Hartford in the '70s, for example, is now vice president of the Hartford teachers' union.

The Wells Fargo tale has a powerful human dimension as well. Amid the swirl of international and domestic politics lie two characters from opposite ends of the Puerto Rican experience whose improbable encounter would forever alter their fate.

One, Juan Segarra Palmer, embraced violent Puerto Rican independence at the elite Phillips Academy in Andover, Mass., then at Harvard. It was he who conceived the robbery and criss-crossed Latin America to plan it, living the life of a privileged, if clandestine, revolutionary.

The other was an apolitical guy who grew up in a bleak public housing project and substandard public education system in Hartford. For a time, this short, smart, strong young man defied the circumstance of his childhood to become a high school wrestling star bound for college and career and a bright future.

But something went wrong. And by 1983, this second man was aimless and down on his luck, a college dropout who was working nights at a boring, low-level job loading cash into an armored car.

* * * In the late 1960s and early 1970s, so-called domestic security experts were snooping around Hartford. The world was suddenly a scarier place. The U.S. was fighting a war in Vietnam. Fidel Castro was selling revolution to whoever would listen. Rioters were burning down U.S. cities. And intelligence collectors and communist hunters were in Hartford because they had decided terrorism by the Puerto Rican independence movement was another thing the country had to be protected from.

Hartford was, by then, a major population center for people of Puerto Rican heritage. The migration began at the close of World War II and by the 1950s and '60s was a flood. The city was the fourth-largest port of entry for Puerto Ricans in the mainland United States. They weren't drawn by the actuarial city's cultural cachet. They wanted work - specifically in the Connecticut River Valley shade tobacco industry. Each summer, the government moved Puerto Ricans north to Connecticut to work the tobacco fields and back south to the Caribbean to harvest winter crops. Each year, more and more people opted not to return to the island.

Hartford was becoming a center of Puerto Rican culture and politics. The commonwealth opened an office in town. Issues affecting the island were debated at Hartford forums. Sometimes candidates for office on the island campaigned in Hartford.

In the 1960s, politics everywhere were radicalized. The Cuban revolution and opposition to U.S. intervention in Vietnam charged the political climate in Puerto Rico and, by extension, in Hartford. Not that radical politics was anything new in Puerto Rico.

Cuba and Puerto Rico have long and common colonial histories. Both islands fought together for independence from Spain. Cuba remained sympathetic to the Puerto Rican nationalist cause when Puerto Rico became a U.S. possession at the close of the Spanish-American War.

Castro has called the Puerto Rican independentistas who tried to assassinate Truman and shot up the U.S. Congress in the early 1950s patriots who inspired his revolution. When he seized power in Cuba in 1959, his government became a magnet for Puerto Rican nationalists.

Among the first to arrive on the newly liberated island was Filiberto Ojeda Rios. Born in Barrio Rio de Naguabo in 1933, Ojeda was enrolled at the University of Puerto Rico by age 15. But he wanted to play the trombone and left school after two semesters. He moved repeatedly between Puerto Rico and New York, where he joined Local 802 of the musicians' union. He blew his horn at the El Morrocco. In 1961, two years after Castro took power, Ojeda moved to Cuba with his wife and two sons and joined the Cuban DGI, the Spanish acronym for the General Directorate of Intelligence, Cuba's principal intelligence agency.

He soon was spying on the U.S. military in Puerto Rico, using his trombone as cover. He played with an orchestra called La Sonora Poncena and lived in Santurce using the name Felipe Ortega. His first mission lasted a year.

Castro, meanwhile, consolidated his position in Cuba and, capitalizing on growing anti-Americanism over Vietnam, moved to take control of the leftist insurgencies brewing in Latin America. He built more than a dozen training camps for terrorists around Havana.

One of the first graduates was Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, the Venezuelen who became infamous as Carlos the Jackal after slaughtering dozens of people in Europe and the Middle East.

Ojeda by the late 1960s was second-in-command of the Puerto Rican independence movement's diplomatic mission in Havana. It was a period during which the movement was reshaping itself. In the great debate of the day - whether to achieve independence through nonviolence or make like Castro, fielding an army of guerrillas and taking to the hills - Ojeda preferred Castro's example.

Ojeda ''wanted to engage in forms of armed resistance,'' said Domingo Amuchastegui, a former Cuban diplomat who now lives in the United States. ''We granted them some support, essentially training. Those people were facing critical situations, so support was essentially underground training. And Ojeda is always the key figure here. He was absolutely convinced that they had to go back to the old traditions of the independentista.''

Many academics say it is preposterous to suggest that Castro would be so foolhardy as to support a group that launched armed attacks on U.S. interests. Amuchastegui and other intelligence sources have a ready response: Castro doesn't consider Puerto Rico part of the United States. During the 1960s and '70s, the Cubans were intimately involved with groups in the United States such as the Black Panther Party and Students for a Democratic Society, but never considered giving them military training, underground assistance or any other illegal support.

''There was never a decision to do this inside the United States with American entities, American institutions, American organizations,'' Amuchastegui said. ''Puerto Rico is different. For us in Cuba this was a part of a sacred policy or principle. For us, until this day, Puerto Rico is a colonial case.''

Amuchastegui said it may be impossible for the average American to understand the deep cultural and historic bond between Cubans and Puerto Ricans. But, he said, that bond has motivated Castro in all his government's decisions on Puerto Rico.

''Fidel Castro has stated privately many times that the day in history where only two people in the world may advocate for the independence of Puerto Rico, one of those two persons will be him,'' Amuchastegui said. ''For him, Puerto Rico is not the United States. And any action connected with the Puerto Ricans should not be seen as connected or threatening U.S. security.''

Ojeda emerged from talks in the early 1970s in Cuba over the future shape of the Puerto Rican independence movement at the head of a militant splinter group calling itself the Armed Commandos of Liberation.

He would later change the name to Los Macheteros - ''The Machete Wielders.'' The meetings in Cuba set off years of violence in Puerto Rico and on the mainland in New York and Chicago. In 1970, Ojeda and three others were arrested for bombing a tourist hotel in San Juan. The police caught him carrying Cuban government documents and secret codes. He jumped bail and ran back to Cuba.

The campus at the University of Puerto Rico during the same period had entered a state of near-continual riot, the result mostly of protests against the war in Vietnam. The same year Ojeda bombed the tourist hotel, the Puerto Rican state police riot squad shot and killed a university student.

In retaliation, the Armed Commandos of Liberation killed two American sailors in San Juan. More bombings soon followed, many ostensibly detonated in support of striking labor unions. The group bombed a Miss Universe pageant. One day, 17 coordinated bombs exploded at U.S. banks, stores and industrial complexes.

On the mainland, people were consumed by violence in the inner cities and on college campuses. The bombings in Puerto Rico were the small headlines on the bottom of the inside pages of American newspapers. But on the island, the Armed Commandos of Liberation were a constant threat.

  * * *
In 1970, the same year Ojeda's guerrillas killed two U.S. sailors in San Juan, a tiny woman with a thick Spanish accent moved her family of four sons and a daughter from the Bronx to Hartford, hoping the smaller, quieter, safer city with an energized Puerto Rican population would afford her children a better life.

Her name was Gloria Gerena.

---

(c)1999 The Hartford Courant 

https://www.courant.com/breaking-news/hc-victor-gerena-mahony-110799-story.html

Cuban opposition activist alleges police brutality | Reuters

 
Cuban opposition activist alleges police brutality

HAVANA, Aug 17 (Reuters) - A Cuban opposition activist said on Tuesday he was beaten and burned with a cigarette when police detained him over the weekend at a provincial station.

Oscar Elias Biscet, head of the illegal rights' group Lawton Foundation, was among more than 20 Cuban dissidents temporarily rounded up by security forces over the weekend trying to organise two opposition meetings in Havana and Matanzas province, according to dissident sources.

All were freed by Monday night in what appears to have been temporary arrests intended to prevent disturbances and protests against President Fidel Castro's government.

Biscet, the last to be released, said Tuesday that he was mistreated by police after being picked up in Pedro Betancourt, a small town in Matanzas, and taken to a station in the nearby town of Jovellanos.

He told reporters he was beaten about the face and shoulders, kicked in the ankles, burnt with a cigarette on his elbow, forced to strip naked, and threatened with a longer detention if he continued his opposition activities.

Speaking at a house in the run-down La Vibora neighbourhood of Havana, Biscet said he was arrested Saturday afternoon in Pedro Betancourt while visiting dissidents there who took part in a recent protest fast in support of political prisoners.

``I am a defender of human rights, and my activities will continue until the Cuban people achieve their rights and their freedom,'' he added.

No Cuban officials were available to comment on Biscet's accusations.

But Havana routinely dismisses such activists as ``counter- revolutionary'' trouble-makers seeking publicity, operating under orders of the U.S. government or anti-Castro exile groups in Florida, and lacking in any popular support.

The government also frequently criticises foreign correspondents in Cuba for allegedly encouraging dissidents by covering their activities.

Biscet, who advocates a civil disobedience campaign against Castro's government and in favour of democratic reforms, has been criticised by some sectors of Cuba's small and fragmented opposition for seeking excessive personal protagonism.

He said the alleged violence against him, and the round-up of other dissidents, might have been a response to the supposed appearance of anti-Castro propaganda last week in a Havana district where his group often operates.

Biscet's case was supported by the Miami-based exile group, the Democracy Movement, who issued a statement also detailing the alleged police violence against him.

``Although we welcome the release of Oscar Elias Biscet by the Cuban government, it's our position that he and the others should not have been detained in the first place as they were only engaging in exercising non-violent and universally recognised rights and activities,'' the statement added.

12:51 08-17-99

Copyright 1999 Reuters Limited

[ BACK TO THE NEWS ]

CUBA 1959 / 1999 por Felipe Sahagun | El Mundo

El Mundo, 31 de diciembre de 1998

 

 DOCUMENTOS

Jueves, 31 de diciembre de 1998 

   

CUBA 1959 / 1999

CLAVES

CINCO HECHOS MARCAN LA VIDA DE CUBA: LA CRISIS DE LOS MISILES, EL ATAQUE CONTRA EL CAPITALISMO, LOS «MARIELITOS», LA MUERTE DE OCHOA Y LA LEGALIZACION DEL DOLAR

FELIPE SAHAGUN

Como todas las revoluciones, la cubana tiene amigos y enemigos, fervientes defensores e implacables adversarios. Aunque el fin de la Guerra Fría ha matizado y difuminado todas las posiciones, la ideología sigue siendo determinante de la visión que se tiene de la revolución cubana.

A pesar de ello, casi todos aceptan como cruciales para Cuba cinco fechas desde la Revolución: la crisis de los misiles (1962); el discurso del 13 de marzo de 1968 por el que Castro destruye los últimos vestigios de la propiedad privada; el éxodo de más de 100.000 cubanos a Florida en la primavera de 1980; la ejecución del general Ochoa en julio de 1989, y la legalización del dólar en julio de 1993.

La crisis de los misiles

1962.- En julio del 62, un año después de establecer relaciones con la URSS, el régimen revolucionario cubano aceptó la instalación de misiles soviéticos en Cuba durante una visita a Moscú de Raúl Castro, ministro de Defensa.

A finales de agosto del mismo año, Ernesto Che Guevara viajó a Rusia para cerrar el acuerdo. El 4 de septiembre, el presidente John F. Kennedy aseguró tener pruebas del envío de 3.500 técnicos militares de la URSS a Cuba y advirtió que, si instalaban misiles tierra-tierra de ataque, Estados Unidos intervendría para impedirlo.

El 14 de octubre aviones-espía estadounidenses fotografiaron obras de construcción de 40 rampas de lanzamiento de misiles de alcance comprendidas entre los 500 y los 3.300 kilómetros en suelo cubano. Dos días más tarde, Kennedy tenía las fotos sobre su mesa, en el Despacho Oval de la Casa Blanca. El 22 de octubre, Kennedy publicó las fotos y anunció un bloqueo -cuarentena- de Cuba.

En un discurso radiotelevisado, Kennedy amenazó con una respuesta nuclear masiva contra la URSS si se lanzaba algún misil nuclear desde Cuba contra Estados Unidos, y con acciones militares directas -invasión, bombardeos o ambas cosas- en Cuba si los misiles soviéticos no eran retirados inmediatamente de la isla.

El 26 de octubre, Kennedy recibió una carta del dirigente soviético, Nikita Jruschov, en la que aceptaba retirar los misiles bajo la supervisión de la ONU si Estados Unidos se comprometía a no invadir Cuba. El peligro había pasado.

En Essence of Decision, el mejor análisis publicado hasta hoy sobre la crisis, Graham Allison demuestra que fue el momento de la Guerra Fría en el que la URSS y Estados Unidos han estado más cerca del precipicio nuclear.

En declaraciones a Theodore Sorensen, su mejor biógrafo, el presidente John F. Kennedy reconoció poco antes de ser asesinado que, de haber estallado la guerra nuclear, «podían haber muerto 100 millones de estadounidenses, más de 100 millones de rusos y millones de europeos».

Ofensiva revolucionaria

1968.- El 13 de marzo de 1968, cinco meses después de la muerte del Che en Bolivia, Castro anunció una «ofensiva revolucionaria» contra «los últimos vestigios del capitalismo y de la moralidad burguesa» con el fin de construir en Cuba «el verdadero comunismo». En el mismo discurso confirmó la detención y encarcelamiento de sus principales críticos comunistas del interior, dirigidos por Aníbal Escalante.

En las 24 horas siguientes nacionalizó o clausuró 58.012 zapaterías, relojerías minúsculas, barberías, viejas imprentas, puestos de fritangas, pequeños comercios y hasta hornos de carbón. El Estado, como señala Jesús Díaz en el capítulo Los años grises de su libro Informe contra mí mismo, se arrogó el control absoluto de la producción y distribución de los bienes de consumo, gigantesca tarea para la que no estaba preparado.

«El empresario mediano y pequeño quedó fuera de los planes quinquenales, acusado de sanguijuela y explotador, y muchos se retiraron a España, Miami o Venezuela, en exilio tardío, con los bolsillos rotos», añade Jesús Díaz.

Mariel

1980.- Tras graves tensiones diplomáticas de Cuba con Venezuela y Perú sobre el derecho de los cubanos a buscar refugio en las embajadas extranjeras de La Habana, Fidel Castro ordenó retirar la vigilancia policial de los recintos diplomáticos a primeros de abril de 1980. En dos días, más de 10.000 cubanos se refugiaron en la sede peruana y varios centenares pudieron salir en avión hacia Costa Rica.

Castro prohibió a mediados de mes la salida de más aviones, pero autorizó la entrada en el puerto de Mariel, al oeste de La Habana, a partir del 21 de abril, de barcos de los exiliados cubanos en EEUU para que recogieran a los familiares y amigos que quisieran irse de Cuba.

Hasta finales de junio, llegaron a Estados Unidos 114.475 cubanos, muchos de ellos delincuentes comunes.

La ejecución de Ochoa

1989.- El general Arnaldo Ochoa, uno de los militares más prestigiosos del Ejército cubano, y seis supuestos cómplices fueron detenidos el 12 de junio de 1989 y acusados de conspirar con el cartel colombiano de Medellín para trasladar cocaína a EEUU. Un tribunal militar recomendó el juicio de Ochoa y los otros detenidos por traición a la patria. Al delito de narcotráfico añadieron el de la venta ilegal de diamantes, marfil y otros productos durante los años de servicio militar en Angola.

Ochoa, de 57 años, había dirigido las fuerzas cubanas en Etiopía, Nicaragua y Angola, y era uno de los cinco oficiales cubanos condecorados con la distinción de Héroe de la República.

Declarados culpables el 7 de julio, Ochoa, Antonio de la Guardia y otros dos acusados fueron ejecutados seis días más tarde. Con su muerte, Fidel Castro se deshizo de uno de sus principales rivales en las Fuerzas Armadas y cortó de raíz las acusaciones de Washington sobre su supuesta cooperación con los narcos colombianos.

La dolarización

1993.- Casi cuatro años después de la caída del Muro de Berlín, Fidel Castro anunció el 26 de julio de 1993 la legalización del dólar, prohibido en la isla desde hacía 30 años.

En un discurso pronunciado en Santiago de Cuba en el 40º aniversario del asalto a Moncada, preludio de la revolución del 59, Castro suavizó también la prohibición de viajar a Cuba a los exiliados y dio facilidades para las inversiones extranjeras.

Con esta medida, el régimen respondió a la grave crisis causada por la ruptura del bloque comunista y reconoció de hecho la existencia de un mercado negro donde el dólar se cotizaba a 60 pesos cuando, oficialmente, se vendía a 0,75 pesos.

Aunque el vicepresidente Carlos Lage insistió en que «los principios revolucionarios siguen intactos», floreció una segunda economía -la de las tiendas especiales, sólo para dólares- y, aunque con serias dificultades, surgieron las primeras empresas privadas desde los años 60.

FELIPE SAHAGUN, profesor de Relaciones Internacionales en la Universidad Complutense de Madrid y miembro del Consejo Editorial de EL MUNDO.

DOCUMENTOS Jueves, 31 de diciembre de 1998

MORAL OBLIGATIONS: Aftermath of the Rubalcaba Affair

Published July 30, 1996 in the Miami Herald Pg. 5 Sec. E

MORAL OBLIGATIONS

Our struggle against Fidel Castro is a struggle for the future of the Cuban nation. Do we want a future Cuba in which the freedom to speak, to work, and to pray are controlled by the state or are do we want these freedoms to be the foundation of a free and prosperous nation? Over the past three decades we have called for freedom in Cuba throughout the four corners of the world, but we have not always practiced what we preached here in Miami.

If we limit the freedom of artists in pursuit of our political ends, in this case a free Cuba, then we are committing the same crime as Fidel Castro and hurting our own cause for freedom. In 1959 when Castro promised freedom and elections he delivered censorship and summary executions.

Most Cubans supported the executions without a fair trial of Batista's supporters. Both freedom and the rule of law were sacrificed on the alter of revenge and ambition. Fidel Castro sacrificed freedom in Cuba to advance his own Fidelismo. If we use the same means as Fidel Castro, then we will be led once again to the same end. In short, we are helping Fidel Castro when we attack freedom in the name of freedom. The Cuban Exile is part of the Cuban nation, and it must be the beacon of freedom and tolerance for those who have lived in the darkness and oppression of Castro's tyranny for these past 37 years.

We are for liberty and justice, not repression and injustice. This is why we struggle against Fidel Castro. Many in this community have suffered torture, the death of loved ones, decades of unjust imprisonment and the separation of families. They have good reason to hate Castro, and his supporters, but for the good of the Cuban nation (inside and outside of Cuba) they must overcome their hatred. In the words of Jesus Christ they must love their enemy. They must save the Cuban nation from the evils committed by this enemy, and not add to them out of a thirst for revenge. Leave revenge to God for that is to whom it belongs.

The true test of respect for freedom of expression and of thought is how do we react to what we strongly disagree with. I believe that we have a moral obligation to criticize what we think is wrong in a civil manner, but we also have a moral obligation to protect those we disagree with from violations of their civil and political rights.

John Suarez

FREE CUBA Foundation

Miami