Foolish to cooperate with Cuba against drugs | Miami Herald - September 6, 2021

Foolish to cooperate with Cuba against drugs 

John Suarez. Published Thursday, September 6, 2001 in The Miami Herald

General Barry McCaffrey

 

 

Re the Aug. 29 story Ex-drug czar: U.S., Cuba should cooperate against trafficking: I attended the presentation by Barry McCaffrey at Georgetown University and heard his concerns about a possible relationship between Castro and Colombia's drug-trafficking guerrillas. At the same time he argued for sharing intelligence with the Cuban government.

McCaffrey seems unaware of several federal indictments and two investigative TV reports, one broadcast in July, linking Cuban officials, including Fidel Castro and his brother Raúl, to drug cartels:

-In 1989, a federal grand jury indicted Robert Vesco for arranging safe passage for drug planes over Cuban airspace after obtaining approval from Cuban authorities.

-According to the 1989 indictment, Reinaldo Ruiz was allowed to land planes in Cuba to refuel after dropping drug cargo off the Cuban coast. Drug-smuggling motorboats would come from Florida to pick up the cargo, and Cuban Coast Guard radar monitored U.S. Coast Guard cutters to help the smugglers evade them. The indictments demonstrated the foolishness of sharing intelligence on drug operations with Havana.

-According to the U.S. indictment of Panama's Manuel Noriega, he traveled to Cuba in 1984 after Castro offered to mediate a disagreement between the drug cartel and Noriega.

-In a 1991 Frontline documentary, Cuba and Cocaine, U.S. Coast Guard Lt. Commander Jeff Karonis, stated, "We would observe in the middle of the day an air drop going on inside Cuban waters. The scenario would be for a small twin-engine airplane with maybe 1,000 to 2,000 pounds of cocaine to fly over Cuba, drop the drugs to a predesignated rendezvous point to several boats. Then it would exit back down off Cuba, and many times a Cuban military vessel would be in the immediate vicinity, right on scene with them.''

-In 1996, Jorge Cabrera was charged with importing 6,000 pounds of cocaine. At the time of his arrest, The Herald reported that Cabrera was carrying a photo of himself with Fidel Castro. Cabrera made a $20,000 donation to the 1996 Democratic presidential campaign after being approached in Havana in 1995 by anti-embargo activist Vivian Mannerud.

-In July, Madrid's TV Channel 5 broadcast Cuba and Drug Trafficking. Spanish journalists filmed (with hidden cameras) their dealings with drug dealers in Cuba. "As to security, forget it. I pay here for the security; I answer only to one, the government,'' the drug dealer said.

Noriega, still in prison for his role in drug trafficking, once received commendations from the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration while turning in competing drug cartels. So it's not surprising that Castro allows U.S. Navy ships to enter Cuban waters in pursuit of or to return Cuban refugees, but the ships aren't allowed in Cuban waters in pursuit of narco-traffickers.

McCaffrey means well. We all would like to see more cooperation against drug trafficking. But given the historical record, it would be appropriate to respectfully remind him that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.

JOHN SUAREZ
Program Officer,
Center for a Free Cuba
Washington, D.C.

Copyright 2001 Miami Herald

Iran and Cuba bolster ties, strengthen anti-US solidarity

"Iran and Cuba, in cooperation with each other, can bring America to its knees. The US regime is very weak, and we are witnessing this weakness from close up," - Fidel Castro, May 10, 2001.

 

Agence France Presse, May 10, 2001, Thursday

A three-day landmark visit to Iran by Cuba's revolutionary leader Fidel Castro ended Thursday with both sides determined to bolster ties in the face of US-imposed unilateral embargoes.

The 74-year-old Cuban president, making his first-ever trip to the Islamic republic, was received with the greatest of honours by top Iranian officials for high-level talks aimed at strengthening bilateral cooperation.Just hours after the red-carpet welcoming ceremony in the former imperial Saad-Abad  palace in northern Tehran, Castro said he felt 
"at home," in Tehran "among the revolutionary people of Iran." Before leaving the Iranian capital Thursday, Castro and his Iranian counterpart, Mohammad Khatami, affirmed during a press conference that the trip had been "very constructive."

In a final statement, both nations "vowed to continue with their efforts for the establishment of a fair economic regime in which third-world countries are permitted to take steps towards attaining affluence and social and economic development.

"Iran and Cuba consider the imposing of economic pressures as well as sanctions against independent countries to be against human rights, and (we) condemn measures by certain nations which aim at imposing their power (on other countries."

During Castro's meeting with Iranian supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei on Wednesday, Khamenei proposed an "Irano-Cuban cooperation" against the United States.

Referring to "US hegemony," Khamenei said Tehran considers the "American regime as an arrogant power, seeking a unipolar world, to which we seriously object.

"The United States is weak and extremely vulnerable today," Khamenei stressed, adding that "US grandeur can be broken, and if this takes place, it will be a service rendered to mankind and even the American people.

"Our resistance against US hegemony is based on our Islamic beliefs, since in Islam, resistance against injustice is considered a value."

Castro for his part said Havana is not "afraid of America, and the Cuban nation, 40 years after its revolution, is now stronger then ever.

"Iran and Cuba, in cooperation with each other, can bring America to its knees. The US regime is very weak, and we are witnessing this weakness from close up," Castro affirmed.

During his trip, the Cuban leader also held meetings with Iran's Foreign Minister Kamal Kharazi, parliament speaker Mehdi Karubi, as well as former president Akbar Hashemi-Rafsanjani.

He also received an honorary doctorate from a Tehran university for his "contributions to justice, humanist ideals and the fight against discrimination."

Castro told journalists before leaving Tehran that he was "totally reassured about Iran. There is great hope for the future of relations between Cuba and Iran. I am leaving with many unforgettable memories."

Iran and Cuba, both under a unilateral embargo by Washington, have had close relations since the 1980s, notably in the medical and farming sectors.

But the two nations, which have been branded terrorist states by Washington, have weak trade links running under 20 million dollars a year.

The Cuban president headed for Malaysia, and is due to visit Qatar on his return journey to Havana.

AFP 2001

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

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