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WEST NILE VIRUS: PART OF HUSSEIN'S PLAN - VIA CUBA?

By John Hughes*
Salt Lake City
from the September 18, 2002 edition
Christian Science Monitor
Colaboración:
Paul Echaniz
E.U.

La Nueva Cuba
Septiembre 19, 2002

Senator Patrick J. Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who has a special familiarity with intelligence matters, last week urged the government to explore the possibility of a terrorist link to the US outbreak of West Nile virus.

Last year, 66 people contracted the disease. This year about 1,400 have, and 66 of them have died.

While there is so far no evidence that the virus, or something similar, is being used as a biological weapon against the US, Mr. Leahy's concern has renewed speculation among some Cuba-watchers about Fidel Castro's dabbling with germ warfare, and his close relationship with Saddam Hussein of Iraq and other rogue nations such as Iran.

Last month, Havana's official newspaper, Granma, carried a curious story about the West Nile virus, revealing substantial familiarity with its transmission by mosquitoes and migratory birds. Then it offered Cuba's "fullest cooperation" with US authorities in confronting the threat.

Does this offer by a regime expert in deception, in fact, mask a long-suspected Cuban biological warfare program?

Assistant Secretary of State for Intelligence and Research Carl Ford Jr. testified to US Senators in June that Cuba "has at least a limited ... offensive biological warfare research and development effort." While US intelligence is perfectly capable of detecting weapons like rockets and missiles for delivery of biological warfare products, is it possible that Cuba could be conducting experiments with delivery by such unconventional means as migratory birds?

Mr. Ford claimed that Cuba has provided dual-use biotechnology (technology that can be used for both constructive medical, or destructive military, use) to rogue states. Does this mean Iraq? Cuba has had friendly relations with Iraq for years and consistently supported it at the UN against the US. Rumors of financial scandal in 1999 at Cuba's Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology suggested some kind of funding support from Iraq. As recently as July, Castro confidant Rodrigo Alvarez Cambra - an orthopedic surgeon who reportedly performed back surgery on Mr. Hussein, and who is president of the Cuban-Arab Friendship Society - was dispatched to Baghdad to meet with Hussein and proclaim Cuba's ongoing support.

West Nile virus first appeared in New York in 1999. In the same year, a book written by Michael Ramadan, a purported former bodyguard and look-alike for Hussein, related an alleged conversation with the Iraqi leader in which he speculated about an "ultimate weapon, developed in secret laboratories outside Iraq, free of UN inspection," to "develop the SV1417 strain of the West Nile virus." The story gained further circulation in an October 1999 article in New York magazine by Richard Preston, the author of "The Cobra Event," a novel whose plot involves a terrorist attack on New York using a lethal virus.

The problem with much of this rumor and speculation about Cuba's biological warfare program - and who might be subsidizing it - is that it is unsubstantiated and in many cases comes from defectors whose reports cannot be corroborated.

It also comes amid heightened debate in Congress over the future of the US-Cuban relationship, and whether US sanctions against Cuba should be modified or lifted. Thus pro- and anti-Castro factions have a vested interest in proving or disproving Mr. Castro's dabbling with dangerous offensive viruses. This is especially so at a time when President Bush is threatening war against Iraq, and any evidence of links between Hussein and Castro involving biological warfare experiments would be political dynamite.

The problem, as Ford testified, is that "the nature of biological weapons makes it difficult to procure clear incontrovertible proof that a country is engaged in illicit biological weapons research, production, weaponization, and stockpiling. Cuba's sophisticated denial and deception practices make our task even more difficult."

In a column four months ago, I suggested that if Castro wanted an early lifting of the US embargo, there were two things he should do. First, he could hold the national referendum called for by 11,000 Cubans who courageously signed a petition to institute human rights and free political prisoners. He has already contemptuously dismissed this appeal by his fellow Cubans. My second suggestion was that he permit serious international inspection of the Cuban laboratories suspected of biological warfare development. In the light of recent developments with Iraq, and a suggestion by an influential US senator that the West Nile virus and terrorism may not be unrelated, that inspection assumes new urgency.

* John Hughes, editor and chief operating officer of the Deseret News, is a former editor of the Monitor.

ANOTHER VICTIM OF CASTRO. AMERICAN TAXPAYERS ARE NEXT.

PANAMA MERCHANTS PINCHED BY CUBA'S PAYMENT PROBLEMS

By Juan O. Tamayo
Panama City
The Miami Herald
La Nueva Cuba
Septiembre 21, 2002

Cuba has fallen chronically behind on repaying its estimated $100 million worth of debts in Panama, with a Cuban government bank even ''bouncing'' $6 million in payments due in one recent week, Panamanian businessmen say.

Some merchants have stopped extending new credit to the communist-run island, and others have traveled to Havana in hopes of persuading the government to make more timely payments, the businessmen added.

The Panamanians' complaints reinforce reports that Cuba is having increasingly severe problems this year making payments on its debts because of a dramatic economic downturn that includes a 13 percent drop in tourism, its most profitable industry.

''Non-U.S. companies are reporting more repayment problems in 2002 than in 2001,'' said John Kavulic, head of the U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council. American firms selling to Havana, he added, are paid in cash because of a U.S. ban on financing of trade with Cuba.

Although Cuba's debts in Panama are a small part of its $10 billion foreign debt, they are significant because Panamanian merchants have long sold key products to the island, especially U.S. goods banned by Washington's trade embargo.

Cuba last year bought $260 million worth of goods from the Colon Free Zone, a duty-free import-re-export complex on the Atlantic coast, mostly construction materials for luxury tourist hotels, electronics and clothing.

Yet most Panamanian merchants have not gone public with their complaints, fearing that Cuba will retaliate by simply not paying at all, said Panamanian merchants and bankers who asked for anonymity.

Havana has paid only an average of 50 percent of its debt payments due since June, although it has paid as little as 20 percent of the amounts due to some smaller companies, said one Colon Free Zone merchant.

NEW CONDITIONS

It has also told some merchants that they will be paid in full only if they provide new financing for shipments of fertilizer for the sugar harvest that begins in December, said one businessman owed nearly $1 million by Havana.

Cuba has delayed payments to many Panamanian businesses, though not beyond the breaking point, Free Zone Director Jorge Fernández was reported as saying by the Panama American newspaper in February.

Even more worrisome to have been the failures of the Cuban government's International Financial Bank (IFB), which makes Havana payments due in Panama through a clearing account at the Panama City branch of BBVA, a Spanish-owned bank.

Each night the IFB must add up the money transfers sent and received from Panama -- and if the balance is in BBVA's favor it is then supposed to send BBVA the money to cover the difference.

But on three nights in one July week, as Cuba made several large payments on its sugar industry debts, the IFB failed to promptly cover a total of $6 million in shortages, said a Panamanian businessman with access to BBVA records.

''In layman's language the IFB bounced three checks,'' the businessman said, adding that BBVA covered the gaps as a courtesy to Havana but later warned the IFB that it had to improve its performance.

Cuba's debts in Panama are difficult to parse because they are owed to merchants and private banks that do not have to publicly disclose their financial transactions.

But a bitter feud within the Rodin family, the Panamanian business conglomerate with the oldest and largest trade relations with Cuba, has helped lift a corner of the secrecy surrounding Cuba's debts since December.

$42 MILLION OWED

Cuba's Sugar Ministry owes about $22 million to the Rodins and another $20 million to four other banks and merchants, used to buy agricultural inputs such as fertilizers and insecticides, said a Panamanian lawyer with access to family enterprise records.

Other Cuban agencies owe the Rodins another $26 million for trucks, cars and other imported goods. But family patriarch Lew Rodin asked Havana this year to stop paying that debt to make sure the money did not reach his son Martin, the lawyer added.

Most of those debts, plus the $30 million that Cuba owes to other Panamanian businessmen and banks, have already been rescheduled several times over the past four years because of Cuba's financial problems.

The Sugar Ministry, for example, rescheduled an $8 million debt in 1998 with the May's trading company over three years. But last year Cuba again renegotiated the debt, this time over five years, said a company employee. May's officials declined comment.

The Cuban Embassy in Panama did not answer a request for comment on the debt.

But one Panamanian businessman said the mission itself is so strapped for cash that it is paying some of its bills with cigars. The businessman said he's buying Romeo y Julieta stogies, usually worth $300 a box, for $90 from a repairman who gets them from the mission as partial settlement of his bill.

SEEING CUBA AS IT REALLY IS
FOUR DECADES AFTER THE REVOLUTION,
CUBA'S POLITICAL PRISONS ARE STILL FULL
AND IT SUFFERS FROM SELF-INFLICTED SHORTAGES
OF PRACTICALLY EVERYTHING

By Dennis Hays*
Guest Columnist
The Miami Herald
Florida
U.S.A.
Colaboración:
CANF News**
Septiembre 25, 2002

Gov. Jesse Ventura says he is a different kind of politician. I hope that he is. He will have a chance to prove it later this week when he travels to Cuba. Through his actions and his public statements, the governor has an opportunity to do something significant in Havana.

The governor believes in education. Well, the most exciting grassroots movement is Cuba today is the growth of the independent libraries — simple rooms in peoples' homes where average Cubans can find books and magazines otherwise denied them.

For their efforts, librarians are often beaten, arrested and thrown out of their houses by the Castro regime, but collectively they bring information and hope to a population that has little of either. The governor can help this movement by taking boxes of Spanish language books to Cuba and personally giving them to one of the independent libraries.

The governor believes in labor rights. He must then know that the International Labor Organization has repeatedly condemned Cuba for the systematic violation of practically every labor right there is.

Hotel jobs are reserved for the communist party faithful and there is rampant racial discrimination in hiring. The regime takes money from foreign partners in dollars and pays workers at an artificial rate in pesos, effectively confiscating over 95 percent of the workers' wages. Independent trade unions are illegal and labor activists imprisoned.

The Dutch human rights organization, Pax Christi Netherlands, notes in a scathing report that the vast majority of Cubans are physically barred from entering tourist areas, a practice known as "tourist apartheid."

The governor has an alternative to becoming complicit in these abuses. There are rooms available in private Cuban homes, known as "casas particulares." By staying with a Cuban family, rather than in a segregated "Sun City" style resort, the governor would register his clear support for the rights of the worker.

The governor wants to promote exports. I hope he has done his due diligence. If so, he knows that Cuba is a bankrupt, deadbeat nation — that Castro owes billions of dollars to every country that has ever been foolish enough to do business with him, that the current round of purchases of American agricultural products is being financed by the regime's decision to stop payment on the debts it owes to other nations, and that the Europeans and Canadians have lost patience with Castro and no longer want to throw good money after bad — thus explaining the Cubans' new interest in us. The regime needs a new source of credit, and we're the only one left.

The governor is justly proud of his service in the military. On his trip he may well be introduced to the Cuban Minister of Higher Education, Fernando Alegret, a man identified in congressional hearings as the infamous "Fidel," a Cuban agent who sadistically beat, tortured, and killed American POWs in Vietnam. Will the governor shake his hand? Or will he insist that Castro release a full accounting of the activities of his agents in North Vietnam?

Finally, the governor spoke movingly on Sept. 11 of how freedom is the foundation of all else. I know he believes this. He must also know that four decades after the revolution, Cuba's political prisons are still full. Cuba suffers from self-inflicted shortages of practically everything, but there has never been a shortage of Cubans who believe enough in freedom to risk their lives.

I urge the governor to go unannounced to the prison cells of Dr. Oscar Biscet, Francisco Chaviano, Jorge Luis Garcia Perez or any of the hundreds of other political prisoners identified by Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch and other organizations. He will know nothing of Cuba if he does not hear their stories.

It is worth noting that the record of Midwestern governors in Cuba is not particularly inspiring. Last month, North Dakota's John Hoeven took the position that whatever the Castro regime does is not of concern to him — as long as Cuba buys his state's agricultural products.

This was practically a "Profiles in Courage" moment, however, when compared with Illinois Gov. George Ryan in 1999. While speaking at the University of Havana, Ryan deleted the entire section of his speech that dealt with human rights, so as to "not offend" Fidel Castro, as he later explained. Castro believes, with ample reason, that American politicians are too polite or too greedy to point out the obvious — that Cuba is a failed state and the single biggest impediment to any improvement is Castro himself.

Ventura has a reputation for being a maverick. Although the odds are against it, I hold out the hope that he earns this reputation and surprises everyone — starting with Fidel Castro.

*Hays, who served coordinator for Cuban Affairs at the State Department from 1993-95, is executive vice president of the Cuban American National Foundation.