Posted on 03/07/2002 1:18:41 AM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
WASHINGTON (AP) - Some of Cuban President Fidel Castro's most severe critics are becoming impatient because there has been no discernible toughening of U.S. policy toward Cuba.
One even said President Bush's first year in office was little more than an extension of Clinton era policies toward the island.
It turns out, however, that the Bush team is just getting warmed up. One reason a more assertive policy may be in the offing was the installation in January of Cuban-born Otto J. Reich as the State Department's top official for Latin America.
He joins other Cuban-Americans in key positions who, like Reich, have viewed Castro as a menace for years.
Shortly after Reich took office, the administration began a policy review of Cuba with a view toward determining Cuba's potential for damaging U.S. interests.
One issue under study, according to a senior official, is the role Washington says Cuba plays in international terrorism. Cuba is on the State Department terrorist country list, a designation based on ties Cuba maintains with other countries on the list, including Iraq, and the haven Cuba provides for foreigners linked to alleged terrorist organizations.
As a result of the policy review, the Cuba section of the next State Department terrorism report, due next month, may add to the rationale for keeping Cuba on the list.
A key unanswered question is what action the administration would take against Cuba if the policy review concludes the island represents a genuine threat to American interests.
Castro argues that Cuba has been the victim of a Miami-based terrorism campaign that dates back 40 years and has claimed, he says, thousands of lives.
In December, Cuba offered to share intelligence with the United States on terrorism but the proposal was never taken seriously.
As part of the policy review, officials also are considering a possible indictment of Castro for the 1996 shootdown by MiG fighters of two Miami-based private planes near Cuban air space. Three U.S. citizens and one resident alien were killed.
The administration weighed the indictment option last year, and the senior official said the matter has not been dropped. One unresolved issue is whether a foreign head of state can be indicted.
Also on the agenda is whether Cuba is developing a potential to use the Internet to interrupt U.S. military communications. Vice Adm. Thomas Wilson, director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, told Congress a year ago that Cuba has the potential to use "information warfare or computer network attack" to disrupt "our access or flow of forces to the region."
There has been no public comment on the subject since then but the senior official, discussing the Cuba situation on condition of not being identified by name, said the issue is still alive. Castro has ridiculed Wilson's suggestions as "craziness."
At a time when the administration is poised to tighten up on Cuba, many in Congress want to back off. Farm state lawmakers want to be able to sell their products to Cuba on credit. They believe this would lead to a significant expansion of the of the cash-only trade that has been legal since 2000 and has netted only about $40 million in sales thus far.
More worrisome to the administration is a proposal before Congress to lift restrictions on travel to Cuba. This would give Castro an economic shot in the arm at a time when his country has been reeling from the effects of Hurricane Michelle, which struck last November.
In an apparent attempt to swell the ranks of congressional dissenters, top Cuban officials have spoken optimistically of a "mutually beneficial rapprochement" between the two countries.
But the senior official warns of a possible presidential veto if travel restrictions are eased. Bush himself has said he will oppose "any effort to weaken sanctions against the Cuban government until it respects Cubans' basic human rights and civil rights, frees political prisoners and holds free and democratic elections."
The Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), flush with a fortune in drug money and rested after three years of peace talks, is fighting a fierce battle against Colombia's democratic government and threatens to install its own totalitarian, anti-Western regime. If it succeeds, analysts say, the Marxist-Leninist FARC, which is on the State Department's list of terrorist groups, would become the world's newest outlaw regime and even more of a haven for terrorists and drug traffickers.
A Rand Corp. report prepared last summer for the Pentagon calls the Colombian crisis "the most serious security challenge in the Western Hemisphere since the Central American wars of the 1980s."
………….Colombian President Andres Pastrana, who had staked his presidency on the peace process and gave the FARC its own demilitarized zone (DMZ) the size of Switzerland, came around to Menges' point of view by Feb. 20, when the FARC hijacked a commercial airplane and kidnapped a senator. Colombians as a whole, facing a new presidential election in May, have become increasingly hard line against the FARC and a smaller Communist narcoterrorist group, the National Liberation Army (ELN).
The FARC, after 38 years of fighting, was building up impressive momentum to fight the Colombian army head-on and possibly overthrow the government by the end of Pastrana's term, according to the Rand study. That report helped underscore the urgency in the Bush administration to tackle Colombia. Assistant Secretary of State Reich visited Bogotá in mid-February, telling reporters of "a plan to contain and eliminate the violence in Colombia."
The Communist guerrillas there are determined to take full power. "Now that the president of Colombia has tried political negotiations for three years and the guerrillas have responded with violence, it's time for the United States to provide full political, intelligence and military-assistance support to Colombia so the guerrillas can be defeated and peace restored," says Menges.
Pastrana finally got it by the time the FARC kidnapped the senator. He gave a national speech itemizing 117 terrorist attacks during the previous 30 days, including four car bombings, murders of women and children and poisoning of aqueducts. He echoed President Bush's "with us or with the terrorists" theme. On Feb. 21, he ordered the army into the DMZ under Operation Thenatus to take control of the huge region. With Israeli-made Kfir-C7 and French Dassault Mirage fighter jets, as well as a fleet of turboprop-driven counterinsurgency aircraft, Colombian forces ran some 200 sorties against the FARC in the first day of fighting.
So far, the Bush administration's support for Colombia has been strong in principle but a work in progress. It has not revoked Clinton's presidential directive and has asked Congress only for military assistance to help Colombia guard an oil pipeline that is a frequent target of FARC attacks - a pipeline, by the way, owned in part by U.S.-based Occidental Petroleum. Menges argues that the United States can provide Colombia with the necessary training, intelligence and equipment "consistent with efforts to fight international terrorism."
"The guerrillas draw political strength and sustenance from a robust network of supporting organizations, both in Colombia and overseas. Multiorganizational networks aided the insurgencies in El Salvador and Guatemala and the Sandinistas in the 1980s, but have assumed a larger role with the information revolution of the 1990s, and particularly with the development of the Internet," according to the Rand report. "The FARC and the ELN have developed a wide range of multiorganizational supporting networks both in Colombia and overseas. The strategic objectives of these networks is to restrict the actions of the Colombian state and its agencies and to deny it international support."
That's the big problem for U.S. policy: how to defuse the FARC's instant activist support base in the United States and in Congress. The FARC has a base of pro-Castro and pro-Marxist groups in the United States who use the Internet, as well as traditional grass-roots demonstrations and letter-writing campaigns, to press their cause. They backed Dodd's failed blockage of Reich (see "Smearing Reich," Aug. 5, 2001).
One of the main activist groups opposing U.S. assistance to Colombia is the New York-based International Action Center (IAC). Headed by former attorney general Ramsey Clark, the IAC is staffed by veteran leaders of the Workers World Party (WWP), a Marxist-Leninist fringe group with a history of street theater going back to the Vietnam War and the Attica Prison uprising. The IAC openly supports an array of terrorists, cop-killers and even convicted communist spies on its Website (see "Domestic Front in the War on Terror," Jan. 7). [End Excerpt]
Yes! Thanks John.
"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." [End Excerpt]
……….."This has never been done before, it has no precedent," he added. "It shows Cubans not only want changes, but also are ready to face the risks to show they want changes."
According to Paya, more than 100 small opposition groups have backed the initiative. However, some prominent dissidents, such as Martha Beatriz Roque, do not support it, arguing it is unrealistic to seek change within a constitution designed by the Castro government.
Paya did not say what Varela Project backers will do if the initiative is rejected by the National Assembly, something analysts and diplomats think is virtually certain.
"We are ready to keep demanding our rights," he said.
Over the four decades since the 1959 revolution, Cuba's scattered and marginalized internal dissident movement has made little headway against Castro's grip on power.
Castro again scathingly lambasted dissidents this week, in a three-hour TV speech, as nonrepresentative of the Cuban people and intent on helping Washington bring Cuba into the U.S. "empire." [End Excerpt]
But the information proved worthless and the Caribbean island will remain on a U.S. list of states that sponsor terrorism, along with Libya, Iraq, Iran, Syria, Sudan and North Korea, a U.S. official said on Wednesday.
"We were convinced that it was deliberately of no assistance. Given Cuba's history there could have been more information at their disposal to provide us," a State Department official told Reuters.
"There is no inclination in this building or anywhere in the executive branch to consider that Cuba is anywhere near qualified to come off the terrorism list," he said.
….. the information provided by President Fidel Castro's government was of no help at all, leading Washington to suspend its contacts with Havana on intelligence sharing, he said.
"Cuba was quick to condemn terrorism, but has done nothing to assist in the global effort against terrorism," the State Department official said. [End Excerpt]
Standing in the way, however, is the Bush administration, which has indicated in recent weeks that it would use all available means to tighten U.S. restrictions and portray Cuba as a terrorist country. In meetings this month, officials including White House senior adviser Karl Rove; Otto Reich, assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs; and others said the administration is fully behind efforts to maintain and even strengthen the embargo. [End Excerpt]
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