Cubans Shoot Down Two Planes
On February 24, 1996, he set out again, along with two other Brothers to the Rescue Cessnas. The details about what happened during the flight are still open to question. Basulto claims that none of the planes entered Cuban airspace that afternoon. Cuba maintains that all three planes entered Cuban airspace and were over its territorial waters when pilots flying Cuban MIGs shot down two of them. US air traffic control tracking data indicates that the two planes were over international waters at the time of the shootdown, and that Basulto’s plane may have crossed into Cuban space. Four men were killed. Basulto headed for clouds to evade the Cuban fighters and returned safely to Florida.17 Cuba’s political leaders did not make the decision to shoot down the planes lightly. They had allowed the incursions to go on for several months, during which time they issued numerous warnings. But senior Cuban military officers were pressing Fidel for some retaliatory action.
The Clinton administration reacted harshly, placing all of the blame on Cuba. At the instigation of the United States, both the UN Security Council and the Council of the International Civil Aviation Organization deplored Cuba’s action. Clinton condemned it “in the strongest possible terms” and two days after the event announced retaliatory measures that tightened the embargo, including the cancellation of direct charter flights between Miami and Havana and new restrictions on the movements of Cuban diplomats within the United States.
In the US Congress, the dynamics of the ongoing debate over versions of the Helms-Burton bill took a dramatic turn. In the new atmosphere of increased hostility toward Cuba, House-Senate conferees opted for the House version’s more radical approach, which constrained the president’s prerogatives to modify the embargo. Prior to the shootdown, the legislation had stalled in the Senate and the Clinton administration had not proposed an alternative. Now the president was confronted with three options in a year when he hoped to win Florida’s electoral votes: (1) do nothing; (2) conduct a military strike against Cuba; (3) sign the unsavory bill.18 Attorney General Janet Reno urged Clinton to veto Helms-Burton, arguing that the law would place undesirable limits on the president’s constitutional powers as commander in chief.19 But Clinton viewed signing the bill as the least worst option, and Helms-Burton became law on March 12, 1996.
The Least Worst Option
The measure codified existing executive orders that made up the US economic embargo against Cuba. This seemed to mean that embargo modifications presidents previously could make at their sole discretion now would require new congressional action. Helms-Burton also granted to US citizens who had been Cuban citizens when the Cuban government nationalized their property the right to have the US government advocate for their claims. In addition, any claimant could sue a foreign company in a US court for allegedly “trafficking” in stolen property. It was a significant departure from accepted international law because it involves a US court in an extraterritorial dispute, which some referred to as the “Bacardí provision.” Bacardí, Ltd. lobbied for the measure, claiming its former distilleries in Cuba were being used to manufacture Havana Club rum. Though the company is headquartered in Bermuda, the family owners moved to Puerto Rico in 1960 and most members became US citizens. They hoped to sue Pernod, the French distributor of Havana Club, which has assets in the United States. However, the law also permits a president to waive the Bacardí provision, and Presidents Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama invoked that loophole consistently after 1996.
That autumn, the international community condemned the Helms-Burton Act in a UN General Assembly vote of 138 to 3, with 24 abstentions. (In 2016, the General Assembly unanimously condemned the US embargo, with the United States and Israel abstaining for the first time.) International businesses then voted with their money to defy Helms-Burton, increasing foreign direct investment in Cuba by 22 percent from 1996 to 1997.20 The growth of investment came in part as a result of new laws in 1995 by which Cuba allowed foreign companies to own 100 percent of an investment, with guaranteed protection against nationalization.
Congressional passage of the Helms-Burton Act was emblematic of the decline in fortune and clout of CANF. The bill’s coauthor, Daniel Fisk, at the time a Senate staffer who worked for Helms, reportedly did not even talk to CANF officials before drafting the legislation.21 Helms sponsored the bill for ideological reasons, but the CANF took credit in any case.
Terrorist Campaign against Cuba
With Helms-Burton failing to deter new investors, a violent sector in the anti-Castro exile community turned to terrorist strikes to scare off tourists. The New York Times identified Luis Posada Carriles as the organizer of a series of 1997 bombings at major hotels in Havana and one popular restaurant, Bodeguita del Medio, in which several people were injured and one Italian tourist was killed.22
In 1998, Cuba invited FBI investigators to examine information that demonstrated the attacks originated with anti-Castro groups in southern Florida. The FBI found that the evidence also indicated CANF had supported some of the terrorists.23 Yet the FBI did not arrest any of those involved in the bombing attacks. Instead, it used the information to identify and arrest fourteen Cuban agents whom Cuba had sent to monitor the terrorist groups. Some were deported; others confessed to minor crimes and were given short prison terms. Five of the Cubans declared their innocence. As a result, Miami prosecutors charged them with conspiracy to commit espionage and asked for sentences ranging from fifteen years to two life sentences. Notably, the evidence prosecutors offered against them validated the defendants’ claims that they had conducted surveillance only on anti-Castro groups planning attacks against Cuba. They became known as the “Cuban Five.”24
Posada had been linked to years of terrorist actions against Cuba, including the 1976 bombing of Cubana Airlines flight 455. In 2000, he planned to assassinate Fidel Castro in Panama by blowing up a car laden with dozens of pounds of C-4 explosive. It was parked adjacent to a university auditorium packed with students where the Cuban leader was speaking, when police nabbed Posada and three accomplices. Convicted of “disturbing the peace,” the four terrorists were pardoned by outgoing Panamanian president Mireya Moscoso in 2004.
While the United States barred Posada from the entering the country because of his terrorist activities, he illegally found his way to Texas. After federal marshals captured him, prosecutors put him on trial merely for lying on an immigration form. The jury members, seemingly intimidated by militant Cuban-Americans in the audience who glowered at them throughout the trial, decided that Posada was not guilty. He then moved to Miami, where local politicians and anti-Castro Cuban-Americans feted him as a hero.25
Both Venezuela and Cuba have requested that the United States extradite Posada to their countries. The requests have been denied. Yet Posada was not the only anti-Cuban terrorist the United States has harbored. His alleged co-planner of the Cubana bombing, Orlando Bosch, also had been barred from the United States because, in the State Department’s judgment, he had a “criminal history and involvement in terrorism.” Indeed, a House of Representatives committee characterized Bosch as “the most aggressive and volatile of the anti-Castro leaders,” and reported that he had organized more than eleven bombing raids over Cuba in 1963 alone.26 After he entered the United States illegally, President George H. W. Bush paroled him in 1990, against the Justice Department’s recommendation. Once out of jail, Bosch publicly hailed the destruction of the Cuban airliner, saying, “It was a legitimate war action. . . .We are at war, aren’t we?” Bosch, too, became a hero in Miami.27
Other Miami-based terrorists carried out attacks on Cuban targets throughout the world. For example, two Cuban diplomats, Adriana Corcho and Efren Monteagudo, were killed by a bomb in Lisbon in 1976. Omega 7, one of the major anti-Castro groups, claimed responsibility for the assassination of Félix García Rodríguez on September 11, 1980. A member of Cuba’s mission to the United Nations, he was the first UN diplomat to be as
sassinated in New York City.28
The Cuban government has tended to link most terrorist acts to some US government agency, whether or not there was evidence of direct US involvement. For example, former general Fabián Escalante asserted in 2006 that there had been more than six hundred attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro sponsored by the United States.29 The United States has acknowledged only eight attempts, and has not revealed any that may have occurred after 1966.30
It was in this context of terrorism that the Cuban government prevented dissidents from holding a conference in February 1996, and sentenced several of them to fourteen-month prison terms. The Clinton administration had been disbursing modest payments to hundreds of Cubans who identified themselves as dissidents and had formed a coalition of 130 loosely organized groups throughout the country. The groups had planned to meet in Havana on February 22, 1996, under an umbrella organization named Concilio Cubano. The United States also had urged the European Union (EU) to condition aid to Cuba on its willingness to allow the coalition to be placed under the EU’s protection.31
Cuban officials were troubled by Concilio’s conference precisely because of the US connection. The meeting’s timing further heightened their suspicions. Brothers to the Rescue had issued a press release announcing that its next flights over Havana would coincide with the gathering, and Cuban security specialists viewed the Brothers’ prior missions as preparation for a terrorist attack. With the experiences of US-sponsored terrorism inflating their calculation of a threat, they imagined a worst-case scenario that linked the meeting to the announced flights in a conflagration designed to pressure President Clinton into taking aggressive action during an election year.
Instead of making Cuba more secure, though, the preventive measures reinforced the country’s international image as a human rights offender. The European Union held up aid to Cuba, the UN General Assembly condemned the shootdown of the Brothers to the Rescue planes, and President Clinton felt compelled to sign a toughened Helms-Burton bill into law.
Notes
1. Soraya M. Castro Mariño, “Cuba-US Relations, 1989–2002: A View from Havana,” in Redefining Cuban Foreign Policy: The Impact of the “Special Period,” ed. H. Michael Erisman and John M. Kirk (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2006), 305.
2. Oficina Nacional de Estadísticas (ONE), “Panorama Económica y Social, Cuba 1996” (Havana: 1997)
3. Walt Vanderbush and Patrick J. Haney, “Policy toward Cuba in the Clinton Administration,” Political Science Quarterly 114, no. 3 (Fall 1999).
4. Jorge Mas Canosa, “Statement,” in US Congress, House, 104th Cong., 1st Sess., “Cuba and US Policy,” Hearing Before the Subcommittee on the Western Hemisphere, Committee on International Relations, February 23, 1995, 14.
5. Jesse Helms, “Remarks,” Congressional Record, February 9, 1995, S2411; 141 Cong. Rec. S 2399.
6. Soraya M. Castro Mariño, “US-Cuban Relations During the Clinton Administration,” Latin American Perspectives 29, no. 4 (July 2002): 62.
7. Jorge I. Domínguez, “US-Cuban Relations: From the Cold War to the Colder War,” Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs 39, no. 3 (1997): 58.
8. Pentagon official quoted in Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic, 472.
9. Philip Brenner and Peter Kornbluh, “Clinton’s Cuba Calculus,” NACLA Report on the Americas, September/October 1995.
10. Carl Nagin, “Backfire,” New Yorker, January 26, 1998, 32.
11. John M. Goshko, “Cuban Aide Defends Air Attack; Supporting Evidence Not Presented to U.N.,” Washington Post, February 29, 1996, A16; Bradley Graham, “US Tried to Restrain Group’s Flights,” Washington Post, February 27, 1996, A5.
12. Felix I. Rodriguez and John Weisman, Shadow Warrior (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989), 109–11.
13. Jefferson Morley, “Shootdown,” Washington Post Magazine, May 25, 1997.
14. Mireya Navarro, “Nonviolence of Castro’s Foes Still Wears a Very Tough Face,” New York Times, February 28, 1996, A1.
15. Nagin, “Backfire,” 32–33.
16. Schoultz, That Infernal Little Cuban Republic, 482; Wayne S. Smith, “The US-Cuba Imbroglio: Anatomy of a Crisis,” International Policy Report, May 1996 (Washington, DC: Center for International Policy); Thomas W. Lippman and Guy Gugliotta, “US Data Forced Cuba to Retreat on Shooting; Basulto Bragged of Buzzing Havana Previously,” Washington Post, March 16, 1996, A19.
17. Morley, “Shootdown.”
18. Daniel W. Fisk, “Cuba in US Policy: An American Congressional Perspective,” in Canada, the US and Cuba: Helms-Burton and Its Aftermath, ed. Heather Nicol (Kingston, Ontario: Centre for International Relations, Queen’s University, 1999), 34.
19. Vanderbush and Haney, “Policy toward Cuba in the Clinton Administration.”
20. Paolo Spadoni, Failed Sanctions: Why the US Embargo against Cuba Could Never Work (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010), 63–64.
21. Patrick J. Haney and Walt Vanderbush, “The Role of Ethnic Interest Groups in US Foreign Policy: The Case of the Cuban American National Foundation.” International Studies Quarterly 43 (June 1999).
22. Ann Louise Bardach and Larry Rohter, “Life in the Shadows, Trying to Bring Down Castro,” New York Times, July 13, 1998; Juan Tamayo, “Exiles Directed Blasts That Rocked Island’s Tourism, Investigation Reveals,” Miami Herald, November 17, 1997.
23. Sánchez-Parodi, CUBA-USA, 209–10.
24. Landau, “The Cuban Five and the US War against Terror,” 274–76.
25. Landau, “The Cuban Five and the US War against Terror,” 273; Glenn Garvin, “Panama: Exile Says Aim Was Castro Hit,” Miami Herald, January 13, 2001; Ann Louise Bardach, “Twilight of the Assassins,” Atlantic, November 2006.
26. US Congress, House Select Committee on Assassination, “Investigation of the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy,” 90–91.
27. Quoted in Andres Oppenheimer, Castro’s Final Hour: The Secret Story behind the Coming Downfall of Communist Cuba (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), 325–26; US Department of Justice, Office of the Associate Attorney General, “Exclusion Proceeding for Orlando Bosch Avila,” File: A28 851 622, A11 861 810, January 23, 1989.
28. Robert D. McFadden, “Cuban Attaché at U.N. Is Slain from Ambush on Queens Road,” New York Times, September 12, 1980, A1.
29. Fabián Escalante Font, Executive Action: 634 Ways to Kill Fidel Castro (Melbourne: Ocean Press, 2006).
30. US Central Intelligence Agency, “Inspector General Report on Plots to Assassinate Fidel Castro,” May 23, 1967.
31. Morris H. Morley and Chris McGillion, Unfinished Business: America and Cuba After the Cold War, 1989–2001 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 96.
Chapter 21
The Pope Goes to Cuba; Elián Goes to Miami, 1998–2000
Figure 21.1. In the spring of 2000, Cuban children were asked to write letters to President Clinton asking him to return Elián González to Cuba. Eight-year-old Teresa García wrote this letter. Translation: President Clinton: Please, return little Elián Gónzales [sic] to Cuba. The whole country of Cuba asks you to do this. Do not be unjust, because Elián is from Cuba. Everyone is waiting for him. We are making this demand because we do not want the United States to hold onto a child who was not born there. And he was not born in the US where drugs are sold, even guns are sold in stores, and children kill their classmates in school. Elián belongs to Cuba and his family is in Cuba. Name: Teresa J. García Castro
Pope John Paul II Visits Cuba
In the mid-1980s, Fidel Castro began trying to improve the government’s quarter-century-long hostile relationship with the Catholic Church, which had turned against the Revolution in 1959. The move was partly defensive, prompted by the role Pope John Paul II was playing in strengthening anti-communist movements in Eastern Europe. It also was a way to impr
ove relations with countries in Latin America. Ultimately, it was an acknowledgment that the Cuban Catholic Church could play a positive role in the future development of the country.
The first major opening took the form of a twenty-three-hour interview in May 1985 with Frei Betto, a Brazilian Dominican friar who was deeply committed to liberation theology and had been working with “base communities.” Near the end of the interview, the friar broached the subject of whether Marxism—which he characterized as class hatred—was incompatible with religious belief. The Cuban leader answered: “We who are revolutionaries, socialists and Marxist-Leninists don’t preach hatred as a philosophy. . . . What we are preaching is the repudiation, rejection and hatred of the [capitalist] system—hatred of injustice. . . . I don’t think there is any contradiction with Christian teachings, because, if somebody says ‘I hate crime’ or ‘I hate injustice, abuses and exploitation,’ I don’t think that would be against Christian teachings.”1
Soon afterward, the government established an Office of Religious Affairs to serve as a direct liaison to all religious organizations in the country. In 1990, the government permitted the Church to broadcast Easter and Christmas services on the radio, and in 1991, the Cuban Communist Party allowed religious adherents to become party members. This led to a 1992 revision of the Cuban constitution, which declared that the nature of the state, which had been until then atheist, was now secular.
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