Taking Note
DM
Hard Liners Gain the Upper Hand in the U.S. and Cuba The February 24 downing of two light U.S. aircraft by the Cuban air force has had farreaching repercussions in both countries. The planes...
...At the time of the incident, Cuba was enjoying a small foreigninvestment and tourism boom coupled with a decent sugar harvest...
...Would they allow it to continue flying undisturbed...
...authorities do...
...policy makers remained wedded to a "Track II" strategy-maintaining the economic embargo, but encouraging cultural exchanges and above all supporting Cuba's tiny human rights movement...
...The U.S...
...Twice in January, they flew over Havana, showering leaflets that called on the Cuban population to engage in civil disobedience...
...The U.S...
...He said the Cuban government was not ready to permit any process of greater media transparency that could resemble "Glasnost" in the ex-Soviet Union...
...The planes were flown by Brothers to the Rescue, founded in 1991 by Martin P6rez and Jos6 Basulto, a Bay of Pigs veteran who, by his own admission, was at one time on the CIA payroll...
...What would happen if an unidentified, or an identified, aircraft piloted by declared enemies of the United States was detected flying over Washington...
...The flight was the most recent in a series of deliberate provocations against the Castro government by the Miami exile group...
...According to Miguel Alfonso Martinez of the Cuban Foreign Ministry, the group's planes violated Cuban airspace 25 times during the last 20 months...
...The United States for refusing to stand up to the Cuban-American community and to enforce the law against its extremist elements...
...The Clinton Administration, looking for ways to shore up the Cuban-American vote in this election year, cranked up its antiCastro bombast...
...law, deprives the president of his authority to modulate it, and attempts to export the embargo to third countries...
...When Basulto was warned by Cuban air-traffic controllers to turn back on February 24, he replied that he had the right to enter the area because he was a "free man...
...government had abundant evidence that the flights would continue, but did not take action against the group...
...business community, meanwhile, was quietly lobbying the government to relax restrictions on entry into the Cuban market...
...The compromise version of the HelmsBurton bill had become bogged down in Congress, with the President threatening to veto it...
...And Cuba for its excessive, perhaps paranoid response to a minor provocation...
...The U.S...
...What would the U.S...
...Accompanying the economic opening was a gradual ideological one...
...The 1995 immigration accord was helping to normalize relations between the two countries...
...President Clinton swiftly signed into law the HelmsBurton bill, a Draconian piece of legislation that codifies the embargo into U.S...
...government, warning that planes that violated Cuban airspace risked being shot down...
...asked Martinez...
...Intellectuals on the island were engaged in a healthy, though at times disjointed, debate about the shape that socialism should take in the post-Soviet era...
...After a similar incursion last summer, Cuba formally protested to the U.S...
...A purge of the institute followed forthwith...
...In his condemnation of Washington-supported "Trojan horses" and "fifth columnists" that sought to destroy the revolution from within, Castro singled out the Center for the Study of the Americas for attack...
...U.S.-Cuban relations are once again extremely polarized--exactly what Brothers to the Rescue set out to achieve...
...Castro called for an all-out battle against corruption, crime and illicit enrichment...
...In the days prior to the incident, the Cuban government had already begun to crack down on dissidents in the midst of critical comments about Track II...
...After contracting by a third since 1989, the Cuban economy was predicted to grow 5% this year...
...and Cuban governments bear some blame for this turn of events...
...government-and its reliable echo, the mass media-declared that there was no evidence proving that the planes had violated Cuban airspace, but debris collected from the water the following day clearly placed the downing within Cuban territorial waters...
...He lambasted the Track II strategy as an effort to "deceive, confuse and disarm" the most vulnerable sectors of Cuban society...
...Researchers at the Center for the Study of the Americas (CEA) were playing a leading role in those discussions [See NACLA's Report on Cuba, Sept/Oct 1995...
...But both the U.S...
...reprisals gave hard liners within the Cuban Communist Party a golden opportunity to close off the nascent political opening in Cuba...
...The final report of a closed two-day plenum of the entire Central Committee, presented by Defense Minister Ratil Castro, used language reminiscent of the early 1970s when the revolution took a more orthodox turn...
...The downing of the planes and the U.S...
...s Brothers to the Rescue no doubt intended and as the ICuban leadership that gave the order to fire must have anticipated, the downing of the planes derailed any possibility of rapprochement...
Vol. 29 • May 1996 • No. 6
