Cuba conducts war games with U.S. invasion in mind
Thu Nov 26, 2009 6:00pm EST
By Jeff Franks
HAVANA (Reuters) - Cuba began its biggest military maneuvers in five years on Thursday, saying they were needed to prepare for a possible invasion by the United States.
Despite a thaw in U.S.-Cuba relations and assurances last week by President Barack Obama that the United States has no intention of invading the island 90 miles from Florida, Cuba's state-run press quoted military leaders as saying there "exists a real possibility of a military aggression against Cuba."
The war games, which are being called "Bastion 2009," also will get the military ready to deal with social unrest the United States may try to foment in this time of economic crisis in Cuba, ahead of an invasion, they said.
Cuban television showed images of tanks firing their guns as they rolled through the countryside, artillery batteries blasting away, camouflaged troops digging trenches and shooting bazookas, attack helicopters and fighter jets buzzing through the sky and rescue teams tending wounded combatants.
It was not clear if the images came from Thursday's maneuvers or from file footage of previous activities, nor were the sites of the war games disclosed.
The maneuvers, which end on Saturday, are taking place at a time when relations between the United States and Cuba have warmed under Obama after five decades of hostility.
He has slightly eased the 47-year-old U.S. trade embargo against the communist-led island and initiated talks on migration and postal service, but based further progress on Cuba releasing political prisoners and improving rights.
The Cuban government under President Raul Castro has said it is open to better relations, but will make no unilateral concessions to the United States.
In a written response to questions from Cuban dissident blogger Yoani Sanchez last week, Obama said, "The United States has no intention of using military force in Cuba."
NECESSITY OF FIRST ORDER
But Cuban military leaders have insisted in state-run press that Bastion 2009 is "a necessity of the first order in the current political-military situation that characterizes the confrontation between Cuba and the empire (the United States)."
They appeared to signal disgruntlement with Obama, whose election brought high hopes of change on the island, saying the embargo goes on and he has not removed Cuba from the United States' list of "terrorist" countries.
History is also a factor. Cuba, fresh from the 1959 revolution that put Fidel Castro in power, fended off a U.S.-backed invasion by Cuban exiles at the Bay of Pigs in 1961 and has remained on high alert for another ever since.
At the height of the Cold War, Cuba entered into an alliance with the Soviet Union and received military support until the former superpower collapsed in 1991.
The alliance almost brought the world to the brink of nuclear war in 1962 when the Soviets placed nuclear missiles on the island, prompting a showdown with the United States that became known as the Cuban missile crisis.
The tense confrontation ended peacefully when the Soviets withdrew the missiles in exchange for a U.S. pledge to never invade Cuba and, it was later revealed, pull its own missiles from Turkey.
Most of Cuba's materiel dates from the Soviet era, but Russia recently agreed to modernize the arsenal as part of a renewal of friendship between the former allies.
(Additional reporting by Rosa Tania Valdes and Esteban Israel; editing by Mohammad Zargham)
WASHINGTON (Reuters) - Cuba's Raul Castro has kept the system his brother Fidel used to repress critics, refusing to free scores of people imprisoned years ago and jailing others for "dangerousness," Human Rights Watch said in a report issued on Wednesday.
The assessment came as President Barack Obama says he wants to "recast" ties with Cuba and Congress is considering lifting a ban on U.S. travel to the Communist-run island 90 miles from Florida.
Fidel Castro temporarily ceded power to his younger brother Raul in July, 2006 and formally stepped aside as president last year because of illness.
Raul Castro has relied in particular on a Cuban law that lets the state imprison people even before they commit a crime, Human Rights Watch said.
The group documented more than 40 cases under Raul Castro in which Cuba has imprisoned individuals for "dangerousness" because they sought to do things such as stage peaceful marches or organize independent labor unions.
In addition, 53 prisoners who were sentenced in a 2003 crackdown on dissidents under Fidel Castro are still in jail, the report by the global human rights monitor said.
Systematic repression has created a climate of fear among Cuban dissidents, and prison conditions are inhumane, said Human Rights Watch, whose researchers traveled to the island for two weeks during the summer for their report.
Jail is only one of the tactics used, it said. "Dissidents who try to express their views are often beaten, arbitrarily arrested, and subjected to public acts of repudiation."
In one recent well-publicized example, Cuban dissident blogger Yoani Sanchez said she was beaten this month by men she thinks were state security agents.
The independent Cuban Commission on Human Rights estimated this year that Cuba has 200 political prisoners. It says the government now favors brief detentions over long sentences because they intimidate without hurting Cuba's image abroad.
U.S. TRAVEL BAN QUESTIONED
In Congress, a key Democrat said the report showed the need to lift the U.S. travel ban on Cuba. That would be "the best anti-Castro-policy," House Foreign Affairs Committee Chairman Howard Berman told Reuters.
Americans visiting Cuba would be ambassadors of democratic values, thus undermining the Castro government, he said.
"I think the Castro regime likes our current policy. They are very nervous about us opening up travel to Cuba," Berman said. He is holding a hearing on the travel ban on Thursday.
But Florida Republican Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart, a Cuban-American who was born in Havana, said it was important to retain the travel ban. U.S. tourists flooding to Cuba could mean "billions of dollars for the (Castro) regime," he said.
Human Rights Watch urged a multilateral approach to press the Cuban government to improve its rights record, focusing on the release of political prisoners, instead of seeking to change Cuba's one-party system through a unilateral embargo.
The United States has restricted trade and travel with Cuba since the 1960s in what started as a Cold War policy to isolate Fidel Castro after his 1959 revolution. But the U.S. embargo has lost international support, with only Israel and Palau backing the U.S. policy at the United Nations this year.
Since taking office in January, Obama has taken steps to ease the embargo as well as reopen dialogue with Havana.
But he also has called on its government to reciprocate by freeing detained dissidents and improving human rights.
Human Rights Watch favors an end to the U.S. travel ban. It says Washington should also end its "failed embargo policy" that has won sympathy for the Castro government abroad.
But before lifting the embargo the United States should agree with allies in Europe and Latin America to jointly demand the immediate release of Cuban political prisoners, it said.
If Havana does not respond in six months, countries should impose joint punitive measures on Cuba, the report said.
(Additional reporting by Anthony Boadle, editing by David Storey)
MIAMI (Reuters) - Using the code name Donna, the younger sister of Fidel and Raul Castro worked undercover for the CIA in Cuba in the early 1960s, helping opponents of their communist rule escape execution and imprisonment, she said in memoirs published in exile on Monday.
Revealing what the publishers called a closely guarded secret kept hidden for four decades, Juanita Castro described in the book how she was recruited by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency in Havana two years after the 1959 Revolution led by her brothers, which she initially supported.
There was no immediate reaction to her revelation from the U.S. authorities or the Cuban government, which routinely dismisses critics as mercenaries in the pay of Washington.
Juanita Castro, 76, broke publicly with the Cuban government led by her brother Fidel Castro in 1964 after leaving Cuba for Mexico. She went into exile in Miami and has remained a firm critic of communist rule in Cuba.
In the memoirs entitled "Fidel and Raul, My Brothers, the Secret History," told to Mexican journalist Maria Antonieta Collins, she says she quickly became disenchanted with Fidel Castro's rule over the Caribbean's largest island because he increasingly persecuted opponents and turned to communism.
She says Fidel Castro "betrayed" her and other Cubans by abandoning the nationalist democratic revolution he had promised and imposing a one-party Marxist state on Cuba.
Juanita Castro wrote she was recruited to be a clandestine CIA operative by her friend Virginia Leitao da Cunha, the wife of the Brazilian ambassador to Cuba, who in 1958 sheltered her and other revolutionary followers of Castro during the armed struggle to topple dictator Fulgencio Batista.
She said that at a meeting with an American CIA officer "Enrique" in a Mexico City hotel in 1961, she was given the code name Donna and codebooks to use in Cuba with a short-wave radio to receive instructions from her CIA handlers.
Former leader Fidel Castro, 83, who last year handed over the presidency of Cuba to his younger brother Raul, 78, for health reasons, has long considered the CIA his arch-enemy. He says the U.S. spy agency was behind most of the 600 or so assassination plots he claims were made against his life.
In her memoirs, Juanita Castro wrote she agreed to work for the CIA under the noses of her brothers on the condition that she was not asked to participate in any violent acts against them or any other member of their government.
"Did I feel remorse about betraying Fidel by agreeing to meet with his enemies? No, for one simple reason: I didn't betray him. He betrayed me," she writes in the 432-page book published in Spanish by Grupo Santillana.
UNPAID COLLABORATION
"He betrayed the thousands of us who suffered and fought for the revolution that he had offered, one that was generous and just and would bring peace and democracy to Cuba, and which, as he himself had promised, would be as 'Cuban as palm trees,'" she said.
Juanita Castro said in her memoirs and in a TV interview that she never accepted any money from the CIA for her collaboration. "I never put any price on my desertion ... on my activities against the communist dictatorship," she told the Spanish language TV channel Univision-Noticias 23 on Monday.
She described in her book how, following CIA instructions often secretly picked up at isolated roadside drop points in Cuba, she helped people persecuted by Fidel Castro's secret police to escape capture, imprisonment and possible execution.
Some were sheltered at the house where she lived with her mother, Lina Ruz Gonzalez, who was also the mother of Fidel and Raul Castro. Lina Ruz, who also helped some friends escape persecution, died in 1963, Juanita Castro said.
She recalled her own shock when Fidel Castro, who had denied publicly that he was a communist, declared on December 2, 1961, that he was a Marxist-Leninist and that he would remain one for the rest of his life.
"Fidel's radical change to communism was not out of political conviction, but simply out of the need to hold power, which is what has always been important to him," she wrote.
"I have no other explanation: He turned to the Soviet Union to perpetuate himself in power."
The collapse in 1991 of the Soviet Union, Cuba's main ally and economic benefactor for years, plunged the island into economic crisis. But despite the economic problems, both Fidel and Raul Castro have ruled out any shift to capitalism.
In response to a call for a "new beginning" in U.S.-Cuban ties made by U.S. President Barack Obama, the Cuban leadership has started talks with Washington on issues like migration and postal service ties, but it demands that Obama completely end the 47-year-old U.S. trade embargo against Cuba.
Obama says he wants to see Havana free jailed dissidents and improve human rights.
Juanita Castro says she has not spoken to Fidel or Raul Castro since she left Cuba in 1964.
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