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 far-
reaching repercussions in both
countries. 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. 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.
Twice in January, they flew over
Havana, showering leaflets that
called on the Cuban population to
engage in civil disobedience.
“What would happen if an uniden-
tified, or an identified, aircraft
piloted by declared enemies of the
United States was detected flying
over Washington?” asked Martinez.
“What would the U.S. authorities
do? Would they allow it to continue
flying undisturbed?”
After a similar incursion last sum-
mer, Cuba formally protested to the
U.S. government, warning that
planes that violated Cuban airspace
risked being shot down. The U.S.
government had abundant evidence
that the flights would continue, but
did not take action against the
group. 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.” The
U.S. 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.
At the time of the incident, Cuba
was enjoying a small foreign-
investment and tourism boom cou-
pled with a decent sugar harvest.
After contracting by a third since
1989, the Cuban economy was pre-
dicted to grow 5% this year.
Accompanying the economic open-
ing was a gradual ideological one.
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. 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].
The 1995 immigration accord
was helping to normalize relations
between the two countries. The
compromise version of the Helms-
Burton bill had become bogged
down in Congress, with the
President threatening to veto it. U.S.
policy makers remained wedded to
a “Track II” strategy-maintaining
the economic embargo, but encour-
aging cultural exchanges and above
all supporting Cuba’s tiny human
rights movement. The U.S. business
community, meanwhile, was quietly
lobbying the government to relax
restrictions on entry into the Cuban
market.
s Brothers to the Rescue no
doubt intended and as the
ICuban leadership that gave
the order to fire must have anticipat-
ed, the downing of the planes
derailed any possibility of rap-
prochement. The Clinton Admini-
stration, looking for ways to shore
up the Cuban-American vote in this
election year, cranked up its anti-
Castro bombast. President Clinton
swiftly signed into law the Helms-
Burton bill, a Draconian piece of
legislation that codifies the embar-
go into U.S. law, deprives the presi-
dent of his authority to modulate it,
and attempts to export the embargo
to third countries.
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. The downing of the
planes and the U.S. reprisals gave
hard liners within the Cuban
Communist Party a golden opportu-
nity to close off the nascent political
opening in Cuba. The final report of
a closed two-day plenum of the
entire Central Committee, present-
ed by Defense Minister Ratil
Castro, used language reminiscent
of the early 1970s when the revolu-
tion took a more orthodox turn.
Castro called for an all-out battle
against corruption, crime and illicit
enrichment. He said the Cuban
government was not ready to per-
mit any process of greater media
transparency that could resemble
“Glasnost” in the ex-Soviet Union.
He lambasted the Track II strategy
as an effort to “deceive, confuse and
disarm” the most vulnerable sectors
of Cuban society. In his condem-
nation of Washington-supported
“Trojan horses” and “fifth colum-
nists” that sought to destroy the
revolution from within, Castro sin-
gled out the Center for the Study of
the Americas for attack. A purge of
the institute followed forthwith.
U.S.-Cuban relations are once
again extremely polarized–exact-
ly what Brothers to the Rescue set
out to achieve. But both the U.S.
and Cuban governments bear some
blame for this turn of events. The
United States for refusing to stand
up to the Cuban-American com-
munity and to enforce the law
against its extremist elements. And
Cuba for its excessive, perhaps
paranoid response to a minor
provocation.
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