Chronicle on Cuba - November 2007

US-Cuba Relations

November 1: Scott Carmichael, a senior counterintelligence officer with the US Defense Intelligence Agency, recently confirmed continued intelligence sharing between Iran and Cuba. Additionally, Israeli sources report that during last year's meeting of the Non-Aligned Movement in Havana, Iranian and Cuban intelligence officers discussed increased collaboration in targeting the United States. Close ties between Tehran and Havana have reportedly existed since Iran's revolutionary leadership came to power in 1979. Given both nations' sponsorship of terrorism, their continued collaboration imperils U.S. national security. In the past, Havana provided training and material to selected terrorist groups, some of which are Iranian allies. Today, Cuba remains a safe haven for some international terrorist groups and it allows safe transit to others. Furthermore, Iran's Interests Section and its Mission to the United Nations appear inadequately staffed for significant intelligence collection. This shortfall likely makes Tehran even more dependent on Havana's continued intelligence trafficking. (The Miami Herald, 1/11/07)

November 1: Colombian Nobel Literature Laureate Gabriel García Marquez joined the international appeal for the release of five Cubans imprisoned in US jails for nine years now. With García Marquez joining the action, plus the recent subscription of the call by the President of East Timor Jose Manuel Ramos Horta, the appeal is now backed by six Nobel laureates. The document, which was released last October 12 on the Website of the Network in Defense of Humankind, demands the release of Gerardo Hernández, Ramón Labañino, Antonio Guerrero, Fernando González and René González, known worldwide as the Cuban Five. (ACN, 1/11/07)

November 1: Millions of Canadians whose MasterCard charge cards were issued by credit unions are now being forced to abide by U.S. economic sanctions that prevent use of the cards in countries including Cuba and Iran. CU Electronic Transaction Services (CUETS), which issues MasterCards to credit unions and caisses populaires, was in October acquired by the Canadian subsidiary of the Bank of America. As a result, CUET MasterCards will not work in Cuba, North Korea, Burma, Iran and Sudan. MasterCards issued by other Canadian financial institutions are not affected and will continue to be accepted around the globe. (CBC, 1/11/07)

November 1: Republican Senator Mel Martinez and his Cuban-American counterpart, New Jersey Senator Bob Menendez, a Democrat, put aside partisan differences to blast a common foe: Fidel Castro. From the Senate floor, the two displayed small white plastic bracelets with the word “cambio” (''change'') etched on them. ''Standing with those that are oppressed is our highest moment and our best calling,'' Martinez said. ``It is unthinkable that a regime would be so weak to be so threatened by something as simple as these wristbands we are wearing.''  Menendez said 70 young people wearing similar bracelets were ''detained, arrested and harassed'' for wearing the bracelets in Cuba. ''What was their crime? Acting violent? No, they were walking down a street in Havana (…) they had on these bracelets,'' Menendez said. (The Miami Herald, 5/11/07)

November 2: A 17-member delegation of Nebraska agriculture representatives are headed to Cuba again. Governor Dave Heineman will lead the group leaving for a visit to coincide with the annual Havana International Trade Fair, which the delegation will visit on November 5. Heineman also will lead meetings with Pedro Alvarez, head of Cuba 's food import company Alimport, and others. Since 2005, Cuba has bought $60 million in Nebraska commodities, including dry edible beans, corn, wheat, turkey, pork, beef, soybeans and other soy products. This will be the Governor's fourth visit to Cuba. (AP, 2/11/07)

November 5: Calling him ''a great man with a mighty heart,'' President Bush bestowed the Presidential Medal of Freedom on one of Cuba's most prominent dissidents, Oscar Elías Biscet. The 46-year-old Biscet, who according to his family is in poor health because of tough prison conditions, is serving a 25-year jail sentence since December of 2002. The medal was accepted by Biscet's stepson, Yan Valdés Morejón, who lives in Miami. Biscet, one of Fidel Castro's most ardent opponents, has been arrested dozens of times as he organized a string of public protests against the communist system between 1997 and 1999. Over the past eight years, he was out of jail on only one 36-day stint, in 2002. ''His example is a rebuke to the tyrants and secret police of a regime whose day is passing,'' Bush said. (The Miami Herald, 6/11/07)

November 5: Cuba is challenging Washington's 45-year-old economic embargo against the communist-ruled island on the grounds that the measure violates the rules set down by the World Trade Organization. In a proposal presented by Cuba to the rest of the member countries, Havana notes that the WTO works for "the elimination of discriminatory treatment in international trade relations." The text recalls that the ministerial declaration of the Doha Round - the negotiations for which began six years ago - specifies that "all members are in agreement with reducing or eliminating trade barriers," including non-tariff barriers. The Cuban proposal goes on to "urge all the members to lift any discriminatory unilateral trade measure." (EFE, 5/11/07) 

November 5: Cuba pledged to sign nearly US$450 million (€310 million) in contracts with firms from the United States and dozens of other countries as it opened its top annual trade event. Less than two weeks after US President George W. Bush asked lawmakers in the United States to renew its economic embargo against the Communist-run nation, Cuban officials touted the 25th annual International Fair of Havana as proof that the decades-old policy has failed. "For Cuba, this is a demonstration that the genocidal, economic, commercial and financial blockade imposed by the United States for nearly 50 years has failed to achieve its objective of isolating us from other countries," Foreign Trade Minister Raul de la Nuez said at the opening ceremony. Cuba will close deals for Canadian wheat and Vietnamese rice at the Havana Trade Fair, while US food sales dwindle. American vendors and Cuban officials blamed the tightening of U.S. financial sanctions against Communist Cuba. "Vietnam gives them credit, we don't," said Marvin Lehrer, the USA Rice Federation's director for Latin America, as he handed out hot samples of chicken-flavored long-grain rice. Sales of US rice to Cuba dropped to 80,000 tones last year from 175,000 tonnes in 2005 and prospects are not good for this year, Lehrer said. (Reuters, 5/11/07)

November 5: Prosecutors have appealed a federal judge's decision to dismiss an immigration fraud case against anti-Castro militant Luis Posada Carriles.  Prosecutors filed the 73-page appeal with the 5th US Circuit Court of Appeals in New Orleans. The case against the former CIA operative and US Army soldier was dismissed in May after US District Judge Kathleen Cardone in El Paso concluded that federal authorities used trickery, fraud and deceit in trying to pursue a criminal case against Posada. He was accused of lying on an application and during an interview to become a naturalized citizen. Lawyers for the government argued in their appeal that Posada didn't meet his burden to prove that the government engaged in trickery or deceit. They also contended that Cardone "erred by imposing the extreme sanction of dismissal and by dismissing counts that had no relation to the naturalization interview." Finally, prosecutors argued that government "deception or outrageous conduct" doesn't excuse Posada's alleged lies.   Posada, 79, is wanted in Venezuela, where he is a naturalized citizen, on charges that he plotted the deadly 1976 bombing of a Cuban jetliner from Caracas. (AP, 6/11/07)  

November 7: In a move that underscores Cuba's belief that relations with the United States could become more critical in the coming years, Havana is dispatching one of its most seasoned diplomats to head its mission in Washington. Jorge Bolaños was ambassador to five countries in Europe and Latin America and was once Cuba's No. 2 diplomat. He comes from Mexico, where he was seen as a healing voice in the often rocky relationship between the two countries. The gray-haired Bolaños, 71, is expected to take over soon after the November 27 send-off party for the younger and straight-talking Dagoberto Rodríguez. The United States and Cuba do not have formal diplomatic relations but run quasi-embassies in each other's capitals known as Interest Sections. (The Miami Herald, 7/11/07)

November 7: The deplorable decision in June by the UN Human Rights Council to drop its long-standing investigation of human rights abuses in Cuba is yielding predictable and tragic results, US Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (Republican-Florida) warned. A United Nations envoy visiting Cuba, Jean Ziegler, offered praise for the regime's food policies, and said that he saw no evidence of malnourishment among the Cuban people and declined to make any comment following a visit to a Cuban prison. According to media reports, Ziegler's visit to Cuba is the first by a UN rights official in nearly a decade. He was invited by the regime following a June decision by the Council to end scrutiny of human rights abuses in Cuba. "How can a UN envoy for food credibly commend the practices of a regime that uses food as a tool of intimidation, coercion and repression?" Ros-Lehtinen asked. "His statement is either a case of wilful self-deception or worse, and it follows the party line of UN officials who have served as fronts for repression on that imprisoned island." (Congressional Documents and Publications, 7/11/07)

November 10: Cuba's most significant trade event concluded in Havana, although the number of US companies in attendance this year dropped. But executives representing 16 Florida firms were there again this year, about as many as attended when American food executives began participating in the fair in 2001. Cuban trade was an investment in the future, they said, even as the Bush administration tightens financial sanctions and sales dwindle. "The biggest companies in America are here: Cargill, Archer Daniels Midland and Perdue," said John Park Wright IV, a livestock baron from Naples whose family has traded cattle with Cuba since the 1850s. "All that Cuba needs is here." Florida executives peddling everything from lumber to fresh vegetables to shipping services said the state stood to gain the most if trade restrictions were eventually eased. Arthur Savage, president of a Tampa-based shipping company that has been delivering food to Cuba for five years, said he and other Florida shipping companies doing business with Cuba already have plans to re-establish ferry service to Havana. "We have vessels that can perform that service today," he said. "That's no secret. Everybody in the shipping business is looking at re-establishing those ferries. They just can't because of the Helms Burton Act," which strengthened the US embargo and prevents the United States from normalizing economic relations as long as the Castro brothers are in power. Wright, who is related to Savage and shared a booth with him at the trade fair, declined to comment further. "We don't want to tip our hand," he said. (Sun Sentinel, 10/11/07)

November 13: Congressman Bill Delahunt announced that the Foreign Affairs panel that he chairs, the Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights, and Oversight, will hold a hearing on November 15, on the case of Luis Posada Carriles, an alleged Cuban exile terrorist currently living in Miami, Florida. "It's important to examine the treatment he has received," said Delahunt, "because it goes to the heart of American credibility among the family of nations." The hearing, entitled "'Diplomatic Assurances' and Torture: A Case Study into Why Some are Accepted and Others Rejected," will seek clues from Posada's background as to why he - unlike other accused terrorists, many of whom have been kidnapped and sent to be tortured in other countries by the Bush Administration - has so far been able to escape an accounting for his alleged crimes. These include one of the most notorious terrorist attacks in the Western Hemisphere, the midair bombing of a civilian airliner in 1976 that resulted in the deaths of 73 civilians. Witnesses will include Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archives; Anne Louise Bardach, an author who has tracked Posada's activities for over a decade; Roseanne Nenninger, the sister of one of Guyana’s victims in the 1976 bombing; and Arturo Hernandez, Posada's attorney. (US Fed News, 13/11/07)  

November 14: Cuba denounced the impunity enjoyed in the United States by several confessed terrorists who, lacking scruples, have committed numerous bloody acts against the island. The issue was addressed by Cuban Ambassador to the United Nations Rodrigo Malmierca, during a Security Council debate, where he referred to freedom granted to Luis Posada Carriles and Orlando Bosch, responsible for the blowing up of a Cuban plane in mid flight in 1976, that killed all 73 people on board. The Cuban diplomat also referred to freedom enjoyed in the US by terrorist Crispin Remon, who is responsible for the assassination of Cuban diplomat Felix Garcia and, two decades later, tried to assassinate Fidel Castro in Panama. (Prensa Latina, 14/11/07)

November 14: Delegates to the World Radio Communication Conference 2007 declared illegal the US government's use of airplanes to beam the signals of Washington-funded Television Marti into Cuba over the objections of the island's communist government, Cuban diplomats said in Geneva. The conference, which is organized by the UN International Telecommunications Union, approved a series of conclusions ratifying some of Havana's complaints about the actions of the US Office of Cuba Broadcasting, the Cuban mission in Geneva said in a statement. "A radio broadcasting station that functions on board an aircraft and transmits only to the territory of another administration without its agreement cannot be considered in conformity with the radio communications regulations," said the conclusions provided by the Cuban Embassy. (EFE, 14/11/07)  

November 15: Thirty-five Cubans -- including a 2-year-old girl and a 5-year-old boy -- jumped from a boat into the surf off Palm Beach and swam. All but one made it safely to the beach. A 33-foot boat and the man aboard suspected of smuggling the immigrants to the United States, were being held by US immigration agents. The disposition of the 34 was not confirmed. Customarily, Cuban migrants who reach land are processed and released within hours. At about 2:30 a.m., four men knocked on the door at 110 Mockingbird Trail and told the owner that their boat sank. The owner called Palm Beach police. Police arrived to find pre-schoolers, teenagers and adults into their 50s or 60s. The group told police one of the group was missing. ''We found him in the surf,'' said Police Captain Rick Howe. The drowned 39-year-old man had names and phone numbers of local contacts on slips of paper in his pockets, Howe said. ''Everybody else was just staying put. They weren't running; they made it to shore. They're Cuban. They don't have to run,'' Howe said, referring to the US wet-foot, dry-foot policy that permits Cubans who make it to land to stay. In all, there were 17 men, 12 women, three teenagers -- two girls and a boy -- and the two children. ''They seem to be very healthy. They claimed to have been on the ocean since November 9”, Howe said. (The Palm Beach Post, 16/11/07)  

November 15: Cuba and the US had a confrontation at the debates of a UN Commission in charge of finances, when the Caribbean island accused Washington of obstructing its payments to the organization. Cuban acting ambassador Ileana Nunez reiterated the difficulties of her country to pay the corresponding payments to this organism due to the reinforcing of US economic, commercial and financial blockade against her nation. She denounced that once again the Washington administration "shows its complete disregard toward the UN, without minding to affect this organization, as well as continues with their political criminal policy of blockade against Cuba". (Prensa Latina, 15/11/07)

November 15: Members of Congress panned the Bush administration's handling of the case of anti-Castro militant Luis Posada Carriles, wanted by Cuba and Venezuela in the 1976 bombing of a Havana airliner that killed 73 passengers and crew. The hearing brought together Posada's attorney, Arturo Hernández, as well as journalists and investigators who have looked into the activities of Posada, now free and living in Miami. The hearing was convened by Representative William Delahunt (Democrat-Massachusetts), chairman of the House Foreign Affairs Subcommittee on International Organizations, Human Rights, and Oversight, and one of the sharpest critics of the Bush administration's policy on Cuba and Venezuela. Delahunt told the congressional subcommittee that national security laws are being unfairly applied to favor Posada Carriles. Delahunt, a Democrat whose district has received subsidized heating oil from Venezuela, said he asked the US Department of Justice why it failed to designate Posada Carriles a "terrorist" despite FBI and CIA documents linking him to the deadly airline bombing. He said he received no response. "We must insist on answers about the disparity of treatment provided him" compared with other terrorism suspects, Delahunt said in a prepared statement. "We must demonstrate that we apply our laws fully and equally without regard to political ideology if we want to ensure international cooperation on terrorism." (AP, The Miami Herald, 16/11/07)

November 16: Victor Rabinowitz, a leftist lawyer whose causes and clients over nearly three-quarters of a century ranged from labor unions to Black Panthers to Cuba to Dashiell Hammett to Dr. Benjamin Spock to his own daughter, died at his home in Manhattan. He was 96. His son Peter announced the death. For much of his career, Mr. Rabinowitz teamed up with the lawyer Leonard B. Boudin, who died in 1989. The two lawyers won the new revolutionary government of Cuba as a client over a poolside chess game with Che Guevara at Havana’s Hotel Riviera in 1960, their law partner, Michael Krinsky, said in an interview. Guevara won, then gave them Cuba’s business. It quickly provided considerable work. The United States banned Cuban sugar imports, and Cuba retaliated by nationalizing American corporate holdings. This led Mr. Rabinowitz to defend Cuba’s position in the case of Banco Nacional de Cuba v. Sabbatino before the United States Supreme Court in 1963. (The New York Times, 21/11/07)

November 20: More than 200 prominent individuals from the arts and show business in the United States have signed a letter addressed to President George W. Bush expressing their support for cultural relations between the United States and Cuba. “President George W. Bush (…) We are writing you as representatives of the cultural sphere in the United States. We write you as American citizens,” the letter begins. “We believe the time has come to move towards cooperation and constructive relations with Cuba,” including cultural exchange, says the letter. The letter to Bush bears the signatures of more than 200 actors, musicians, filmmakers, producers and other prestigious individuals such as Harry Belafonte, Ry Cooder, Peter Coyote, Danny Glover, Sean Penn, Bonnie Raitt, Gloria Steinem and Alice Walker. [Letter to US President] (Granma International, 20/11/07)

November 21: Utah's Hispano-Latino Rotary Club is leading a humanitarian mission to Cuba. Some 40 Rotarians from various Utah clubs plan to deliver 2,500 pounds of school supplies, five wheelchairs, clothing and shoes to Cuban kids. The eight-day trip is the Hispano-Latino club's first to Cuba, said the group's president, Cesar Diaz. Getting permission from both the Cuban and US governments was an "incredible ordeal," he said. "Rotarians are not political. We are not religious. We just want to go and serve and do whatever we can to help," said Diaz, whose club routinely organizes international service trips. Each traveling Rotarian has to pack 50 pounds of supplies to take to Cuba. (The Salt Lake Tribune, 21/11/07)

November 21: The number of interdictions in the Florida Straits may soon match or exceed those in 2005, when the US Coast Guard made the greatest number of interceptions since the rafter crisis 13 years ago. The number of Cuban migrants stopped by the Coast Guard was 2,938, just 14 shy of the 2005 mark. While no mass exodus is afoot, the increased number of interdictions is part of a gradually increasing number of Cubans leaving the island and heading for the United States -- by boat, plane, car and on foot through the US-Mexican border. At least 3,437 more Cubans left the Communist island and reached the United States between October 2006 and September 2007 than during the previous 12-month period, leading some Cuban affairs analysts to wonder whether a migration crisis is coming. [Coming to America: The New Cuban Migration Crisis] (The Miami Herald, 24/11/07)

November 22: In a significant shift in Cuba migration policy, the US government announced it was creating a new program that would reduce the long delays many Cubans experience in securing visas to enter the United States. Under the new Cuban Family Reunification Parole Program, Cubans granted permission to travel by US authorities will no longer have to wait in Cuba to receive permanent residency. They will now be given a travel document that would ''parole'' them into the United States, so they can wait in the US for their green card to be delivered to them. Even with the new program, however, there is no guarantee that Cubans with approved parole will enter the country any faster. That's because they still must get an exit permit from the Cuban government. It's unclear whether or not Havana will even recognize the new US program. Cuban Interests Section officials in Washington did not return a call asking for comment. (The Miami Herald, 22/11/07)

November 22: The Cuban government published a book that gathers "important information" about the activities of former CIA operative Luis Posada Carriles, accused by Havana of multiple terrorist acts against the communist-ruled island. "Posada Carriles: Four Decades of Terror" compiles declassified Central Intelligence Agency documents, interviews and transcripts of phone calls made by the anti-Castro militant. The book brings together "texts published in Cuba and abroad that detail various moments of the criminal activity of the dangerous international assassin," the state news agency Prensa Latina reported, citing the book's author, Canadian journalist Jean Guy Allard. (EFE, 22/11/07)

November 26: The US Coast Guard repatriated 37 Cubans to Bahia de Cabanas, Cuba. The migrants were interdicted trying to reach US land in two separate groups that included two suspected smugglers who were detained on November 19. (The Miami Herald, 27/11/07)

November 27: After state lawyers objected to a Miami-Dade judge's attempt to hold a hearing on the welfare of a 5-year-old girl at the center of an international custody battle, the judge blasted the state Department of Children & Families for setting what she called "a dangerous, dangerous precedent." Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Jeri B. Cohen had scheduled a judicial review hearing to gauge the welfare of the girl, who is splitting time between her birth father, a Cuban national, and a Coral Gables foster family that is seeking to raise her. Such hearings -- which are intended to ensure that children in state custody are well cared for and are receiving all the services necessary to promote good health, stability and education -- are required under both state and federal law, which ties the completion of the hearings to federal funding. But attorneys for DCF; for the foster parents, Joe and Maria Cubas; and for the girl's birth father, Rafael Izquierdo, objected to Cohen's holding the hearing. They argued that Cohen has no jurisdiction over the case because a state appeals court late last month stayed trial court proceedings. (The Miami Herald, 27/11/07)  

November 28: US First Lady Laura Bush met via video conference with Cuban independent librarians Noelia Pedraza Jimenez, Roberto de Miranda, Iraida Rivas, and Nereida Rodriguez and her daughter Yurisel. Mrs. Bush spoke of her admiration for the work of the independent librarians in Cuba who provide a source of uncensored information to their countrymen at great personal risk, and expressed solidarity with them and their cause. (White House Press Release, 28/11/07)

November 28: A letter by Cuba’s Legendary Prima Ballerina Alicia Alonso ignited the support from the entertainment industry. US Cuba Cultural Exchange (USCCE), a national network of artists and presenters took the initiative from a letter by Alicia Alonso to create a campaign to end the ban the US has imposed infringing on the rights of artists in both countries to collaborate and create. USCCE has obtained an unprecedented number of signatures from noted artists, intellectuals, presenters and industry executives from Alice Walker to Tom Waits calling for an end to this ban between the two countries. Alicia Alonso who is also UNESCO’s Goodwill Ambassador stated in her letter “Let us work together so that Cuban artists and writers can take their talent to the United States, and that you are not prevented to come to our island to share your knowledge and values; so that a song, a book, a scientific study or a choreographic work are not considered, in an irrational way, as a crime.” (Reuters, 28/11/07)

November 28: A settlement was reached in the court battle between a Cuban farmer and a wealthy Florida couple over the man's 5-year-old daughter, and a person familiar with the deal said it gives the farmer sole custody. Rafael Izquierdo and his daughter would remain in the US for several years and the girl would regularly visit her US foster parents, according to the person, who spoke on condition of anonymity because of confidentiality rules. The person said Izquierdo eventually could return to Cuba with his daughter. The girl and her half-brother, whom the foster parents have adopted, emigrated legally to the US from Cuba with their mother, Elena Perez, in 2005. They went into foster care after Perez, who has a history of psychological troubles, attempted suicide. The state Department of Children and Families has sided with the foster family and fought to keep the girl in the United States. A department spokeswoman, Flora Beal, confirmed that a settlement has been reached but declined to comment on the details. (The Miami Herald, 29/11/07)