Harvard scholar and former New York Sen. Daniel Patrick Moynihan once said that everyone is entitled to his own
opinion but not his own facts. Not a bad concept to keep in
mind now that Cuban government officials claim that the
reason for including Cuba on the list of terrorist nations is
total nonsense; that the inclusion of Castro's Cuba among
Iraq, Libya, Iran and other unsavory characters is motivated
by U.S. domestic politics.
Sixteen anti-embargo activists, including Princeton professor
Alejandro Portes and John Hopkins University visiting
professor Wayne Smith agreed, charging that Castro is on
the terrorist list due to the unwillingness of the United States
to offend elements of the Cuban-American community.
Is Castro's Cuba a terrorist state?
Biological weapons are of no minor concern for Americans
today. Castro's bankrupt regime has spent more than $1
billion to set up a scientific infrastructure that, former
Secretary of Defense William Cohen said in 1998, could
support an offensive biological-warfare program. In 1995 the
U.S. Office of Technological Assessment included Cuba
among 17 countries believed to possess biological weapons.
Last year Ken Alibeck, former deputy director of Biopreparat,
the Soviet Union's biological-weapons program, revealed that
a few years after Castro's visit to the Soviet Union in 1981,
Cuba had one of the most sophisticated genetic-engineering
labs in the world.
A few days ago the University of Miami School of
International Studies released a report, Castro and
Terrorism: A Chronology. It says that:
Castro refused to join the other Ibero-American heads of
state in condemning ETA terrorism at the 2000
Ibero-American Summit in Panama and slammed Mexico for
its support of the summit's statement against terrorism.
This summer Colombian officials arrested IRA members
Niall Connolly, Martin McCauley and James Monaghan and
accused them of training the Revolutionary Armed Forces of
Colombia (FARC). Connolly had been living in Cuba as the
representative of the IRA for Latin America.
Argentine-born Cuban intelligence agent Jorge Massetti
helped funnel Cuban funds to finance Puerto Rican terrorists
belonging to the Machetero group. The Macheteros hijacked
a Wells Fargo truck in Connecticut in September 1983 and
stole $7.2 million.
Illich Ramírez Sánchez, known as Carlos the Jackal and
responsible for numerous terrorist acts in Europe in the
1960s and '70s trained in Cuba.
Black Panther leaders in the 1960s received weapons
training in Havana.
Does any of that have anything to do with the influence of
Cuban Americans? Were exiles responsible for the
expulsion of Castro's diplomats from Paris and London who
were linked to Carlos the Jackal? Do exiles explain why
Castro supported Puerto Rico's Macheteros, charged with
terrorist acts there and on the mainland? Were exiles
responsible for his training of the Faribundo Marti Front, El
Salvador's terrorist group, or for Uruguay's Tupamaros,
known for targeting Americans?
One day the archives of Cuba's intelligence service will be
opened just like the KGB's and East Germany's Stasi's.
Then details will be known, as well as the names and
activities of Castro's ``agents of influence'' in the United
States. But if history is any indication, they will say they fell
for the romance of the revolution, that they could not have
imagined such a regime and such a tyrant. They will go on
with their lives, just like the old Stalinists who saw no
difference between Stalin's Russia and Great Britain and
who claimed, while it mattered, that Stalin's terror was
simply an invention of the Russian exiles in Paris.
Frank Calzón is executive director of the Center for a Free
Cuba in Washington, D.C.
