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.
