The statement submitted to the court in Havana also spoke of numerous “plans to assassinate the leader of the Cuban Revolution,” Fidel Castro. Since December 11, 1959, when the CIA head of operations in the Western hemisphere, Colonel J. C. King, wrote a memorandum suggesting Castro’s overthrow, “Cuban state security [had] disclosed, investigated, uncovered or neutralized … 637 attempts on the life of Commander-in-Chief Fidel Castro.”50
On November 2, 1999, the people’s court in Havana handed down a judgment that it will scarcely be possible ever to follow up: namely, that the government of the United States should pay $181 billion in damages and compensation to the Cuban people.51 “You must not forget that the government of the United States already owes the Cuban people more than 300 billion dollars for human damages caused by its mercenary invasion at the Bay of Pigs, its dirty war and many other crimes, as well as for the effects of the blockade on the national economy,” Castro told a rally at Pinar del Río in July 2000.52
One who boasted of “drafting a large part of the Helms-Burton Act,” and of actually being “responsible” for its aggravation of the embargo, was none other than congressman Lincoln Díaz-Balart from Florida. In fact, he was Castro’s nephew, born in 1954 in Havana when Castro was in prison for the attack on the Moncada Barracks. His father, then, was Castro’s brother-in-law, Rafael Díaz-Balart, his close friend, political comrade, and speechwriter from university days, whose sister Mirta had been Castro’s wife at the time. The family link and the political friendship both fell apart after Batista’s seizure of power and the attack on the Moncada Barracks, when Castro considered that the Díaz-Balarts, as close followers of the dictator, were giving cover to the brutal repression and even shared some of the responsibility for it. Thus, Castro’s former father-in-law was Batista’s public prosecutor, as well as mayor of Batista’s native town of Banes and a member of his cabinet; and Rafael Díaz-Balart, his son of the same name, was serving as deputy minister of the interior at the time of Castro’s imprisonment. After the victory of the revolution, the erstwhile friend was regarded as a traitor and had to flee the island.
The past ties of Rafael and then Lincoln Díaz-Balart with the man now in Havana’s Palace of the Revolution gave the struggle over Cuba some of the characteristics of bitter family warfare, which assumed even more bizarre dimensions in 1999 when the young refugee Elián González was washed up on the coast of Florida.
Since the Helms-Burton Act came into force, Washington had been trying to impose its worldwide implementation. One day in late 1999 this author himself felt its absurd complications, when he applied for a Cuban visa and used the United Parcel Service to send his passport from Hamburg to the Cuban embassy in Berlin, only to receive the package back three days later without having achieved anything. The company refused to deliver the article in question and would give no explanation for the three days’ delay. But a UPS employee had clearly indicated the reason by writing the word “Embargo!” on the envelope, complete with an exclamation mark. To the objection that the American embargo had no validity or legal force in the Federal Republic of Germany, the person at the other end of the telephone line tersely replied that that did not interest him: UPS was a US company and followed the business policy laid down at headquarters. Incidentally, it was also on the list of “top contributors” to Lincoln Díaz-Balart’s election campaign in 1996.
In October 1996, half a year after the Helms-Burton Act came into force, the EU’s Council of Europe adopted regulations which forbade European companies and their subsidiaries to respect the terms of the Act. The EU Commission in Brussels opened a kind of bureau to which Europe’s ever more frequent experiences with the US embargo could be reported. Companies that were prosecuted in the USA had the right to bring a counter-claim in Europe, if the US plaintiff had a branch on this side of the Atlantic. Mexico and Canada introduced similar procedures.
At first, in view of the unanimously negative reaction around the world, it seemed that the USA had gone too far with the Helms-Burton Act. After all, the President was able to extract the agreement of Congress that certain provisions of the Act could be “suspended” for periods of six months – and from the very first day he used this leeway in connection with sanctions against foreign companies doing business with Cuba. In reality, however, this “suspension” was not a climbdown but a threatening gesture. What it said was that, if Europe in future did not give adequate support to US policy in Cuba, the full force of sanctions would be brought to bear against third countries.
The threat proved effective. Talks begun in 1995 to explore the possibility of a EU cooperation agreement with Cuba were broken off for the time being, and the expansion of economic assistance to Cuba was explicitly tied to visible progress on human rights issues and political freedoms. Spain’s new conservative premier, José María Aznar, in contrast to his Socialist predecessor, Felipe González, adopted a particularly negative attitude to Castro’s Cuba, ending economic assistance and coming down so hard on human rights that a crisis and a three-year break in diplomatic relations ensued between the old colonial power and its former overseas possession. Meanwhile, the uproar in various European governments was dismissed in Washington as mere rhetoric. After the Clinton administration promised to suspend extra-territorial action under the Helms-Burton Act until the end of his term in 2001, the EU made concessions of its own at the World Trade Organization by withdrawing its complaint against the United States for violation of the international freedom of trade; it also ordered European companies to refrain from making use of expropriated property anywhere in the world, not only in Cuba.
But there were still companies which ignored the Helms-Burton Act. Mercedes-Benz, for example, a German-American firm belonging to Daimler-Chrysler, traded in Cuba as neither German nor American but as Egyptian, in the form of a Cairo-registered joint venture with the Cubans in which the Egyptian partner was one of the few to which the Cuban government had allowed a stake of 51 percent. At the end of the millennium, its annual turnover was estimated to be over $50 million. Its business consisted of supplying and assembling buses and small trucks, and providing Mercedes limousines for the Cuban government and engines for Cuban agriculture, evidently paid for out of the proceeds of sugar sales on the international market.
Mercedes-Benz, trading in this case as “MCV – Manufacturing of Commercial Vehicles,” did not choose Cuba only as a local market with good prospects for the future; it also saw the island as an ideal springboard for business in the Caribbean. Nowhere in the region was “the social climate as healthy as in Cuba,” enthused Günther Roller, then commercial director of the company on loan from Stuttgart, who had good connections with the Comandante and his economics chief Carlos Lage. Nowhere else in the region was the potential workforce so well educated, so capable, so creative and so highly motivated.53
Cuba’s political system and security apparatus provided its main advantages as a business location: the ubiquitous police presence ensured public safety and order; millions did not vegetate in slum areas as in other countries of South and Central America (including nearby Haiti or Jamaica); and crime and corruption were scarcely a problem, in sharp contrast to the rest of the Caribbean and Latin America. This apparatus, which had the positive effect of preserving law and order, was the same as the one which represented the darker side of the system by restricting personal and political freedoms. But, for the “Egyptians” and for others attracted for the same reasons, the involvement in Cuba was of strategic significance: “First,” Günther Roller stated, “Cuba with its population of eleven million is the largest market in the Caribbean. Second, it offers a huge potential for expansion in the Caribbean and the countries bordering on it.”
When Fidel Castro, as in the old days, attended the UN millennium summit in New York in September 2000 to uphold the complaints of the Third World against the industrial nations, Cuba had diplomatic relations with a total of 170 countries, nearly every one in the world. Thus, by the end of t
he twentieth century, Cuba had quietly made further advances in breaking the international isolation promoted by the United States. Castro’s new non-military “internationalism,” defined in opposition to the globalization of politics and economics, was meant to establish his profile once more as a spokesman for the Third World. As he said at the millennium summit, he had “the privilege of being able to speak absolutely freely, since we are dependent neither on the World Bank nor on the Monetary Fund, and we have resisted for ten years the double blockade [by the US and also by the countries of the former Eastern bloc].”54
Once again, as 40 years before, he knew how to take the stage as a media star. This time he did not put up in a Harlem hotel, but he did visit the black district of New York, and his opponents again served as useful supernumeraries by drawing attention to him with their vociferous insults. At the UN General Assembly he did not, as then, speak for four and a half hours, but kept to the time limit of five minutes that everyone was expected to observe. Fully aware of his enduring charisma, he took the opportunity to put on a little show to frighten his audience – not with a thermos flask, this time, but with a white handkerchief that he used to cover the red light at the rostrum, in allusion to his reputation as a marathon speaker. To the photographers, he offered a welcome opportunity to take a snapshot that relieved the tedium of the usual UN poses. The picture in question, which grateful editors all around the world immediately published, made his appearance the most widely noted event of the summit.
The audience at the plenary session listened to a man who expressed himself slowly and deliberately, in well-chosen words and fleshed-out sentences. Nothing seemed to have changed in this respect, except that his voice had become slightly more brittle. But even when he sounded a little fossil-like, he never lost the thread. He presented his case in a more forthcoming manner, ostensibly with greater wisdom and maturity, than on previous occasions when he had adopted a more combative style. A fighting spirit anyway comes to him more readily when he is at home, among his fellow-countrymen, capable of speaking for hours in the wettest or sultriest weather, unimpressed by the fact that young and old members of the audience meanwhile feel faint and have to be carried away by paramedics.
Despite its ideological handicap, or maybe because of it, Cuba had meanwhile escaped wider public notice as it had grown into a leading political and economic role among the countries and islands of the Caribbean. Since 1993 it had had a cooperation agreement with the CARICOM economic community; it had observer status at meetings of the Caribbean Forum; it joined in December 2000 the 78-member group of African, Caribbean and Pacific states (ACP); and it was a founding member of the Association of Caribbean States (ACS). Havana wanted to develop the island as a hub for the entire region, which was not in good shape either economically or politically. Colombia was paralyzed by the gang terror of drug barons, leftist guerrillas, and rightist paramilitary death squads. Venezuela was stuck in a deep economic crisis, as were Central America and the Caribbean. And, particularly in Central America, the US-nurtured promises of a better life after the civil war had not been fulfilled.
At the end of 1999, a strategic alliance between Cuba and Venezuela seemed to be taking shape within Latin America, much to Washington’s chagrin. Venezuela’s unpredictable populist head of state, Hugo Chávez, who in 1992 had staged an abortive coup against the regime of Carlos Andrés Pérez and ended up in jail, was a self-professed admirer of Fidel Castro. And the hothead was of interest to the Cuban leader, not so much because of his flattery as because his country was endowed with great oil wealth. After the Ibero–American summit in Havana in 1999, Chávez stayed on for a state visit lasting several days; he shared a baseball match with Castro, signed an economic and military cooperation agreement, and received the highest Cuban decoration. Shortly after his departure, the Cubans were able to prove their usefulness in an especially vital sphere, when Castro’s secret service claimed to have uncovered an attempt by exile circles to assassinate the Venezuelan leader. And, when his country was struck by a natural disaster, Cuba sent doctors and other relief workers to help with the reconstruction.
Castro had mounted a similar aid operation after Hurricane Mitch left a trail of destruction in Central America. Another extremely clever move, which also raised Castro’s and Cuba’s prestige in Latin America, was the official opening of an Escuela Latinoamericana de Medicina during the Ibero–American summit in Havana – a center for the training of doctors and medical personnel that had no parallel elsewhere in Latin America. Quite consciously, Cuba was here drawing political capital from its international reputation in the field of medical research and training.
In late October 2000, Castro strengthened the ties with Venezuela by paying a four-day official visit to his friend Chávez, who was emulating him with a not yet clearly defined “Bolivarian revolution.” Castro came back with a five-year agreement for economic and technical cooperation, the most important point of which was an undertaking by Venezuela to supply 53,000 tons daily of oil or oil derivatives on preferential terms – an invaluable gesture at a time when OPEC, the organization of oil-exporting countries, was conducting a high-price policy. Cuba did not even have to pay for this oil in hard currency, but undertook to supply in return medicine, sugar, and other goods, as well as technical support services in agriculture, tourism, medicine, education, and sport – for example, 3,000 sports trainers and specialists to instruct Venezuelan hotel staff.55 Admittedly the Venezuelan medical profession, conscious of the threat to its social standing, loudly protested at the idea of swapping oil for humanitarian aid in the form of Cuban doctors. (But a general strike aimed at ousting Chávez in 2003 brought the oil supplies to Cuba temporarily to a halt.)
The Cubans’ growing self-assurance was somewhat clouded by a bureaucracy which – as Western firms such as MCV complained – “hampered the orderly conduct of business.” At the same time, there was a marked “tendency to huge and spectacular projects,” as well as weaknesses in the decision-making process attributable to the fact that Castro still wanted to decide too much himself. A country that had been written off politically and economically just a few years before was now seen as being “in great need of development, but also with a great capacity for development.” MCV was not the only Western firm to consider a “first-rate scandal” the ideologically motivated refusal of organizations such as the World Bank (where US influence was strong) to provide Cuba with development capital. “As soon as the blockade comes down,” Mercedes-Benz/MCV-Cuba wanted to export “small 25- to 30-seater buses from Cuba to Florida” – unless, of course, the embargo was replaced with a protectionist barrier.
The MCV example makes it clear that, after the collapse of the Communist system in the Eastern bloc, Europe rediscovered, captured, and divided up the relatively small Cuban market much more quickly than anyone in Washington had thought possible. However cautiously European politicians proceeded, European business soon found the ways and means to get round the considerable obstacles placed in its way by the Helms-Burton Act. When King Juan Carlos, 500 years after Christopher Columbus and 40 years after the revolution of 1959, became the first Spanish monarch ever to set foot on Cuban soil and jointly presided with Fidel Castro over the ninth summit of Ibero–American heads of state and government, the old colonial power was already Cuba’s most important economic partner in Europe – even if next year’s newspapers reported that tourists from Japan had pushed Spain into second place in the holiday statistics.56
Castro took advantage of the favorable situation in the middle of 1999 and had the euro introduced as a second convertible currency for trade with the EU. But, although the EU had appeared in the place of the defunct Eastern bloc, Russia was coming back into the picture: a decade after the end of the Soviet Union, it was already receiving 25 percent of all Cuban exports,57 and the two-way trade was running at a little under $900 million. In December 2000, to Washington’s horror, President Vladimir Putin and a large entourage were due to make a t
hree-day trip to Havana, the first high-ranking visit by a Russian leader since the end of the Soviet Union, which demonstrated that Cuba was again a significant partner in Russian foreign policy. The old power wanted to put out fresh feelers in Latin America – still with the help of its listening station at Lourdes near Havana (which nevertheless was closed down in 2002).
Putin may have picked up the “signal for help” that Castro sent out at the end of a speech lasting several hours at the end of a cultural congress in 1999, in which he praised Cuba’s own experience.
It is my conviction … that Russia can save itself and does not necessarily have to depend on loans from the West. Sooner or later its leading figures will grasp this, even if today they still unquestionably depend on the loans… . We have neither the huge Siberian forests and gas and oil deposits nor major steel and machine-building industries. If we had nothing else than the raw materials, the economy of this country – with the experience we have today, … for we must learn to be much more efficient and make better use of resources – would perhaps grow by 12 percent or 14 percent.”58
Such trends caused anxiety in the US that it might arrive on the scene too late. For a long time there had been an awareness that the embargo had failed in its purpose of protecting American economic interests in Cuba and reserving its market for US firms. The response was now a kind of twin-track strategy: on the one hand, politicians hoped that the embargo would hasten the collapse of the Castro regime; on the other hand, US economic interests did everything behind the scenes to prepare starting-blocks that they could use when Day X dawned on the island. Of the 120,000 US citizens who annually got round the travel ban in the late nineties, a good half were businessmen and politicians holding special permits, who mostly flew direct to Havana in chartered aircraft or private jets from Miami, Los Angeles, New York, or other US cities. In order to meet the sudden surge in demand for aircraft seats theoretically excluded under the Helms-Burton Act, the US government even gave the go-ahead for more frequent flights and an expansion of the route network. As American entrepreneurs, managers, and high-ranking politicians came and went in a steady stream to the ministries and offices of the Cuban nomenklatura, right up to Fidel Castro himself, they sent a clear signal that large sections of US business (especially the Mid West’s powerful farming lobby) were in favor of ending the embargo.
Fidel Castro Page 39