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These NGOs have a double purpose, one directed to their counterpart groups in Cuba and one directed to the world, mainly through websites. Whereas on the one hand they channel funds and equipment into Cuba, on the other they disseminate to the world the activities and production of the groups in Cuba. Cubanet in Miami, for example, publishes the writings of the "independent journalists" of the Independent Press Association of Cuba based in Havana and channels money to the writers.

Interestingly, AID claims on its website that its "grantees are not authorized to use grant funds to provide cash assistance to any person or organization in Cuba." It's hard to believe that claim, but if it's true, all those millions are only going to support the U.S.-based NGO infrastructure, a subsidized anti-Castro cottage industry of a sort, except for what can be delivered in Cuba in kind: computers, faxes, copy machines, cell phones, radios, TVs and VCRs, books, magazines and the like. AID lists 7 purposes for the money: solidarity with human rights activists, dissemination of the work of independent journalists, development of independent NGOs, promoting workers' rights, outreach to the Cuban people, planning for future assistance to a transition government, and evaluation of the program. Anyone who wants to see which NGOs are getting how much of the millions under each of these programs can check out http://www.usaid.gov/regions/lac/cu/upd-cub.htm.

AID's claim that its NGO grantees can't provide cash to Cubans in Cuba, makes one wonder about the more than $100,000 in cash that Cuban investigators found in possession of the 75 mostly unemployed dissidents who went on trial. A clue may be found in the AID statement that "U.S. policy encourages U.S. NGOs and individuals to undertake humanitarian, informational and civil society-building activities in Cuba with private funds." Could such "private funds" be money from the National Endowment for Democracy?

Recall the fiction that the NED is a "private" foundation, an NGO. It has no restrictions on its funds going for cash payments abroad, and it just happens to fund some of the same NGOs as AID. Be assured that this is not the result of rivalry or lack of coordination in Washington. The reason probably is that NED funds can go for salaries and other personal compensation to people on the ground in Cuba. There is, after all, the rung of organizations below the U.S. NGOs in the command and money chain, and these are the individuals and groups in Cuba that correspond in purpose with the U.S. NGOs. They number nearly 100 and have names [translated from Spanish] like Independent Libraries of Cuba, All United, Society of Journalists Marquez Sterling, Independent Press Association of Cuba, Assembly to Promote Civil Society, and the Human Rights Party of Cuba.

Each of the Cubans in these organizations will be fully identified with assigned tasks in the AID, NED or CIA project documentation covering the activity, probably in a classified annex, whether they are categorized as human rights activists, independent journalists, independent librarians, or distributors of information materials. The money, after all, does not go to phantoms or ghosts even on the lowest level. Nor are the U.S. NGOs given discretion to pass out money to whatever malcontents they can find to take it. End users (final recipients) are designated in writing, as are the core foundations and intermediary U.S. NGOs.

NED's website is conveniently out of date, showing its Cuba program only for 2001. But it is instructive. Its funds for Cuban activities in 2001 totaled only $765,000 if one is to believe what they say. The money they gave to eight NGOs in 2001 averaged about $52,000, while a ninth NGO, the International Republican Institute (IRI) of the Republican Party, received $350,000 for the Directorio Revolucionario Democrático Cubano, based in Miami as previously noted, for "strengthening civil society and human rights" in Cuba. In contrast, this NGO is to receive $2,174,462 in 2003 from AID through the same IRI. Why would the NED be granting the lower amounts and AID such huge amounts, both channeled through IRI? The answer, apart from IRI's skim-off, probably is that the NED money is destined for the pockets of people in Cuba while the AID money supports the U.S. NGO infrastructures. Switching target countries, recall that the IRI, as mentioned above, has an office in Caracas that one can assume has an equally benign mission relating to the Hugo Chávez government.

According to Cuban Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez Roque (in an April 7 press conference) and to Cuban security agents working inside the dissident groups that he showed on film, the U.S. money came to recipients in Cuba 1) disguised as wired family remittances, 2) in cash mixed with the many remittances brought by couriers known as "mules," and 3) by payments to the Transcard debit card system in Canada for credit to cards held by dissidents in Cuba (the cards are good for cash withdrawals from Cuban banks). Although the Foreign Minister said that the Cuban Central Bank has followed carefully the flow of money to the dissidents, he did not reveal the total amount for any given period or specific amounts to recipient groups or individuals.

Whatever the amounts of money reaching Cuba may have been, everyone in Cuba working in the various dissident projects knows of U.S. government sponsorship and funding and of the purpose: regime change. Far from being "independent" journalists, "idealistic" human rights activists, "legitimate" advocates for change, or "Marian librarians from River City," every one of the 75 arrested and convicted was knowingly a participant in U.S. government operations to overthrow the government and install a different, U.S.-favored, political, economic and social order. They knew what they were doing was illegal, they got caught, and they are paying the price. Anyone who thinks they are prisoners of conscience, persecuted for their ideas or speech, or victims of repression, simply fails to see them properly as instruments of a U.S. government that has declared revolutionary Cuba its enemy. They were not convicted for ideas but for paid actions on behalf of a foreign power that has waged a 44-year war of varying degrees of intensity against this country.

To think that the dissidents were creating an independent, free civil society is absurd, for they were funded and controlled by a hostile foreign power and to that degree, which was total, they were not free or independent in the least. The civil society they wished to create was not just your normal, garden variety civil society of Harley freaks and Boxer breeders, but a political opposition movement fomented openly by the U.S. government. What government in the world would be so self-destructive as to sit by and just watch this happen?*

Foreign Minister Pérez Roque in his press conference gave an example of how several operations worked. He showed a film clip from the trial of Oswaldo Alfonso Valdés, President of the Liberal Democratic Party of Cuba, in which Alfonso described a meeting he had with an AID official and Vickie Huddleston (until mid-2002 the chief of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana), in which they discussed how to improve the way that he was getting "resources" in order to better conceal the U.S. government as the source. In the clip Alfonso also acknowledged receiving money and material resources from the U.S. government via organizations based in Miami.

Under Cuban law, being paid to execute U.S. policy toward Cuba is illegal and in itself sufficient to convict. The largest group within the 75, the 37 "independent journalists," were writing commentaries on Cuba for publication outside the country, using the internet for communications. One of their organizations in Cuba was the Independent Press Association of which the President, Néstor Baguer, was a Cuban government security agent who testified in court. Members of his group, he said, wrote for the website Cubanet, based in Miami, and were paid via the Transcard debit card system in Canada except for large amounts that were brought by courier. (Cubanet by the way received $35,000 from NED in 2001 and is to receive $833,000 from AID in 2003.) Baguer also testified that on visits to the U.S. Interests Section, he and his colleagues received instructions on topics to cover in their writings such as the shortage of medicines, the treatment of patients in hospitals, and the treatment of inmates in prisons. Generally speaking the "independent journalists" were to place Cuba in a bad light abroad and to justify continuation of the trade embargo.

The Foreign Minister also showed three letters dated in January and March 2001 to Oswaldo Alfonso, the Liberal Party leader, from Carlos Alberto Montaner, an exile journalist who lives in Madrid and is President of the Cuban Liberal Union (member of the Liberal International). Montaner is also a founding member of the Hispanic-Cuban Foundation, a project of Spain's ruling conservative party, and is closely associated with the exile cultural/political quarterly Encuentro de la Cultura Cubana which is based in Madrid and financed in part by NED ($80,000 in 2001).

Reading from the letters, Pérez Roque revealed that each of the three letters mentioned money enclosed: 200 dollars, 30,000 pesetas and 200 dollars, the latter two apparently from people Montaner and Alfonso know mutually. In the letter with the pesetas, Montaner wrote: "Very soon two high level Spanish friends will call you to talk about Project Varela. I suggested five names for the founding of that new idea: Payá, Alfonso, Arcos, Raúl Rivero and Tania Quintero."

Readers can draw their own conclusions on the possible foreign influence in Project Varela. Oswaldo Payá, of course, is the dissident honored by the European Union with the Sakharov Human Rights Prize for his leadership of Project Varela.

Prominent in the outrage at Cuba's action against the dissidents were commentaries of shock over how nice things had been getting in recent years with Fidel's mellowing and tolerance of the dissident community, and suddenly now THIS! In actual fact May 20, 2002 was the turning point when, in speeches in Washington and Miami, Bush announced his "Initiative for a New Cuba." Central to this "new" plan, citing Poland as a past success, he announced increased and direct assistance to "help build Cuban civil society," leading to a "new government" in Cuba. I wonder. Would it be overreach to say Bush was advocating regime change through the dissidents? The Cubans made no secret of their interpretation.

The knell for "our guys" came with the arrival in September 2002 of a new Chief of the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, the equivalent of Ambassador were Cuba and the U.S. to have full diplomatic relations. James Cason is a career State Department diplomat in his late fifties who has served mostly in Latin American countries-not menacing to the eye, just a bit overstuffed in the face, with wide round glasses in front of half-closed eyes. Otto Reich, Cuban-American fanatic and one of the un-indicted criminals of Iran-Contra, who was serving a limited recess appointment (read no chance for Senate confirmation) as Bush's Assistant Secretary of State for Latin America, gave Cason the job and apparently put an ample load of hot sauce on his appointee's backside.

Cason swooped down on Havana like a Fed from Gangbusters' central casting with an "in your face" attitude big time. But give the guy credit. He ran all over this island burning his dissident friends, "our guys," and sealing their fate as he went along. His blatant support for Washington's civil society in Cuba looked for all the world like he was bent on getting himself PNG'd, expelled as persona non grata in diplomatic parlance. He made a show of unity with groups in the provinces as well as Havana; gave 24-hour passes to the Interests Section to favorites, including Cuban penetration agents, for free internet access and other facilities; attended meet- ings in dissidents' homes where he gave the equivalent of press conferences to foreign journalists; personally launched the youth wing of the Liberal Party; entertained dissidents in his official residence, even hosting an independent journalists' workshop there one Saturday. His conduct went so far beyond accepted diplomatic protocol that you might say he was the mother of all provocations.

But expelling Cason would have led to a new crisis with the U.S., and the Cubans didn't take the bait. For six months they waited and watched through their highly placed penetrations of Cason's dissident community. Then they decided to act. They had the evidence of criminal activities in support of Helms-Burton and in violation of other legislation on sedition, so they finally decided to sweep away Cason's constituency in a stroke. And there he stood in March, appropriately like the Emperor who wore no cool. Indeed, there's been not a peep from the man since his acolytes were picked up.

One can imagine the bitterness from prison with 75 of "our guys" reflecting on how stupid they were to fall for Cason's grandstanding. So now Cason and his staff, CIA and AID officers included, have to start all over, pretty much from scratch. But hey, buddy, careful whom you all recruit. You may be salivating tomorrow over another of Fidel's finest. Never know, do you? Think about that when you file for security clearances on your next generation of dissidents.

Without a doubt the Cubans weighed the price they would have to pay with friends and foes before taking the decision to act. And they knew they had a lot to lose. The movement in the U.S. to end the embargo and travel ban, in Congress and on the street, would peel rubber in reverse with all the media distortions. Cuban entrance into the Cotonou Agreement for preferential trade and aid with the EU would likely go back into the deep freeze, which it did. Moreover, the U.N. Human Rights Commission was then meeting in Geneva, and the U.S. was trying as hard as possible, with threats and bribes, to get a motion approved condemning Cuba for human rights violations. In the end they didn't get it, but the Cuban government was willing to take this risk as well.

With so much at stake, the timing of the decision triggered intense speculation. In truth the dissident community, including those imprisoned, has never been a threat to the revolution, and Cuba could have gone on indefinitely tolerating, penetrating and monitoring their U.S. government-ordered activities. But the U.S. might have seen that as weakness, and that's the last thing you want a Grendel to think.

Moreover there was an important internal political dimension to tolerating Cason's insulting provocations because they were so widely known here. He had gone so far beyond the pale that people in general wondered about the government's tolerance. This too could be seen as weakness by supporters of the revolution. So they decided to stop him once and for all and to send a message to his remaining protégés, to stretch the protective connotation just a bit in the Cuban context. In 1996 the government had stopped the highly visible Brothers to the Rescue overflights by the shootdowns, largely for internal political reasons, knowing full well the price they would pay internationally. So also in 2003 they decided to firmly use the hook on Cason's Top Gun stage act regardless of international opinion. As in the shootdowns, internal Cuban politics, not inter- national reactions, more than likely determined the timing.

The Three Executions

The hijacking of the Havana harbor ferry, the Baraguá, couldn't have come at a worse time. It was the seventh hijacking in 7 months and came on April 2, a day before the trials of the dissidents were to start, making it easy for Cuba's enemies, and not a few of its friends, to lump the two disparate events into one "wave of repression."

The ferry was no more than a flat-bottomed self-propelled barge with a cabin, safe only for calm harbor waters, and that night there were 50-odd people on board including children and foreign tourists. The armed hijackers took it to sea in a highly dangerous Force 4 wind, ran it out of fuel, and threatened by radio to start throwing hostages overboard if they were not given enough fuel to reach Florida. The amazing part is how the Cuban coast guard convinced the hijackers to allow a tow of the drifting ferry to the port of Mariel where special forces set up a trap and divers prepared for the rescue. After many hours of standoff, it all ended in less than a minute when a French woman suddenly dove overboard and was followed en masse by the other hostages and the hijackers as well. The hostages were all rescued, and the hijackers quickly arrested.

In the trial the state asked for, and received, the death penalty for the three ringleaders of the hijacking, an action upheld by an appeals court because it was a terrorist act of extreme gravity even though no one was injured. Then the Council of State had to ratify or commute. Should Cuba end their nearly three-year moratorium on executions? Should they stir up condemnation from the world movement against the death penalty? Should they delay their decision and let those guys wait on death row for a while-not 15-20 years like in the States but at least a few weeks so as not to show undue haste? Or should they commute to life and show mercy.

Frankly, being against the death penalty, I thought a combination of the last two would be best: wait and commute. But I didn't know that at the time the Cuban security forces were investigating another 29 hijacking plots. From the Council of State's point of view it surely looked like the beginning of a wave of hijackings encouraged as always by the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act and the wet-foot, dry-foot policy that discriminates against all non-Cuban illegal immigrants.* Particularly galling to Cuba is the hero treatment hijackers have gotten in Florida and the fact that if a pilot flies a plane over there willingly, he's not considered a hijacker and is guilty of no more than misappropriation of property.

If there is one principle that Cuba has always followed, at least since the missile crisis of 1962, it is never to give the U.S. a pretext for military action. Another Mariel exodus or rafters crisis, or indeed a wave of hijackings, would be just such a pretext, as Fidel later reasoned, for imposing a U.S. naval blockade, an all-out bombing campaign, and an outright invasion. They could avoid another Mariel or rafters episode, but they had to stop the hijackings immediately. And he was right. On April 25, the chief of the Cuba Bureau of the State Department told the Chief of Cuba's Interests Section in Washington that the United States considers any more hijackings to be a serious threat to U.S. national security. Understanding "one more and we take military action" would not be paranoia.

But the Council of State didn't have to wait for that news. They knew it already. They ratified the sentences on April 10, and they were carried out the next morning. You can fault Cuba on the principle of "no death penalty under any circumstances," but the fact is that Cuba is one of more than 100 countries that have it on the books. They had just seen what U.S. bombs and missiles had done to Baghdad, saw the painstaking work of two generations at risk, including their centers of science and technology, educational institutions, hospitals and clinics, their historic cultural heritage, but most important their people who would be killed and maimed. And they didn't confuse the hijackers with dissidents. They were delinquents turned terrorists who had threatened vastly more than their 50 hostages.

It came as no surprise to Cuba when, with the executions and the sentencing of the dissidents at nearly the same time, the howling around the world began. They seemed to be ready for it to a degree, but you could sense a certain shock when long-time friends of the revolution like Eduardo Galeano and Jose Saramago joined the chorus of condemnation. They were joined by Chomsky, Zinn, Albert, Davis, Dorfman and others, whose works are treasures in my library, who signed the superficial statement of the Campaign for Peace and Democracy: "We the undersigned strongly protest the current wave of repression in Cuba [against dissidents] for their non-violent political activities."-as if the dissidents were not crucial instruments, along with terrorism, embargo, and psychological warfare, in Washington's unending campaign to convert Cuba into another American vassal. Fair enough if that's what they want for Cuba. Pitiful if they signed without thinking.

A few weeks after the executions and dissident trials, at the May Day rally of more than a million people in Havana's Revolution Square, the Rev. Lucius Walker, one of the most effective and committed U.S. Cuba solidarity activists, made an elegant plea for Cuba to abolish the death penalty. Fidel responded with appreciation, saying only that such an action was under study. Yet less than 3 weeks later another group of 8 armed hijackers, arrested before taking over a flight on April 10, were tried and sentenced. Despite convictions for terrorism and violence, the ringleaders were sentenced to life imprisonment and the others to terms of 20 to 30 years.

Readers will note that the important legal and human rights issue of due process has not been addressed in these pages. Among the criticisms of both the dissidents' and the hijackers' cases were alle- gations that the defendants were railroaded without an opportunity for adequate legal defense. The problem in addressing this issue has not been helped by the lack of published information on the trials. For example, I have found no public chronology in any of the 75 cases from the moment of arrest to the opening of the trial that would include dates and times for events such as the arrest, the presentation of charges, and sessions spent by the defendant with a defence lawyer in preparation for the trial. Nor have the written charges nor the defendants' responses and pleas nor the judges' decisions been published with the exception of the sentences. This lack of infor- mation prevents assessment of due process.

Nevertheless the Foreign Minister went to pains to address these criticisms in his three-hour-plus press conference of April 7, pointing out the Spanish colonial origins of summary trial procedures and their wide use around the world today. He also said that in the 29 trials (some trials had more than one defendant) 54 lawyers participated of whom 44 were chosen by the defendants and 10 appointed as public defenders by the courts, adding that several lawyers served more than one defendant. Perhaps most important, he said that defendants were allowed to testify before the court answering the charges and submitting to cross-examination. He emphasized the number of people allowed to attend the trials, mostly family members and averaging about 100 observers per trial. Still, the lack of full information on the prosecution and trial procedures has left the door open for charges of lack of due process, charges that cannot be resolved until the courts provide more details.

Epilogue

In Washington, despite the black eye that Cuba is seen to have self-inflicted, Congressional supporters of legislation to end or ease the embargo and to abolish the travel ban are again moving ahead with the introduction of new legislation for that purpose. While most condemned the April events, they are sticking with their principles, mostly in the belief that Americans who come to Cuba will change the Cubans. Over the years I've seen just the opposite happen, but ending the travel ban is certainly worthy, reasons aside.

The Bush administration, peopled as it is with hard line Cuban- Americans, continues to ratchet up the pressure with the expulsion of 14 Cuban diplomats in Washington and New York on vague espionage charges. Clearly a political, not a national security decision, someone in the FBI leaked the news that the White House had apparently told the State Department to expel Cubans, and State asked the FBI for some names. The FBI source added that none of the Cubans was the subject of an on-going espionage investigation. Con- versely the Cuban-American congressional representatives from Miami, Ros Lehtinen and Díaz Balart, whine openly that Bush won't take their calls demanding a swift end to the Cuba problem once and for all.

In Miami all those NGOs sucking at the teats of AID and NED to keep their anti-Castro industry going, along with their comfortable life-styles, will have to go back to their computers and draw up new plans for civil society in Cuba. They'll have to look for ways to salvage their counterpart fronts across the straits and for more Cubans with few enough scruples and just enough self-destructive instincts to take their money.

Over here in Havana, James Cason would do well to slip away on consultations back at the State Department and quietly retire. He did, after all, get 75 of "our guys" put away, some for quite a while, and all the anti-Cuban propaganda dividend flowing from his service to Reich in no way compensates. He's finished in the Foreign Service even though he was carrying out Reich's orders, for Cason, not Reich, is the one who'll take the fall. Then again he might just find a fat new anti-Cuba career with one of the Miami NGOs.

At the U.S. Interests Section, State, AID and CIA officers will now have to start beating the bushes for new blood, sending names and background information for security clearances on people willing to work with the Miami NGOs following in the footsteps of the 75, and the Cuban security service will surely oblige with promising candidates as they always have in the past.

And the rest of us?

The threat of war in Cuba from Bush and his coterie of crusaders, all of them crazed with hubris after Iraq, is real. A military campaign against Cuba, coinciding with the already-underway 2004 electoral campaign, may be the only way he can hope to finally get himself elected, even if only for his second term. And every day the economy is working against him with no signs of improving for 2004. He knows the economy in '92 did his father in, and he may conclude that fulfilling his divine mission to extend U.S. military control of the world will need a crisis very close to home.

The time to mobilize against that war is now, and not a day can be lost.

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