Jimmy Carter travels to Cuba, kisses up to “old friend” Fidel Castro

…because even mass-murdering thugs need a hug every now and then.

All I can say is somebody's gotta make a movie about this guy's life — except who could they ever get to play Carter now that Charlton Heston is dead?

Heston would have been perfect for the role. You know, just like in The Ten Commandments when he stepped over the enslaved Israelites to sup with Pharaoh, pose for photos, fawn over his "beautiful" palace, and then beat it on home to report on Pharaoh's "health" and brag about how they "welcomed each other as old friends" — building of course, to a soul-stirring climax where he raises his staff and bellows, "Let the Cuban 5 go!"

It kind of makes me feel sorry for President Reagan, serving as he did in the long shadow of such a great man. It's not that he didn't try, but he just didn't get it. I mean, who can forget that cringe-inducing moment when he stood at the Brandenburg Gate and commanded, "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!" I'm sure that gruel-spraying hoots rang out in political prison cells all over the Eastern Bloc after that – especially from the families of those shot trying to escape through that very same wall.

So, yeah, it's a cinch nobody's going to make a movie about that.

Whew. I feel better. Sometimes you just need to get the snark out. I apologize, but it's Jimmy Carter, and I'm only human. Being as nobody's figured out how to pull his passport yet, our elder Useful Idiot set out once again this week to service his tyrant fetish and convince his "old friends," the Castro brothers, to release Alan Gross, an American sentenced to 15 years for bringing Internet equipment and satellite phones to Cuban citizens.

And by all accounts, it was a lovely visit, except for the part where Carter went home alone because his "old friends" were unconvinced by his pledge that Gross was "innocent of any serious threat" to the "Cuban people."

For the best commentary on that remarkable statement, I defer to Real Cuba. (Hat tip to Gateway Pundit)

"No, socotroco, he [Gross] is not in jail for being a threat to the Cuban people, he is in jail for being a threat to the brutal dictator in Cuba, who is scared to death of the Internet and is trying to prevent the Cuban people from having access to news of what is happening in their own country and around the world.

The only threat to the Cuban people comes from the Castro brothers, and the useful idiots like Jimmy Carter who are always finding excuses for the Castros' genocide against the Cuban people.

Carter also met with Cuba's walking corpse and "retired" dictator, who he called an "old friend."
It is hard to comprehend that this idiot was at one time president of this great country."

Carter also assured his "old friends" that he didn't support the U.S. trade restrictions and the continued incarceration of five Cuban spies in the U.S. because, I presume, we all have sins to atone for.

For example the Castro dictators might imprison 11 million of their own countryman and an American who threatened the Cuban people — but not "seriously" — with satellite phones, but we're not exactly pure as the wind-driven snow either. That's because we're holding the Cuban 5: Castro operatives — or "Cuban patriots" according to Carter — who infiltrated the Miami-based Cuban humanitarian group, Brothers to the Rescue, making it possible for Castro shoot down one of their mercy missions to those dehydrated, sunburned, half-drowned Cuban families that tend to bob about on inner tubes in the Caribbean. (Why do they do that, anyway?) And that constitutes moral equivalence in Carter's view.

Honestly, Carter's usefulness is anybody's call, but… what an idiot.

by Elena


From: Thinklets

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CUBA: Preparing For Perestroika

El Capitolio, or National Capitol Building in Havana, Cuba.

Dividing Old Havana from Chinatown is Cuba’s Capitolio Nacional, a monumental edifice with a fateful past. El Capitolio was conceived during the Roaring ’20s, when the island led the world in sugar exports and the future seemed sky blue.

President Gerardo Machado dreamed of turning Cuba into the Switzerland of the Americas. He decided that his 4 million countrymen needed a domed capitol building even taller and more ornate than the one he toured in Washington. So Cuba’s Congress dutifully poured 3% of the country’s GDP into their new home. (This would be akin to the US Congress spending $420 billion for a new office today, but let’s not give them any ideas…)

It took 8,000 skilled Cuban laborers just three years to complete El Capitolio, which featured gilt ceilings, a giant diamond embedded into the pristine marble floor and the world’s third-largest indoor statue. However, the showy project couldn’t have been more poorly timed. Work completed in 1929, just as America’s stock market crashed and the Great Depression unfolded.

The Smoot-Hawley tariffs crushed Cuban sugar prices by 74%. When El Capitolio’s ribbon was cut in 1931, Cuba’s economy lay in tatters. Machado was forced out of office, and his dream building would perform congressional service for only 28 years before Fidel Castro’s revolutionaries swept into Havana and opted for more austere premises. I don’t need to recite the history from here, which you probably well know.

The winds of change are gathering in Cuba, though. Since Fidel Castro’s health nearly failed in 2006, power has passed to his younger brother, Raul Castro. Raul has quietly reshuffled more than 30 cabinet members to prepare his party and people for a sweeping economic policy overhaul – Perestroika al Cubano. Even the semi-retired Fidel seems to have glumly accepted that change is inevitable, candidly admitting to a visiting US journalist that “the Cuban model doesn’t even work for us anymore.”

The global economic crisis whacked Cuba hard. Venezuela cut back on its largesse as its own economy worsened. Tourism and remittances softened, while nickel export prices tanked. Furthermore, three severe hurricanes left a wake of destruction in 2008. Unable to service Cuba’s estimated $21 billion foreign debt, and running out of generous leftist patrons to hit up, Raul Castro has, apparently, decided he has little choice but to pry open Cuba’s economy.

Castro’s wild card is Cuba’s oil and gas reserves. The island currently produces 60,000 bbl a day. But its US-facing northern waters hold an estimated 5-20 billion barrels of oil and 20 trillion cubic feet of natural gas. (Note: This compares with 29 billion barrels of oil reserves in the entire US.) Accessing this undersea oil requires the sophisticated drilling technology the US excels in. But as long as sanctions remain in place, the US oil majors are excluded from that bonanza. Amidst the applause of oil industry lobbyists, the dance for reengagement has begun, with both partners taking some unprecedented steps.

Raul Castro has issued a far-reaching five-year road map for Cuba’s future economic reform. The proposed changes would put Cuba on a very similar path to that taken by China in the 1980s and Vietnam in the 1990s. Here are some of the ideas: permit real estate transactions amongst Cubans, merge the two-tier currency system, close down inefficient state enterprises, decentralize state ownership, facilitate private ownership of businesses, distribute idle land to farmers, open state-owned wholesale markets and further encourage foreign investment – particularly in tourism.

In recent months, some planned reforms have already been implemented in an effort to delay Cuba’s impending insolvency. Costly subsidies on sugar and personal care products are being scaled back. The government announced plans to shed 500,000 state workers (that’s 10% of the country’s government work force in a country where 85% of workers work for the state) and guide them somehow into the private sector.

Cubans are being encouraged to grow and sell their own fruits and vegetables. The government is inviting foreign investors to develop 10 golf course estates in Cuba, with a new law allowing 99-year land leases to foreign buyers of plots in such projects. In the old days of Fidel’s revolution, such policies were unthinkable.

So what is the potential for a liberalized Cuban economy?

Just look 90 miles across the straits to Florida. A million Cuban-Americans call Miami home. Cuba has 60% of Florida’s population and 80% of its landmass, but greater natural resources and a much longer coastline, so one might conclude that the two are of comparable overall potential.

Perhaps to underscore their similarities, remember the fact that England and Spain cleanly swapped the two in 1763. Today, Florida’s economy is 12 times larger than Cuba’s. One reason is that Florida gets 20 times as many tourists as Cuba, plus an inflow of affluent retirees.

When the US government stops restricting its citizens from traveling to Cuba, the island will become an instant tourist magnet. Offering short flights, sunny beaches, cool music, “old world” architecture and cheap surgery, Cuba should have no problem drawing several million American tourists a year, as further-away destinations like Costa Rica have done.

Should reforms become comprehensive enough, agriculture seems an obvious investment play: Half the land is arable, labor is cheap and rain is plentiful. Cuba’s once-vaunted sugar industry stands in disarray, with 80% of the old mills shut down. However, today’s high sugar prices provide ample incentive to revive the sector, along with other traditional crops such as cigar tobacco.

Despite its long coastline, fisheries and aquaculture remain largely overlooked. Cuba is a world-class producer of nickel, but other mineral deposits remain underexploited. And then there’s the oil. The entire power system needs to be updated, financial services developed, retailing expanded – the opportunities seem endless.

Beyond the subsidized basics, most consumer goods have to be imported, and imports draw heavy duties. Telecom services are costly due to government monopolization and inefficiency. The list goes on. In this environment, it is tough for most Cubans to get by unless they receive remittances, tourist gratuities or tea money.

All in all, we eagerly await the implementation of Cuba’s economic reforms. As this process unfolds, Cuba could transform into one of the world’s most attractive frontier investment destinations. America has a long track record of turning bitter rivals into productive partners (a recent example being Vietnam), and re-engagement with Cuba could be one of Obama’s most notable foreign policy legacies.

Some frontier investors are not waiting for that and are already investing in Cuba. While 100% foreign ownership is permitted, most investors enter joint ventures with Cuban state enterprises, which typically contribute land, labor and sometimes capital. Over 250 such joint ventures exist, mostly for specific sectors or projects. Investments are made in foreign currency, eliminating exchange rate issues, and there are no restrictions on capital repatriation. Corporate income tax is 30% for joint ventures and 35% for wholly owned foreign companies, but tax holidays of five-seven years are available.

A few Cuba-focused investment groups have been established that non-US investors can access. Canada-listed Sherritt Group is a major player in Cuban nickel mining and, formerly, telecoms. A private investment group backed by European investors, Coral Capital has restored Havana’s historic Saratoga Hotel, which was recently ranked by Conde Nast as the 16th best hotel in the world. Coral is now planning a number of golf courses, marina, housing and hotel projects, as is Leisure Canada, a Canada-listed investment vehicle.

Douglas Clayton

Source: Business Insider

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Pedro Pan flight veterans mark 50th anniversary

Some of the Cuban children sent to the US.

The last thing 13-year-old Mercedes Argiz's father told her before she boarded the plane from Cuba to the U.S. was: "I will see you for Christmas."

That was nearly half a century ago, just days before the Cuban Missile Crisis. She never saw him again.

Argiz was one of more than 14,000 Cuban children spirited out of the country between late 1960 and 1962 on the so-called Pedro Pan flights organized by Catholic Church leaders following the Cuban revolution. On Friday, she flew from northern Virginia to join more than 100 other Cuban-Americans in Miami to mark the 50th anniversary of their exodus and tour the South Florida refugee camps they first stayed in.

Operation Pedro Pan effort was organized at the behest of Cuban parents, fearful of the new communist government's efforts to take control of their children. Most of the refugees spent time in one of several Florida refugee camps before they moved into foster homes or orphanages around the country. The effort drew its name from the fictional character Peter Pan and an unaccompanied minor named Pedro who came to the attention of Bryan O. Walsh, a priest who headed the Catholic Welfare Bureau.

The children thought they would be reunited with their parents within a few weeks. But heightened tension between the two countries following the missile crisis — the nuclear standoff over missile sites on the island — meant many had to wait years to see their parents again. Some never did.

On Friday, dozens of Pedro Pan veterans cheered and shouted as they hugged friends they had not seen since childhood. They waved American and Cuban flags and sang the camp songs they learned upon their arrival, Spanish children's tunes exhorting communists to leave Cuba while promising "Americans" they would be friends.

Cuban officials and some researchers have long maintained the effort was a CIA-backed plot to create a brain-drain from the island. The U.S. government denies those accusations.

Argiz, who now goes by her married name Precht-Matuschek, says it was her own experience that prompted her departure. After the government shut down her Catholic school, she was transferred to a communist-run public school where she excelled. Asked to recite a poem at the school year's closing ceremonies, she planned to thank her family, friends and God, she says. A teacher warned her to replace God with the name of revolutionary leader Fidel Castro. Precht-Matuschek didn't, and the local dignitaries in attendance were not pleased.

A short time later, her family was informed she was selected to go to Russia to continue her studies.

Precht-Matuschek's family was able to get her a temporary visa, promising she would soon return. After a brief stay in the camps, she ended up with a wealthy family in Cincinnati until she was reunited with her younger brother and mother five years later. She says her father, who had owned a canning company before the revolution, was not allowed to leave.

At Camp Matecumbe in the south Miami suburb of Kendall, the former Pedro Pan children walked the grounds of what were once dorms for the newly arrived teenage boys. Julio A. Martinez, now a Miami-Dade County civil engineer, recalled sleeping in tents as the number of children arriving outpaced dormitory space, unable to fall asleep because he was terrified of the rattle snakes that haunted the nearby pine and palmetto tree woods.

Housing developments and shopping malls have displaced most of the tangled forest. The camp is now an activity center for children with disabilities. But for Martinez and his friend Andres Garcia Fernandez of San Francisco, returning for the first time in 50 years, it was as if time had stood still.

They recalled desperately trying to help their parents leave Cuba as they were bounced from camp to camp.

They were both eventually able to help get their parents out as part of the 1963 prisoner exchanges between the U.S. and Cuba following the failed CIA-backed Bay of Pigs invasion of the island by Cuban exiles. Martinez said he was able to convince a Bay of Pigs veteran to claim his stepfather as family because the two shared a last name.

"We had to survive. We had to figure it out. We were adults at the age of 15," he said, blinking away tears.

Martinez says he is ever grateful to the U.S. for giving him the chance to remake his life and raise his two daughters and grandchildren.

Nearby, Garcia's adult daughter, sporting a video camera and nose ring, watched her father protectively.

"It is so good for my dad to be here with his friends," said Rachel Garcia, 22. "He's always talked about it. And he carries so much sadness and grief from that time, but no one where we live in San Francisco has any idea about it. It's just not history people know about."

Precht-Matuschek, a retiree who lives in Spotsylvania, Va. near her two daughters, says her father was forced to work once a week cutting sugar cane after she left as punishment. Years later, she moved to Germany with her husband, and in 1973 became pregnant with their daughter. Her father was finally granted a visa to visit her there.

He died of a heart attack at age 47 before he could make the trip.

From: Sify News 

Escape from Havana 1/5

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2 Cubans rescued at sea might stay

Picture from 1994, behind, center, the building of the former Soviet Embassy, now Russian.

Two of the seven Cuban refugees pulled from a raft in the Atlantic Ocean and brought to Cape Canaveral Hospital this week have a greater chance of staying in the United States than their counterparts who were kept aboard a Coast Guard cutter, officials said.

The two unidentified Cubans were treated at the Brevard County hospital for respiratory problems and dehydration after spending 14 days floating on a makeshift raft that ended up about 45 miles off the coast of Volusia County.

The five others on board the same raft were secured aboard the Coast Guard cutter in Port Canaveral and are expected to be taken back to Cuba within the next week, Coast Guard officials say.

The two who were hospitalized and released have been turned over to U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents. The medical tab for the short stay likely will be absorbed by the hospital's charitable service, Health First officials said Thursday.

Immigration authorities say the two probably will benefit from the so-called "wet-foot, dry-foot" policy enacted under President Bill Clinton in 1995. It means that if Cubans literally touch U.S. soil, they can remain rather than be returned to Cuba if they are interdicted at sea. The policy does not apply to other immigrants attempting to get into the United States illegally.

"They will be processed according to our border protection policies," said Migbalia Travis, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Border Patrol. "Under normal circumstances, they should be able to stay, but we cannot discuss their case directly."

The "wet-foot, dry-foot" policy, a change in the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act, was designed to stem the flow of refugees after President Fidel Castro allowed more than 100,000 Cubans -- including many from mental hospitals and prisons -- to escape by boat to the United States in 1980. As a result, the number of Cubans interdicted at sea this year stands at 422, compared to 38,500 refugees who attempted to get into the United States in 1994, which was a peak year.

Today, Coast Guard officials said those who make it to shore are sent to immigration centers to be interviewed and processed for criminal background checks.

"They could still end up being treated as "wet foot" by the U.S. government. They'll be taken into custody, but they don't have the right to legal protection during the interview and inspection process," said David Stoller, a Melbourne-based immigration attorney.

After a year and a day, Cuban refugees can apply for permanent residency, he said.

"Basically, if you make it here, you're here. But, you never know what's going to happen. Today, it's a different atmosphere than before. Most of the Cubans today are economic refugees more than anything else."

Other refugees, such as 15 Haitians rescued June 24 at sea by the Coast Guard about 14 miles off Brevard County, do not have the same status under federal law, Stoller pointed out. That group was repatriated to Haiti within a week, Coast Guard officials reported.

"We treat Cubans differently, while others are sent back," Stoller said, citing the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966.

Some Cuban-American residents living in Brevard County -- many of whom came here as political refugees -- say the policy needs to be reviewed.

Roland Guilarte, 52, of Satellite Beach recalls the struggles of learning English and adapting to the fast pace of American culture after he and his family escaped Castro's regime aboard a 1967 freedom flight to Miami.

"We were legal refugees and it took about two to 21/2 years for us to be processed," Guilarte said. "But today, the main difference is that you have Cuban organizations that offer assistance and housing for anyone like the two people in this situation."

Some limited federal assistance is also available. He added that he had sympathy for the five who face repatriation to Cuba, even though they were brought to Port Canaveral yet not allowed to leave the Coast Guard cutter.

"These people are oppressed, and now they're going back to a living hell," he said. "We understand that we don't want to strain the federal government with taking care of these folks. We don't like the 'wet-foot, dry-foot' policy. We want to be able to take care of our own."

A look at Cubans interdicted at sea:
Year -- Number
2005 -- 2,712
2006 -- 2,810
2007 -- 2,868
2008 -- 2,199
2009 -- 799
2010 -- 422
-- U.S. Coast Guard

From: Florida Today

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30 years later, revisiting the Mariel boatlift

Escaping from Castro's "paradise"

Miami’s Merle Frank never expected what followed after she asked President Jimmy Carter in 1980 how he could help her city with the mass of Cubans arriving on the Mariel boatlift.

“We’ll continue to provide an open heart and open arms,” Carter told Frank, then-head of the Miami League of Women Voters, during a League conference in Washington.

Fidel Castro took Carter at his widely reported word. Six days later, on May 11, Mariel set the one-day record for arrivals and newly freed criminals began boarding the boats.

No U.S. president, before or since, has tried as hard as Carter to establish normal relations with Castro. And none have been burned as badly.

The boatlift officially ended Sept. 26, 1980, when Cuban soldiers ordered the last 150 boats in Mariel to leave the port west of Havana, without passengers.

By that time, 125,000 Cubans had landed in Key West, Carter had secured his image as indecisive and Castro was boasting of another blow to the “empire.”

“Unfortunately, a democracy is at a disadvantage when a totalitarian regime decides to do something like this,” said Robert Pastor, the Carter White House’s point man on Cuba.

Carter already faced other crises when the Mariel boatlift erupted in April 1980 — the aftermath of the failed Iran hostage rescue raid and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan.

There were gasoline lines across America, Sen. Ted Kennedy was challenging Carter in the Democratic Party primaries and GOP presidential hopeful Ronald Reagan was gaining ground.

The key factor in the Mariel crisis, Pastor said, was the early on decision that Washington could not halt the boatlift without harsh measures that could endanger lives at sea.

“The truth is, once it was determined the only way we could stop the flow was to risk loss of life — and that was too high a price — we were never able to take control of events and after that we were just reacting,” he said.

But the problems went well beyond that decision, David W. Engstrom wrote in his 1997 book about Mariel, “Presidential Decision Making Adrift.”

The Carter administration initially considered the crisis a problem between Cuba and Peru, whose embassy in Havana was jammed with 10,000 asylum seekers, Engstrom wrote.

Then it waffled between trying to ensure the safety of the Cuban migrants and trying to avoid encouraging even more migration, he argued.

While the State Department was warning that the boatlift amounted to migrant smuggling and telling exiles that they were only helping Castro, the Coast Guard was urging exile boaters to carry enough life vests and file sailing plans.

Not until May 14 did Carter personally attend a meeting on the crisis, and no single federal agency was put in charge from the start, according to Engstrom.

“Governments were fighting with each other — Federal against state against county against city, and the decisions changed day by day,” recalled Sergio Piñon, then a Florida Department of Law Enforcement investigator.

Then Carter made his May 5 comment during the question-and-answer period after a speech to the LWV, opening the floodgates to the Mariel exodus.

 

“At the time, we all looked at each other and basically agreed that he didn’t offer any specifics,” recalled Frank, a real estate agent. “But Castro must have said, ‘Oh, great. What an opportunity for us.’ ”

Carter later said he was misunderstood, and May 14 ordered the Coast Guard to stop all Cuba-bound boats. By the end of June, the flow of arrivals had slowed to a trickle, but the problems continued.

It took two months for the administration to decide to treat the arrivals as asylum seekers rather than refugees, to avoid setting a precedent that foreigners arriving by boat would be considered refugees.

State Department officials meanwhile argued that the boatlift was largely a domestic issue, while other U.S. departments wanted the State Department or the White House to take the lead.

“This was a unique emergency that was half foreign policy and half domestic policy, and involved a whole bunch of people who were not accustomed to working together,” said Pastor, now a professor at American University in Washington.

Carter initially refused direct negotiations with Castro, but later sent to Havana Pastor, then Latin America director at the White House’s National Security Council, and Peter Tarnoff, executive secretary at the State Department.

Mariel “was totally mishandled,” Engstrom quoted Stuart Eizenstat, Carter’s chief domestic policy adviser, as saying.

In the end, the boatlift helped spike what was the most determined effort by any U.S. president in half a century to resolve U.S.-Cuba hostilities.

“We should attempt to achieve normalization of our relations with Cuba,” Carter wrote in a secret Presidential Directive — in essence an order to his administration to work toward that goal — soon after he entered the White House.

He lifted all restrictions on U.S. travel to Cuba, including tourism, and exchanged diplomatic missions known as Interests Sections in Havana and Washington.

Carter negotiated a 1977 agreement that delineated territorial waters and fishing rights, and agreed to take more than 3,000 former political prisoners released by Castro.

But he failed to persuade Cuba to pull its troops out of Angola — one of Carter’s key goals — and the last Cuban soldier did not leave Africa until 1991.

An analysis of the Mariel crisis carried out by the Reagan administration concluded that Mariel “destroyed any prospect of improved bilateral relations under President Carter.”

By JUAN O. TAMAYO

 

From: Bradenton

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Using Che Guevara image riles some Cuban Americans

WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. – Some Cuban Americans in south Florida are upset to see a picture of revolutionary Che Guevara promoting an irreverent car race.

The “24 Horas de Cuba del Norte” — or 24 Hours of Cuba of the North — is part of a national circuit of farcical auto races called 24 Hours of LeMons. Drivers spend less than $500 and race junk cars decorated like Halloween floats.

Other races in the circuit have names like “The Can’t Get Bayou” in New Orleans and “The Rod Blagojevich Never-Say-Die 500″ in Chicago.

But the use of Cuban revolutionary Guevara’s image in the Dec. 30-31 race’s logo crosses the line for some native Cubans. Critics say it’s like using Ku Klux Klan imagery to advertise in the South.

Race organizers say they don't plan to change the campaign.

From: Cheat Games

Video - The Victims of Che Guevara

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Raul Castro wants “an opening” with Washington to help with the economy

Cardinal Jaime Ortega, Roman Catholic archbishop of Havana, told The Washington Post that Cuban President Raul Castro wants “an opening” with the United States.

“He has a desire for an opening with the US government,” Ortega was quoted as saying. “He repeated to me on several occasions that he is ready to talk to the United States government directly, about every issue”.
Ortega and the Catholic Church led negotiations with the Cuban government that secured in recent weeks the release of more than 50 dissidents who have been jailed for years.
The church official made the comments in an interview with the columnist Jackson Diehl, who published them in Monday's edition of the US daily.
According to Ortega, Castro's motivation to improve relations with the United States lies in the chance that Cuba's economy can be revived by US trade and investment.
When asked whether such talks could include democratic reform as requested by the administration of US President Barack Obama, the cardinal said things need to be taken “step by step.”
“It's not realistic to begin at the end. This is a process. The most important thing is to take steps in the process” Ortega said.
He highlighted the current situation as “something new” and as something that is set to “open possibilities” in the communist island.
Ortega was in Washington last week to collect a prize, in what was his second visit to the US capital in a little over one month.
He met with high officials of the Obama administration, including Obama's National Security Adviser Jim Jones and Arturo Valenzuela, the Assistant Secretary of State for Western Hemisphere Affairs. In his first visit to Washington in late June, he had already met with Valenzuela.

From: MercoPress

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Cuba tries armed men tied to US anti-Castro group

Santa Clara streets

Three armed men who were intercepted by Cuban border guards in 2001 and have been awaiting trial since then on charges they planned acts of sabotage went to court behind closed-doors Friday, according to a veteran human rights activist.
Elizardo Sanchez, head of the Cuban Commission on Human Rights and National Reconciliation, said that during a roughly eight-hour hearing in the central city of Santa Clara prosecutors presented their case against the three Cuban-born exiles: Ihosvani Suris de la Torre, Santiago Padron Quintero and Maximo Pradera Valdes, also known as Maximo Robaina.
Authorities are seeking 30-year prison sentences for Padron and Pradera, and life behind bars for Suris. A judge will now rule on their guilt and determine an appropriate sentence for each — though it was not clear when that decision would come.
"The trial is ready for sentencing," Sanchez said by phone Friday night. He said the three men were transferred from a maximum-security prison in Havana to Santa Clara for their day in court.
Island border agents first intercepted the men on the northern coast of Villa Clara province, of which Santa Clara is the capital. After exchanging gunfire with Cuban authorities, the three fled to Jutia Key Island, where they were arrested April 26, 2001.
They were armed with four AK-47 assault rifles, an M-3 rifle, three Makarov pistols and night goggles, all purchased openly at stores in Miami, according to evidence Cuban prosecutors detailed on state television in the months following the arrests.
In Miami, Andres Nazario Sargen, leader of anti-Castro paramilitary group Alpha 66, said in 2001 that Suris and Robaina were active members of the group but went to Cuba independently. He said back then that Padron had been a member years ago, but had not been active lately.
The three have long featured prominently in a video shown several times a week on Cuban state television, where the voice of Suris is apparently heard, confessing that the group arrived in Cuba to commit acts of violence. That same presentation includes a bugged phone conversation between Suris and a man identified as a leader of the anti-Castro, Cuban-American community, detailing a plan to detonate an explosive inside the Tropicana, Havana's best-known cabaret.
Cuban authorities did not comment on Friday's proceedings, and rarely discuss such matters publicly.
Sanchez's commission is not recognized by Cuba's communist government, but largely allowed to operate.
Sanchez said he did not know exactly why it took eight years for the three to go to court, but that he suspected it was no coincidence that authorities held a trial a day after the U.S. State Department again included Cuba on its list of state sponsors of terrorism. Cuba has bristled at that charge, which Foreign Minister Bruno Rodriguez dismissed as "two-faced and hypocritical."

WILL WEISSERT (AP)

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