2001CRE2141C CUBA
robop...@us.govnews.org
[Congressional Record: November 27, 2001 (Extensions)]
[Page E2141-E2142]
From the Congressional Record Online via GPO Access [wais.access.gpo.gov]
[DOCID:cr27no01-42]
CUBA
______
HON. LINCOLN DIAZ-BALART
of florida
in the house of representatives
Tuesday, November 27, 2001
Mr. DIAZ-BALART. Mr. Speaker, I rise today to commend to you the
attached article from earlier this summer written by Mr. Frank Calzon,
entitled ``Yes, Cuba is a Terrorist Nation''. Mr. Calzon is the
executive director of the Center for a Free Cuba in Washington, DC and
is a tireless fighter for democratic causes. I encourage my colleagues
to learn from his insightful article.
[From the Miami Herald, Nov. 7, 2001]
Yes, Cuba Is a Terrorist Nation
(By Frank Calzon)
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 Johns 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.
[[Page E2142]]
Illich Ramirez Sanchez, 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.
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