Terrorism
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Looking For Terrorists In Cuba’s Health System
by
Jane Franklin
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Sneaking
into a Cuban health clinic, James Bond—Agent 007—stands before a mural
of Fidel Castro. Agent 007 pushes against a worn spot on the portrait.
A hidden door slides open to reveal what this so-called health clinic
really is—a cover for a state-of-the-art laboratory that carries out
“DNA transfer.” Guess what? Cuban scientists have provided a change of
identity to the movie’s main villain, a North Korean who aims to rule
the world with a weapon of mass destruction.
MGM bet millions of dollars that Die Another Day,
the latest James Bond vehicle, would find an audience programmed to
accept the idea that a health clinic in Cuba could be a cover for a
terrorist conspiracy. They won their bet. Die Another Day was a
box office smash and will earn millions more on video. The mainstream
critics who complain about the positive views of Fidel Castro in two
recent documentaries—Oliver Stone’s Comandante and Estela
Bravo’s Fidel—seem not at all concerned about the grotesque
fabrications of Die Another Day.
This present campaign is a paradigm of Washington’s pattern
of accusing others of doing what Washington is planning to do or has
already done. Even three New York Times reporters—Judith
Miller, Stephen Engelberg, and William Broad—in their 2001 book, Germs:
Biological Weapons and America’s
Secret War, acknowledge U.S. contingency plans for bioterrorism
against Cuba beginning soon after the revolution in 1959. One scenario
was to start with a “biological strike against Cuba’s soldiers and
civilians.”
Speaking in 1999 about those schemes, Bill Patrick, who
carried out biological research for two decades at Fort Detrick,
Maryland (the main base for developing germ warfare), told an audience
of military officers, “We would incapacitate the Cuban population from
three days to a little over two weeks.” He explained that only about 2
percent of Cuba’s 7 million people (about 140,000) would die and then,
“We could move our forces in and take over the country and that would
be it.” This seems even more frightening when we remember that these
plans coincided with President Kennedy’s massive use of chemical
warfare in Vietnam called Operation Hades, later renamed Operation
Ranch Hand, that began in 1961 and continued under Presidents Johnson
and Nixon until 1971.
Meanwhile, as the Cubans set about developing a system that
could deliver free health care to those seven million people whose
incapacitation was being plotted at Fort Detrick, Washington responded
with a total ban on trade, including food and medicine—sanctions that
have continued for more than four decades.
Pro-embargo logic forms a vicious and bizarre circle:
Washington outlaws trade with Cuba, even in medicine, forcing Cuba to
develop its own advanced pharmaceutical and biotechnological industry.
Washington then cites that industry as evidence of Cuba’s ability to
wage biological warfare. Washington therefore labels Cuba a terrorist
nation. Thus the embargo is “not only legitimate, but
essential.”
In
1965, Cuba established the first of its centers for biomedical and
scientific research and development. About half of Cuba’s doctors had
fled the island at the time of the revolution. Those who remained were
teaching and learning the medical techniques of a new era. In a 1976
study called “Changes in Cuban Health Care: An Argument Against
Technological Pessimism,” health specialists from the United States
concluded: “Judging from what has happened in Cuba in the last
seventeen years, we argue that cynicism concerning the humane
possibilities of modern technology must give way to a chastened
optimism.” They added, “Our survey,” they wrote, “has shown that the
dehumanizing side effects of bureaucratic institutional care are
subject to significant correction in a social context which is free to
respond to such concern.”
Biotechnology took off in Cuba in 1981 when Cuban scientists
produced Interferon in just six weeks during an epidemic of dengue
fever that was killing dozens of people, many of them children. Here
was an historic moment when biotechnology was able to respond to what
many believe was U.S. bio-terror- ism. Suspicion that dengue was
introduced into Cuba by the CIA was given added credence three years
later by the testimony of the leader of one of the most murderous
Cuban-American terrorist groups, Eduardo Arocena of Omega 7, during his
trial on charges that included the murder of a Cuban diplomat in New
York. As the New York Times reported at the time, “Mr. Arocena
testified that he had visited Cuba in 1980 in connection with a mission
to introduce ‘some germs’ into the country.” The New York Times
did not report what Arocena said next: that whatever was carried to
Cuba in that mission “produced results that were not what we had
expected because we thought that it was going to be used against the
Soviet forces and it was used against our own people and with that we
did not agree.”
This testimony is only one example of a body of considerable
evidence that the United States government has carried out multiple
chemical and biological attacks on Cuban people, animals, and plants
over four decades. In 1982, two years after Arocena’s mission, the U.S.
State Department put Cuba on a list of terrorist nations, where it
still remains.Successes
like the production of Interferon during an epidemic led to the opening
in 1986 of the Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, which,
by the way, has a portrait of Fidel Castro on its walls. The United
Nations World Health Organization obviously thought that portrait was
there for good reason. In 1988 President Castro became the only head of
government in the world to receive the Health for All medal awarded by
the World Health Organization in recognition of what he had done not
just in Cuba, but around the world. Cuba was the only country that had
attained the goals established in 1988 that the World Health
Organization hoped Third World countries could achieve by the year
2000. Cuba had reached those goals by 1983. The award was given again
in 1998 to President Castro. Among the multiple reasons for these
awards, two (one international and one domestic) must be mentioned: by
1991, Cuba had more doctors serving abroad than the World Health
Organization; and Cuba’s infant mortality rate—that is, the number of
babies who die before the age of one year for every 1,000 live
births—decreased from 60 in 1959 to 6.5 in 2002.
Cuban biotechnological accomplishments have received
worldwide recognition. For example, in June 2002, the London Financial
Times reported that half of a Canadian biotechnology company’s most
promising cancer treatments come from Cuba and pointed out that while
North American and European medical labs are producing meager results,
“Cuba is winning a reputation for its talent in drug discovery.”
Once the so-called Cold War ended, Washington could have
ended sanctions if for no other reason than to help preserve Cuba’s
medical and educational systems. Quite to the contrary, when Cuba’s
economy plunged after the collapse of the Soviet Union, Washington
tightened sanctions with the Cuban Democracy Act (the Torricelli law)
devised by the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), the
wealthiest and most influential Cuban American group. The goal of the
Democracy Act, as explained by Rep. Robert Torricelli, is to “wreak
havoc on that island.”
The Democracy Act singles out biotechnology, banning all
exports “in which the item to be exported could be used in production
of any biotechnological product.” In addition, it blocks foreign
subsidiaries of U.S. businesses from trading with Cuba. More than 75
percent of such trade was in food and medicine. The outright cruelty of
this law motivated many scientists to try to come to the aid of Cuba’s
clinics and hospitals. The Journal of the Florida Medical
Association in 1994 published an article by Dr. Anthony Kirkpatrick
that was a call to the conscience of U.S. medical personnel,
painstakingly explaining how the sanctions contribute to death and
disease. The March 1995 Scientific American reported that the
American Academy of Neurology had sent a letter to President Clinton
and to every member of Congress urging an end to sanctions against
trade in food and medicine.
In contrast, check out the view of Cuba’s biotechnology that
reaches our living rooms and offices. In 1997, an article in U.S.
News and World Report did list some of Cuba’s biotechnological
accomplishments: the meningitis-B and hepatitis-B vaccines,
streptokinase for dissolving blood clots, a skin growth factor for
treating burns; diagnostic equipment to screen infants for various
conditions, and so on. But all these accomplishments are reduced to
manifestations of “Castro’s ego.” The overall vision is summed up in
the article’s title, “The Island of Dr. Castro.” In case any readers
miss the allusion, we are told that Cuba’s position “at the frontiers
of biotechnology comes as a surprise to many scientists and to some it
conjures up images of The Island of Dr. Moreau—H.G. Wells’s
macabre tale of a mad scientist who creates animal-human hybrids on a
remote tropical isle.”
“The Island of Dr. Castro,” like many other articles,
reports quite accurately that Cubans are trying to make biotechnology a
major source of income. Biotechnology exports increased in 2001 by 42
percent over the previous year. Those products were sold to more than
35 nations. U.S. policy has consistently aimed at destroying any
industry that makes money for Cuba. In 1960 President Eisenhower
terminated the sugar quota. When Cuba turned to tourism after the fall
of the Soviet Union, terrorists based in the United States declared war
on tourism, bombing and shooting up hotels. When foreign companies
formed joint ventures with Cuba, CANF engineered the 1996 Helms-Burton
law aimed at penalizing those involved in trade with the island.
An unending stream of propaganda portrays Cuba’s
biotechnological industry as a cover for terrorism. In a flurry of such
accusations, the Associated Press reported in December 1998 that “Cuba
is suspected” of developing biological weapons: “Programs are easily
hidden from spying satellites, cloaked by medical research.” Two weeks
later, the New York Times reported that at least 17 nations
“are suspected of having or trying to acquire germ weapons.” The Times
said the “wild card” is that some, including Cuba, are also “considered
architects of terrorism”—that is, they are on the State Department’s
list of terrorist nations. Two months later came a New York Times
Book Review article praising Vincent
Patrick’s novel Smoke Screen, which, according to reviewer
James Polk, “satisfies on all sorts of levels.” The reader can figure
out who exactly and, at what level, is satisfied by this plot: “A
deadly virus smuggled into the United States will be released by a
Cuban scientist unless the American government gives in to demands of
Fidel Castro.”Last
May, just six days before former President Jimmy Carter was scheduled
to fly to Havana, John Bolton, Undersecretary of State for Arms Control
and International Security, delivered a speech to the Heritage
Foundation called “Beyond the Axis of Evil,” adding Cuba, Libya, and
Syria to President Bush’s “Axis of Evil”—Iraq, North Korea, and Iran.
He announced, “The United States believes that Cuba has at least a
limited offensive biological warfare research and development effort.
Cuba has provided dual-use biotechnology to other rogue states. We are
concerned that such technology could support BW [biological warfare]
programs in those states.” On that day and the next Bolton’s remarks
were broadcast worldwide.
But this time something unusual happened. Although some
media reported the story, ready to demonize Cuba once again, others
asked, “Where’s the evidence?” The Florida Sun-Sentinel brought
up the question of timing, following up with an editorial that asked,
“Where’s the beef?” New York’s Newsday called the charge of
terrorism a “preposterous suggestion,” noting that the upshot is that
Cuba has “the most sophisticated biomedical resources in Latin
American,” and adding, “So what?” The Guardian of England,
stating that Bolton “presented no evidence for his claims,” warned that
“the U.S. threatened to extend its war on terror to Cuba.” The Baltimore
Sun editorialized, “It’s a tired, old political line that more and
more Americans are rejecting.” A Chicago Tribune
editorial declared that such charges, “offered without a shred of
proof,” begin “to look like a political stunt.”
When Jimmy Carter toured the Center for Genetic Engineering
and Biotechnology in Havana with President Castro, he made his own
announcement: that during briefings before his visit, he asked the
White House, State Department, and CIA if there were any “possible
terrorist activities that were supported by Cuba,” and the answer was
‘No’.”
But the White House doesn’t need evidence. If President Bush
and his coterie disapprove of a government, they can simply state that
the regime has the potential for bioterrorism, since any laboratory has
that potential. Last September, Wall Street Journal columnist
Mary Anastasia O’Grady asked, “Is Fidel Castro busy cooking up viruses
in Cuban labs to share with Islamic fundamentalists?” On Halloween
night, Otto Reich, a Cuban-American who was then Assistant Secretary of
State for Western Hemisphere Affairs, was still embellishing the same
charges to the Heritage Foundation that his Undersecretary Bolton
delivered five months earlier.
On June 1, 2002, at West Point, George Bush delivered a
message to the new officers of his imperial army, graduating, he said,
“in a time of war.” He warned them that, with technology, “even weak
states and small groups could attain a catastrophic power to strike
great nations.” He told them, “We must take the battle to the enemy,
disrupt his plans, and confront the worst threats before they emerge.”
He stated, “Our security will require transforming the military you
will lead—a military that must be ready to strike at a moment’s notice
in any dark corner of the world.” Will Cuba’s medical achievements make
it one of those targets?
Historian Jane Franklin has been a contributing editor
to Cuba Update, the journal of the Center for
Cuban Studies in New York City, since 1979. Her books on Cuba are: Cuban
Foreign Relations 1959-1982 and Cuba
and the United States: A Chronological History.
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