HONEST--CROSS MY HEART!
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Posted on 04/13/2003 8:52:25 AM PDT by Luis Gonzalez
HAVANA - For years they were familiar faces in Cuba's opposition movement: the elderly man with a black beret, the reporter who used a cane, the efficient secretary. But last week their real identities became known: They were government spies and helped the regime to lock up 75 of its most vocal critics. ''The True Faces of the Nation'' is what the Communist Party daily Granma called them -- as many as a dozen men and women who faked opposition to Fidel Castro's government to gather facts and figures about the dissidents. Several of the undercover agents were so trusted by U.S. diplomats that they had permission to use computers whenever they wished. The unmasking underscored the efficiency of the Cuban government's intelligence services and sent a strong message to diplomats and dissidents alike. ''No one in Cuba is sucking their thumb,'' Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez Roque said last week, defending the crackdown. ``What we have said here is just a part of what we know.'' James Cason, the top U.S. official with whom the dissidents are accused of collaborating, ''should know that our nation has learned how to defend itself,'' Pérez Roque said. Communist officials apparently identified the agents now because there was political gain in letting the dissidents and diplomats know just how much information they had, said Nelson P. Valdes, a Cuba analyst. ''The Cuban government not only penetrated the so-called dissidents, it managed to have people setting up the very organizations that the United States government found attractive, supported and funded,'' said Valdes, a University of New Mexico sociology professor. Informant David Manuel Orrio, the reporter who walks with the cane, told Granma that the decision was based on politics. ''We thought there was still a lot we could do,'' Orrio was quoted as saying, but ``we understood the political importance of unmasking the traitors of the nation and those who had bought them off.'' Since the mid-1990s, the websites of Cuban exile groups in Miami have published hundreds of Orrio's articles, many of them anti-Castro in tone. He had even helped organize a journalism ethics conference at Cason's home. Testimony from Orrio was used to get 20-year prison sentences for independent journalists Raul Rivero and Ricardo González. Also testifying against Rivero and González was Néstor Baguer, a wiry 81-year-old in a black beret popularly known as the ``dean of Cuba's independent reporters.'' ''I already said it in the trial: they are mercenaries,'' Baguer told Granma.
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