1998 Montes (Later determined to be a spy for Cuba) tagged along with two senior aides to Sen. Jesse Helms (R-NC) on a trip to Cuba; Helms was at that time the chair of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and one of the most vehement opponents of Cuba’s leftist government.
May 1998 Secretary of Defense William Cohen testified in Congress that Cuba possesses advanced biotechnology and is capable of mass-producing agents for biological warfare.
May 13, 1999 An incident recorded by the Federal Communications Commission in which Cuban electronic-warfare specialists penetrated New York's air-traffic-control system by simulating U.S. Air Force flight codes. The signals, which seriously threatened to disrupt air traffic, were traced to a 1,500 kilowatt transmitter operating west of Havana. (The Chinese have also established for themselves a sophisticated network of electronic espionage in Cuba to be used against the U.S. The bases are operating under the cover of Radio China short wave transmissions to Latin America and the U.S. Their principal bases are at Bejucal and near Havana. They are capable of interfering with U.S. air traffic control, according to the FCC. On the 13th of May at 4:48 p.m., the Chinese sent a communication to the air traffic control in New York, falsely identifying themselves as OPEC21, a U.S. Military C130 plane. )
Sept 12, 1998: Ten people allegedly operating as a Cuban spy ring "have been arrested and accused of collecting information on U.S. military installations and anti-Castro groups in Florida, federal officials announced today. The arrests, carried out Saturday [12 Sep. 1998], ended the most extensive espionage effort involving Cuban agents ever uncovered here, U.S. Attorney Thomas E. Scott said."
December 23, 1998, three Cuban diplomats at the United Nations were ordered to leave the United States. "The three men were linked to espionage after an investigation by the FBI that led to the arrest and indictment of 10 suspected Cuban agents in Miami three months ago. The three men in New York have diplomatic passports, which give them immunity from prosecution as spies."
Feb 2000: Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) official Mariano Faget, charged in February 2000; he was subsequently convicted of using classified information for business purposes, a technical violation of the U.S. Espionage Act, and was sentenced to five years in jail As of this time he was the highest ranking Cuban spy known to operate in the US. March 2000, Amarylis Silverio Santos and her husband, Joseph Santos, along with several (14?) others of the group, pleaded guilty to "charges of acting as unregistered agents of a foreign government." John Elvin, "Jail Time for Cuban Spies," Insight on the News, 6 Mar. 2000.
May 2000: Castro visits Iran
August 2000: Three Afghani nationals and suspected al-Qaeda members caught trying to deposit $2 million in a bank in the Cayman Islands were found to have entered the British colony on a commercial flight from nearby Cuba using false Pakistani passports.
May 10, 2001: Agence France-Presse reported that Castro, in an apocalyptic speech, told his Muslim audience in Iran: "America is weak. I have studied its weaknesses from very close by. I tell you, the imperialist king will finally fall."
May 25, 2001: The U.S. says that agents copied incriminating material from a computer in (Cuban spy) Montes’ home.
August 31, 2001: George and Marisol Gari were arrested and charged with "conspiracy to act as agents of a foreign government without proper identification or notice to the attorney general." U.S. authorities say that they were members of "the largest Cuban spy ring ever detected,... 'La Red Avispa,' or the Wasp Network, five members of whom were convicted in June of conspiring to spy on the United States for Fidel Castro's regime."
Sept 11, 2001: Castro was ordering a military alert in Cuba and calling up reserves.
6:30 p.m. on Sept. 14, 2001: Ana Belen Montes, a senior analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), walked into a public telephone booth outside Washington's National Zoo and made two calls to pager numbers later traced by federal agents to Cuba's Directorate of General Intelligence (DGI). She already had compromised the identities of CIA agents, revealed U.S. military secrets and exposed the contents of classified files. But, as Montes sent repeated signals to her DGI handlers during the days immediately following the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the Pentagon and the twin towers of the World Trade Center, the FBI was given orders to act.
Sept 21, 2001: Ana Belen Montes arrested
October 19, 2001: Putin announces that Russia will close its listening post at Lourdes, near Havana, Cuba- just hours before the APEC meeting in Shanhai which Bush would attend.
Cuba also has some interesting relationships with several terrorist groups, notably FARC.
I never said Cuba was a saint, the comparison here was between Cuba and China with us having an embargo against Cuba but an open arms policy with China....my point being what's good for one should be good for the other unless hypocricy is the order of the day.
Should be May 2001
And further info on the Afghans that were detained in the Cayman Islands in 2001 prior to Sept 11:
Mohammed Raza Hassani, Nez Nezar Nezary, and Ali Sha Yusufi-three Afghan men were detained in the Cayman Islands. They carried fake Pakistani passports and claimed to have gotten off a boat bound for Canada from Turkey. The police commissioner, however, determined that they actually had arrived by plane from Cuba.