House Votes to Lift Cuba Travel Ban - How Can This Be Good for the U.S.?

yahoo.com ^ | Jul 24, 2002 - 12:00 AM ET | Andrew Clark, Reuters

[Cincinatus' Wife]

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - For the third time in as many years, the U.S. House of Representatives on Tuesday defied White House veto threats and supported lifting the four-decades-old ban on Americans traveling to Cuba.

The House voted 262-167 to lift the travel restrictions as it debated an $18.5 billion bill funding the U.S. Treasury and general government operations in the next fiscal year. It is expected to pass the spending bill sometime on Wednesday.

In the past, the Cuba travel effort has failed in the Senate. This year, however, the Senate also is moving to lift the ban, setting up a clash with President Bush.

The White House last week threatened to veto any change in U.S. policy toward Cuba, accusing Congress of providing "a helping hand to a desperate and repressive regime."

But proponents of ending the travel ban say it infringes on U.S. citizens' constitutional right to travel freely and has demonstrably failed to weaken the grip of President Fidel Castro on the Caribbean island nation.

"For 42 years we've had the same, failed policy," said Arizona Republican Rep. Jeff Flake, the chief House sponsor of the effort. "And the question occurs: after 42 years isn't it about time to decide maybe we need a change here?"

House Republican leaders and the influential U.S. Cuban exile community staunchly oppose the move, arguing that the ban should be lifted only once Castro releases political prisoners and returns fugitives from U.S. justice.

AID TO CUBANS OR CASTRO?

"Any revenue from increased travel or trade will go to support Castro's regime, and the Cuban people will continue to live lives of oppression and poverty," said New Jersey Republican Rep. Chris Smith.

House leaders sought to outflank the vote on the travel ban by trying to add a proviso that it could only be lifted if Bush certified Cuba was not developing biological weapons or aiding terrorists -- but the move was rejected by the House.

Currently, U.S. citizens must get a license from the U.S. Treasury to travel to Cuba, and those are generally limited to Cuban-Americans visiting family, journalists, academics, government officials and groups on humanitarian missions.

But Americans are increasingly finding ways to reach Cuba anyway by traveling through third countries, with an estimated 176,000 visiting the island in 2001. The House action would cut the funds the Treasury uses to enforce the ban.

The House, as it did last year, also rejected a bid to lift the full U.S. trade embargo against Cuba, voting 226 to 204 against the broader move.

But it did back amendments to loosen rules limiting the amount of money U.S.-based Cubans can remit to relatives on the island each year, and to make it easier for U.S. farmers to take advantage of an earlier easing of curbs on food sales.

[Dqban22]

Poisedwoman, It is true that the Cuban people do not have any bad feelings towards the American people, but you are not being candid in denying the strict apartheid enforced by the regime against the regular Cuban people. Only those who work in the tourist industry are allowed contact with foreigners and are carefully selected according to their loyalty to the regime. Not even the Cubans who have dollars, if they are not from the “new class”, are allowed to come inside the hotels and tourists places.

[PoisedWoman]

Only those who work in the tourist industry are allowed contact with foreigners

That may be written in the commie code, but in practice, the average Jose on the street is eager to talk with Americans and goes out of his way to do so. The hotel and restaurant workers we met were not so very loyal to Castro. Many slammed him to high heavens in private. Even a good commie propaganda-spouting tour guide we met on a one-day bus tour took us aside when she learned we were Americans and asked us to help her get to New York.

For one thing, the tourist indsutry workers are well aware that foreign hotels are paying Castro $700 or so per worker per month, and Castro "gives" workers a salary of $7 - $12. They're hugely resentful.

[AmericanInTokyo]

American travel to Cuba, either illicit or sanctioned, is probably in the cards and may well be inevitable. Dont' kill the messenger! (This is just an inevitability, not a value judgement). At any rate, I don't want to be a defeatist if that happens. Make sure they wish they never had opened the doors, by utilizing every opportunity to support, nurture the underground, conduct widespread espionage, destroy their infrastruture, and flip some of their political or military leaders w/ cash to work for our side, would be the way to go.

[AmericanInTokyo]

Agreed. Luis. Then we need to be consistent and also forbid travel by American businessmen and tourists (unless they apply for a special Justice Department license) to travel anywhere in Red China, North Korea, Vietnam, etc.

[VA Advogado]

Sorry, but in the House nothing comes up on the floor without the leadership's say-so. That's what the Rules Committee is for.

That is true for general bills. However, I think appropriations are under a different set of operating rules.

[Polybius]

You are both right regarding the apatheid question.

See the first hand accounts in my Post 35.

The Cubans are not allowed into the tourist hotels. Even the Cuban husband of that Canadian resort worker was not allowed in the resort. However, the tourists are allowed to go slumming amongst the regular Cubans....up to a point.

[Ragtime Cowgirl]

I think that we should lift the travel ban for US citizens going to Cuba, when Castro lifts the travel ban on Cuban citizens coming to the US.

56 posted on 7/24/02 4:53 PM Eastern by Luis Gonzalez

PING. No way will President Bush sign this. Shame on the Congress....and Castro's biggest PR agent-AP.

On the positive side, look what Gov. Jeb did (take that Wexler, Boise and Butterworth):

GOPAC

FLORIDA: Heartburn in Havana
Governor Jeb Bush this week tapped Raoul G. Cantero III to fill a vacancy on the state's highest court. Cantero, a Miami appellate attorney, becomes the first Hispanic to serve as a justice on the Florida Supreme Court.

The Spanish-born Cantero is the grandson of former Cuban president and dictator Fulgencio Batista, who was overthrown by brutal communist tyrant Fidel Castro in 1959.

Bush called his choice of Cantero proof that "service on our state's highest court is open to men and women of excellence of all backgrounds. His character, humility and judicial philosophy make him perfectly qualified."

The conservative Cantero has handled more than 250 civil and criminal appeals in all five District Courts of Appeal, the Florida Supreme Court, several U.S. Circuit Courts of Appeal and the U.S. Supreme Court.

Bush's appointment is final; it does not require the consent of the legislature.

[BikerNYC]

And you make the perfect Statist. Telling others how to behave...how to express their morality...and using the Government to enforce it. You don't let the People decide for themselves whether or not they should spend money or visit Cuba, you will decide for them. You don't believe in freedom too much, do you?

[PoisedWoman]

The Cubans are not allowed into the tourist hotels

Right. But they come in if they are with guests.

[TLBSHOW]

All the liberals want to go there. Good Idea!

Suicide epidemic exists under Castro

Cubans on the island have the highest rate of suicide in Latin America. But Cubans in Miami-Dade County kill themselves less often than other Miamians, and Cuban-born women in Miami commit suicide least of all, according to a study.

And although Cubans on the island average one death per three attempts serious enough to require hospital treatment, Communist Party members commit one suicide per attempt, the study says.

If suicide is truly an act of desperation, then the just-published study, Suicide in Cuba and Miami, shows that Cubans are dreadfully miserable in one place and far less so in the other.

``The difference between the two places reflects different societal, political and economic outlooks,'' said Maida Donate-Armada, one of the two Cuba-educated academics now living in Miami who wrote the study, published by the Cuban American National Council.


The catalyst

Using statistics from the Cuban Health Ministry and Donate-Armada's own study of suicides in 1984, when she was working for the Health Ministry, the study argues that the island's people have been emotionally shattered since the failure of President Fidel Castro's plans for a record 10 million ton sugar harvest in 1970.

``It was the first break in the collective conscience regarding the revolution's ability to provide coherent answers to economic problems,'' said Donate-Armada, a psychologist who left Cuba in 1993.

http://www.fiu.edu/~fcf/suicidepidemic.html

[RWG]

No different than what already happens with countless of our other friends like the turks and the saudis. the pakistanis got a considerable forgiveness to advance the war on terror. The problem is if we buy a certain foreign policy there is no consistent application across all of our friends. What we give the chinese in the name of all that is holy becomes unthinkable for the cubans. The cubans are hardly more of a threat than the chinese and all of the arguements against trading with the cubans is more relevant when applied to the chinese but we do it with considerable shameless bending of the logic in both cases.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Venezuelan oil shipments to Cuba resuming in August - Libya studying Cuba's oil refinery [Full Text] CARACAS, Venezuela - Venezuela will resume oil shipments to Cuba on Aug. 1, the president of Venezuela's state-owned oil monopoly confirmed Wednesday. Petroleos de Venezuela SA plans to renew shipments of 53,000 barrels of crude per day to Cuba, said Ali Rodriguez, a former secretary general of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries. The pact, under which Cuba buys Venezuelan oil at preferential financing terms, was suspended when Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez was ousted in an April 12-14 coup.

During Chavez's brief ouster, PDVSA officials vowed not to deliver more oil to Cuba, claiming Venezuela was giving it away. Chavez's government insists the deal is similar to others in which Venezuela helps struggling Caribbean nations. According to PDVSA, Cuba owed dlrs 142 million when the cutoff occurred. When Chavez returned, Venezuela urged Cuba to pay, and Rodriguez said Wednesday the issue had been resolved. PDVSA supplies a third of Cuba's oil. Rodriguez added that Cuba and Venezuela had studied the possibility of modernizing Cuba's Cienfuegos refinery but decided the project isn't feasible. He said OPEC member Libya is conducting a similar study and that Venezuela is sharing information on Cienfuegos with Libya.[End]

LINKS to Gaddafi/Castro/Chavez/ Saddam Hussein

[TLBSHOW]

BUMP

[Dqban22]

"On Trade, Cuba is Not China"

Senator Jesse Helms

The New York Times

June 24, 2000

Some lawmakers, including a number of Republicans, have argued in recent weeks that if Congress believes trade will promote democratic change in China, then why not adopt the same policy for Cuba? Here is why: Cuba is not China.

The argument that American investment will democratize China has itself been wildly oversold. Beijing is doing everything in its power to dampen the impact of private investment: placing stringent control on the Internet (all users must register with the Public Security Bureau), and most recently declaring that it will insert "party cells" into every private business that operates in China.

But regardless of how one feels about permanent normalized trade with China, there is simply no case to be made that investment would democratize Cuba.

Cuba has undertaken none of the market reforms that China has in recent years; there is no private property, and there are no entrepreneurs with whom to do business. The Fidel Castro regime maintains power by controlling every single aspect of Cuban life: access to food, access to education, access to health care, access to work.

This permits Castro to stifle any and all dissent. Any Cuban daring to say the wrong thing, by Castro's standards, loses his or her job. Anyone refusing to spy on a neighbor is denied a university education. Anyone daring to organize an opposition group goes to jail.

American investment cannot and will not change any of this. It cannot empower individual Cubans, or give them independence from the regime, because foreign investors in Cuba cannot do business with private citizens. They can do business only with Fidel Castro.

It is illegal in Cuba for anyone except the regime to employ workers. That means that foreign investors cannot hire or pay workers directly. They must go to the Cuban government employment agency, which picks the workers. The investors then pay Castro in hard currency for the workers, and Castro pays the workers in worthless pesos.

Here is a real-life example: Sherritt International of Canada, the largest foreign investor in Cuba, operates a nickel mine in Moa Bay (a mine, incidentally, which Cuba stole from an American company). Roughly 1,500 Cubans work there as virtual slave laborers. Sherritt pays Castro approximately $10,000 a year for each of these Cuban workers. Castro gives the workers about $18 a month in pesos, then pockets the difference.

The net result is a subsidy of nearly $15 million in hard currency each year that Castro then uses to pay for the security apparatus that keeps the Cubans enslaved. Those who advocate lifting the embargo speak in broad terms about using investment to promote democracy in Cuba. But I challenge them to explain exactly how, under this system, investment can do anything to help the Cuban people.

The anti-embargo crowd should drop its rhetoric about promoting democracy and be honest: the one reason for their push to lift sanctions on Cuba is to pander to well-intentioned American farmers, who have been misled by the agribusiness giants into believing that going into business with a bankrupt Communist island is a solution to the farm crisis in America.

Whoever has convinced farmers that their salvation lies in trade with Cuba has sold them a bill of goods. Cuba is desperately poor, barely able to feed its own people, much less save the American farmer.

Castro wants the American embargo lifted because he is desperate for hard currency. After the Soviet Union collapsed and Moscow's subsidies ended, Castro turned to European and Canadian investors to keep his Communist system afloat. Now he wants American investors to do the same. We must not allow that to happen.

Unfortunately, some in Washington are all too willing to give Castro what he wants. At the least they should stop pretending that they are doing this to promote Cuban democracy and American values.

[Dqban22]

To AmerikanInTokyo, BikerNYC, and RWG, and to all Americans of good will:

I am against a powerful government intruding in our liberties and personal lives. But, I am a realist person. I wonder if you would aid and abet Bin Laden? When you travel to, or trade with Cuba, you are adding and abetting a tyrant who is a main part of the same terrorist network and has as much deep-rooted hatred against the United States as Bin Laden. Castro’s life long dream is the obliteration of the United States and he has pledged to do it publicly and repeatedly. It is a fact that during the Missile Crisis Castro tried to force Khrushchev to nuke our cities. It is a fact that Cuba is among the seven worst terrorists states in the world according to the U.S. Department of State. It is a fact that Castro has chemical, biological and cyber-warfare capabilities and the will to use it. It is a fact that during the middle of 2001 Castro’s sold one of his advanced biological laboratories with bio-warfare capabilities to Iran. It is a fact that Cuba counts with over 3,000 experts in biological research trained in the Soviet Union. It is also a fact that this week a special envoy of Castro reaffirmed in Iraq the full support of Cuba in case of an American attack to that terrorist nation. We can not ignore reality at our own peril. Why so many in the Congress and the Senate are doing so, is beyond comprehension.

Although I do not agree with the U.S. policy towards China, certainly Cuba is not China. Cuba, at present, is much more of a threat to the security of the U.S. than China. Communist China is evolving, not so Cuba, Castro has kept a brutal Stalinist regimen and his pathological hatred against us has not diminished at all in more than half a century.

That Castro might inflict terrible human losses in the United States is a very real fact that the media do not allow our citizens to know. A few months before 9/11, Russian President Putin, during a visit to Cuba pointed out the extraordinary importance of their spy base in Lourdes, on the outskirts of Havana. That base was the most important source of intelligence for them since it provided access to all telephone and electronic communications of the U.S. and had advanced cyber-warfare capabilities able to disrupt all communications in our country.

Nevertheless, in October, right after the 9/11 attacks, Putin ordered the base to be dismantled and the equipment returned to Russia. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that there might be a cause and effect between the attacks and the sudden order to dismantle the base reversing a decades long Russian policy. Did Castro use the base to transmit the necessary intelligence to his allies in the Islamic terrorist network that made the attack so successful?

The Cuban dictator has also a more modern and sophisticated Chinese spy base in Bejucal, about 60 Km. from Havana. Castro did not allow Putin to take the equipment back to Russia and is in negotiations with the Chinese in order to give them the former Russian base.

In conclusion, Castro, an important link in the terrorism network, is a real an imminent threat to the security of our country. Should Americans be allowed to aid and abet a declared enemy in the middle of our war against terrorism?

That is my main concern, but you should also ask yourself if you want American taxpayers’ money to finance a terrorist state. That is exactly what the Congress and the Senate has approved, to open a line of credit to Cuba, a country that has defaulted in all its international debts and that has also encouraged other Third World nations to follow its example.

[RWG]

What about grievances that could be enumerated about any one of our friends like saudi arabia and kuwait? Not buying this extreme hatred of cuba without including a whole list of other candidates that should receive the same treatment. Since they don't cuba shouldn't either. A handful of cubans in miami should not be allowed to make US foreign policy.

[RWG]

No I would not abett OSB but I would also not let a saudi princess skate on assault charges either. What about grievances that could be enumerated about any one of our friends like saudi arabia and kuwait? Not buying this extreme hatred of cuba without including a whole list of other candidates that should receive the same treatment. Since they don't cuba shouldn't either. A handful of cubans in miami should not be allowed to make US foreign policy.

[BikerNYC]

Cuba, at present, is much more of a threat to the security of the U.S. than China.

I disagree. China presents much more of a threat because it has the willpower and the resources to export its ideology and it's power across its borders, something Cuba simply cannot do on its own. Cuba is a neutered paper tiger. It is helpless without the help of other States who are much more dangerous to us.

[Dqban22]

What do you belive are doing the Chinese in Cuba?

This is the kind of regime those traveling to cuba are sponsoring

Torturers' aim was `total surrender' Savage beatings bent captives to will of man dubbed `Fidel'

By JUAN O. TAMAYO

Herald Staff Writer

8/22/1999

FORT WALTON BEACH, Fla. -- Retired Air Force Col. Ed Hubbard says he holds no hate for ``Fidel, the Cuban government agent who viciously tortured him and 17 other U.S. prisoners of war in North Vietnam three decades ago.

Almost daily for one year, the man the POWs nicknamed Fidel whipped them with strips cut from rubber tires until their buttocks ``hung in shreds, and trussed them in ropes and wires to tear at limbs and cut into flesh.

Fidel was one of three Cubans sent to North Vietnam by Havana to deal with American POWs, in what became known as the Cuba Program.

He whipped and kicked one POW so fiercely in 1968 that the American went into a catatonic state and later died, in what a new book on U.S. POWs in Vietnam calls ``one of the most heinous and tragic atrocity cases.

Hubbard himself was beaten so brutally by ``Fidel'' during one 1967 interrogation session that fellow POW Jack Bomar recalled finding him afterward unconscious on a cell floor, ``a bleeding, broken, bruised mass.

Concealed for decades by official U.S. secrecy and the shadows of a war that many simply wanted to forget, the full story of Fidel and the so-called Cuba Program is finally becoming public. Honor Bound, a book published in April with Department of Defense assistance, devotes 13 pages to the ``unusually intensive and prolonged operation that monopolized the [prison's] torture machinery for much of the year.''

A two-inch-thick stack of documents declassified by the Defense Department's Prisoner of War, Missing Personnel Office (DPMO) for a string of congressional hearings in 1996 provide extensive and gruesome details on the Cuba Program.

And a DPMO official has now reported that two North Vietnamese army colonels confirmed to him in 1992 that ``Fidel'' was indeed Cuban and had tortured American POWs -- but without Hanoi's official approval.

DIFFICULT TO FORGET

Some former POWs consider suing Cuba ``I've moved on with my life, said Hubbard, a motivational speaker living in Fort Walton Beach who uses his POW experiences to celebrate the human spirit. Then he smiles and adds: ``But if I see `Fidel' again, maybe I'd turn him over to Bomar.

He knows that Bomar has not forgotten the broken nose, broken cheek and busted eardrum he suffered in one particularly brutal beating by ``Fidel'' after he insulted Cuban-Argentine guerrilla Ernesto ``Che Guevara.

``I would kill him, said Bomar, another former Air Force colonel who, like his fellow POWs, was handpicked by ``Fidel and two Cuban ``good guy interrogators, ``Chico and ``Garcia, for what they dubbed the Cuba Program.

Some former POWs angry with the DPMO's handling of the Cuba case say they may even file suit against Havana, following the example set in Miami by relatives of three Brothers to the Rescue pilots killed by Cuban MiGs in 1996.

``I don't mind admitting it -- I want to harass the Vietnamese, said Mike Benge, a former POW who was not part of the Cuba Program but has long accused the DPMO of failing to properly investigate allegations that Chinese and Soviet officers interrogated U.S. POWs.

DPMO officials in Washington declined to comment to The Herald on ``Fidel,'' the Cuba Program or the many controversies surrounding the agency's handling of the case.

Sketchy versions of the story of ``Fidel'' appeared in a handful of U.S. publications from 1973, soon after Hanoi began freeing American POWs, until mid-1977, but the tale drew little attention.

Perhaps that was because most POWs obeyed Pentagon orders to keep quiet, to protect POWs who might remain in Vietnam, and perhaps because Fidel's identification as a Cuban was then only an unconfirmed allegation by the POWs.

But now the newly released DPMO documents, the book Honor Bound by Stuart Rochester and Frederick Kiley, and Herald interviews with Hubbard, Bomar and three other Fidel victims provide the fullest account yet of a significant chapter in the history of Vietnam-era POWS.

``This marked the first and only time that non-Vietnamese were overtly involved in the exploitation of American prisoners, said a 1975 U.S. Air Force analysis of the Cuba Program declassified in 1996.

When Fidel and Chico showed up around August 1967 at the POW camp known as ``The Zoo,'' a former French movie studio on the southwestern edge of Hanoi, it was clear to the 50 prisoners there that they were no ordinary visitors.

While the camp's North Vietnamese commandant rode a bicycle to work, Fidel arrived in a car chauffeured by a Hanoi army officer and always sat to the commandant's right, a position of honor, Bomar said.

Debriefed after they returned home, POWs held at The Zoo described Fidel as about six feet one inch tall, in his early 30s, muscular, ramrod-straight, swarthy and handsome enough to be compared to movie star Fernando Lamas.

They described Chico as more light-skinned, almost blond and in his 40s. He liked to play Spanish-sounding songs on the camp's organ, and often wore a beret with a visor, the type then popular in Cuba.

Both spoke good if accented English, but while Fidel had full command of American slang and even obscenities, Chico struggled with words like Piper Cub, pronouncing it ``peeper koob,'' according to excerpts from the debriefings.

Fidel interviewed POWs and soon selected Hubbard, Bomar and eight other Air Force and Navy pilots or navigators shot down over North Vietnam, segregating them in a block of four cells that the POWs nicknamed ``Stable.''

That, the POWs said, is when the torture began, after a few cursory questions -- such as whether they liked Mexican food -- apparently designed less to elicit intelligence information than to provide an excuse for beatings.

While Chico always played the ``good guy, Fidel was a savage torturer one day and a friend the next, a man who would ``hammer one POW, then play Frank Sinatra tapes and offer chewing gum to the next.

``Under different circumstances, Fidel might have been an interesting guy to talk to, former Zoo POW Allan Carpenter told The Herald. ``But I can't have anything but loathing for him.

Level of violence worsens

As days passed, Fidel notched up the torture. ``He loved direct hits to the face with the tire strips that the POWs came to call fan belts, one POW told his debriefer.

Fidel placed POWs awaiting interrogation in cells next to his torture room, to make sure they heard their predecessor's screams. He threw POWs he had just finished torturing with new roommates, so they saw the results.

``Fidel could get you squirming without even touching you, former Zoo POW Robert Daughtry told The Herald. A debriefer quoted one POW as saying, ``Anticipation of beatings became more of a threat than actual beatings. Nervous to the point of loosening of bowels when heard the key in the lock.

One by one, the POWs gave way before Fidel. By Christmas 1967, all but one had been tortured into ``surrendering'' -- which meant any sign of submission that Fidel arbitrarily set, from bowing to a Vietnamese guard to accepting an unwanted cigarette or making written or tape-recorded statements that could be used by the North Vietnamese propaganda machine.

Some of the 10 were still beaten occasionally -- ``just a reminder, to keep us in line, Bomar said -- but they received better meals, more mail and more time in the sunlight, outside their dark and bug-infested cells.

A confident Fidel began to select a second group of 10 POWs in January 1968. One, aware of Fidel's reputation, ``surrendered'' swiftly. Two others won the POWs' admiration by engaging Fidel in conversations that averted torture.

But then Fidel ran into Jim Kasler, sent to The Zoo after withstanding tortures at another prison, and Earl Cobeil, a Navy F-105 pilot who acted crazy and may indeed have suffered a head injury when he was shot down.

Fidel's monthlong beatings of Kasler were ``among the worst sieges of torture any American withstood in Hanoi, the book Honor Bound said. Fidel flogged him ``until his buttocks, lower back and legs hung in shreds, and at the end he was in a semi-coma. He eventually recovered.

Worse still was the onslaught against Cobeil, accused by Fidel of faking his craziness to avoid torture. Bomar recalls Fidel angrily vowing to other POWs, ``I'm going to break this guy in a million pieces.

Bomar recalled that during one all-day torture session in May 1968, ``Fidel took a length of black rubber hose . . . and lashed it as hard as he could into the man's face. The prisoner did not react. He did not cry out or even blink.

After a month of almost daily beatings, Bomar told his debriefer, Cobeil ``was bleeding everywhere, terribly swollen, a dirty, yellowish black-and-purple from head to toe.

Another POW's debriefing said Cobeil ``was beaten to the point where he was incapable of surrender. Was completely catatonic. He was later transferred out of The Zoo and is listed as having died in captivity.

By July 1968, Fidel appeared to have grown frustrated, flying into rages and beating POWs without apparent purpose. He was seen drunk around the camp, and complained of worsening liver problems.

Fidel, Chico and Garcia, also nicknamed ``Pancho,'' a fat, always sloppily dressed man in his mid-30s who had arrived at the camp around June, suddenly vanished in mid-August, never to be seen again by the POWs.

By the end of the Cuba Program, Fidel had tortured 18 of the 20 POWs selected for the Cuba Program. Two apparently were never beaten. All but Cobeil had ``submitted.''

ENGLISH INSTRUCTORS?

A Vietnamese version of Cubans' presence cited Fidel left behind a crucial question: What had been the goal of the Cuba Program?

DPMO analyst Robert Destatte, in an e-mail message written July 2, 1996, reported that he had received one answer from two Vietnamese colonels he interviewed in 1992 as part of his research.

``According to the Vietnamese, . . . the Cubans sent a team of three English-language instructors to provide instruction in basic English to [North Vietnamese army] personnel working with American prisoners, Destatte wrote.

``At the working level, the three Cubans persuaded their Vietnamese colleagues to allow them to demonstrate the effectiveness of Cuban interrogation techniques, he added. ``Information about the mistreatment eventually filtered up to the Vietnamese decision makers and they terminated the . . . program.

``The Vietnamese explanation is plausible and fully consistent with what we know about the conduct of the Cubans, concluded the note, leaked to the House Subcommittee on Military Personnel as it held several hearings on POW and missing-in-action issues in mid-1996.

Destatte presented the same argument to the committee in a closed-door session. But the DPMO's own Cuba Program expert, former POW Chip Beck, later told the committee in open session that it was ``professionally incompetent.

While Fidel and Chico did indeed run English classes for Vietnamese interrogators for a few months, Beck and Fidel's POW victims insist that the Cuba Program was clearly something more than a language class.

Goal of `total surrender'

Foremost among Fidel's goals, they say, was to break the POWs so fully that they would always do his bidding with little need for further torture, instead of the usual rounds of torture-surrender, torture-surrender.

``Fidel's aim was to convince us that absolute and total surrender was the only possible outcome. He told you that flat out in your first meeting, said Hubbard, a 29-year-old B-66 navigator when he was captured.

One POW debriefer wrote: ``Once the prisoner surrendered, he remained submissive, as the [torture] experience was so memorable and painful that he did not care to repeat it.

The book Honor Bound notes that unlike Vietnamese interrogators, the Cubans ``relied on more controlled and orchestrated mingling of physical torture and psychological pressures, suggesting that theirs was a more conscious experimental program with an emphasis as much on assessing the efficacy of tactics as on achieving results.

Some victims of the Cuba Program suspect it was also designed to select candidates for ``early release -- prisoners who could be counted on to make statements favorable to North Vietnam once freed.

Still others believe Fidel was searching for POWs who would agree to participate in a conference in Havana, which took place six weeks after he disappeared from The Zoo, on the U.S. ``genocidal war in Vietnam.

``He wanted a few tamed POWs he could bring to this propaganda extravaganza, former POW Benge said. Some of the ``confessions signed by POWs at The Zoo were in fact made public at the Havana conference, he added.

WHO WERE TORTURERS?

They didn't acknowledge any role as Castro agents. The other major question left unanswered when Fidel, Chico and Garcia walked out of The Zoo in 1968 was their real identity.

Long before Destatte's e-mail message confirmed they were Cubans, the POWs who suffered at their hands had concluded that they were agents of Fidel Castro's government, although the trio never admitted that directly.

Bomar, who came up with the nickname Fidel, recalled that a Vietnamese guard once referred to him as ``Cuba, and that Chico had once slipped and told a POW that ``Fidel'' used to pilot a small plane over Havana.

``Fidel'' spoke knowledgeably about Cuba's sugar crops and Che Guevara, and a POW once found a lapel pin in the shape of Cuba on the floor of a prison bathroom.

More intriguing are hints that Fidel may have lived in the United States for a significant period.

His command of American slang and swear words was almost native-born, and his knowledge of U.S. cars up to 1956 models, especially Fords, was astounding, said Bomar, who raced stock cars before he was sent to Vietnam.

Fidel seemed to have personal knowledge of many cities in the southeastern United States, from Miami to the Carolinas, Hubbard said, and knew enough about U.S. paratrooper terminology and tactics to make many POWs suspect he had attended a U.S. Army course at Fort Benning, Ga.

No solid identification.

Based on such slim evidence, U.S. intelligence agencies launched an intensive campaign in 1973 to try to identify Fidel and his cohorts. An Air Force report dated June 14, 1973, lists some of the efforts: The National Security Agency produced the names of all Cubans known to have traveled to North Vietnam in the 1960s. POWs were shown ``the entire CIA photographic holdings of Cuban personalities. The Defense Intelligence Agency checked the list of pre-Castro Cuban military officers who received U.S. military training. But the searches proved fruitless, even after some of the POWs were sent to police and military artists, who sketched eight portraits of Fidel alone, based on the POWs' descriptions.

Hubbard said he and two other POW investigators spent a week in Miami in early 1974, trolling Little Havana restaurants and bars for any exiles who might have heard anything about Cubans in Vietnam.

An FBI agent visited Hubbard in 1979 to show him a half-dozen surveillance photographs of a Cuban Education Ministry official who had just toured Harvard and Massachusetts Institute of Technology and returned to Havana.

``If you replaced some hair and took 20 to 25 pounds off, it very easily could have been this guy, Hubbard told The Herald.

Hubbard could not recall the man's name, but documents declassified by the DPMO identified the visitor as Fernando Vecino Alegret, today Cuba's minister of higher education. A military specialist in anti-aircraft defenses in the 1960s, he is known to have visited North Vietnam around 1967.

DPMO documents declassified for the 1996 congressional hearings noted that there had been several other ``possible and ``unconfirmed identifications of Fidel, although none amounted to more than passing mentions.

Speculation on names

An Air Force intelligence report in 1973 mentioned ``Cacillio Moss or ``Moller. A 1976 Defense Intelligence Agency report mentioned ``Luis Perez Jaen. A congressional report in 1992 referred to ``Eduardo Morejon Estevez or ``Morjon Esievez.

Benge believes it might be Raul Valdez Vivo, Cuba's ambassador to North Vietnam in the 1960s and author of a 1990 book about Cuba's involvement in the Vietnam War, The Great Secret: Cubans on the Ho Chi Minh Trail. The book makes no mention of torturing American POWs.

``I'm not sure it's him, but if he's not, he must know who it was, said Benge, a civilian U.S. Agency for International Development employee captured in South Vietnam who spent five years as a POW, including 27 months in solitary confinement.

``Some people have forgotten these atrocities. Some want to forget, said Benge, now an AID employee in Washington still battling the CIA, DPMO and DIA to declassify more documents on the Cuba Program. ``I don't forget.

Bomar would also like to find Fidel, if not for revenge, at least to end his flashbacks to Hanoi, circa 1967.

``I wake up at night and I am in a situation back there,'' he said. ``Sometimes I am trying to bail out of my airplane, or sometimes it might be Fidel there, waiting to hammer me.

DPMO investigator Chip Beck put it another way in an e-mail to Destatte just days before he left the DPMO in 1996 and went public with complaints that the agency was concealing reports of Cuban, Chinese and Soviet involvement in POW tortures.

``The Cubans have never been adequately held to task, Beck wrote. ``As long as we remain, I hate to say it, but, smug in our opinion that we know all that happened, we will continue to fool ourselves at the same time as the intelligence apparatus of these countries continue to fool us.

e-mail: jtamayo@herald.com

[BikerNYC]

This is the kind of regime those traveling to cuba are sponsoring.

And tourists to China are sponsoring China's one-child forced abortion program. Yet the United States trades with China to the annual tune of billions of dollars and thousands of Americans visit China every year.