The Cuban dictator is devoting a lot of his destitute island nation's budget
to secretive biological- and chemical-weapons research. Will he share his
germ arsenal with terrorists?
Not far from Havana's picturesque harbor, where ogling tourists and
curvaceous prostitutes ply Cuba's only thriving form of free trade, stands
the Luis Diaz Soto Naval Hospital, flanked by a newly built concrete
laboratory complex about 400 feet long by 300 feet wide. Inside the compound,
along a 165-foot acid-resistant work table with built-in circuit breakers,
military biotechnicians reportedly experiment on cadavers, hospital patients
and live animals with anthrax, brucellosis, equine encephalitis, dengue
fever, hepatitis, tetanus and a variety of other bacterial agents.
Five chemical- and biological-weapons plants operate throughout the island,
according to documents smuggled out of Cuba and made available to Insight by
Alvaro Prendes, a former Cuban air force colonel who now is the Miami-based
spokesman for the Union of Liberated Soldiers and Officers, a clandestine
pro-democracy movement within Cuba's security services.
The credibility of the smuggled documents is enhanced by a recent classified
Pentagon analysis. Also, these facilities have not been on the itinerary of
such visiting dignitaries as retired Marine Gen. John Sheehan, the recently
passed-over candidate for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who
enthusiastically embraced normalizing relations with Havana following a
recent round of junketing with Castro.
Pentagon, State Department and congressional sources also point to continuing
Cuban support for international terrorism and drug trafficking. They tell
Insight that, according to the CIA, Russian specialists still operate the
electronic listening station at Lourdes on the northeast tip of the island
which taps into U.S. communications. During the Persian Gulf War, this
station forwarded strategic information to Iraq.
Reports smuggled out this year by dissident Cuban military officers and
scientists are believed to be among the factors prompting Defense Secretary
William Cohen to revise a Pentagon report sent to Congress last April which
decertified Cuba as a threat to U.S. national security. The revised report,
still classified but made available to an Insight reporter, states: "Cuba's
air force is in disrepair and much of the regular army is demobilized, but
the Castro government retains the potential to pose unconventional threats.
It has the infrastructure which can be adapted to the production of chem-bio
weapons."
A classified annex to the Pentagon's final report to Congress further warns:
"According to sources within Cuba, at least one research site is run and
funded by the Cuban military to work on the development of offensive and
defensive biological weapons."
Why does the president ignore this? "Clinton just wants to avoid another
front," says Ernesto Betancourt, former director of Radio Marti, a U.S.
government broadcasting service. Betancourt believes that the administration
is terrified of provoking a confrontation which could lead to another Cuban
wave of refugees. "While maintaining the economic embargo to placate
Cuban-American voters, Clinton desperately avoids making waves with Castro,"
Betancourt adds.
"The administration has been asleep at the switch on China, India and very
possibly now on Cuba," Chairman Dan Burton of the House Government Reform and
Oversight Committee tells Insight. "They are simply not on the ball."
Moreover, former U.S. ambassador to Colombia Lewis Tambs has the same
concern: "If we cannot prevent the proliferation of weapons of mass
destruction in our backyard, how can we hope to do so halfway around the
world?"
Although Clinton has been sufficiently concerned about the general threat of
chemical and biological terrorism triggering an internal domestic crisis by
setting up a series of new response measures -- including expanded storage of
antidotes, stepped-up inoculations of military personnel and a call for $250
million to train first-responder teams at state and local levels -- he
appears to be taking no action against Castro.
According to the documents obtained by Insight, Castro initiated his
chemical-weapons program in 1981 when Soviet technicians built a plant to
produce tricothecen, the main component of "yellow rain," in an underground
tunnel complex at Quimonor in Matanzas province. The program was expanded
some years later with the construction of another chemical-weapons facility
in Pinar del Rio, where Cuban and Soviet technicians began experimenting with
mixtures of germs and toxins to produce anthrax, the documents assert.
Drastic cutbacks in Russian subsidies and military aid to Cuba did not
dissuade Castro from further expanding his development of germ warfare.
According to Betancourt, classified CIA reports dating back to 1989 describe
Cuban efforts to acquire technology and equipment to manufacture biological
weapons.
The exile reports back this up: While Cuba's economy collapsed, Dr. Maria del
Pilar y Gloria de la Campa, a biochemist and Politburo member on Castro's
presidential staff -- whose real name is Gladys Llanusa -- made repeated
trips to Europe, the Middle East and the former Soviet Union to arrange
related purchases, these reports say. A centrifugal reactor capable of 10,000
revolutions per minute, used to separate biological microorganisms from solid
and liquid substances, was acquired through Comicondor, an Italian company in
Milan which also supplies technology to Libya for Col. Muammar Qaddafi's
biological-weapons experiments.
Cuba's chemical- and biological-weapons production is administered through a
network of state-controlled biogenetic industries operated by interlocking
front companies linked to the Defense and Interior ministries. Manuel
Cereijo, a professor of electronic engineering at Florida International
University in Miami who has debriefed more than 300 Cuban scientists,
estimates that from an original investment of $1.6 million in 1980, Cuba's
biogenetic industry has grown into a $2 billion-a-year venture. "This
unprecedented level of investment is comparable with the biotechnologies of
the most advanced industrial countries in Europe and the United States. It's
out of all proportion to Cuba's small and bankrupt economy which is
desperately undeveloped in all other areas," Cereijo says.
Eleven biochemical plants currently are operating in Cuba, half of which are
believed to serve military purposes, according to the Florida professor. With
the exception of some cattle inoculants, very little vaccine is being
produced for medical or commercial purposes, his sources say. The Prendes
documents explain:
The two newest laboratories, built near military installations on the east
side of Havana Bay have started operating during the last five years. The
largest facility, located 100 meters from the naval hospital, was completed
in late 1993 and inaugurated in April 1994, while another began functioning
in early 1995 close to the J. Finlay military hospital.
These plants are supervised closely by a military-scientific coordinating
body composed of top army and intelligence officers. They include former
armed-forces chief of staff Gen. Ulises Rosales del Toro and
counterintelligence chief Col. Librado Reina Benitan. Another officer with an
extensive track record in special operations, Gen. Julio Casas Regueiro, also
is supervising the project, as are two personal deputies to Defense Minister
Raul Castro (a Col. Alonso and a Brig. Gen. Milian) and the chief of
investments for the armed forces, Lt. Col. Sergio Sanchez.
According to Cuban sources with personal access to the project's rec-ords, a
team of specialists in strategic military construction, carefully vetted by
Cuban counterintelligence, carried out much of the construction and
installation.
The Italian-manufactured centrifugal plant and other laboratory equipment
were transported to Cuba in 1993 onboard a Panama-registered vessel crewed by
carefully selected Cuban naval personnel. Records indicate the ship, the
Cristina Amary, previously used for sensitive cargo, is leased to front
companies operated by the Cuban military intelligence, Cubanacan S.A. and
Cimex, which intelligence experts say channel financial proceeds from tourism
and other state-run enterprises into military operations. The intelligence
sources also maintain that accounting records for the lab's construction are
meticulously covered up through authorized funding for extensions to existing
medical facilities and the remodeling of Havana's historical El Morro
Fortress.
"The extensive covert arrangements indicate plans to use the material
produced in the plants in an offensive capacity or for genocidal purposes to
eliminate centers of antigovernment unrest," says Col. Prendes, who was a
Cuban top gun and chief air-defense strategist before being forced into exile
in 1994 when he called upon Castro to resign. SS-22 medium-range missiles
acquired from the Soviet Union in 1990 are installed at coastal batteries
near the most recently built laboratories, according to the colonel. Within
easy striking range of Florida, these missiles could be armed with chemical
or biological warheads.
Rather than using conventional military delivery systems, however, more
insidious methods are being tested to infect civilian communities.
Experiments are reported to be underway in the use of insects, rats and even
house pets as contaminants. Cuba's biowarfare technicians also have developed
tetanus-carrying antipersonnel mines in the form of easily built,
low-explosive devices armed with infected needles. These small and
inexpensive booby traps reportedly are being used for perimeter security
around forced-labor camps, underground sources report from Cuba.
Deliveries of biological weapons also could be facilitated through the
numerous terrorist and Mafia organizations keeping close ties to Havana.
According to Tambs, "There is no doubt about continuing Cuban support for the
the National Liberation Army and Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia in
their alliance with major drug-trafficking cartels to topple the Colombian
government."
Cuba's support for terrorism is widespread. Spain's Interior Minister, Jaime
Mayor Oreja, despite his country's important investments in Cuba, accuses
Havana of providing asylum and intelligence support to Basque separatist ETA
terrorists. And the State Department is worked up about recent reports
indicating Cuban involvement with guerrillas of the Zapatista National
Liberation Army in Mexico. All these are potential markets for Cuba's
chemical and biological weapons.
"We are producing medicines, not weapons," insists a spokesman for the Cuban
interests section in Washington, who claims to be head of the unit but does
not give his name. "We deny the Pentagon's charges of offensive potential in
our biogenetic industry," he says. A State Department official who says he is
uncomfortable about the subject of Cuban biochemical weapons -- and asks not
to be named -- nonetheless says for the record, "Any evidence that Castro
could manufacture biological weapons is strictly circumstantial. We don't see
much indication that he is doing it." The U.S. official points to the embargo
of Cuba as an effective means to curtail the communist island nation's
biochemical research, citing a recent example in which a British company
seeking to enter into joint biogenetic ventures with the Cuban government was
blocked by U.S. sanctions, due to partial ownership of the company by U.S.
citizens. "We are keeping an eye on it," he says reassuringly.
"These labs operated by the Cuban military and interior ministries are highly
secure and off-limits to foreigners and visiting scientists," Florida
Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen warned in a recent House speech. While
she and other members of Congress have called for on-site inspections of the
Cuban facilities, State Department officials believe "it would be very
tricky. The Cubans could claim the right to inspect our industries. Getting
the U.N. involved would be very difficult."
"A factor which must be considered is the deeply sadistic and psychotic
nature of Castro's personality," says Prendes, who has known him personally
since serving as one of his ace pilots in repelling the 1961 CIA-backed Bay
of Pigs invasion. "He is determined to hold on to power until the very end,
to take everyone down with him." And Castro's eight-hour speeches still are
punctuated by apocalyptic rhetoric: "Communism or death. ... After me comes
the deluge. ... The last wish of a revolutionary is to pull the trigger
against his enemy, explode a land mine."
How ruthless is Castro? Would he actually use these weapons of mass
extermination? Consider:
Among the long line of distinguished foreign visitors who have enjoyed the
opportunity of being hosted and entertained by Cuba's Maximum Leader, some
have been surprised to discover that he is an avid herpetophile, or reptile
lover. A multimillionaire Spanish entrepreneur and mayor of a luxurious
resort city who regularly visits Cuba and is on first-name terms with Fidel
recently told an Insight reporter that he never will forget being shown
around the last true socialist's private game preserve at Guahnacabiles,
occupying an entire peninsula in the western part of Pinar del Rio. While
touring the lush paradise, he was amazed to come upon a massive snake farm
attended by military personnel.
Castro explained that this is where he breeds a deadly viper discovered by
his troops in Angola -- a snake which can kill a human instantly.
Dissident sources often have reported that these poisonous snakes are used as
guards by Castro's security men. They anchor the snakes to stakes using long
tethers as if they were prison guard dogs. Few prisoners dare even try to
escape. So impressed was the mayor by Castro's Jurassic Park ruthlessness
that Fidel sent him a baby snake as a birthday gift. It was returned to
sender.
Copyright © 1998 News World Communications, Inc.
