Senior Cuban officials voiced their opposition Saturday to Washington's plans for housing Taliban and Al Qaeda prisoners in a controversial U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay on the communist-run Caribbean island.
"I think it would be yet another mistake by the Americans to use that usurped territory," Higher Education Minister Fernando Vecino Alegret said of the proposal to turn the facility on Cuba's southeast tip into a detention center.
"I think there will be repudiation of that around the world," Vecino told reporters outside a special session of Cuba's National Assembly parliament.
Cuban Atty. Gen. Juan Escalona also scoffed at the plan announced Thursday by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to bring detainees from the conflict in Afghanistan halfway around the world to the century-old Guantanamo base.
"It's another provocation from the Americans," Escalona said on his way into the parliament meeting.
While condemning the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks on the United States, Havana has also opposed the bombing of Afghanistan, calling it a barbaric massacre of civilians to advance imperial goals.
Cuban President Fidel Castro and his ruling Communist Party have long opposed their decades-old political foe's military presence at the 45-square-mile base in Guantanamo Bay, calling the installation a "dagger pointed at Cuba's heart."
The base was founded after U.S. Marines landed at Guantanamo Bay in 1898 during the Spanish-American War and, under a 1934 treaty, can be disbanded only by mutual consent or if the U.S. forces pull out voluntarily.
The comments by Vecino and Escalona were the first reaction by Cuban officials. Castro has offered no comment and state media are not reporting on the plan.
In his earlier announcement, Rumsfeld said Washington did not anticipate any trouble from Havana over the use of Guantanamo, which he described as "the least worst place we could have selected."
One senior U.S. military official said earlier this week that ultimately hundreds of captured Al Qaeda and Taliban members could be brought to Guantanamo for interrogation.
One of the last front lines of the Cold War, the Guantanamo base has long been a sore point in tense U.S.-Cuba relations and is heavily guarded on both sides.
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