-Caveat Lector- http://www.transbay.net/~nessie/Pages/30.seconds.html
30 Seconds Over Cuba In February of 1996 Cuban fighters shot down two supposedly unarmed light planes which were purported to be assisting Cuban refugees who were fleeing the island. The light planes would supposedly search for small boats and rafts headed north and report their location to the American Coast Guard. The Coast Guard would then rescue the refugees. However, the supply of refugees had in fact petered out. For reasons most Americans find difficult to fathom, most Cubans prefer Cuba, even under Castro, to our own balmy shore. So what were those planes really doing? We'll never know. Two were blown out of the sky by the Cuban Air Force. The subsequent fallout included heightened sanctions on trade with Cuba and a renewed interest in Cuban affairs by the U. S. press. Never a paper to be left out of a trend, the San Francisco Chronicle gave us the following: IN CUBA, MIGHTY MILITARY MACHINE PLAYS A MULTITUDE OF ROLES . . . Fear might be precisely the reason that a small Caribbean island, which nevertheless is one of the most militarized nations in the world, would scramble MiG-29 fighter planes armed with advance (sic) missiles to shoot down unarmed Cessnas apparently with little or no warning. 'We are 90 miles from an enemy that is the world's only superpower, and which took three days to wipe out Iraq,' Carlos Losada Jardin, 44, a former soldier who spent 37 months with the Cuban army in Angola, said, explaining Cuba's large military and quick response." -- San Francisco Chronicle, 3/4/96 Consider this: We have only the word of the Cuban-Americans responsible for the ill fated flight that the planes actually were unarmed. Most Americans believe they were unarmed, but that does not make it true. Moot point. It matters not a whit to the Cubans whether or not most Americans believe those Cessnas might have been armed. Neither does it matter whether they WERE in fact actually armed. What matters is whether the Cubans believe that they MIGHT have been armed. Now it could be that those planes were set up by Cuban-Americans in Florida who sacrificed them in order to gain a propaganda victory. This could have been easily done by tipping off Cuban intelligence that on this particular mission, these particular planes WERE armed, and with a deadly weapon that their pilots fully intended to use once they penetrated Cuban airspace. As soon as the double agent's disinformation reached Cuban command the shoot down order would have gone out immediately. Though this scenario is only a speculation, this is not some wacko paranoid fantasy. This sort of thing is a standard, time tested and much used stratagem, well worn, emmencely successful, and dating back to antiquity. On the other hand, Cuban intelligence had no need of a "tip" to make them consider that the planes might be armed. On the contrary, they could draw on their thirty years of experience dealing with covert penetration of their airspace by light planes and their waters by small boats. 'There is garrison-state mentality,' said a diplomat, who asked not to be identified. 'It's not credible that Cuba is going to be invaded by anybody except mosquitoes, so (large military) is a way of maintaining control.' ibid Again, we have only the anonymous diplomat's word for this, but just for the sake of argument, let's assume that s/he's telling the truth. " . . . anybody except mosquitoes . . .", eh? Now there's a clue. Let's look a little deeper. Just how bad couldan invasion by mosquitoes be, really? To find out, we must take a much deeper look than offered by America's lap dog mass media news. When we're spoon fed the "news," we only get what they put on the spoon. The best stuff they leave on the plate. Consider Chemical Biological Warfare (CBW) for example. It's not something that the powers that be want us to think about, so it's pretty much absent from the six o'clock news. That doesn't mean it's not happening, only that we're not being told much about it and what little we ARE told we have to seek out and think over before it makes sense. But what sort of weapons CAN arm a Cessna in a meaningful manner? It's a very short list. Factor in economics, and the list is topped by CBW. Before we jump to any conclusions, let's examine the history of CBW in Cuba. It does have a history, one with which Cubans are acutely familiar. It begins during the Cold War. Return with us then to those wild and woolly days of yesteryear, when, much like today, Cuban fought Cuban in a shadow war, a war fought partly on the behalf of personal ambitions and partly on the behalf of their Cold War, super power, puppet masters. The year is 1981. The scene is the U. N. General Assembly. The Cuban ambassador speaks: CUBA SAYS U. S. USED BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS TO KILL 156 PEOPLE UNITED NATIONS (UPI) - Cuba publicly accused the United States Thursday before the U. N. General Assembly of using biological warfare against the island nation in a campaign that killed 156 Cubans, including 99 children. 'In less than three years, our country has suffered the scourge of five grave plagues and epidemics, which have hit our cattle, our plantations and now our people,' Cuban Foreign Minister Isidoro Malmierca told the assembly in his policy speech. 'The agencies of the U. S. are using biological weapons against the people of Cuba. 'Ninety-nine children have died in Cuba,' he charged. 'They were victims of the hemorrhagic dengue epidemic that took from us a toll of 156 lives.' Cuban President Fidel Castro has in the past charged that the CIA was responsible for spreading the diseases in Cuba. Malmierca said Cuba has been hit successively by 'the swine fever, the blue mold in tobacco, the sugar cane rot, the hemorrhagic dengue and, more recently, when we were still in the process of fighting of this one, hemorrhagic conjunctivitis appears.'" -- Houston Post 9/25/81 * * * * * Cuba's charges could not be proved, but they were not farfetched. As noted above, the United States has frequently destroyed enemy crops. The CIA tried to overthrow the Cuban government at the Bay of Pigs and mounted numerous assassination attempts against Castro. Agency interest in sabotaging the Cuban economy with chemical or biological methods against crops and workers is also a matter of public record . . . -- Gene Wars by Charles Pillar and Keith R. Yamamoto, Beech Tree Books-William Morrow, New York, 1988, ISBN 0-688-07050-7, p 72 Six years after it happened, one incident came to light: CIA LINK TO CUBAN PIG VIRUS REPORTED New York -- With at least the tacit backing of U. S. Central Intelligence Agency officials, operatives linked to anti-Castro terrorists introduced African swine fever virus into Cuba in 1971. Six weeks later an outbreak of the disease forced the slaughter of 500,000 pigs to prevent a nationwide animal epidemic. A U. S. intelligence source told Newsday last week he was given the virus in a sealed, unmarked container at a U. S. Army base and CIA training ground in Panama with instructions to turn it over to the anti-Castro group. The 1971 outbreak, the first and only time the disease has hit the Western Hemisphere, was labeled the 'most alarming event' of 1971 by the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization. African swine fever is a highly contagious and usually lethal viral disease that infects only pigs and unlike swine flu, cannot be transmitted to humans. All production of pork, a Cuban staple, halted, apparently for several months. A CIA spokesman, Dennis Berend, in response to a Newsday request for comment, said, 'We don't comment on information from unnamed and, at best, obscure sources. [snip] . . . on the basis of numerous interviews over four months' with U. S. intelligence sources, Cuban exiles and scientists concerning the outbreak -- which occurred two years after then-President Nixon had banned the use of offensive chemical and biological warfare -- <Newsday> was able to piece together this account of events leading up to the outbreak. The U. S. intelligence source said that early in 1971 he was given the virus in a sealed, unmarked container at Ft. Gulick, an Army base in the Panama Canal Zone. The CIA also operates a paramilitary training center for career personnel and mercenaries at Ft. Gulick. The source said he was given instruction to turn the container over to members of an anti-Castro group. The container was given to a person in the Canal Zone, who took it by boat and turned it over to persons aboard a fishing trawler off the Panamanian coast. The source said the substance was not identified to him until months after the outbreak in Cuba. He would not elaborate further. Another man involved in the operation, a Cuban exile who asked not to be identified, said he was on the trawler when the virus was put aboard at a rendezvous point off Bocas del Toro, Panama. He said the trawler carried the virus to Navassa Island, a tiny, deserted, U. S.-owned island between Jamaica and Haiti. From there, after the trawler made a brief stopover, the container was taken to Cuba and given to other operatives near the U. S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay. The source on the trawler, who had been trained by the CIA and had carried out previous missions for the agency, said he saw no CIA officials aboard the boat that delivered the virus to the trawler off Panama, but added: 'We were very well paid for this and Cuban exile groups don't have that kind of money . . ." He said he was revealing the information because he is a member of an exile group being investigated by the United States in connection with terrorist activity in Florida. His account was confirmed by another intelligence source in Miami. The source said he had no proof that the operation was approved by CIA officials in Washington, but added: 'In a case like this, though, they would always give them (CIA officials in Washington) plausible deniability.' The investigation referred to by the operative on the trawler involves a federal inquiry into terrorist acts allegedly carried out by Cuban exiles. 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