ACCESSION NUMBER:00000
FILE ID:96040103.LAR
DATE:04/01/96
TITLE:01-04-96  CUBAN PLANE SHOOTDOWN WAS MEANT TO STOP OPENING

TEXT:
(U.S. official briefs) all (840)
By Andrew L. Lluberes
USIA Staff Writer

WASHINGTON -- Fidel Castro's regime shot down two unarmed U.S.
civilian planes Feb. 24 because it wanted to stop what it perceived as
a dangerously growing Cuban opening to the outside world, a U.S.
official said March 29.

Briefing reporters on the condition of anonymity, the U.S. official
said that since last fall, Castro's 37-year-old dictatorship has been
reducing the number and frequency of cultural, educational and
scientific contacts it allows Cubans to have with foreign countries
and organizations -- despite its cultivation of tourism and
desperately needed foreign investment.

As examples of this ideological tightening, the official cited
increased harassment of writers; the denial of exit visas to three
vice ministers scheduled to travel to France and Spain -- two
countries especially courted by Havana; a reversal of permission for
the Masons to build a major building in Havana with foreign donations;
and the crackdown in February against the coalition of dissident and
human rights groups known as the Concilio Cubano.

"This is what Cuba fears -- ideas," the official said, adding that the
shootdown of the planes was meant to send a clear signal that Castro's
hard-line inner circle had decided the small opening it began last
year had gone far enough and needed to be stopped.

The official's briefing came two days before the New York Times
reported from Havana that the governing Cuban Communist Party's
Central Committee, at a rare full session March 23-24, called for
strengthening ideological and economic orthodoxy and threatened
"severe punishment" for those who failed to comply.

Three U.S. citizens and one U.S. resident were killed in the Feb. 24
attack, which led President Clinton to reverse his position and sign
the tough anti-Castro Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity
(LIBERTAD) Act March 12.

Despite the new law, the official said, the United States will
continue to allow and encourage cultural, educational and scientific
exchanges with Cuba. "We want ideas to enter Cuba," the official said.

Cuban authorities were "freaked out" by the signing of the
Helms-Burton legislation, the official said. Sen. Jesse Helms of North
Carolina, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, and Rep.
Dan Burton of Indiana, chairman of the House Western Hemisphere
affairs subcommittee, are the LIBERTAD bill's main cosponsors.

Within Cuba, the official added, Castro's regime continues to exert
total control through its extensive security and intelligence
apparatus.

Some 10 of the 150 Concilio members arrested last month are still
detained. "Concilio is not dead, but people are very scared," the
official said.

Between 75 and 100 independent Cuban journalists are working
throughout the island, the official said, but their work is seen
almost exclusively abroad and there still is no opposition press --
even underground. There has been no progress in moves to allow U.S.
news organizations to set up bureaus in Cuba, the official added, and
Reuters news agency, the Financial Times newspaper and the British
Broadcasting Corp. remain the only three English-language foreign news
organizations with resident correspondents.

Cubans do not have access to the Internet beyond censored electronic
mail, the official said, and while they are often prohibited from
meeting with U.S. diplomats stationed there, Cubans still visit the
U.S. Interests Section in Havana.

Castro's regime continues to allow foreign contacts and exchanges it
perceives to be in its interest, the official said, citing 200 Cuban
doctors sent to work and teach in South Africa. Tourism, a major
source of foreign currency for Cuba, is up 45 percent, with a
bed-and-breakfast industry emerging, the official added.

In its report, the New York Times said ordinary Cubans, dissidents and
foreign diplomats have expressed concern at the tone of the documents
emerging from the Central Committee meeting, "saying they augur a
period of increased repression and retrenchment."

It quoted a report to the committee by Defense Minister Raul Castro
published in Granma, the official party newspaper, as arguing that
Cuba must at all costs avoid reforms of the type that "undermined the
Soviet Union and other socialist countries." Raul Castro is the
country's second most powerful figure after his brother.

"Self-employed workers and intellectuals here are being used by Cuba's
enemies, he complained, to weaken the authority of the party and the
state and must be brought back into line," according to the Times
report.

The newspaper also quoted a Concilio Cubano leader, Vladimiro Roca, as
contending that the tough line showed a "fear and panic among the
leadership of losing power."

The Communist Party, said Roca in the Times report, views the
emergence of a vigorous sector of self-employed workers as a threat to
its absolute control. The emerging private sector is less dependent on
the state and underlines the inefficiencies of a centralized economy,
Roca was quoted as saying, so "the government feels it has to break
this."
NNNN