Fidel Fuels Fires of Vieques Quarrel

0 Comments | Insight on the News, July 23, 2001 | by J. Michael Waller

U.S. counterIntelligence sources tell Insight that Cuban intelligence is fomenting the controversy over the U.S. Navy's live-fire exercises on the Puerto Rican island.

Cuban leader Fidel Castro may have fainted during a recent tirade in Havana, but his American foot soldiers who once heralded his Marxist revolutionary movement around the world are alive and well. After more than a decade of obscurity, they're back with a passion not seen since the Sandinistas made war against Ronald Reagan. Like Castro they're a little grayer and a little flabby, but their militant spirit is as strong as ever. And they have a whole new generation of young people in tow.

Where once they supported practically any group that could lob a bomb at a Yankee, their new mantra is for the Yankees to stop the bombing. Nor is their battleground Managua or Palestine or some other far-off place. As El Barbudo himself once promised, it's right here on American soil: the Puerto Rican island of Vieques (pronounced vee-AY-kes). It's part of a growing movement to oust the U.S. military from bases around the world.

The U.S. military has used Vieques as a training ground to practice amphibious invasions under realistic air-and seaborne bombings and strafings since before the attack on Pearl Harbor. The island is the only available place in the Atlantic Ocean affording perfect practice conditions. And nobody but Castro, a few Marxist separatist groups and their supporters and a handful of antimilitary activists called the Committee for the Rescue and Development of Vieques (CRDV) raised a peep. That is, until April 1999, when two errant 500-pound bombs from a Marine F/A-18 jet accidentally killed a civilian security guard at Camp Garcia on Vieques' eastern test range. David Sanes Rodriguez, whom the left otherwise would have regarded as a tool of the U.S. military, suddenly became a martyr and icon for Puerto Rican independence.

The CRDV, whose two decades of unnoticed activism seemed almost fruitless, helped set up a New York-based umbrella organization called the Vieques Support Campaign (VSC) for agitprop on the U.S. mainland.

Little of the "U.S.-out-of-Vieques" campaign is homegrown. During the last two years, more than 1,200 demonstrators have been arrested for trying to break into, vandalize or otherwise disrupt Camp Garcia. Almost none of the protesters are from the island. U.S. military sources tell Insight that of the 180 demonstrators arrested between April 27 and May 1, only four were local. "The rest were imported for the occasion," sources say.

Much of the Vieques activism comes from left-wing political organizers in the New York City area. At the 2000 Democratic National Convention, Rep. Nydia Velfizquez, D-N.Y. -- a Puerto Rican-born congresswoman and veteran supporter of Marxist revolutionary movements in the Caribbean region -- called for the U.S. Navy to stop bombing Vieques while about 300 people in the New York delegation held up anti-Navy signs. Despite the far-left origin of the protests -- a Clinton White House official tried in vain to suppress the anti-Navy activism at the Democratic convention -- mainstream Republicans led by New York Gov. George Pataki have climbed aboard the U.S.-out-of-Vieques bandwagon. As Insight's Jamie Dettmer first reported (see Political Notebook, July 2-9) White House political director Karl Rove then took the opportunity to try to attract Puerto Rican votes in the United States by sending the Navy packing.

The movement is led by and attracts extremists, such as Lolita Lebron, whom the New York Times describes as a "hero to many Puerto Ricans." Lebron wants the United States out of Vieques and is active in the movement. She was one of four militants who shot up the U.S. House of Representatives in a 1954 terrorist attack -- part of the same movement that had tried to assassinate President Harry S Truman. President Jimmy Carter pardoned her in 1979. Though she says she has renounced violence, Lebron has inspired much of the civil disobedience that drew press attention on Vieques.

In Havana, Castro has sponsored huge demonstrations in support of the Vieques protesters and personally recognized Puerto Rican protest organizers under his patronage. On May 30, the Cuban government sponsored an anti-imperialist tribunal in Havana, mobbing 100,000 protesters in front of the U.S. Interests Section to denounce the U.S. Navy in Vieques. Puerto Rican Sen. Fernando Martin, executive director of the splinter secessionist Puerto Rican Independence Party, thanked Castro for his support.

Is Cuban intelligence behind the protests? U.S. counterintelligence officials tell Insight it is. On June 7, the Cuban government's top official responsible for supporting foreign political and revolutionary movements visited Puerto Rico. Jose Antonio Arbezu, director of the America Department of the Cuban Communist Party, paid a visit to the U.S. island in a delegation led by the chief of Cuba's rubber-stamp Legislature, Ricardo Alarcon. Mainstream Puerto Rican politicians called on Gov. Sila Calderon to block the Cuban coordinators' visit. New Progressive Party Sen. Kenneth McClintock tried to get U.S. visas denied to the Cuban delegation. But Calderon said that although she rejected the Cuban government's support for her anti-Vieques activism, she wouldn't attempt to block the operative's visit, saying, "I don't know the purpose of his visit, but it merits the respect that one should give any human being."