Cuban subversion

Peter Kemp

The conviction at the Old Bailey last month of two Cuban spies and ter- rorists caused something of a stir in Britain. In Central America it would cause no sur- prise to anyone; for over the last five years Cuba has been trying by every possible means, and with alarming success, to disrupt the already frail stability of that region.

In Central America, as in Africa, Cuba has been acting as Russia's satellite, sedulously advancing Soviet imperial designs. In his first attempts to export revolution to Latin America, in the Sixties, Castro acted independently and against the wishes of the Kremlin, and he came to grief. The betrayal of Che Guevara to the authorities, on Moscow's orders, by the Bolivian Communist Party, spelled out the Soviet message to the revolutionary Left: submit or be destroyed. Wholly dependent now on Soviet economic aid, Castro has submitted.

There has been turbulence in Central America since Mayan times. It has been perpetuated by the wide gap between rich and poor and the indifference of the former, until recently, to the plight of the latter. What the Cubans have done is to ex- ploit genuine grievances, hinder as much as possible any attempts at reform, and work to unite the various guerrilla organisations and co-ordinate their activities to serve Cuban, and therefore Russian, ambitions. The 'America Department' of the Cuban DGI (General Directorate of Intelligence) is in charge of this process, financing and arming those movements which accept its direction and seeking to undermine the others.

The 1979 revolution in Nicaragua which overthrew the dictator Somoza gave the Cubans their first real chance to intervene in Central America. Somoza's corrupt and despotic rule had united against him Nicaraguans of all political persuasions; but the Cubans contrived to incorporate the different opposition groups into the San- dinista movement, whose leaders were Cuban-trained communists. Somoza had also alienated his neighbours, who therefore supported the Sandinistas and allowed free passage of arms and equip- ment to them. This traffic was largly con- trolled by the Cubans, even though many of the arms came from the international black market.

On the pretext of helping the Sandinistas the Cubans were able to build up networks for subversion and future revolution in the adjacent countries of Central America. For example, they sent to Costa Rica a senior officer of their America Department, Julian Lopez Diaz, who established an operational base in San Jose, the capital. There he recruited the Minister of Public Security, a certain Johnny Echeverria who had a grim reputation for brutality; between them they organised supplies of arms to Nicaragua, in the course of which Echeverria made himself a small fortune.

After the fall of Somoza this arms traffic continued, via Nicaragua, Honduras and Guatemala, to the guerrillas in El Salvador. It became a major scandal, and in May 1980 the Costa Rican Congress began a thorough investigation into the identity of the smug- glers; its report a year late implicated not only Echeverria and the Cubans, but even the President of Costa Rica and members of his family. The resulting outcry led to Echeverria's resignation and the rupture of diplomatic relations between Costa Rica and Cuba.

The traffic is very profitable and so it still continues, despite the lack of sympathy in Costa Rica for Salvadorean revolutionaries. There is plenty of evidence, however, that Nicaraguan agents are heavily involved. The arms are assembled in Costa Rica and loaded into vans or private cars specially adapted to conceal their cargo; the cars are often luxury models, like Mercedes, and their drivers are expensively dressed to allay suspicion. Inter-continental buses have been used, and one company was recently suspended by the Salvadorean authorities for persistently ferrying arms. The land route is long but not too difficult for the smugglers, given the help of Nicaragua. The governments of Costa Rica, Honduras and Guatemala would like to block it, but can- not patrol effectively the miles of wild country along their borders. Private and commercial aircraft also play an important part in the trade.

Politically, Costa Rica is the most stable democracy in Central America; it is the only one approaching a welfare state — spend- ing 9 per cent of the GNP on social securi- ty and 7 per cent on education. The economy, however, is chaotic and on the verge of collapse, although Dr Oscar Arias, secretary-general of the party which won the last election, assured me the new government would stabilise it in time. Meanwhile, the great majority of Costa Ricans are well content with their system and do not want to see it overturned; they are a self-satisfied people who, for all their rough manners, detest violence. They have had no army since 1948, but their police force is highly efficient.

Terrorism, therefore, has been confined to a few isolated incidents, although there still exist covert support groups for guer- rillas elsewhere. Recently police searches have revealed arms caches in several houses, notably the home of Manuel Mora, the 70-year-old leader of the Costa Rican Com- munist Party — a legal party under the Constitution. Arraigned before the courts but released on bail, Mora was asked to ex- plain why his house was stacked with weapons from cellar to attic; he was not in the least embarrassed. 'I am a Costa Rican politician', he replied, 'and all politicians here carry arms'.

Honduras, the poorest country in the region, was described to me by the editor of its leading newspaper, La Prensa, as 'the Cambodia of Central America'; he was referring to the days of the Vietnam war, when the North Vietnamese tolerated Cambodian neutrality so long as they found it useful for the passage of their troops and supplies to the South. Similarly, Honduras acts, albeit unwillingly, as a conduit for arms to guerrillas in Guatemala and fl Salvador; the Honduran army is well aware of this traffic but can do little to impede it.

There is a well organised support net- work for the Salvadorean guerrillas; some of its components operate openly, like the 'Committee of Solidarity with the Salvadorean People', but most of the ac- tivity has been underground. It seems to be directed by Nicaraguans rather than Cubans and has the backing of radicals Within the unions. The university in Tegucigalpa, the Honduran capital, is also a valuable centre and refuge for subversion, because it has its own autonomia and the Police may not enter. There are revolu- tionary cells among students and teachers, and open courses of Marxist indoctrina- tion; there are also stories, well authen- ticated and widely believed, of 'people's jails' in the cellars.

Recently there has been an increase in ter- rorist incidents. Last year a prominent businessman was abducted and eventually ransomed for nearly £750,000; La Prensa revealed it was the work of the Salvadorean revolutionary movement, FMLN. When I was there two months ago the press was mounting a campaign against the escalating violence, which culminated in the hijacking by a terrorist group of a Honduran aircraft on an internal flight. The plane with its Passengers remained for three days at the airport of Tegucigalpa in the savage heat, While the hijackers demanded the release of specified political prisoners, the payment of a huge ransom, and the publication of an inflammatory manifesto. The government denied any knowledge of the political Prisoners and refused the ransom, but secured the release, on 1 May, of the air- craft, with the hostages unharmed, in return only for publishing the manifesto. The terrorist group called itself the 'Loren- zo Zelaya Popular Revolutionary Com- mand', which was ironic because Zelaya turns out to have been a respected member of the Liberal Party which now governs Honduras.

Although the most populous of the

Central American republics, Guatemala is far from the most densely Populated; large parts of the north are almost empty, making them ideal guerrilla country. There are four main guerrilla organisations, which the Cubans have been trying to unite — so far with limited success despite the fact that in charge of the opera- tion is the head of the America Depart- ment, Manuel Pineiro Losada; the leaders have agreed a joint military strategy, but as Yet have not formed a common political front.

The most active guerrilla movement is the EGP (Ejercito Guerrillero de los Pobres or Guerrilla Army of the Poor) which was founded and organised in Cuba in the early Seventies. After a raid on a village, when its warriors lined up 20 villagers, including several women and one or two children and shot them, there were suggestions in the Press that it should change its name to Ejer- cito Genocido de los Pobres. The Guatemalan guerrillas have killed on a scale unequalled elsewhere in Central America, except perhaps in El Salvador. Their policy, Openly proclaimed, is intimidation, but it is Carefully planned. They seldom kill the

large landowners, whose behaviour, they hope, will justify their existence; they go for social reformers, like the President of the Guatemalan Chamber of Commerce, whom they murdered after he sponsored a law requiring all employers to give their staff a Christmas bonus of at least one month's wages.

Most guerrilla activity is concentrated in the north-western province of Huehuetenango on the Mexican border, a matter of serious concern to the Mexican government despite its generally sym- pathetic attitude to Central American revolutionaries.

General Efrain Rios Montt, the Guatemalan head of state, has committed himself to the guerrillas' destruction — he and God would do it together, he told the nation on television in May. He is a born- again Christian — strange in the leader of a predominantly Catholic country, whose brother is a Catholic bishop — but despite the occasional naiveté of his speeches he has won popular confidence by his firm govern- ment. In his first six weeks of office he halv- ed the number of killings — by the Right as well as the Left. His tenure of power will depend not only on his success against the guerrillas but on his ability to restore the economy, shattered by many years of in- competence and corruption.

When I raised the subject of Belize with the general in an interview half an hour after his installation, he assured me he had no intention of trying to annexe it, but simply to negotiate the right to construct a port there; at present Guatemala's only outlet to the sea leads through Honduran or Belizean waters. He thought Great Britain might help to persuade the Belizeans to agree.

Costa Rica, Honduras and Guatemala are not yet threatened with imminent com- munist control. In Nicaragua and El Salvador it is a different story.

This is the first of two articles by Peter Kemp, who has just returned from Central America.