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United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan is in possession of a report submitted by Cuba which contains more than sufficient evidence linking the U.S. government to the appearance of a plant disease currently causing severe damage to corn, bean, squash, cucumber and other food crops in four Cuban provinces and the Isle of Youth. According to charges made on October 21, 1996, a fumigation aircraft operated by the U.S. State Department, registration number N3093M, released the Thrips palmi insect plague along the international air corridor that passes over the western Cuban province of Matanzas. Thrips palmi is an invertebrate of between one and two millimeters in length, and is resistant to a considerable variety of insecticides. The U.S. State Department denies the veracity of these facts, alleging that this is a case of deliberate disinformation. It further claims that the United States has not committed a single act in violation of the 1972 agreement on chemical and biological weapons. This response comes as no surprise to Cuba. Since the triumph of the Revolution, Cuba has repeatedly denounced acts of U.S. aggression that are emphatically denied by the government in power at the time. Years later, however, these accusations have been confirmed when the U.S. Congress decides to make previously secret information public. Back in the early 1960s, U.S. intelligence services and the military began to elaborate plans for biological warfare, which have included blights that attack food crops, sugar cane defoliants, bacteria that thwart sugar cane cultivation and the interruption of rain by way of highly sophisticated methods. In 1962, the CIA designed an operation known as Mongoose with the goal of destroying the Cuban Revolution. The operation's strategies included the use of military force, sabotage and the assassination of the country's leaders, as well as the introduction of nonlethal chemical agents that would cause illness among sugar cane workers (hundreds of thousands of individuals) and keep them off work for a period of between 24 and 48 hours, thus hindering the production of Cuba's leading export. The Long Island newspaper Newsday revealed in 1971 that a virus originating in Fort Gulik, in the Panama Canal Zone, had been delivered by fishing boat to agents working against Cuba. A book entitled The Fish is Red, for its part, reports that in 1972, CIA agents first introduced the African swine fever virus that decimated Cuba's livestock population. It is estimated that more than half a million pigs were sacrificed, burned and buried in order to combat the epidemic. Several years later, Newsday reported that a biological warfare program aimed against poultry production in Cuba had failed, for reasons not revealed. Between 1979 and 1981, four destructive diseases were unleashed that seriously affected individuals and crops vital to the Cuban economy: hemorrhagic conjunctivitis, dengue fever, sugar cane rust and tobacco blue mold. Covert Action, a Washington-based publication, stated that as part of the CIA-Pentagon anti-Cuba arsenal, a disease known as hemorrhagic dengue was introduced on the island, where it infected hundreds of thousands of people, leaving 158 dead; 101 of them were children. Eduardo Arocena, a leader of the anti-Cuba terrorist group Omega 7, admitted before a U.S. court in 1984 - while he was being tried for murder - that in 1980 he had participated in an operation to introduce germs into Cuba as part of the United States' war against the island. Five years earlier, in 1979, The Washington Post had reported that the CIA had a program aimed against Cuban agriculture, and that since 1962 Pentagon specialists had been manufacturing biological agents to be used for this purpose. The secret bases operated in the United States for the development of chemical and bacteriological warfare include the Edgewood arsenal, near the city of Baltimore, and Fort Detrick, in the state of Maryland. A report issued in 1969 by the U.S. Senate committee on labor and social security recognized that under certain conditions, it is difficult to prove guilt in a bacteriological attack if the organisms causing the harm are sent clandestinely, which would allow for the argument that the situation created is the result of a spontaneous epidemic. Of course, Cuba is not the only country against which the United States has used these prohibited forms of weapons. During the war in Viet Nam, there was ample media coverage throughout the world, including in the U.S. press, regarding the indiscriminate use of highly toxic chemical and bacteriological agents affecting both humans and animals, as well as defoliants aimed at devastating plantations, crops and forests, such as Agent Orange. Other antecedents are far too numerous to catalog. In 1981, for example, the Press Asia agency of India reported that bacteriological experiments being carried out by U.S. scientists in Lahore, Pakistan, had led to 30 mysterious deaths. A year earlier, in 1980, the U.S. government declassified documents revealing that in 1956, there had been plans to use the mosquito which spreads yellow fever against the former Soviet Union. There is more than sufficient information available to back Cuba in its charges regarding this latest biological attack against it. There are hard facts, conclusive evidence and more than convincing arguments. It would not be just if this were to remain as simply another chapter in the United States' dirty war against the Cuban people. Copyright © 1997 by Granma International. |
