Cuba unmasks agents working among dissidents
Associated Press
HAVANA -- For years they were familiar faces in Cuba's opposition movement:
the elderly man with
a black beret, the reporter who used a cane, the efficient secretary.
But last week, after the government locked up 75 of its most vocal critics,
their real identities became
known: government spies.
"The True Faces of the Nation" is what the Communist Party daily Granma
called them: as many as a
dozen men and women who faked opposition to Fidel Castro's government to
gather facts and figures
about the dissidents.
Several of the undercover agents were so trusted by American diplomats
that they had permission to
use computers whenever they wished.
The unmasking underscored the efficiency of the Cuban government's intelligence
services and sent a
strong message to diplomats and dissidents alike.
"No one in Cuba is sucking their thumb," Foreign Minister Felipe Perez
Roque said last week,
defending the crackdown. "What we have said here is just a part of what
we know."
James Cason, the top American official with whom the dissidents are accused
of collaborating, "should
know that our nation has learned how to defend itself," Perez Roque said.
Communist officials apparently identified the agents now because there
was political gain in letting the
dissidents and diplomats know just how much information they had, said
Nelson P Valdes, a Cuba
analyst.
"The Cuban government not only penetrated the so-called dissidents, it
managed to have people setting
up the very organizations that the United States government found attractive,
supported and funded,"
said Valdes, a University of New Mexico sociology professor.
Informant David Manuel Orrio, the reporter with the cane, told Granma that
the decision was based on
politics.
"We thought there was still a lot we could do," Orrio was quoted as saying,
but "we understood the
political importance of unmasking the traitors of the nation and those
who had bought them off."
Since the mid-1990s, the Web sites of Cuban exile groups in Miami have
published hundreds of
Orrio's articles, many of them anti-Castro in tone. He had even helped
organize a journalism ethics
conference at Cason's home.
Testimony from Orrio was used to get 20-year prison sentences for independent
journalists Raul
Rivero and Ricardo Gonzalez.
Also testifying against Rivero and Gonzalez was Nestor Baguer, a wiry 81-year-old
in a black beret
popularly known as the "dean of Cuba's independent reporters."
"I already said it in the trial: they are mercenaries," Baguer told Granma.
Granma on Friday celebrated the agents as "patriots" and told of them being
welcomed as heroes by
their neighbors.
"Today we know the true face of the revolutionary and unbreakable nation,"
Granma quoted a state
security official saying at a welcoming ceremony for Aleida de las Mercedes
Godines, the efficient
secretary.
Godines most recently worked for Marta Beatriz Roque, sentenced last week
to 20 years in prison for
collaborating with U.S. officials to undermine Cuba's socialist system.
Opposition leaders say Godines did the greatest damage to the dissident
movement because of her
access to documents and American officials.
It wasn't clear what the agents would do now that they've been unmasked,
but Baguer wants to keep
writing. He's detailing his undercover work in a book titled "Octavio"
-- his code name.