By Vanessa Bauza
HAVANA BUREAU

Havana · The escalating controversy over a political holiday decoration at the U.S. diplomatic mission in Havana got nastier Friday when Fidel Castro's government unfurled large billboards with swastikas, photos of the Iraqi prisoner abuse scandal and the words "Made in the USA."

The billboards are Cuba's response to a holiday display on the lawn of the U.S. Interests Section, which includes a tinsel Santa Claus, Frosty the Snowman and a sign with the number 75, referencing the Cuban dissidents imprisoned last year.

The Cubans' billboard appeared overnight on the Malecon, Havana's seaside highway, directly facing the Interests Section offices.

American diplomats refused to take down the decorations this week after Cuban officials warned they would face retaliation. On Friday, the busy seaside avenue was dotted with the Cuban billboards, including one with a cartoon depiction of an American soldier pointing a rifle at an Iraqi boy. In it, the boy tells the soldier "For New Year's, I don't want any more bombs to be dropped on my house and don't torture my Daddy."

An American diplomat in Havana on Friday called the Cuban billboards "rabid and hyperbolic" and rejected the comparison between the Abu Ghraib prison scandal and the prisoners of conscience held in Cuba.

"The torture at Abu Ghraib, which president Bush called abominable, has been investigated, reported, and discussed fully and openly in the U.S., and those responsible are being prosecuted ," the diplomat said. "On the other hand, the Cuban government does not allow a single word of dissent in its media, jails those who dare espouse different ideas and has not allowed the International Red Cross or anyone else to visit Cuban political prisoners since the late 1980s."

The U.S. diplomat repeated that the display will remain in place through the end of the holiday season to draw attention to the plight of political prisoners in Cuba.

Wayne Smith, former chief of the U.S. mission in Havana during the Carter and Reagan administrations, said the United States made a mistake.

"I would of course like to see all of the 75 released, but this is not the way to do it," said Smith, who is now a senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and a proponent of normalizing U.S.-Cuba relations. "Putting up the pictures of Abu Ghraib is simply signaling `two can play at this game, and your hands aren't clean either.'"

"[The U.S. display] was a deliberate provocation. ... It means ``screw you." So the Cubans have put up something in kind that says ``screw you, too," Smith said.

In Havana, where the Cold War continues, the Cuban government routinely assails the Bush administration for what it calls a hypocritical stance on human rights.

The new billboards were an effort to reply to Bush administration's criticisms of Cuba's human rights record. Earlier in the week, Parliament Speaker Ricardo Alarcon told The Associated Press that the U.S. display was "rubbish," and that Cason seemed "desperate to create problems."

Vanessa Bauza can be reached at vmbauza@yahoo.com

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