Fri, Sep 05, 2003 page6

• It's 1984 and Big Brother is watching you

  • REUTERS
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  In a country where informants are treated as heroes, your neighbor could well be spying on you and the man you thought was a fiercely anti-government dissident may turn out to be a decorated government agent.

  Welcome to the murky world of Cuban espionage and counter-espionage, where it's best to stay clear of flower pots in hotel lobbies and assume that the waiter has long ears.

  Western diplomats in Havana say their phones are tapped and their steps watched. The more wary switch off their mobile phones at meetings because they could be bugged.

  

  Expatriate Cuban Miguel Saavedra, president of human rights group Vigilia Mambisa, yells as he demonstrates outside the American Airlines Arena in Miami, Florida, where the Latin Grammy Awards were held Wednesday night. Saavedra holds a picture of Dr. Oscar Elisa Biscet, who he said has been held 25-years as a political prisoner in Cuba.

  PHOTO: EPA

  After four decades as a communist society besieged by the world's most powerful nation just 145km away, Cuba's enduring Cold War climate remains a part of life.

  For many it is a world of state vigilance more akin to the omniscient Big Brother of George Orwell's novel 1984 than the antics of Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana, who dispatched vacuum cleaner drawings to London's MI6 as plans for a secret weapon.

  "In Cuba anyone can be an agent. It is a society based on fear. There are secret agents everywhere. What works well here is control and propaganda," said Miriam Leiva, a former foreign ministry official who lost her job when her economist husband Oscar Espinosa Chepe became a dissident.

  Heroes and villians

  He was one of 75 opponents of President Fidel Castro who were arrested in March and jailed for terms of up to 28 years in the harshest crackdown in decades on the communist-run island.

  The main witnesses at their one-day trials were 12 dissidents who revealed that they were undercover agents who had infiltrated opposition ranks for many years.

  The informants had their stories published in a book and were the toast of the town for posing as "counter-revolutionaries" who got money and support from Cuba's arch-enemy the US.

  Far from a shameful occupation, spying is seen as a legitimate weapon by Castro's government to defend itself against its foes.

  The CIA has tried countless times to assassinate Castro with cloak and dagger plots such as an exploding cigar and powder to make his beard fall out.

  CIA-trained exiles landed in Cuba in 1961 in a failed invasion attempt to oust Castro.

  The long arm of Cuban intelligence has penetrated the exile community in Miami to spy on anti-Castro activists planning sabotage and bombings in Cuba from across the Florida Straits.

  In 2001, a Miami court convicted five Cubans of espionage and sentenced them to prison terms ranging from 15 years to life.

  The spy ring members said they had caused no harm to the US and gathered information only to defend their homeland from exile attacks. They are glorified in anti-American propaganda as "five heroes trapped in the belly of the beast".

  In the treacherous world of espionage, Havana has sought to discredit its opponents by showing them to be villains who once collaborated.

  A recent book based on secret police files charged that Elizardo Sanchez, Cuba's best known human rights activist, was an agent code-named Juana who had informed on dissidents, diplomats and foreign journalists since 1997.

  Photos showed the veteran dissident apparently being decorated for his services by a colonel, handing over documents at a park bench meeting and receiving a bottle of whisky as a present.

  "It is a colossal lie," said 59-year-old Sanchez, who heads the Cuban Commission for Human Rights. The book was a montage reminiscent of the KGB's smear campaigns, he said.

  "The government is waging a dirty war against us. It's what the KGB used to do, print whole books to discredit people like Solzhenitsyn, Sakharov and Havel," he said.

  Infiltrated

  The depth to which Cuba's small dissident movement had been penetrated astonished European diplomats who no longer know whom to trust in Havana.

  Even after death, Cubans can have their reputations tarnished as moles, as was the case of Jesus Yanez Pelletier, a former Castro aide who later became one of his best-known opponents.

  In 2001, on the first anniversary of his death, Yanez's widow was shocked by the arrival of state security agents at the graveside carrying a wreath in a posthumous recognition of decades of duty infiltrating dissident circles.

  Cubans have been asked to spy on their families and friends. Eliseo Alberto, the son of noted Cuban poet Eliseo Diego, confessed in a book entitled Report on Myself that he agreed to inform on intellectuals and artists visiting his father.

  Neighborhood watch groups called Committees to Defend the Revolution, found on most blocks, have long been the eyes and ears of the government, creating a climate of suspicion and distrust between Cubans, said Roman Catholic priest Jose Corado.

  "People have two faces and censor themselves out of fear. They think they are alone and that their neighbor is with the government," Corado said in his parish church in the eastern city of Santiago. "This is pure 1984."
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