Tag: havana
U.S. And Cuba Agree To Open Embassies, Restore Diplomatic Relations

U.S. And Cuba Agree To Open Embassies, Restore Diplomatic Relations

By Christi Parsons, Tribune Washington Bureau (TNS)

WASHINGTON — After 50 years of diplomatic standoff, the U.S. and Cuba plan to announce Wednesday that they will establish formal diplomatic relations and open embassies in each other’s capitals, a senior U.S. administration official said.

President Barack Obama and Secretary of State John F. Kerry plan to address the decision publicly on Wednesday, as the two nations move to open the door to a new relationship of trade, travel and tourism.

The announcement follows months of talks between the two countries, after a historic decision in December by both that they would release prisoners as a good-faith move toward melting their Cold War freeze.

All spring, negotiators from both sides have been talking about sending ambassadors, lifting restrictions on diplomatic personnel and opening the way to financial and technological deals.

On Tuesday, senior advisers to Obama said the conversations had gone well and that the two sides were now prepared for the much more serious commitment of opening embassies.

(c)2015 Tribune Co. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Photo: Day Donaldson via Flicrk

Cuba, U.S. Launch High-Level Talks In Havana

Cuba, U.S. Launch High-Level Talks In Havana

By Tracy Wilkinson, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

HAVANA — Cuba and the United States launched their highest-level talks in a generation Wednesday, agreeing to disagree on basic immigration policies but recognizing a new spirit of cooperation.

Wednesday’s meeting was the first of two days of sessions here in the Cuban capital, the first official face-to-face talks since Presidents Barack Obama and Raul Castro announced plans to open diplomatic ties after a half-century of animosity.

As could be expected, however, little progress was made on long-standing disputes.

Josefina Vidal, Cuba’s foreign ministry official in charge of affairs with the U.S., criticized the American policies that allow Cubans who enter the U.S. illegally to remain there. The so-called dry-foot, wet-foot rules are a “preferential treatment” afforded uniquely to Cubans that constitute the “principal incentive and stimulus” behind the flight of Cubans from the island, she said.

Vidal said the ease of immigration was also contributing to a brain drain of doctors and engineers who travel legally to third countries and then defect to the U.S.

Her counterpart in Wednesday’s talks, Alex Lee, said U.S. officials made it clear that the U.S government would keep the special status in place. The exchange comes after a significant uptick last month in the number of Cubans braving the seas to reach Florida.

The U.S. “is committed to assuring that migration remains safe, legal and orderly,” said Lee, deputy assistant secretary of state for Western Hemisphere affairs.

Lee and Vidal, director-general of the U.S. division of the Cuban Foreign Ministry, briefed reporters separately following conclusion of the first round of talks. On Thursday, Roberta Jacobson, an assistant secretary of state, will join the talks that will move into broader issues involving the normalization of diplomatic relations. She is the highest-ranking U.S. official to meet with the Cuban government here in 35 years.

Vidal said the migration policies, which have been in effect for nearly 20 years, contradict the new spirit of engagement. Still, both she and Lee sounded upbeat despite the differences and promised to continue working on the issue.

Obama, in his State of the Union speech Tuesday, said the “expiration date” on Washington’s adversarial policies toward Cuba had long passed and the government’s new attitude had “the potential to end a legacy of mistrust.” Cuban officials have been trying to play down expectations, however, warning that they have no intention of changing the Communist nation’s political system or one-party rule.

AFP Photo/Joe Raedle

North Korean Freighter, Fresh From Stop In Havana, Raises Suspicion As It Runs Aground Off Mexican Coast

North Korean Freighter, Fresh From Stop In Havana, Raises Suspicion As It Runs Aground Off Mexican Coast

By Juan O. Tamayo, El Nuevo Herald

A North Korean freighter has run aground near a port in eastern Mexico, just days after a stop in Havana that sparked comparisons with another Pyongyang vessel seized last summer with a large and illegal shipment of Cuban weapons.

The 6,700-ton Mu Du Bong, built in 1983, ran aground Monday on a reef off the port of Tuxpan in the Gulf of Mexico, according to shipping and salvage industry officials. There was no immediate information on whether the freighter docked or planned to dock in Tuxpan.

The ship had sparked suspicions before its mishap because its Caribbean voyage seemed similar to that of the Chong Chon Gang, seized by Panama last summer as it prepared to cross the Panama Canal on its way home to North Korea. An estimated 240 tons of weapons were hidden under hundreds of thousands of sacks of sugar.

Both freighters sailed in Cuban waters and stopped in Havana, but their exact locations were mysteries for days because there were no reports from their location transponders, as required by safety regulations. The Chong Chon Gang had turned off its transponder to hide its location, a U.N. investigation later found.

The Mu Du Bong crossed the Panama Canal into the Caribbean June 15. Its transponder signaled on June 25 that it was near the port of Mariel, and on June 29-30 that it was in the port of Havana, according to an article in Forbes magazine that first reported its voyage.

For the next nine days the freighter’s transponder fell silent, Forbes reported. It started working again July 10, showing the ship was in Havana and then sailed into the Gulf of Mexico, according to Forbes.

AFP Photo/KNS

Interested in world news? Sign up for our daily email newsletter!

Former CIA Agent, Now In Havana, Discusses Gadhafi’s ‘Secret World’

Former CIA Agent, Now In Havana, Discusses Gadhafi’s ‘Secret World’

By Juan O. Tamayo, El Nuevo Herald

MIAMI — U.S. fugitive and renegade CIA agent Frank Terpil is still living in Havana and easily recounting his days helping former Libyan dictator Moammar Gadhafi to murder his political enemies, according to a recently released British documentary.

Co-producer Michael Chrisman said Terpil, 74, was interviewed at his Havana home in December and gave the impression of leading a somewhat bored life, “with little to do (and) spending much time frequenting Havana watering holes nursing a drink.”

He has a much younger Cuban girlfriend, and asks friends and visitors to supply him with the occasional English language book, said Chrisman. The Showtime documentary is titled “Mad Dog: Inside the Secret World of Muammar Gaddafi.”

The interview focused on Terpil’s relations with the Libyan dictator, killed in a 2011 revolt, and not on his links to his Cuban hosts because “he was no doubt taking a gamble upsetting them by doing the interview,” the co-producer added.

Terpil, a CIA operative who resigned from the agency in 1970, is one of more than 70 U.S. fugitives reported to have received safe haven in Cuba. Many are viewed by Havana as victims of U.S. political persecution, such as black-rights militant Joanne Chesimard.

He fled the United States in 1980 to escape a U.S. indictment on charges of conspiracy to murder and delivering more than 20 tons of plastic explosives to Gadhafi and turned up in Lebanon but eventually settled in Cuba.

Cuba’s General Intelligence Directorate recruited Terpil, gave him the code name of Curiel — guinea pig — and used him in 1987 to try to recruit a CIA worker in the former Czechoslovakia, retired agency analyst Brian Latell wrote in his book, “Castro’s Secrets: Cuban Intelligence, the CIA and the Kennedy Assassination.”

The Canadian government announced in 1995 that its embassy in Havana had been told that Cuban authorities had arrested Terpil, but provided no details on the reasons for the detention or what happened to him afterward.

One foreigner living in Havana said that in 2000 a Cuban friend at a ballet performance pointed out a man sitting nearby and identified him as Terpil. The man was accompanied by a younger Cuban woman, the foreigner said.

Terpil fled the United States after U.S. federal prosecutors accused him and business partner Ed Wilson of conspiracy to commit murder and the sale of plastic explosives to Libya. A New York state court earlier had sentenced him to 53 years in prison after trying him in absentia on charges of conspiring to smuggle 10,000 submachine guns.

Chrisman said that during the Havana interview for the documentary, produced by Fresh One Productions for Showtime, Terpil admitted he helped Gadhafi run a campaign to track down and assassinate the Libyan dictator’s enemies abroad.

“I would say Murder Incorporated, yeah, murder for hire. Gadhafi thought that anybody who was a dissident, they were going to be eliminated,” Terpil said. In one case, he added, the dictator wanted the head of one of his foes brought to him in a cooler.

Chrisman said Terpil also recounted hiring two Cuban exiles from Miami, telling them they were to assassinate Ilich Ramirez Sanchez, the terrorist known as “Carlos the Jackal.” The Cubans backed out when they realized the real target was a Gadhafi foe, he added.

“Terpil expressed no remorse or misgiving as he told his story matter-of-factly, with an edge of morbid humor, about his time helping to run and supply Gadhafi’s international terror campaign,” said a news release for the documentary.

A native of the New York City borough of Brooklyn, Terpil has claimed that he was forced to resign from the CIA after the agency learned that when he was posted in India he ran a hard-currency scam through Afghanistan, for his personal profit.

He has acknowledged working for dictators such as Uganda’s Idi Amin, Iraq’s Saddam Hussein and Anastasio Somoza in Nicaragua, as well as the governments of Saudi Arabia, Iran and Egypt.

And he has sometimes claimed, and at times provided evidence, that he had CIA approval for some of his allegedly rogue operations. He was a close friend of Ted Shackley, a CIA deputy director of covert operations who died in 2002.

AFP Photo/Abdullah Doma