NEW CUBAN MUSIC - THE BEJUCAL JAM SESSIONS

August 11, 2003

by Agustín Blázquez with the collaboration of Jaums Sutton

While the U.S. gets involved in far away wars and international affairs that sometimes are difficult to justify, it has a tendency to overlook grave dangers that are taking place in its own backyard.

Anti-American governments have flourished in our hemisphere and they have ties and strong alliances to Cuba’s Castro. Now we have Venezuela’s Chavez, Brazil’s Lula, Argentina’s Kirchner, Ecuador’s Gutierrez and the prospect of the communist from the FMLN, Schafick Handal, being elected in El Salvador. Not a pretty picture since they all have connections with Middle Eastern terrorist organizations and other anti-American and communist organizations. Indeed a very dangerous front south of our border.

Think just for a minute of the enormous number of illegal aliens that enter the U.S. daily from Latin America. Surely terrorists or would-be terrorists are among them. It is known that Chavez is furnishing them with Venezuelan passports.

But among them, the country in the Americas that has caused the most trouble for the U.S. is Castro’s Cuba. Never forget that Castro actually asked the Soviet Union to nuke the U.S. in 1962. And never forget that it was Castro’s arms and trained guerrillas that destabilized Latin America resulting in thousands of illegal immigrants fleeing and still flooding the U.S.

But the U.S. is too distracted fighting in Iraq and hunting down Saddam Hussein, with the problems of Afghanistan, North Korea, Liberia and fighting terrorism to look into what is happening under its nose with a pivotal player in the international terrorist network, Castro.

Since July 6, 2003, from the electronic base in Bejucal, 20 miles southwest of Havana, Castro has been jamming the Voice of America’s (VOA) new Farsi-language programming beamed to Iran via the Telstar-12 satellite, 22,000 miles above the Atlantic Ocean. The National Review Online briefly reported this information first on July 8. The FCC believes that the jamming was coming from Cuba. In addition to VOA, the jamming was affecting the pro-democracy Iranian exiles’ radio and TV broadcasts from the Los Angeles, also in Farsi-language to Iran.

The reason for the jamming is to prevent the people of Iran from hearing other opinions--from the VOA and that of Iranian exiles in the U.S. who are advocates of replacing the Islamic regime for a democracy where individual freedoms and human rights are respected. These Iranian exiles in the Los Angeles area are teaching the people of Iran what freedom is and its responsibilities.

Castro has been a close friend and ally of the Iranian regime for over 12 years. On May 7, 2001, he said upon arrival in Tehran, “The people and governments of Cuba and Iran can send the United States to its knees.” According to the November 30, 2001 issue of the U.S. Cuba Policy Report, a reporter for the Madrid-based Spanish newspaper La Razon said, “Tours through radical Islamic states by Castro and his close Venezuelan ally, President Hugo Chavez, in the months prior to the September attacks indicate some level of complicity or knowledge of what was going to happen.”

We have to remember that prior to the September 11 terrorist attack, the Cubans and Russians were still operating the 28-square mile Lourdes spy base located south of Havana that was able to monitor the personal data of U.S. government leaders, political, military and commercial communications all along the east coast of the U.S. The Cubans might have been sharing sensitive information with the terrorists.

As a double jeopardy prior to September 11, Ana Belen Montes, the Senior Analyst at the Defense Intelligence Agency at the Pentagon, was still spying for the Castro regime.

The Lourdes base, built and still operated by Russians, was closed in the aftermath of the September 11 attacks, at the insistence of President Bush. But Castro still has his intelligence base at Bejucal.

According to an article by Prof. Manuel Cereijo, published by www.AmigosPais-Guaracabuya.org, “In 1995, Cuba and Russia made an agreement for Russian to build a base similar to Lourdes for the use of the Cuban government.” Completed in 1998, it took three years to build at a cost of $750 million. The U.S. Defense Department denounced a huge increase of penetration activities in their computer systems beginning in 1998.

According to Cereijo’s article, the 20-square mile base at Bejucal uses “high speed computers known as HPC that were acquired from China, who acquired them from the United States as well as voice recognition equipment . . . and 10 satellite antennas.

“The Bejucal base can accomplish other important and dangerous activities for U.S. national security. For instance, infiltrate the computer network of this country to obtain the information from the files inside and altering them by changing the data, without the knowledge of the user. And the most dangerous is to be able to change the command orders of the computer systems, which it can paralyze or alter the basic infrastructure of the country. They can also interfere in the telecommunications inside the U.S. and between the U.S. and other countries.”

Cereijo says that in 1999, Castro’s brother, Raul, negotiated with China’s Minister of Defense, Chi Hoatin and General Dong Liang Ju, an agreement in which Chinese military personnel would use the Bejucal base together with the Cuban military. But most important, that the base would use China’s communication satellites, not Russia’s. China, according to Cereijo, “is the country that has launched the most communications satellites to space between 1999 and May 2003.” More than 30.

But, our “friend,” China, still receives from the U.S. “most favorable trade nation” status while they are very busy cozying up to Castro establishing their presence on the island just 90 miles south of the border. And who better to help Castro in his war with the U.S. than a country that has already obtained the plans for U.S.’s missiles and weapons all the while is maintaining their “most favorable” status?

The Chinese presence has been reported in the satellite-tracking facility at Jaruco, near Havana. Sources say that they modernized the base and supplied Castro with spare parts for military equipment including Russian warplanes, like the ones used to kill three U.S. citizens and a resident on February 24, 1996.

The information about the jamming of the VOA and other private radio and TV stations in the U.S. has been scarcely reported by the American media. The Washington Times published an article about it on July 16, following an article the day before in The Miami Herald. The Washington Times’ article quotes Kenneth Y. Tomlinson, the Chairman of the VOA Board of Governors saying, “Cuba is obviously doing this at the behest of the mullahs in Iran. Iran needs somebody in this hemisphere to do its dirty work.”

Ernesto Betancourt, former Director of Radio Marti said to me in a recent interview “Cuba has in the past interfered with the radio stations at U.S. airports of the so-called ARINC network. I have reports of such interferences. Cuban military officers handling such facilities should be warned that the U.S. reserves the right of using the same precision weapons used in Iraq to dismantle such installations should they ever again interfere with the security of American flyers or our broadcasts to third countries.”

This jamming of the broadcasts to Iran represents a hostile act against the U.S. According to Cereijo, the jamming finally stopped on August 2. The silence of the Bush administration (presumably an attempt to minimize embarrassment) leads to the assumption that it has taken the negotiations route. Hopefully the “agreements” between Castro and Bush will not be disadvantageous to the U.S. or to the freedom-seeking Cuban escapees or to Cuban American exiles or to the American people in the long run.

As suggested in the Wall Street Journal editorial A Victory for Fidel dated April 24, 2000, “Cuba was the Soviet Union’s espionage listening-post on the U.S., and Castro might have access to embarrassing information.” Castro might know information that allows him to take the risks he takes. I often wonder if all that listening capability of Castro is also used to blackmail U.S. politicians into inaction.

Agustín Blázquez is a Washington-based documentary film producer and director, including the films "Covering Cuba," "Cuba: The Pearl of the Antilles", "Covering Cuba 2: The Next Generation." and Covering Cuba 3: Elián (presented at the 2003 Miami Latin Film Festival). And author with Carlos Wotzkow of the book Covering and Discovering and translator with Jaums Sutton of the upcoming book by Luis Grave de Peralta Morell THE MAFIA OF HAVANA-The Cuban Cosa Nostra.

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