U.S. Outpost in Cuba to Step Out of the Shadows
By RANDAL C. ARCHIBOLD
New York Times
JAN. 20, 2015
HAVANA — Fidel Castro called the building a “nest of spies,” routinely marshaling tens of thousands of people to protest at its doorstep. His government even made a television mini-series with what it called images of American diplomats lurking in a forest nearby, dropping off suspicious bags and marking benches in acts of espionage.
President George W. Bush took swipes of his own, installing a Times Square-style ticker on the building’s side to flash news and political statements. The move so enraged Cuban officials that they erected a thicket of 138 black flags on towering poles to block the sign.
Now the building, the American government’s main outpost in Cuba, for decades a hulking symbol of the tensions between the two countries, is supposed to become something else: a full-fledged embassy operating in the open for the first time in more than five decades.
Officially, the six-story embassy, in a choice spot along Havana’s seaside highway, was closed after President Dwight D. Eisenhower broke ties with Cuba in 1961. Yet it has hardly been dormant. Since 1997, the United States has run it as an “interests section” to process visas, hold cultural events and keep some communication flowing between the two estranged neighbors.
But all the while, it has also served as the staging ground for an on-again, off-again game of tit for tat — and spy versus spy.
“We were the closest of enemies,” Wayne S. Smith, who was the first chief of the mission in 1977, once remarked.
The exchanges have ranged from the serious, including the occasional expulsion of diplomatic officers, to the theatrical, especially when Fidel Castro was in power and made the interest section a rallying point to lacerate American policy.
For a generation of Cubans, the secret inner workings of the austere, concrete structure were supposedly revealed in the 1980s through a six-part series on state television called “The C.I.A. in Cuba.” It claimed to catch American officials in the act of spying, displaying briefcases, boxes and even a picnic basket for hiding radios that Cuban intelligence agents said were given to them by C.I.A. handlers posing as diplomats.
But sometimes, the spycraft came in the form of simple harassment, even pranks, on both sides.
On more than one occasion, American diplomats said they came to their homes to find all of the family books rearranged, presumably by state security agents making it abundantly clear that they were watching.
One Cuban government visitor to the American outpost spit out a coffee accidentally seasoned with salt instead of sugar, wondering aloud if he was being poisoned.
A former American intelligence officer in Havana recalled when reciprocity reached a new low. He once opened his car door and discovered dog feces smeared under the door handle.When he came back to the United States for a regular debriefing with the F.B.I., he said that agents started laughing as he recounted the episode.
“We did the same thing to them here” in the United States, the agents told him. (Cuba has its interests section in an old mansion in Washington, which will become an embassy).
James Cason, who headed the American outpost during a period of high tension from 2002 to 2005, said he relished provoking the Cubans, once donning a costume of a cartoon character after Fidel Castro likened him to one. He also put up Christmas decorations outside the building in the form of the number 75, to draw attention to a roundup of dissidents then.
At times, he said, it was just plain awkward to be around each other. “If the Australians were having a party, the Cubans would ask, ‘Are the Americans going to be there?’ And then not come if we were, or we wouldn’t go,” said Mr. Cason in the early 2000s.
The mistrust in recent months has mellowed somewhat, in the new spirit of letting bygones be bygones.
American diplomats, however, still believe they are watched closely and sometimes photographed. Some go outdoors or take other precautions for secret conversations, wondering if homes and vehicles may be bugged.
This week, as part of the détente between the nations, the Obama administration is sending the highest-ranking delegation of American officials to the island in nearly 40 years to restart diplomatic relations and set the stage to reopen the interests sections as embassies in the coming months.
Stoking intrigue on the eve of the talks, a Russian ship that the Defense Department and military analysts have identified as an intelligence craft docked on Tuesday in Havana’s harbor, a couple of miles down the road from the American interests section. A spokesman for the Russian Embassy here said the visit was a long-planned rest stop that had nothing to do with the talks.
The feud started when Fidel Castro, declaring the American Embassy a breeding ground for plots against him, ordered it to cut its staff in late 1960, prompting Eisenhower to break diplomatic relations. The C.I.A. -coordinated Bay of Pigs invasion would come to light later, in April 1961, under President John F. Kennedy, followed by the missile crisis in October 1962.
Highlights from The Times’s coverage of the historic developments in relations between the United States and Cuba.
In Cuba, from the baseball games on the fields to those played in streets with balls wrapped in duct tape, it’s a love pursued amid the ruins.
Announcing new, more flexible regulations, American officials expect visitors to get a view of life on the island rather than sit poolside with a margarita.
Neither country had diplomatic representation in the respective capitals after diplomatic ties were severed. But Peter Kornbluh, an author of “Back Channel to Cuba,” a chronicle of the secret back-and-forth between the countries, said that the Americans continued to carry out intelligence missions with the help of allies with embassies there.
There were occasional spy arrests and prisoner exchanges over the years, he said, but President Jimmy Carter sought a thaw in relations and reached an agreement with the Cubans to open the “interests sections,” technically under the auspices of the Swiss Embassy.
Efforts to fully re-establish embassies stalled because of Cuba’s role in the Angola war and its insistence that the trade embargo be lifted unconditionally.
Then President Carter lost to Ronald Reagan, who took a hard line toward Cuba, and the standoff with Cuba continued for decades.
It didn’t take long for both sides to assume the respective interests sections were mainly listening posts for intelligence services. Each side put limits on the other’s diplomats, restricting their ability to travel much beyond Washington or Havana without permission.
In 2003, 14 diplomats from the Cuban interests section in Washington were kicked out of the United States on suspicion of espionage. Josefina Vidal — the Cuban official expected to meet on Thursday with Assistant Secretary of State Roberta S. Jacobson, the top American diplomat to visit Cuba in decades — is married to one of the officials sent home.
But the American mission here, with 50 Americans and 300 Cuban employees, has for the Cuban government represented a special opportunity to mobilize the masses. Tens of thousands of demonstrators regularly marched on it with patriotic fervor, though even those displays have cooled in recent years.
The Obama administration took down the contentious ticker in 2009, and while the flagpoles remain out front, they are rusting now, their defiant flags taken down.
For all the intrigue and subterfuge surrounding the interest section, the Americans and Cubans have often talked and cooperated on issues of mutual interest, like migration, counternarcotics and maritime safety.
From a technical standpoint, switching back to an embassy may be among the easiest parts of the new attempts to normalize relations.
State Department officials have said it is as simple as switching the lettering on the building, requiring no congressional action. Before President Obama and President Raúl Castro attend a regional summit meeting in April, they are likely to set a date to mutually declare their embassies open.
Getting an ambassador here may take longer, because of an expected drawn-out debate in Congress. But just having a functioning embassy will probably improve the overall climate in relations, former diplomats assigned here said.
Vicki Huddleston, a former chief of the mission from 1999 to 2002, said that opening the embassies will make it easier and more likely for diplomats of both countries to attend briefings and other meetings in their respective capitals that are routinely granted to embassy officers. And meetings with dissidents may no longer be seen as acts to overthrow the Castros.
“As an interest section, we were sort of the enemy and they were suspicious that everything we were doing was trying to overthrow them,” said Ms. Huddleston.
In 2002, she openly distributed hundreds of shortwave radios to Cubans so they could hear American government programming, prompting Fidel Castro to accuse diplomats of going “around the country as they like, organizing networks and conspiracies.’”
Still, despite the periods of animosity, a couple of interest section chiefs got to spend time with Fidel Castro before he turned over power to his brother, Raúl, who has not been known to see American officials in recent times.
Mr. Smith recalled that as he was about to leave Cuba, he was summoned to a beach house. Fidel Castro was holding a farewell cookout for him.
What they discussed he prefers to keep classified.
 |
| Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in Cuba during early days of Revolution. |
New York Times
JAN. 20, 2015
HAVANA — Fidel Castro called the building a “nest of spies,” routinely marshaling tens of thousands of people to protest at its doorstep. His government even made a television mini-series with what it called images of American diplomats lurking in a forest nearby, dropping off suspicious bags and marking benches in acts of espionage.
President George W. Bush took swipes of his own, installing a Times Square-style ticker on the building’s side to flash news and political statements. The move so enraged Cuban officials that they erected a thicket of 138 black flags on towering poles to block the sign.
Now the building, the American government’s main outpost in Cuba, for decades a hulking symbol of the tensions between the two countries, is supposed to become something else: a full-fledged embassy operating in the open for the first time in more than five decades.
Officially, the six-story embassy, in a choice spot along Havana’s seaside highway, was closed after President Dwight D. Eisenhower broke ties with Cuba in 1961. Yet it has hardly been dormant. Since 1997, the United States has run it as an “interests section” to process visas, hold cultural events and keep some communication flowing between the two estranged neighbors.
But all the while, it has also served as the staging ground for an on-again, off-again game of tit for tat — and spy versus spy.
“We were the closest of enemies,” Wayne S. Smith, who was the first chief of the mission in 1977, once remarked.
The exchanges have ranged from the serious, including the occasional expulsion of diplomatic officers, to the theatrical, especially when Fidel Castro was in power and made the interest section a rallying point to lacerate American policy.
For a generation of Cubans, the secret inner workings of the austere, concrete structure were supposedly revealed in the 1980s through a six-part series on state television called “The C.I.A. in Cuba.” It claimed to catch American officials in the act of spying, displaying briefcases, boxes and even a picnic basket for hiding radios that Cuban intelligence agents said were given to them by C.I.A. handlers posing as diplomats.
But sometimes, the spycraft came in the form of simple harassment, even pranks, on both sides.
On more than one occasion, American diplomats said they came to their homes to find all of the family books rearranged, presumably by state security agents making it abundantly clear that they were watching.
One Cuban government visitor to the American outpost spit out a coffee accidentally seasoned with salt instead of sugar, wondering aloud if he was being poisoned.
A former American intelligence officer in Havana recalled when reciprocity reached a new low. He once opened his car door and discovered dog feces smeared under the door handle.When he came back to the United States for a regular debriefing with the F.B.I., he said that agents started laughing as he recounted the episode.
“We did the same thing to them here” in the United States, the agents told him. (Cuba has its interests section in an old mansion in Washington, which will become an embassy).
James Cason, who headed the American outpost during a period of high tension from 2002 to 2005, said he relished provoking the Cubans, once donning a costume of a cartoon character after Fidel Castro likened him to one. He also put up Christmas decorations outside the building in the form of the number 75, to draw attention to a roundup of dissidents then.
At times, he said, it was just plain awkward to be around each other. “If the Australians were having a party, the Cubans would ask, ‘Are the Americans going to be there?’ And then not come if we were, or we wouldn’t go,” said Mr. Cason in the early 2000s.
The mistrust in recent months has mellowed somewhat, in the new spirit of letting bygones be bygones.
American diplomats, however, still believe they are watched closely and sometimes photographed. Some go outdoors or take other precautions for secret conversations, wondering if homes and vehicles may be bugged.
This week, as part of the détente between the nations, the Obama administration is sending the highest-ranking delegation of American officials to the island in nearly 40 years to restart diplomatic relations and set the stage to reopen the interests sections as embassies in the coming months.
Stoking intrigue on the eve of the talks, a Russian ship that the Defense Department and military analysts have identified as an intelligence craft docked on Tuesday in Havana’s harbor, a couple of miles down the road from the American interests section. A spokesman for the Russian Embassy here said the visit was a long-planned rest stop that had nothing to do with the talks.
The feud started when Fidel Castro, declaring the American Embassy a breeding ground for plots against him, ordered it to cut its staff in late 1960, prompting Eisenhower to break diplomatic relations. The C.I.A. -coordinated Bay of Pigs invasion would come to light later, in April 1961, under President John F. Kennedy, followed by the missile crisis in October 1962.
Highlights from The Times’s coverage of the historic developments in relations between the United States and Cuba.
In Cuba, from the baseball games on the fields to those played in streets with balls wrapped in duct tape, it’s a love pursued amid the ruins.
Announcing new, more flexible regulations, American officials expect visitors to get a view of life on the island rather than sit poolside with a margarita.
Neither country had diplomatic representation in the respective capitals after diplomatic ties were severed. But Peter Kornbluh, an author of “Back Channel to Cuba,” a chronicle of the secret back-and-forth between the countries, said that the Americans continued to carry out intelligence missions with the help of allies with embassies there.
There were occasional spy arrests and prisoner exchanges over the years, he said, but President Jimmy Carter sought a thaw in relations and reached an agreement with the Cubans to open the “interests sections,” technically under the auspices of the Swiss Embassy.
Efforts to fully re-establish embassies stalled because of Cuba’s role in the Angola war and its insistence that the trade embargo be lifted unconditionally.
Then President Carter lost to Ronald Reagan, who took a hard line toward Cuba, and the standoff with Cuba continued for decades.
It didn’t take long for both sides to assume the respective interests sections were mainly listening posts for intelligence services. Each side put limits on the other’s diplomats, restricting their ability to travel much beyond Washington or Havana without permission.
In 2003, 14 diplomats from the Cuban interests section in Washington were kicked out of the United States on suspicion of espionage. Josefina Vidal — the Cuban official expected to meet on Thursday with Assistant Secretary of State Roberta S. Jacobson, the top American diplomat to visit Cuba in decades — is married to one of the officials sent home.
But the American mission here, with 50 Americans and 300 Cuban employees, has for the Cuban government represented a special opportunity to mobilize the masses. Tens of thousands of demonstrators regularly marched on it with patriotic fervor, though even those displays have cooled in recent years.
The Obama administration took down the contentious ticker in 2009, and while the flagpoles remain out front, they are rusting now, their defiant flags taken down.
For all the intrigue and subterfuge surrounding the interest section, the Americans and Cubans have often talked and cooperated on issues of mutual interest, like migration, counternarcotics and maritime safety.
From a technical standpoint, switching back to an embassy may be among the easiest parts of the new attempts to normalize relations.
State Department officials have said it is as simple as switching the lettering on the building, requiring no congressional action. Before President Obama and President Raúl Castro attend a regional summit meeting in April, they are likely to set a date to mutually declare their embassies open.
Getting an ambassador here may take longer, because of an expected drawn-out debate in Congress. But just having a functioning embassy will probably improve the overall climate in relations, former diplomats assigned here said.
Vicki Huddleston, a former chief of the mission from 1999 to 2002, said that opening the embassies will make it easier and more likely for diplomats of both countries to attend briefings and other meetings in their respective capitals that are routinely granted to embassy officers. And meetings with dissidents may no longer be seen as acts to overthrow the Castros.
“As an interest section, we were sort of the enemy and they were suspicious that everything we were doing was trying to overthrow them,” said Ms. Huddleston.
In 2002, she openly distributed hundreds of shortwave radios to Cubans so they could hear American government programming, prompting Fidel Castro to accuse diplomats of going “around the country as they like, organizing networks and conspiracies.’”
Still, despite the periods of animosity, a couple of interest section chiefs got to spend time with Fidel Castro before he turned over power to his brother, Raúl, who has not been known to see American officials in recent times.
Mr. Smith recalled that as he was about to leave Cuba, he was summoned to a beach house. Fidel Castro was holding a farewell cookout for him.
What they discussed he prefers to keep classified.
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