Ed Rabel
Wednesday, April 9, 2003

At the same time the Bush administration is deploying forces to remove Saddam Hussein and his weapons of mass destruction, it is apparently preparing to take out Fidel Castro militarily as well.

Far-fetched? Maybe. But in the post-Sept. 11 environment, many Americans are more than willing to accept a scenario in which the United States has to launch a pre-emptive strike against a Cuban government that gives safe haven to terrorists and has the capability to kill millions of us with biological weapons.

The trouble with that scenario is that there is no reason to believe it to be true.

Yet an administration official told a Senate committee earlier this year that Cuba “has everything you need to build an offensive biological capability.” But the assistant secretary of state who offered that testimony provided no direct evidence to support the idea that Cuba poses a threat to our well-being.

And, in fact, having interviewed Pentagon and Senate Intelligence Committee sources extensively for NBC News, I have never found a single voice of knowledge or authority willing to state unequivocally that Cuba has a lethal capability we should fear.

Those of us who have studied the U.S.-Cuba relationship for some time, however, see disturbing wheels in motion right now, machinations that suggest the Bush administration may be preparing to celebrate the 20th anniversary of Ronald Reagan’s successful invasion of Grenada with a splashier power play of its own.

In recent weeks:

• Federal law enforcement authorities clearly leaked a story to The New York Times earlier this year that Cuban spies have been trying to steal secrets from U.S. military installations. This would shift our prevailing perspective of Cuba from one of a benign Communist annoyance to a more active national security threat.

• According to news reports, some administration officials have sought the reassignment of Fulton T. Armstrong, the national intelligence officer for Latin America, because he has been openly skeptical about Cuba’s capability to develop and deploy military or biological weapons.

• Otto Reich, an anti-Castro hardliner who played a key role in the Reagan administration’s support of the Contra insurgency in Nicaragua and who was recently accused of assisting the attempted coup in Venezuela, has been appointed to a key White House position that requires no Senate confirmation hearings.

• The Cuban-American community in Florida, a critical constituency to the Bush administration if it hopes to win the state in 2004, has been increasingly critical of the President, expressing disappointment that more aggressive actions against Castro haven’t been taken.

Cuban-Americans in south Florida, however, would be outraged to see the embargo lifted – unless their anti-Castro appetites were whetted by a meatier military strategy.

And that could, of course, make all the difference in a state that may again decide the presidency in 2004.

The downsides of an unjustified assault on Cuba are clear and considerable. It would give ammunition to those around the world who eagerly seek to portray the United States as a power-hungry, imperialist bully. It would be a destabilizing event that would put American lives at risk for no good reason.

We’ve recently passed the 40th anniversary of another confrontation over Cuba. For 13 days, the world waited anxiously as John F. Kennedy insisted that the Soviet Union remove its nuclear missiles from Cuba. In retrospect, this was a needless crisis because the Soviets already had ICBMs able to strike American cities. The missiles based in Cuba were, in essence, no different from the U.S. missiles based in Turkey aimed at Soviet cities.

In 1962, the world was made less safe because of a poorly conceived strategy toward Cuba. Let’s hope, in 2003, another U.S. president doesn’t make the same mistake.

For 22 years, correspondent Ed Rabel covered Cuba for both CBS News and NBC News, visiting the island more than 150 times. Rabel was NBC’s Pentagon Correspondent from 1993 through 1997. He is now corporate crisis manager at The McGinn Group in Arlington, Va.

Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics:
Bush Administration
Castro/Cuba
Saddam Hussein/Iraq

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