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Book Reveals Cuba-Vietnam POW Link
Former Congressman Bill Hendon’s compelling new book about American POWs in Southeast Asia stirs up memories of an earlier controversy – charges that American prisoners in Vietnam were tortured by Cuban agents. In "An Enormous Crime – The Definitive Account of American POWs Abandoned in Southeast Asia," Hendon and co-author Elizabeth Stewart disclose that Fidel Castro was a key adviser to the North Vietnamese government during the Vietnam War. They report that Castro gave Hanoi a strategy for capturing GIs and then trading them for postwar reconstruction aid from the U.S., just as Cuba had done with the Bay of Pigs prisoners.
But another Cuba-Vietnam connection came to light in late 1999 with the revelations about the torture of POWs.
U.S. Air Force Col. Edward Hubbard, a former POW, said he had received brutal treatment at the hands of a Cuban advisor the prisoners nicknamed "Fidel.”
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Hubbard claimed that "Fidel” was actually Fernando Vecino Alegret, who is now Cuba’s Education Minister. And Hubbard said one of the POWs tortured by the Cubans died after a savage beating. After reports of the Cuban torture program first surfaced, Fidel Castro dismissed the claims on state television, saying Alegret had never even set foot in Vietnam. But in late October 1999, Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a Florida Republican with many Cuban-American constituents, told the House’s International Relations Committee:
"During this period of August 1967 to August 1968, 19 of our courageous servicemen were physically and psychologically tortured by Cuban agents working under orders from Hanoi and Havana. "Assessed to be a psychological experiment to test interrogation methods, the Cuba Program, as the torture project was labeled by our Defense Department and intelligence agencies, was aimed at obtaining absolute compliance and submission to captor demands.
It was aimed at converting or turning the POWs and to be used as propaganda by the international Communist effort. It was inhumane. It was incessant. It was barbaric.” Air Force Major James Kasler "said that during one period in June 1968 he was tortured incessantly by a man known as Fernando Vecino Alegret, who had been identified as Fidel, the Cuban agent in charge of this exercise in brutality,” said Rep. Ros-Lehtinen. She also told the committee: "The atrocities committed by Castro’s men in a prison camp known as ‘the Zoo’ resulted in the death of Air Force Captain Earl Cobeil, one of the 19 POWs held captive there.” Hendon’s new book, based on more than 60,000 pages of never-before-published U.S. government documents, shows that the American government has known all along that hundreds of POWs in North Vietnam and Laos were never freed by their captors. Kirkus Reviews called the book "a sprawling indictment of eight U.S. administrations … a convincing, urgent argument.”
© NewsMax 2007. All rights reserved.
Editor's note:
Read more on this subject in related Hot Topics: Inside Cover Stories
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