ISBN: 9781626751422
“Shootdown” is excerpted from What Lies Across the Water: The Real Story of the Cuban Five, which will be published by Fernwood Publishing in August 2013. For further information or to pre-order, please contact Fernwood at info@fernpub.ca.
“Stephen Kimber’s book is an invaluable and informative account of the last chapter of the Cold War between Cuba and the United States—a story that is alternatively bizarre, surreal and ever suspenseful.”
Ann Louise Bardach
Author, Without Fidel and Cuba Confidential
***
“This book removes the thin fabric of lies around the case of five Cuban intelligence agents who came to Miami to fight terrorism… This book has the detail and the analysis. Read it.”
Saul Landau
Director
Will The Real Terrorist Please Stand Up?
***
“… provides the key information and analysis needed to understand the case of the Cuban Five.”
—Danny Glover
Actor
***
“… the most complete – and moving – account of the Cuban Five I’ve yet read.”
Wayne Smith
Former Director
US Interests Section in Havana, 1979-82
***
“… a thorough and detailed telling of the case of the Five…. feels like a ticking time bomb before the arrests.”
José Pertierra
Attorney, Washington
***
“If you want to know how [the case of the Cuban Five] fits into the history of relations between Cuba and the United States, you must read this book… [Kimber’s] combination of narrative style and historical knowledge makes the book a tool for educating the general public about the peculiarities of the case of the Five.”
Arturo Lopez-Levy
Josef Korbel School of International Studies, University of Denver
Co-author Raul Castro and the New Cuba: A Close Up View of Change
José Basulto: Born 1940. Bay of Pigs, CIA veteran. Founder, Brothers to the Rescue.
René González: Born 1956. Stole a plane and “defected” to the United States in 1990. In fact, a Cuban intelligence agent who infiltrated Brothers to the Rescue, PUND and the Democracy Movement.
Gerardo Hernández: Born 1965. Cuban illegal intelligence officer, head of La Red Avispa, a Cuban intelligence network in South Florida. Operating in the United States as Manuel Viramóntez.
Juan Pablo Roque: Born 1955. Cuban Air Force pilot, “defected” to the United States in 1992. Actually, a Cuban intelligence agent who penetrated Brothers to the Rescue and married a Cuban-American woman.
Ramón Saul Sanchez: Born 1955. Cuban-born exile. Member of Alpha 66. Founder of the Democracy Movement.
At 3:19 p.m. on the afternoon of February 24, 1996, over the Straits of Florida, a Cuban MiG fighter pilot urgently radioed his ground controller: “Target lock-on, authorize us.”
“Zero-eight… Authorized to destroy.”
A pause, then:“First shot… We got him, damn it! We got him!”
Within seconds, Cuban jets had blown two unarmed aircraft out of the air, killing four civilian members of the anti-Castro exile group, Brothers to the Rescue.
That shootdown touched off an international incident that reverberates to this day.
But what really triggered the tragedy, and why does the shootdown itself continue to stalk relations between Havana and Washington?
***
José Basulto had to do something. From the cockpit of his Cessna, the president of Brothers to the Rescue watched as the two brown-and-gray Cuban government gunboats menaced a much smaller, unarmed vessel in the Straits of Florida.
Not again.
The vessel, the Democracia, was the pointy end of a 13-boat flotilla filled with Cuban exiles that had set out from Key West on their way to a spot, six miles inside Cuban territorial waters, to mark a tragic incident that had happened just one year ago today. Seventy two would-be Cuban refugees had hijacked a tugboat in Havana harbor and were making good their escape to Florida when fellow Cubans overtook them in other tugs. The Cubans had rammed the stolen vessel, then turned water hoses on it, sinking it. Forty-one people died.1
Those aboard today’s small-boat flotilla intended to sail to the site of the sinking and lay wreaths. It was a memorial but also, of course, a provocation. “Our purpose,” explained Ramon Saul Sanchez, the founder of the Democracy Movement, another Miami-based exile group, “is to have Castro be concerned, to bring a message of solidarity to the Cuban people and to show that we are willing to take risks.”
Shortly after 2:30 p.m., Sanchez gleefully announced to those aboard the Democracia that they had crossed into Cuban waters. The 100, mostly Cuban exiles began singing the Cuban national anthem. Before the final verse, the first gunboats had arrived.
“You have entered Cuban territorial waters,” an officer hailed them in Spanish over his bullhorn. “You have violated Cuban territorial waters.”
“We are Cubans, you are Cubans,” Sanchez shouted back over the noise of the engines. “We have as much right to be here in Cuban waters as you.”
While the exiles threw flowers into the ocean, the Democracia’s captain ignored the Cuban warning and kept his bow pointed toward Havana.
“You have violated Cuban national waters,” the officer repeated, louder this time. “We will not be responsible for what happens.”
The Democracia didn’t change course or even slow down. At 2:50 p.m., the gunboats finally approached the Democracia from either side, squeezing closer, closer, until finally the vessels crunched the Democracia’s fiberglass hull between them, knocking many on board off their feet.
As Basulto and his fellow pilots—he and five other Brothers planes were accompanying the flotilla—watched the drama unfold below them, Basulto decided he had to do something. Now. It was a split-second decision, he would explain later.
He radioed fellow pilot Billy Schuss. “Follow me,” he said, and the two planes peeled off south toward Havana, deliberately violating Cuban air space in hopes of distracting the Cuban military and keeping them from sinking the flotilla.
For 13 minutes, they flew not simply inside Cuban territory but directly over the city of Havana. As Basulto flew, his co-pilot, Guillermo Lares, rained thousands of religious medallions and bumper stickers—“Not Comrades, Brothers”—on the streets below.
Back in Miami, Basulto was unrepentant. “We are proud of what we did,” he told reporters. “Ultimately, it serves as a message to the people of Cuba. The regime is not invulnerable.”
In fact, Basulto’s split-second decision had been anything but spontaneous. As even he would later acknowledge, flying over Havana was always “a Plan B in case something went awry,” although he insisted he would not have flown over Havana “had the attack against the Democracia not occurred.”
Even before the planes took off that day, however, Billy Schuss had confided to another pilot, René González, that their plan was to fly “all the way to the Malecón.” González just happened to be a Cuban intelligence agent who’d been infiltrating Miami exile groups and reporting back to Havana on their schemes.
González wasn’t the only one gathering information on Basulto’s intentions. In a memo the week before, a detective from the Criminal Intelligence Bureau of the Miami-Dade Police Department noted: “recent information received from various sources has revealed the intention of several organizers to create an international incident during the course of the [flotilla].” It singled out Basulto and the Democracy Movement’s Sanchez, and suggested they were “presently involved in an effort to obtain a vessel which will be utilized solely to enter Cuban territorial waters and attempt to disembark in the Port of Havana.”
If not a vessel, of course, a plane.
Before July 13, Basulto also met with the U.S. Federal Aviation Association’s Charles Smith who’d specifically warned Basulto not to fly into Cuban airspace during the flotilla.
“Chuck, you know I always play by the rules,” Basulto replied, “but you must understand I have a mission in life to perform.”
That mission in life was to rid Cuba of Fidel Castro and his communist regime.
A militant anti-Castro Cuban exile who’d served his own apprenticeship in what would become the de rigueur exilio experience—the botched Bay of Pigs finishing school—and gone on to participate in and organize various armed attacks against Cuba, Basulto had once boasted to the Miami Herald: “I was trained as a terrorist by the United States.”
By the early 1990s, however, Basulto had become—he would insist to anyone who asked—a changed man. He’d had an epiphany. After studying the writings of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, he had decided to make active non-violence his “guiding principle for the rest of his life.” That was why he’d created Brothers to the Rescue, a humanitarian organization of small-plane pilots. Its sole mission was to save the lives of thousands of Cubans who were attempting to flee their oppressive communist homeland and seek their freedom in the United States.
As economic conditions in Cuba worsened in the aftermath of the collapse of their Soviet patron, more and more Cubans attempted the perilous 90-mile journey to Florida in rickety fishing boats and jerry-built rafts. Many died but many others were rescued, thanks in no small measure to the work of BTTR pilots who patrolled the Straits of Florida, alerting Coast Guard officials whenever they sighted a raft.
In the summer of 1994 with the numbers of rafters increasing every day, Cuban President Fidel Castro stunned his countrymen—and the U.S. government—by announcing that any Cuban who wanted to leave the island was now free to go. Tens of thousands jumped into boats unfit to float. Although Brothers to the Rescue stepped up its missions, “patrolling the Straits in anything that could fly,” they, like the U.S. Coast Guard, which was intercepting 300 rafts a day, were simply overwhelmed.
On September 9, 1994, the Clinton administration announced it had struck a deal with the Cuban government. The United States would no longer automatically allow Cubans picked up in the Straits to come to America, a reversal of a decades-old policy. Instead, rafters intercepted at sea would be dispatched to “safe haven” camps in Panama or Guantanamo. In future, the U.S. agreed to legally admit no fewer than 20,000 Cubans each year, but through normal channels. In exchange, Cuba promised to use “persuasive methods” to discourage its citizens from trying to make their way by sea.
The new U.S.-Cuba agreement, of course, also had an unintended consequence. Suddenly, Brothers to the Rescue had no one to rescue. Once the rafters realized they would be shipped off to Guantanamo or Panama if Brothers’ pilots notified the Coast Guard of their coordinates, they began angrily waving off their would-be saviors the moment they spotted one of their aircraft overhead. And with no one to rescue—and no publicity for having done it—donations had also begun to dry up. Basulto had tried to stir up new interest by pitching fund-raising drives, telethons and collections to support the dissident movement inside Cuba, but those pleas had fallen flat. His new missions, dismissed a Miami Herald columnist, seemed “less sexy” than plucking rafters from the waves.