U.S., Cuba Cooperate to Fight Drugs

HAVANA —  Two Colombian drug traffickers who counted on taking advantage of more than three decades of bad blood between the United States and Cuba got a big surprise.

They are now in a U.S. federal prison, thanks in part to testimony that four Cuban border guards provided a Miami jury this spring.

The cooperation between U.S. and Cuban drug enforcement officials in the case of the Limerick, a Honduran cargo ship that sailed from Barranquilla, Colombia, for Freeport in the Bahamas last autumn, taking on 1.8 tons of cocaine en route, is the most striking example of how authorities in the two countries are working together against the illegal drug trade.

The joint efforts are in sharp contrast to the situation just four years ago, when U.S. prosecutors in Miami drafted a widely reported drug-trafficking indictment against President Fidel Castro’s brother Raul and other Cuban officials. The draft never resulted in formal charges, but it did increase tensions in an already testy relationship.

The two countries do not have diplomatic relations, and the United States has maintained an embargo against Cuba since 1960. The only formal agreement between the two, signed in 1994, covers migration. Still, they are increasingly cooperating on law enforcement issues, particularly drug trafficking.

“Cubans can cooperate when they believe it is in their best interests,” said one Western diplomat. And Cuban law enforcement authorities frankly admit that they are worried about drug trafficking through their island.

“Knowing how quickly this phenomenon was introduced in some countries, we have worked since 1989 to prevent drugs from taking hold here,” said Pablo Antonio Rodriguez, director of international relations at the Justice Ministry here. “Unfortunately, recently there have been some flash points of trafficking--above all pressure from traffickers using our waters and our territories because of Cuba’s strategic geographic location.”

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With Cuba just 90 miles from the Florida coast, traffickers take advantage of the island’s inability, because of economic problems, to patrol its waters, U.S. law enforcement officials say. “They skim right along the edge of the international limit and duck into international waters when they see the Cuban coast guard and into Cuban waters when they see the U.S. Coast Guard,” said one official.

That appears to be the game that the crew of the Limerick was playing when the U.S. Coast Guard stopped the ship in international waters in October. The 11 Colombian and Ecuadorean crew members tried to sink the 220-foot freighter, forcing the Coast Guard to abandon the Limerick and take aboard its crew, witnesses told a U.S. federal jury in March.

The ship, with its cargo of cocaine, drifted into Cuban waters, where the Cuban coast guard, part of the island nation’s border guards, seized it near Guantanamo and towed it to shore. A Cuban diver was called in to search the vessel and found the huge load of cocaine in a submerged secret compartment. Cubans tested the drug shipment and turned it over to U.S. authorities for use as evidence against the captain and chief engineer, the only crew members tried in the case.

Four Cuban border guards, dressed in civilian clothes, testified for a day in the case, which the U.S. State Department’s International Narcotics Control Strategy report ranked as Cuba’s crowning achievement against drug trafficking in 1996.

Cubans are eager to formalize such ad hoc collaboration by signing an anti-narcotics cooperation agreement with the United States, similar to agreements between the island and 22 other nations.

They are particularly interested in improving coordination of patrols in international waters between the two countries. Rodriguez noted that in the autumn of 1994, when both Cuban and U.S. coast guard vessels were out in full force to pick up rafters fleeing the island for Florida, drug trafficking through the Florida Straits virtually came to a halt.

The U.S. government, however, which has pressured other Caribbean countries to sign anti-drug accords, has demurred in the case of Cuba.

“Those agreements are only useful when there is a lot of traffic,” the diplomat said. “The Cubans should be happy that is not the case with them.”

But U.S. drug enforcement officials, who spoke on condition of anonymity, agreed with Cubans that the island is becoming a transshipment point for narcotics traffickers.

The U.N. drug control program narcotics report listed dozens of arrests in Cuba last year, mainly involving small amounts of cocaine, hashish and marijuana headed from South America to Europe. The arrests were partly the result of better detection efforts, thanks to training and equipment from New Scotland Yard, Rodriguez said. But they also reflect a growth in trafficking, he added.

“If the policy is to seal off the Caribbean [to drug traffickers], then you must include Cuba because of its strategic position,” said Luis Suarez, a drug expert at the University of Havana. “But the U.S. agenda with respect to Cuba is dominated by the effort to finish off the [Marxist] revolution.”

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In fact, the Miami-based Cuban American National Foundation disagreed with the decision to use the Cuban witnesses in the case of the Limerick.

“We find it absurd that the U.S. would accept the testimony of a government that has been proved to be involved with drug trafficking,” spokeswoman Ninoska Perez said at the time. Several years ago, the Cuban government executed high-ranking officials who were involved in narcotics trafficking, but suspicions remain that the government itself cooperated with drug barons.

But Rodriguez insisted, “In spite of the economic situation and our scarce resources, we have used all the means at our disposal to keep drugs from arriving in our country and to frustrate any attempt to carry out narcotics activities in our territory.”

Cuban authorities are especially concerned that their actions to open the country to tourism and foreign investment--key parts of Cuba’s effort to overcome the eight-year economic crisis caused by the collapse of the Soviet Bloc, previously this country’s principal trading partner--do not encourage drug trafficking and drug-related investment.

Cuba is reviewing its banking and investment laws to prevent such possibilities, authorities said. “Now that Cuba is part of the foreign investment circuit, there is a danger not only of drug trafficking but also of money laundering,” Suarez said, referring to his country’s efforts to attract international investment after decades as a closed economy.

Still, Cuba’s most urgent concern is the drug trade. Since late 1995, packages of cocaine and hashish have been washing up on Cuban shores, Rodriguez said. They are thought to be drugs dumped overboard by traffickers when they have been detected and pursued by authorities. In other Caribbean and Central American countries, such floating packages have provided the first step toward creating a local drug trade.

Until last year, the packages were mainly found on the north shore, Rodriguez said. But recently, they have begun to turn up in the south too. “This makes us think that drug traffickers are moving through other zones as well,” he said.

At first, citizens who came across the packages would notify police, and law enforcement authorities would find the bags still sealed. More recently, Rodriguez said, “We have started to find that packages have been opened and that part of the drugs were missing.”

Through laboratory testing, police have discovered that sometimes, the missing drugs were confiscated later, usually during sales in tourist areas, he said.

Cuba does not have an internal problem with cocaine use because Cubans cannot afford the drug, he said. But the latest novel in a popular mystery series here centers on a marijuana trafficking ring.

“The marijuana is like a fuse that keeps on burning, and we are going to find out where it goes,” the main character, a police detective, says near the end of the novel. “We have to find out where it came from and how it got to Cuba, because I don’t swallow the story that it was found on the coast.”