Castro's home a surf away

Posted on Wed, Jan. 04, 2006

THE INTERNET
Castro's home a surf away
A new Google Internet program allows users to zero in on the homes of famous people, including the alleged homes of Fidel Castro.
BY RUI FERREIRA
rferreira@MiamiHerald.com

Want to see a satellite photograph of Fidel Castro's home in Havana? How about one of a Cuban air force base, showing even some warplanes?
Well, anyone can, with Google Earth, an Internet program launched last June to easily display satellite photos of virtually any place in the world and allow visitors to mark specific places -- like Castro's home.
The satellite images of Havana are, in fact, marked with two places for the home of Castro, whose private life has long been kept virtually secret because of what the 79-year-old leader claims have been the more than 600 assassination attempts against him.
One of the addresses is clearly wrong, placing it in the center of Havana, in a colonial-era fortress known as the Castle of the Prince. The fortress was used as a prison until the mid-1970s and is now a military command center.
But the other address, in an area of western Havana known as Siboney, matches the neighborhood where U.S. officials and senior Cuban defectors have long said Castro lives with his wife, Dalia Sotodelvalle, and several of their five sons.

BOMB SHELTER
The erroneous address was marked by someone who used the name ''Alexander Mendoza'' and offered other alleged details of the residence, such as the presence nearby of an underground nuclear bomb shelter where Castro, his family and top generals can survive for 24 months.
''Mendoza'' also claims that Castro's shower was specially built because he's relatively tall for a Cuban, but he doesn't explain how he knows those details. Comments from other visitors to Google Earth sometimes challenge his data.
The more likely true location of Castro's house was marked by someone using the name of ''Luisdo,'' who also marked many other places on the satellite map of Cuba, many of them with military significance.
He seems to be something of an expert on military aircraft, because he tries to correct what he calls mistakes by other readers in the identification of planes at military airports.
''Luisdo'' corrected an error in the identification of the military airstrip at Ciudad Libertad, known as Camp Columbia before Castro seized power in 1959. He also identified some parked planes as MiG-23s, MiG-21s or MiG-17s -- even though the satellite photo shows only fuzzy outlines of airplanes.
What he does not explain is how he learned all this.
''I can't say,'' Luisdo writes.
Google Earth is one of the latest and most successful products from Google, a company that has soared to the top listings in the New York Stock Exchange.
The company has described the site as a satellite imagery-based mapping product that combines 3D buildings and terrain with mapping capability and Google-styled searches. The program enables users to ''fly'' from space to street level views, and to find geographic information.
The program easily identifies streets and even houses, although the images of smaller objects like cars and pedestrians grow increasingly fuzzy.
Google Earth already has created controversy in some countries, mainly in the Middle East, which fear that their military secrets and even the palaces of their rulers will be exposed to the public.
Google rejects that criticism, saying the photographs are at least six months old and in any case can be easily obtained directly from commercial satellite services.
Viewers who place their comments on the photos must first register in ''the Google community,'' but there's no independent check on their information. None of the people mentioned in this article included their e-mail addresses or telephone numbers and could not be contacted.
In addition to pinpointing Castro's apparent house, Google Earth allows viewers to identify many other places in Havana and elsewhere in Cuba, including government ministries, museums, hotels and tourist spots.

MONUMENTAL GAFFES
But some mistakes appear, some of them monumental.
A large, five-pointed building in the town of Tarará east of Havana is marked as looking ''somehow satanic,'' or a possible ''battery of SAM-7 antiaircraft missiles.'' In fact, it's an abandoned amusement park.
And the landing strip at the Ciudad Libertad military base in Havana is marked as the capital's José Martí International Airport. That airport is actually in the city's southern outskirts.

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