U.S. and Cuba Theatrical Shouting Match Rages

U.S. and Cuba Theatrical Shouting Match Rages
Four-Block Area in Havana Is Ground Zero for Venting Pent-Up Hostilities
By MARC FRANK

HAVANA, Feb. 13, 2006 — - A four-block area around the U.S. diplomatic
mission in Havana has become ground zero for the two countries to vent
pent-up hostility and grievances. The theatrical shouting match is
pushing always contentious relations toward the breaking point.

A crimson ticker runs through 25 windows on the fifth floor of the
six-story building. The 5-foot-high ticker streams news, political
statements, and messages blaming everyday problems such as
transportation shortages on the country's communist politics and
socialist economy.

"Some go around in Mercedes, some in Ladas [a Russian car], but the
system forces almost everyone to hitch rides," stated one message,
playing on a common complaint that there are few buses and that Cubans
need the government's permission to buy a new car.

Counterrevolution or Promoting Democracy?

''When people lose their fear totalitarian regimes lose power," another
message stated.

The United States insists it is merely promoting democracy and human
rights. Havana charges the diplomatic mission has been turned into "the
headquarters of the counterrevolution."

Parliament President Ricardo Alarcon told ABC News the most radical
Cuban-Americans had always sought to destroy the few links that existed
between the two countries and apparently had the Bush administration's ear.

In 1977, counselor-level Interests Sections were established in Havana
to handle visa and other administrative matters between the countries.
An immigration agreement that put an end to the mass migration crisis
was signed in 1994. The two countries also cooperate in fighting drug
trafficking.

"The U.S. representatives here are behaving as if they were seeking to
provoke a situation in which they can meet the demands of the most
extreme, radical groups in Miami," Alarcon said. "Let's see if they
succeed in going all the way to the elimination of diplomatic links.
That would be very irresponsible and wrong."

Michael Parmly, the U.S. top diplomat in Havana, said only a government
that censored information would be worried about the U.S. electronic
messenger.

"We are only trying to communicate with the Cuban people," Parmly insisted.

Few Cubans can actually read the U.S. ticker.

President Fidel Castro's government has blocked it from view with huge
black flags more than 100 feet in the air and just a few feet from the
mission's front door on what was the parking lot. Cuba says the 138
black flags, each with a white star in the center, represent the years
since its independence struggle began against Spain in 1868.

The black background symbolizes the country's mourning for what Havana
alleges are the 3,400 Cubans killed by U.S. violence over the years,
from the Bay of Pigs invasion to the 1976 bombing of a Cuban commercial
plane off the Barbados coast, killing all 73 aboard.

Now You See It, Now You Don't

Traffic around the mission, which sits along Havana's seaside highway,
has been diverted. A few dozen guards stand before the building's
imposing, iron picket fence. Billboards, depicting the United States as
linked to anti-Castro terrorists, surround the mission. A huge outdoor
stage, half a football field from the front door, called the
anti-imperialist tribunal, is the venue for Cuban political and cultural
events.

Soon after the tickers first sprang to life on Jan. 16 with Martin
Luther King Jr.'s words, "I have a dream that one day this nation will
rise up," Castro marched more than a million people by the mission,
charging the Bush administration was harboring terrorists, in the
persons of exiled former CIA agents Orlando Bosch and Luis Posada
Carriles, accused by Havana of being behind the plane bombing, among
other violent acts.

Bosch was pardoned for other crimes by former President Bush when he was
president and now lives in Miami, while Posada has been held on a minor
immigration charge since entering the United States illegally last year.

The Bush administration has expelled 14 Cuban diplomats in recent years,
tightened sanctions, restricted contacts at all levels, and ordered
diplomats to openly taunt Castro and support his opponents in a way the
rest of the diplomatic community in Havana, with but few exceptions,
considers a gross violation of the Geneva diplomatic convention.

Cuba has further restricted U.S. diplomats' movements, clamped down on
dissent, and raised to a deafening decibel its anti-U.S. rhetoric.

"I think the U.S. side is trying to provoke the closing of the Interests
Sections," said Wayne Smith, who opened the U.S. Havana office under the
Carter administration.

"Instead of isolating ourselves over there, we should be increasing
communications through travel and other means," he said.

Parmly countered such criticism by insisting new restriction on travel
to Cuba "deprive the regime of funds," while the systematic denial of
visas to cultural figures, academics and others, was to deprive "those
who participate in the regime" access to the United States.

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