DID CASTRO USE COCAINE TO KEEP THE ECONOMY AFLOAT?

INSPIRED by the Pinochet affair, Cuban exiles in France want Fidel Castro
tried there for alleged crimes including drug trafficking, writes Phil
Davison. A French judge on Friday rejected their case, but is there any
truth in the claims?

US agents suspect President Castro may have condoned some cocaine deals
before the mid-1980s, though to help his sinking economy rather than for
self-gain, and may have turned a blind eye to others. But they say there is
absolutely no evidence against him, and that he clamped down on trafficking
in 1989 after the Panamanian strongman, Manuel Noriega, was indicted in the
US for drug smuggling. General Noriega was later captured after an American
invasion of his country and jailed in Miami for 40 years.

The CIA believed Mr Castro accepted cocaine shipments as payment for Cuban
weapons sent to Marxist guerrillas of the Colombian M-19 group in the early
1980s. The cocaine was then smuggled to the US to earn badly needed dollars
for a Cuba suffering from the decline of its Soviet bloc benefactors.
"Castro saw it as a money-earning transaction for Cuba's national
security," one former CIA agent said.

Videotaped during a US Drug Enforcement Administration "sting" operation in
1987, a Cuban-American drug-runner, Reinaldo Ruiz - later jailed here -
boasted of shipping cocaine through Cuba and told an undercover DEA agent
"the money that was paid to Fidel is in the drawer". This, said Cuban
officials, was yet another lie aimed at undermining the revolution.

In 1989, US agents planned "Operation Greyhound" to kidnap interior
minister, General Jose Abrantes, suspected of cocaine smuggling, but it was
later called off. Jailed soon afterwards in Cuba for "corruption", Gen
Abrantes reportedly told fellow inmates that Mr Castro had been aware of
cocaine trafficking through the island. The general died of an apparent
heart attack soon afterwards.

But Cuba's involvement with drug-running came to world attention in the
summer of 1989 when, after a show trial, four senior military officers were
executed and 10 other military or government officials jailed for cocaine
trafficking. The best-known, Gen Arnaldo Ochoa, denied the charge. Many
Cubans felt Mr Castro was eliminating a popular war hero who might have
threatened his grip on power.

Another of those executed, Gen Tony de la Guardia, was known by the DEA to
be deeply involved, and confessed at the trial, but made a point of
testifying that his superiors had known nothing of his dealings. His
daughter Ileana, one of those who brought the case against Mr Castro in
France, claims the Cuban leader had promised to spare her father's life in
return for that testimony.