http://english.pravda.ru/main/2001/07/13/9962.html
11:04 2001-07-13
MARCIA MIRANDA: CUBA ACCUSES CIA OF ATTACKS WITH BIOLOGICAL WEAPONS
The transcript from a recent Cuban Council of State meeting provides evidence
that Havana is convinced the CIA was behind many attacks on Cuba with
biological weapons between 1961 and 1981.
According to this transcript, the CIA launched attacks with biological
weapons on Cuba’s agricultural workers at the sugar harvest time in 1961 and
1962, in an attempt to paralyse the Cuban economy at the height of the
international crisis.
A decade later, it is claimed, the CIA introduced swine fever into the
island, an epidemic which culminated in the death of 500,000 pigs.
In 1979, the Washington Post wrote an article stating that the CIA had a
secret programme to destroy Cuban agriculture and that since 1962, the
Pentagon had been producing biological agents to use against Cuba’s sugar
cane and tobacco production.
Sugar cane and tobacco are two mainstays of the Cuban economy.
In 1984, Eduardo Arosena, leader of the terrorist group OMEGA-7, admitted to
an American jury that he had taken part in operations to introduce deadly
viruses into Cuba as part of a secret biological warfare programme against
Havana.
Spokesperson of the Council of State meeting Randy Alonso claims “Cuba has
been the victim of the investigation and development of deadly viruses in
North American Laboratories. We must not forget the cases of haemorrhagic
dengue and haemorrhagic conjunctivitis.”
The Council of State meeting revealed evidence that the epidemic of
haemorrhagic dengue in 1981 killed 158 people, 191 of them children. It is
claimed that this virus was cultivated especially for Cuba because it is a
virus that is not endemic in the island and it was only here that this strain
was to be found, being unknown in the rest of the American continent.
Dr. Eric Martinez confirmed this and remembers that “at the height of the
crisis, when we had 300,000 people sick, and we had the possibility of
acquiring one of the products (Abate) that we needed to use to stop the
spread of this disease. Due to the blockade, the access to this medicine was
denied to us”.
Accusations of this kind are unfortunately not a surprise in South America, a
continent which the USA has always used and abused in a tissue of power games
as it divides and rules and keeps its economic stranglehold over the
continent it loves to dominate.
Marcia MIRANDA
Pravda.Ru
BRAZIL
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