American Mission Cries Foul as Castro Turns Off the Lights

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Power was restored to the American mission in Havana yesterday after the State Department complained that Fidel Castro’s communist regime was harassing its diplomats.

American diplomats, who are obliged to work out of the United States Interests Section of the Embassy of Switzerland in Havana because of strained American-Cuban relations, had been relying on generators for a week. A State Department spokesman, Sean McCormack, said yesterday that the electrical outage – one of a number in the last month – “has probably everything to do with their displeasure over some of the activities.”

Although Cuba has denied it is inconveniencing the American officials deliberately, saying they enjoy the same conditions as the rest of Havana’s population, a State Department official said the persistent failure of basic services is intended as punishment for America’s hostility to Castro’s authoritarian regime.

“I find it hard to explain otherwise,” the U.S. Interests Section chief, Michael Parmly, told the Associated Press. “They are denying it now because it became public.”

The power was cut around 3 a.m. on June 5, and the Interests Section building was using generators to help the staff continue its daily activities until yesterday. “We have power … from the outside,” a man who picked up the phone at the Interests Section told The New York Sun yesterday afternoon. He requested that his name not be disclosed because he is not an official spokesman.

State Department officials said the Cuban government had failed to respond to repeated notes of complaint, nor had it replied to similar letters from the Swiss Embassy.

A State Department spokesman said the Cuban bully tactics are not new. The Cuban government has “long sought to isolate and harass our Interests Section,” a State Department spokesman, Kurtis Cooper, told the Sun.

Mr. Cooper said the main American building had its water supply switched off entirely from February 22 to March 26 and that the water supply in an annex of the building that processes refugee applications “has literally been a trickle for most of the year.”

Other utility failures and official hassles are numerous, Mr. Cooper said, including the Cuban government stopping the sale or import of necessary construction materials and “placing an indefinite hold on the majority of official United States government visa applications,” making it difficult to appoint personnel to the mission.

“It’s sort of according to the winds of the Cuban regime,” he said, noting that “compared to the regime’s vindictiveness towards Cuba’s pro-democracy activists, our harassment is minor.”

An editorial published yesterday in the Cuban Communist Party’s official newspaper, Granma, said the outages and other inconveniences endured by the Americans were not intentional.

“U.S. government spokespersons are shamelessly lying when they hold our government responsible for a supposed power cut and a decrease in the availability of potable water to the Interests Section,” it said, attributing the power failures to bad weather that caused a “large number of power failures” in Havana and throughout the country.

Mr. Cooper said the American office in Havana was “the only building without electricity in the neighborhood.” Officials from the Cuban Interests Section in Washington and the Cuban mission to the United Nations could not be reached for comment.


The New York Sun

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