After 40 years of hissing across the Florida Straits, the interminable hostility between Cuba and the U.S. now has entered the Geritol phase.
Last Tuesday, the Department of Justice announced the indictment of seven Cuban exiles–most of them in their 60s–for conspiring to kill President Fidel Castro, age 72. If you add to this picture the 79-year-old Sen. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.)–Castro’s most implacable foe in Congress and the staunchest supporter of the U.S. embargo against Cuba–the saber rattling by both sides begins to look as ridiculous as a kung-fu demonstration at a retirement home.
The charges are serious though. One of the Cubans charged was Jose Antonio Llama, 66, a member of the executive committee of the Cuban National Foundation, a powerful exile group that has singlehandedly shaped American policy toward Cuba since the Reagan administration, and effectively thwarted every attempt to lift or ease the 37-year-old U.S. embargo.
Four of Llama’s legionnaires were aboard a yacht off the coast of Puerto Rico last fall when a U.S. Coast Guard search found a stash of weapons. Arrests followed after one of the men, in a badly timed bit of bravado, blurted out that they were “revolutionaries” en route to bump off Castro during a Latin American summit at Margarita Island, in Venezuela.
Such plots are not uncommon in Miami’s politically overheated atmosphere, with the aim of killing Castro, triggering an armed insurrection on the island, or possibly provoking an incident between the U.S. and Cuba. In the past, the U.S. has hatched its own bizarre assassination schemes, including the one with a box of exploding cigars. Instead, the Bearded One quit smoking and probably extended his life by a few years.
Even if the latest federal charges against the foundation don’t stick, this might be an opportune time for American policy-makers, even Helms, to seek the company and advice of calmer, younger voices in the exile community–and try jostling U.S.-Cuba relations out of the rut they’ve been in for decades.
Such normalization of relations between the two countries might force the foundation and Miami’s other elderly plotters into retirement, to reminisce about the ups and downs of the Cold War. Failing that, well, there’s always canasta.
