Ray Sanchez | Direct from Havana
8:10 AM EDT, May 20, 2008
Havana
State security surveillance video showed the dissident accused of taking
money from the top U.S. diplomat in Havana cutting short a cell phone
conversation because credit on her phone was low.
"I'm running out of money on this because I don't have money to buy
another [phone] card," dissident Martha Beatriz Roque was telling a
contact at the U.S. Interests Section.
Her phone credit may have been running out but Cuban officials said
Roque was receiving $1,500 a month from Fundacion Rescate Juridico, a
nonprofit exile group created by Santiago Alvarez, 66, an exile militant
jailed in the United States on weapons charges.
Roque did have time to tell the diplomat on the line that CNN had showed
up to cover a small demonstration she was staging outside the Justice
Ministry. "CNN, wow!" her contact said.
Cuban officials said outgoing Interests Section chief Michael Parmly
delivered money from the Miami-based group to Roque and other
dissidents. Alvarez is a benefactor and close associate of reputed
terrorist Luis Posada Carriles.
Parmly, whose Havana mission ends this summer, was described by a top
foreign ministry official as "a facilitator of payments" from
anti-Castro militants in Miami to dissident in Havana. If anything,
emails being released piecemeal by the Cuban government reveal a strange
coziness between American diplomats and dissidents on the island. This
is the first time U.S. officials here are accused of funneling private
funds to the opposition.
In emails, Roque provides a relative in Miami with Parmly's U.S. cell
phone in order to arrange the delivery of money from Alvarez to him at
the Miami airport, Cuban officials said. The emails contained the name
and phone number of Parmly's daughter in Washington, D.C., as well as
the diplomat's personal cell number.
"Martha, you have my telephone in the U.S. always," Parmly allegedly
wrote Roque late last year, including his number in the message.
When a reporter called the number last night, Parmly answered but
declined to comment. "You have to call Washington," he said.
Last night, a former top American diplomat to Cuba, Wayne Smith,
criticized the United States' continued involvement with dissidents.
"It's like putting a target on the back of their heads when you say your
objective is to bring down the government and one of your means of doing
so is to give assistance to the dissidents in Cuba," he said of the
opposition. "That's turning them, for all to see, into paid agents of a
foreign government."
Roque, labeled an American mercenary by Cuba, said she would wait until
after Tuesday night's installment of a state television program aimed at
proving her complicity with the United States.
"I'm going to wait until the end of this soap opera to comment," she said.
http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/cuba/sfl-0520havanadaily,0,7375944.column
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