Cuba’s Neighbors Putting Out the Welcome Mat for Castro

The jitters seemed justifiable the week before Cuban President Fidel Castro’s first visit to the Dominican Republic, a once fiercely anti-Communist land just east of Cuba’s shores.

But in the rumors and reports that played back in Miami’s Cuban exile community this week as the Dominican Republic prepared to join a growing list of Caribbean nations playing host to Castro this year, the facts blurred:

* A Cuban was arrested by Dominican intelligence agents Wednesday and turned over to immigration authorities in Santo Domingo, the capital. That was the official version. Reports published here claimed that the Cuban was a potential assassin who was deported to Spain after Dominican intelligence found a copy of Castro’s detailed itinerary in his possession.

* The U.S. Embassy in Santo Domingo gave Dominican civil aviation authorities a U.S. Federal Aviation Administration report warning of possible security risks at the city’s international airport. That was the official version. Here, it was reported that U.S. diplomats had alerted Dominican authorities of a plot to blow up a Cuban airliner in Santo Domingo in advance of Castro’s visit.

Amid all the anxiety, Dominican intelligence officials have tried to assure their nation that all is secure for Castro’s scheduled arrival next Thursday. And officials in President Leonel Fernandez’s government say that their greatest fear is that the occasion for the visit--a Pan-Caribbean summit--will be lost among the Castro hype.

That fear, diplomats and academics in the region agree, is understandable.

The main event is a two-day gathering of more than 15 heads of state in the Caribbean Community, or Caricom, who plan to discuss such vital issues as tourism and trade in a region that increasingly views Cuba as a formidable competitor.

But Castro, who turned 72 on Thursday, is planning to spend a full eight days in the Dominican Republic. And his trip comes on the heels of a symbolic three-nation Caribbean tour that brought him to other lands long opposed to his regime.

Castro’s Caribbean hosts have stressed that his travels are meant to send a strong signal that the United States’ 36-year Cuba policy to isolate the Communist island through America’s Cold War-era trade embargo is passe in a region that is closing ranks.

The Caribbean leaders say their embrace of Castro is also pragmatic: In a region where the U.S. cut its foreign aid by 90% between 1985 and 1995, Havana’s advanced medical and educational resources have more to offer than Washington.

But Castro’s warming relations with his neighbors have been met with “a sense of accumulated frustration” among hard-line Cuban exile groups in Miami, according to Max Castro, senior research associate at the University of Miami’s North-South Center.

“These groups thought that by strangling the economy and waiting it out, the Cuban government would just collapse, and that hasn’t happened,” he said. And now, as Cuba’s neighbors pursue an opposite course, “there’s definitely anger and frustration” in Miami, fueling rumors of assassination plots each time the Cuban leader ventures to a new country.

*

Similar rumors preceded Castro’s six-day Caribbean swing last month--a tour that reinforced the region’s new political dynamic.

During Castro’s visit to Grenada--which has been staunchly anti-Castro since U.S. Marines invaded in 1983, partly to rid the island of Havana’s influence--Premier Keith Mitchell condemned the U.S. embargo as “immoral.”

And in Jamaica, Castro met with Edward Seaga and made peace with the former premier, who fervently fought Castro’s influence in the Cuban’s own backyard. The meeting came 18 years after Seaga, 68, expelled Cuban workers and Havana’s envoy.

“Every conflict has its beginning and its end,” Seaga said afterward. “We are at the end of that period.”

A similar meeting may well take place in Santo Domingo, where Castro is scheduled to visit another foe--former President Joaquin Balaguer.

As Seaga put it in Kingston, the Jamaican capital, last month: “We are not dealing with memories. We are dealing with the future.”