Other Cuban Involvement

Several reports indicate that Cubans were piloting MIGs in aerial combat with American pilots over North Vietnam. One American advisor flying in an H-34 used a M-79 grenade launcher to shoot down a Cuban flying a biplane in Northern Laos.(28) This was the same kind of plane used in the attack against Lima Site 85--the top-secret base in Laos providing guidance for American planes in the bombing of North Vietnam.

The involvement with American POWs was just a part of Cuba's long history of commitment to assist the Vietnamese communists, and just another chapter in their role as "communist internationales" on behalf of the Soviet Union. The Cubans first showed up in Vietnam not too many years after they consolidated power on their own island in the early 1960s. Soon after, the Cubans soon began operating en masse alongside their Vietnamese brethren. They even accompanied the North Vietnamese through the gates of the South Vietnamese Presidential Palace in Saigon on April 29, 1975.(21) However, the Cuban's assistance to the North Vietnamese continued well beyond 1975.

Raul Valdes Vivo: The creditation of Raul Valdes Vivo as a journalist, however, was only a cover, for he was in fact a DGI (Cuban Intelligence) officer and a high-ranking Cuban communist party member. [Latinos often hyphenate their last name in recognization of the matrilineal side of the family. Therefore, the last name of Raul Valdes Vivo (Valdes-Vivo), may in fact be Valdes. However, he will be referred to as Vivo in this paper.] In his book, El Gran Secreto: Cubanos en el Camino Ho Chi Minh, Vivo wrote that he first met Marta Rojas in 1965 at a Cuban Communist party meeting. Vivo was the Cuban communist party representative to the IndoChinese communist party from 1965 thru 1974.(21)

Vivo claims to have established a Cuban embassy in the jungle in Vietnam in South Viet Nam in 1969. The truth is Vivo was attached to the Central Office for South Vietnam (COSVN), the central command for North Vietnam's operations in South Vietnam, which was located well inside Cambodia. Much to the chagrin of the Vietnamese, Vivo was assigned to COSVN upon the insistency of Raul Castro, Fidel's brother, who was head of the Cuban armed forces. The Vietnamese reluctantly acquiesced, since Cuba was supplying several thousand soldiers to build, maintain and guard a sizeable portion of the Ho Chi Minh Trail, and providing a large amount of other "technical" and material assistance. COSVN was in fact a front for a front. [For propaganda purposes, the North Vietnamese maintained that COSVN was the headquarters for the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NLF), a political arm of the Viet Cong. However, in fact, the NLF was a "front" for Hanoi, and COSVN was entirely controlled by the North Vietnamese. It was the North Vietnamese headquarters for staging and directing operations into South Vietnam.]

During a reception in Cuba for a high-ranking Vietnamese communist party official, in a loud voice, Castro chided Vivo for not inviting him to "his embassy." In fact, Castro wasn't at all chiding Vivo, for the barb was aimed at the North Vietnamese for not inviting Castro to COSVN headquarters in Cambodia. Vivo responded by telling Castro the difficulty in accessing "his embassy" after Cambodian General Lon Nol's coup d'etat 1970, indicating that Castro's safety in Cambodia could not be assured. Vivo was evidently in charge of Cuban intelligence in Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. Initially, the soviet-block subversion of Cambodia was coordinated by the Cubans out of the Cuban embassy in Phnom Penh. After General Lon Nol took over in 1970, the intelligence staff of the Cuban Embassy in Phnom Penh was moved into Hanoi along with a core of Vietnamese trained high-ranking Khmer Rouge officials to form a "Cambodian government in exile." In another section of his book, Vivo refers to himself as the Cuban Ambassador "in" Hanoi in 1971.

Later in his book, Vivo says that Cubans were with the North Vietnamese communists in 1975 when they took over Saigon, "although a modest presence." These statements are very important, for historians have yet to admit the extent of the involvement of Cuba and the other Soviet-Bloc in the directing the Vietnam War as part of the "communist internationale."

Vietnamese in Cuba

While a POW in Hanoi, I was interrogated by "The Lump" and another individual who had a Spanish accent. After learning about the "Cuban Program" upon release, I assumed the person with the Spanish accent might have been "Fidel." After my release in 1973, I identified "The Lump" in a photograph taken in Cuba shown to me by a member of a Congressional committee. In the picture, "The Lump" was with a U.S. anti-war contingent. I was told that he had been identified by intelligence agents as being responsible for funneling KGB money to the American anti-war groups, such as those that Jane Fonda led.(9)

The foreign affairs element of the Vietnamese National Liberation Front, code named "CP-72," was positioned only 90 miles off the coast of Florida during the war and their personnel worked closely with the Cuban Government in manipulating the anti-war movement in the United States. Many of the propaganda themes directed at influencing groups in the United States were developed from information gathered by "CP-72" and was fed to the Cuban interrogation experts who were involved in exploiting American POWS in Vietnam for propaganda.(29).

Also, CIA and DIA reports reveal the operation of an international communist youth training center southeast of Santiago de Cuba in the mid-and-late 1960s. The young people, many of whom were blacks and Vietnamese, were being trained for subversive operations against the United States. One intelligence source reported that many of these young people were children of French soldiers who had either defected to the Vietnamese communists during the French Indochina or were children of French forces who were POWs and still held by the Hanoi communists. Reportedly, they had been given Vietnamese wives, and the children were taken away from their parents at a very young age and sent to communist youth camps similar to those in the Soviet Union and "Hitler's Children" in Nazi Germany.(30)

According to a DIA source, their control officer was Jesus Jiminez Escobar. "The students (agents) were to be infiltrated into the United States through normal airlift channels and would be claimed by relatives on their arrival." "Their subversive activities against the United States would include sabotage in connection with race riots..."16 Another DIA source said that "the 5th contingent was infiltrated into the U.S. from Canada through Calais, Maine."17

The same source said that DIA also monitored a center in Cuba during the same period where Vietnamese were being trained by the Cubans in POW interrogation methods. "Fidel", "Chico", and the other Cubans associated with the "Cuban Program" in Hanoi in all likelihood may have been staff associated with this center. Maj. Fernando Vecino Alegret, "Chico", has an extensive background in youth movements. This presumption is strengthened by the debriefing reports of American POWs who were in the "Cuban Program." They reported that "a large number of VN officer trainees" came to the camp, and the Cubans "Conducted interrogation training, using [American] POWs."[DPMO] The trainees were estimated to be approximately 20 years of age. One would logically assume that this was in-service training of Vietnamese graduates from the training camp in Cuba.

Vietnamese and Soviet Bloc Research on American POWs

The Cubans used standard scientific methologies in selecting American POWs for the "Cuban Program;" i.e., random selection with a control group. Everett Alvarez was initially interviewed for the "Program" but was disqualified purportedly because he was of Spanish decent and presumed to speak Spanish.(5)

A 1975 secret CIA counterintelligence study states that the Medical Office of Hanoi's Ministry of Public Security (MPSMO) was responsible for "preparing studies and performing research on the most effective Soviet, French, communist Chinese and other...techniques..." of extracting information from POWs. The MPSMO "...supervised the use of torture and the use of drugs to induce [American] prisoners to cooperate." MPSMO's functions also "...included working with Soviet and Communist Chinese intelligence advisors who were qualified in the use of medical techniques for intelligence purposes. .... The Soviets and Chinese...were... interested in research studies on the reactions of American prisoners to various psychological and medical techniques..."(32)

The "Cuban Program" in Vietnam parallels that of a similar Soviet program in Korea according to congressional testimony on September 17, 1996 by General Jan Sejana, the highest ranking defector from the Soviet Block during the "Cold War."(33) After defecting, Sejana worked for years as a top-secret analyst for the U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency. According to Gen. Sejana,"Americans were used to test physiological and psychological endurance and various mind control drugs. Moscow ordered Czechoslovakia to build a hospital in North Korea for the experiments [on American POWs] there." As in North Korean, Soviet, East German, Czechoslovakian and Cuban "medical specialists" were assigned to the top-secret "Hospital 198" in Hanoi where American POWs were believed to have been taken for "treatment".(34) This would have been the hospital where at least one of the American POWs in the "Cuban Program" was taken for shock treatment.[35]

In the 1950s and early 1960s, Gen. Sejana had been in charge of communist Czechoslovakia's Defense Council Secretariat, and from 1964 on, First Secretary at the Ministry of Defense. In his various official capacities, he was constantly meeting with Soviet officials, receiving instructions, and relaying those instructions to various Czech agencies and departments. "At the beginning of the Korean War, we received directions from Moscow to build a military hospital in North Korea. ..... The Top Secret purpose of the hospital was to experiment on American and South Korean POWs. .... It was very important to the Soviet plans because they believed it was essential to understand the manner in which different drugs...affected different races and people who had been brought up differently; for example on better diets. .... Because America was the main enemy, American POWs were the most highly valued experimental subjects. .... I want to point out that the same things happened in Vietnam and Laos during the Vietnam War. The only difference is the operation in Vietnam was better planned and more American POWs were used, both in Vietnam and Laos and in the Soviet Union."

Several sets of remains of American servicemen repatriated from Vietnam evidenced that they were of POWs who had suffered severe and depraved conditions long after the purported release of all POWs in 1973. The skull of one had been sawn open, evidence of an autopsy as part of an experiment common to Soviet-style research on the affect of certain drugs on the brain.(36)