World

Cuba Sends Busy Signal

By CBSNews.com staff CBSNews.com staff

December 8, 2000 / 7:40 AM EST / CBS

Cuba made good on its threat to stop direct telephone service between the United States and the communist country Friday as a retaliatory move in a dispute over frozen Cuban funds.

Callers in Cuba could phone the U.S., despite a warning from an operator at Cuba's state telephone company, but people in the United States could not get through to Cuba.

"From today, December 15th, from right now, phone calls to the United States cease," the operator said.

It was not immediately clear if the difficulty in calling Cuba from the U.S. was the result of temporary disruptions caused by routing calls through third countries or if Cuba had decided to stop all incoming calls from the United States, both direct and indirect.

Cuba warned last week that it might sever all indirect links as well - a move that would make U.S.-Cuba telephone communications nearly impossible. The threat was in response to U.S. companies' failure to pay a new 10 percent tax.

"We can adopt additional measures," an article in the official Communist Party daily Granma said last Saturday, adding that a cut of all indirect telephone links also was possible. It did not say what would prompt a total break.

Cuba imposed the new tax on the basic, per-minute long distance rate for U.S.-Cuba calls in October. It was in response to a U.S. measure allowing use of frozen Cuban funds to compensate families of Cuban-American pilots killed when their planes were downed by a Cuban fighter in 1996.

American companies were not authorized by Washington to pay the tax.

The Cuban-American group Brothers to the Rescue says the men were shot down over international waters off Cuba while searching for rafters trying to leave the island. Cuba says the men violated Cuban airspace and flew over the island to scatter anti-communist leaflets in Havana neighborhoods.

A judge awarded the men's families $188 million in damages in 1997. They hope to be paid at least part of that through seizure of Cuban funds in AT&T accounts frozen by the U.S. government since the 1960s.

The U.S. Senate passed a bill in October that would allow them to be paid from the seized Cuban funds. Cuba condemned the move, calling it "robbery."

Cuba has said the tax would remain in place "until the complete return, with corresponding interest, of the Cuban funds illegally frozen in the United States."

Cuba has suspended direct phone links between the two countries in the past, with only minor and temporary disruptions to service as routing systems for the calls are set up through other countries, such as Canada.

In February 1999, the Cuban phone company Empresa de Telecomunicaciones de Cuba S.A., or Etecsa, made a similar cut in direct service to the United States that lasted more than a year.

Washington and foes of Fidel Castro's governmenhad criticized Cuba for threatening to cut direct links just before the December holidays when people on both sides of the Florida Straits want to call relatives.

"They acted like they thought there would be no response" to the new law designed to help the victims' families get the Cuban funds, Granma said. "Now they are remembering Christmas, families, even the birth of Christ."