Thu, 25 June 15:18 2009

Cyber trap for a Castro

If you can’t beat them, make them look ridiculous. This was Luis Dominguez’s thinking when he tricked Fidel Castro’s son Antonio into believing that he was conducting a cyber romance with an attractive 26-year-old Colombian sports journalist named Claudia Valencia. Instead, Antonio was chatting over an eight-month period on the Taggart networking site to Dominguez, a 46-year-old exiled Cuban living in Miami.

Reputedly the favourite amongst Fidel’s eight known children, Antonio is a 43-year-old doctor. One of his principal responsibilities is supervising the health of Cuba’s national baseball team and when security company employee Dominguez saw young women mobbing Dr Castro ‘as though he were a rock star’ during a baseball tournament in Columbia three years ago, he began to incubate his cyber-trap.

Over the course of the 20 emails, some of which lasted up to five hours, the cyber relationships became flirtatious and Antonio told ‘Claudia’ that he wanted to make love to her. Antonio unwittingly revealed that he enjoyed a lifestyle denied to most Cubans thanks to the consequences of the 1996 Helms Burton Act. Intended to express US solidarity with the Cuban population, by restricting trade and commerce, it has imposed material misery on the island’s 11.3 million inhabitants and done more to unite them than anything ever said or done by Fidel Castro.

This austerity clearly does not apply to Antonio Castro whose emails to ‘Claudia’ revealed that he wears Lacoste shirts, has a Mackintosh computer and uses a Blackberry although Internet use is not freely available to Cubans. Having sold his story to the Miami Herald and owned up to the deception, Luis Dominguez was unrepentant. “I’m a Cuban,” he said, “and I’m a Cuban American and have not been able to go back to my country since 1972 when I left.”
He admitted using whatever tools he had ‘to get back at these people’ who violated other people’s rights.

Many other tools have been tried against Castro’s regime and not one has succeeded, despite some 638 assassination attempts since 1959. These range from hitmen to CIA-inspired gadgets that included exploding cigars and exploding seashells on Fidel’s favourite beach, plus a plan to pump LSD into a radio station during a live broadcast to disorientate and humiliate the ageing dictator.

Failing health succeeded where the CIA did not and, two years ago Castro, 83 in August, handed over to his 78-year-old brother Raul, regarded by Washington as more pragmatic than his brother. Change in Cuba is inevitable but meanwhile Luis Dominguez has proved that laughter is as good a weapon as any other.

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