BY HILDA CUZCO
The morning of July 12, bomb blasts ripped through the lobbies of two well-known tourist hotels in Havana, Cuba, leaving three people injured. The explosions that rocked the Capri and National hotels in the busy district of El Vedado occurred 10 minutes apart.

Cuban government officials stated later in the day that they have evidence that the explosions originated in the United States. "The Interior Ministry has evidence that those responsible for these actions, as well as the materials utilized came from the United States," read the statement that was broadcast through Cuban radio and television. Washington denied knowing anything.

Right-wing Cuban groups have been announcing in Spain and Costa Rica a campaign to attack tourist hotels in Cuba, but so far no one has claimed responsibility for the July 12 blasts. Earlier in April, the Miami Herald reported a bomb explosion in a discotheque at the Hotel Cohiba, but hotel management blamed it on faulty gas piping. The Cuban government regarded that report as a rumor spread by right- wing Cubans to discourage tourism on the island. In 1996 tourism yielded the Cuban economy more than $1 billion in income, making it the biggest source for hard currency.

There is a long history of attacks against the Cuban revolution launched from U.S. soil, going back to the 1961 mercenary invasion at the Bay of Pigs, and before.

In December 1991, Cuban authorities arrested a Cuban counterrevolutionary group with arms and explosives. Eduardo Díaz, the leader of the outfit, who eventually was executed, admitted in a trial that their target were public places. "We were thinking of targeting sugar mills, theaters, tourism centers, etc.," said Díaz. The group also said that they had trained for an armed attack on Cuba with the knowledge of the U.S. government. Washington denied the charge. That year a hotel in the Cuban resort of Varadero was the target of an attack by counterrevolutionary Cuban- Americans.

In February 1996, Cuban fighter pilots downed two aircraft belonging to the right-wing Miami-based group Brothers to the Rescue, after they entered Cuban airspace despite warnings to stay clear. Over the previous year and a half, the group had carried out 25 incursions into Cuban airspace, including dropping counterrevolutionary propaganda over the island. Cuban officials reported these violations to U.S. authorities, who did nothing to stop them. U.S. president William Clinton then used the shoot-down as a pretext to sign the Cuban Liberty and Democratic Solidarity Act, better known as the Helms-Burton law, tightening the U.S. embargo against Cuba.

Hours before the recent explosions at the hotels, a flotilla organized by right-wing Cuban groups in Florida was set to sail to commemorate a 1994 accident in which 32 Cubans who were trying to emigrate to the United States drowned. The flotilla's organizers stated beforehand their intent to enter Cuban territorial waters despite warnings from Havana. A U.S. coast guard seized a lead boat when its commander refused to stay out of Cuban waters.

Also on July 12, a Cubana de Aviación plane carrying 44 people from Santiago de Cuba to Havana crashed into the sea, leaving no survivors. Cuban authorities have since determined that the crash was the result of engine failure, not a bomb or fire.

Initial reports had suggested that the crash might have been caused by sabotage. A July 14 article in the New York paper El Diario/La Prensa pointed out that the captain of the plane, Jesús Nazareno Jiménez, was one of the witnesses to what Havana has described as U.S. biological warfare against Cuba. Early in July, the Cuban government filed a complaint in the United Nations of biological aggression. Last October a Cuban plane spotted a U.S. plane spraying a substance over central Matanzas province. Later entomologists found that a plague of palm thrips, an insect previously unknown in Cuba, had infested a number of crops in precisely that region of the country. State Department spokesman Nicholas Burns claims the complaint is "a farce" and "flagrant disinformation."  
 
 
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