U.S. officials accused Imperatori, a vice-consul at the Cuban Interests Section in Washington, D.C., of spying and expelled him from the United States to Canada February 26. Earlier that day, Imperatori resigned from his post, giving up his diplomatic immunity, and demanded to be tried in U.S. courts in order to contest the accusations against him.

Canadian foreign minister Lloyd Axworthy asserted that his government had simply accepted to "facilitate" Imperatori's return to Cuba through Canada. The Cuban diplomat was flown to Montreal aboard an FBI plane.

Officials in Ottawa refused him a 30-day visa requested by Cuba, granting him only a 48-hour transit visa and insisting he leave Canada on a February 28 flight to Havana. At press time, he remains in the Cuban embassy in Ottawa, continuing a hunger strike he began in Washington.

"I will remain on a hunger strike," he wrote in a letter to his wife in Cuba, "as long as I do not get a satisfactory answer to my problem, which is also a slander against Cuban diplomacy."

Since last year, the Canadian government has adopted a more openly hostile stance toward Cuba, straining diplomatic relations, to try to pressure the revolutionary government into making concessions to imperialist dictates. The previous week, Washington arrested Mariano Faget, an official of the Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS) in Miami, and charged him with espionage on behalf of the Cuban government. U.S. officials alleged that Faget had passed secret information to Cuban-American businessman Pedro Font. They then demanded Imperatori leave the United States, claiming he was associated with the alleged spying activities.

The Cuban daily Granma published a statement in its February 22 issue reviewing the facts in detail and refuting the charges that Cuban officials had done anything improper. Imperatori, it explained, had met with Faget, who is Cuban-American, on routine business. Cuban diplomatic personnel regularly meet with Cuban-Americans, businessmen and others.

The head of the Cuban Interests Section, Fernando Remírez, stated at a news conference on February 26, the day Imperatori resigned from his post, that the arrest of Faget and expulsion order against Imperatori had the effect of undermining the effort to seek the return of the boy Elián González to Cuba and his family there. The arrest of the INS official on spying charges came just days before a scheduled federal court hearing on the child's case.

U.S. State Department spokesman James Rubin declared that it was "highly unusual" for Cuba to refuse to remove its diplomat voluntarily after being ordered by Washington to leave. He stated, however, that Imperatori, who has demanded to appear before a U.S. court to refute the charges against him, may be asked to return to testify in the trial against Faget.

Meanwhile, more than 150,000 people marched down Havana's seafront February 22 in a spirited protest against the U.S. spying charges and to demand the return of the Cuban boy.  
 
 
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