Shortly after the shootdown, Clinton signed into law the Helms-Burton Act, which has tightened the four-decade-long U.S. embargo against Cuba.

The same year, the U.S. government passed the so-called Antiterrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act of 1996, which allows U.S. citizens to go to U.S. courts to seize frozen assets of nations targeted by Washington.

Under the recently approved "Justice for Victims of Terrorism Act," based on the 1996 law, the U.S. Treasury would seize frozen assets of several governments smeared as "terrorist" by Washington, including Iran, Libya, and Cuba, and award the funds to plaintiffs in lawsuits against these governments.

On October 23, in response to the U.S. moves to seize Cuban funds, the government in Havana adopted a decree imposing a 10 percent tax on all phone calls between the two countries. It also announced that it was considering cutting off all telephone communications with the United States if the U.S. government proceeded to seize the assets.

The legislation "constitutes a gross act of aggression against the economy of our nation," the Cuban decree stated, "by using Cuban funds--arbitrarily frozen in the United States--to deliver large sums to terrorist groups under the pretext" of compensating the pilots’ relatives. "This robbery of Cuban funds is an unjustified, illegal, and immoral act."

In a front-page editorial the daily Granma stated, "The government of Cuba reserves the right to adopt the measures it judges pertinent, including cutting off all direct and indirect telephone communications between Cuba and the United Sates."

The new 10 percent tax law "will remain in effect until the total of Cuban assets illegitimately frozen in the United States is returned with the corresponding interest," Granma reported in an article. It added that money collected from this tax "will be directed to the purchase of medical equipment, medicines and raw materials for their production, over and above the country’s current annual hard currency outlay for the population’s medical care."

As part of its economic war on the Cuban revolution, Washington has frozen more than $120 million in payments due to Cuba’s telephone company for bilateral telecom services provided between 1966 and 1994.

In an earlier attempt to seize money from frozen Cuban assets, a U.S. judge awarded $188 million in 1997 in damages to the families of the three Cuban-American counterrevolutionaries--members of the rightist Brothers to the Rescue--who had been killed in the previous year’s shootdown over Cuban territory. In response, Cuba’s national phone company, ETECSA, in February 1999 cut most direct telephone communications with the United States for more than a year. This service was restored in April of this year.

Meanwhile, the U.S. Senate voted October 18, by a 86-8 margin, to approve legislation that purportedly allows the sale of food and medicine to Cuba but in reality tightens Washington’s economic squeeze on Cuba. The bill, which was recently approved by the U.S. House of Representatives and which Clinton has pledged to sign, would prohibit Cuba from using U.S. government or commercial credit to purchase these items while continuing to ban the sale of Cuban goods to the United States. It also codifies into law existing executive orders that restrict travel to Cuba by U.S. residents.

Close to a million Cubans marched October 18 to protest the new trade measure and the move to seize Cuban assets. "This is a patriotic march against the genocidal blockade, and the latest attempts to destroy our revolution," said one Havana housewife, Olga, quoted by the British news agency Reuters.  
 
 
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