W O R L D T H R E A T S - Is Cuba a Threat to the United States?

Is Cuba a Threat to the United States?
Dr. Manuel Cereijo - June 24, 2004

Reality:

In spite of all the economic disasters, Cuba has continued its development of very expensive facilities in the areas of terrorist activities. To mention just a few, we have:

The most important institution in Cuba's biotechnology industry is the Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, CIGB. It was established in La Habana, in 1986. Located west of La Habana. 31 Ave, between158 and 190 Streets, Cubanacan. Cost: $150 million dollars.

It has a total area of 60,000 square meters. The Center has state-of-the-art equipment, second only to the United States in the Americas. At the center work outstanding scientists and engineers dedicated to genetic research, virology, cloning, vaccines development.

The main CIGB buildings cover an area of 43,200 square meters and contain specialized labs for both general purposes and dedicated research. The CIGB has a biotherium, barrier zones or white rooms,which allow research with sensitive and lethal agents.

The CIGB's modern andefficient technological equipment includes mass spectrometers, infraredand ultraviolet, electron and scanning microscopes, gamma counters, DNA synthesizers. Also, and very important, downstream fermenters, drying and milling machines, centrifuges, which can, therefore guarantee research and development of bioweapons, such as bacteria and virus agents.

In the CIGB work more than 700 highly skilled researchers, scientists, and engineers. Russians scientists cooperated with the CIGB several times, including, according to certain intelligence sources, assisting in the development of altered strains of bacteria. Capacity to produce bioweapons.
Annual operating cost: $400 million dollars

The National Bio-preparations center, Biocen, located in Bejucal, south of Habana province, at Carretera de Beltran km 1 1/2 is engaged in industrial scale production of human vaccines. It was built in 1992 at a cost of $15 million dollars.

Biocen's culture media plant has an annual 40 tons. capacity. It is equipped to carry out homogenization, hydrolisis, dehydration, milling, sifting, filtration, and several other processess required not only for the biotech and pharmaceutical industries, but for bacteria and virus weaponization.

A new department that manufactures recombinant products went into operation in 1993. New cost: $7 million dollars. The complex also includes a plant producing immunological reagents and two vivaria labs.

Innovative techniques have been developed at Biocen for obtaining culture media, substituting the traditional expensive nutritive bases, like meat, casein. They have developed 14 alternative protein sources. There is the capacity here to produce bioweapons. Annual operating cost: $50 million dollars
The Finlay Institute

The Carlos J. Finlay Medical Research Institute is located in Ave. 27, No. 19805, La Lisa, Habana. Modernized in 1994 at a cost of $10 million dollars.

he Institute occupies an area of 23,000 square meters, divided into three areas: fermentation, purification, and "clean rooms". Over 950 persons work at the Institute. Of these, 70% are engineers and scientists.

The Institute has done extensive work in the research and development of new vaccines. Among them, vaccines against Leptospirosis, Hepatitis, Cholera, and Meningitis. The Plant III area is well prepared for the production of the most sophisticated biomaterials. It is highly secured.

The main areas of research and production of the Institute are related to bacteria and viruses.Commercially, it has worked on research and production of vaccines. Capacity to produce bioweapons. Annual operating cost: $25 million dollars
The Institute of Tropical Medicine Pedro Khoury

The Institute was founded in 1937 by Dr. Flori, a very well known Cuban scientist. The center's research area is in microbiology. The Institute has the necessary state-of the-art equipment for research and development related to tropical bacteria and viruses. Modernized and relocated in 1992 at a cost of $12 million dollars.

The Institute has also conducted extensive research on yellow fever. Yellow fever is a viral disease that has caused large epidemics in the world. Infection causes a wide spectrum of disease, from mild symptoms to severe illness and death.

There are other tropicaldisease that could be used as bioweapons, such as: malaria,dracunculiasis, filariasis, leishmaniasis, dengue, dengue hemorrhagic fever.

Capacity to produce bioweapons.Annual operating cost: $15 million dollars.

CIM

The Center for Molecular Immunology is a 15,000 square meter, two floor facility. Over 250 employees work at the Center, of which, 200 are scientists and engineers. It was built in 1994 at a cost of $10 million dollars. The ground floor includes development, pharmacology, and toxicology. The auxiliary technical services, and, secret research and development are on the second floor.

Their main research activities are on antibodies-hybridoma, molecular biology, celular immunology. CIM has laboratories equipped for cell culture, immunochemistry, and radiochemistry. Their work on the immune system is related to the development of stronger strains of virus an bacteria. The Center has the capacity to produce bio-weapons. Annual operating cost: $10 million dollars.

New inaugurated medical genetic center to research and develop with genes, DNA, Genome, and to make more resistant viruses, bacteria, and toxins. Cost: unknown so far. Operational cost: unknown so far.

Conclusions

Cuba's biotechnological capacity places it in group four of the World Health Organization's five categories. To reach group five, which is formed only by the eight top industrial economies, Cuba must produce at least 20% of the 260 basic materials. It regularly produces 18 percent of these and certainly has the scientific ability to produce the others with biotech methods.

Cuba also has 160 distinct research and development units and over 10,000 researchers through out the country.

According to Cuba’s own figures, as well as those provided by scientists and engineers, both from Cuba and other countries, the Cuban government has spent approximately $3,500 million dollars in this industry since 1986. The return of such investment has been approximately the sales of $200 million dollars in vaccines and medicines. The production for domestic use has been almost nothing, since the Cuban people lack the most basic medicines.
Summary of the Signout and Cyber Facilities of Cuba

Located in Bejucal, La Habana, Cuba. 20 square mile area. Cost: $750 millions. Built by the Russians from 1994 to 1997. Workforce: 1,100 engineers, computer scientists, technicians, staff. Three groups of antennas/satellites. First group to listen to general USA telecommunications. Second group to listen to predesignated phones and computers. Third group with the voice recognition capacity. It has two HPCs given by PRC. Operated now with the cooperation of PRC’s military personnel. Utilizes PRC’s satellites. It can interfere USA computer networks. Annual operational cost: $150 million dollars.

Dedicated to transmission and reception of radio waves. Cost: $60 million. Radio and TV Marti interference headquarters are located here. Capacity to interfere radio telecommunications in USA, mainly in airports and strategic places. Annual operational cost: $25 million dollars.

Located in La Habana del Este. Cost: $20 million. Work on electronic experiments, such as HERF. Annual operational cost: $10 million dollars.

Located in Wajay, La Habana. Cost: $15 million. Weather change research. Radio interference. More than 100 very high antennas. Annual operational cost: $8 million.

Very similar to the Wajay farm. Located in Santiago de Cuba, extreme east of Cuba. Cost: $10 million. 80 very high antennas. Annual operational cost: $8 million.

What are Cuba’s elite forces? Who commands them? Who trains them? Where is their training camp? What are the main missions they are prepared for? Since the mid 1980s, Cuba established in Los Palacios, Pinar del Río, in a region known as El Cacho, a special troop military training school.

Named Baraguá School, it is situated in a big valley, near the mountains of Pinar del Río. It is a very large training camp, with artificial lakes, and the most modern training technology. The School is exactly located where the first missiles were seen during the 1962 missile crisis. The De la Guardia brothers founded the School. It was under General José Luis Mesa, very close to Raúl Castro. General Mesa, 50, speaks fluent English, and is wellmannered. He was a veteran of Vietnam, as a young officer, and also of the African wars. He retired due to health problems. The daily operations are under Colonel Ramírez, Veteran of Angola, Vietnam, and other war places. Colonel Ramírez is an expert on this kind of special troop training. Presently they have assistant from special personnel from China and Vietnam. The special troop school has about a constant flow of 2500 to 3000 men in training.

Ranging from 18 to 35 years old, they are a breed apart - a cut above the rest. Unquestionable, they are one of the world’s finest unconventional warfare experts. Certainly, second only to the United States Special Troops in this Hemisphere. They are kept on an uncommon physical and mental caliber. Mature, highly skilled, and superbly trained. They are always ready to serve anywhere, at any time: Infiltrations, commando operations, biowarfare, cyber warfare, and espionage. Special troops are trained to deliver people, equipment, and weapons with surgical precision. They locate high-value, strategic, movable targets and they deliver firepower more accurately. They are trained to operate in small independent units.

They have advanced personal camouflage with enhanced protection against harsh environments and climatic conditions. Clothing will offer them individual body armor and safeguards against biological and chemical agents. They have helmets fitted with enhanced sensory head-up displays including thermal, image-intensified, and acoustic sensors. External and imbedded optics enable them to see long distances clearly without using handheld optical systems.

They have external skeletal systems that will improve individual skills, enabling special operators to move faster, jump farther, and lift more weight. Such enhanced physical attributes allow them to deliver more deadly force with greater accuracy and penetrating power. They also have miniaturized command, control, and communication functions, as well as embedded artificial intelligence for situational decision-making. In Baraguá School, Special troops are trained to perform the following missions:

Unconventional Warfare, UW: A broad spectrum of military operations conducted in politically sensitive territory or “enemy” held territory.
Including interrelated fields of guerrilla warfare, evasion and escape, subversion, sabotage.

Direct Action, DA: Either overt or cover action against an “enemy” force. Seize, damage, and destroy a target. Short duration, small scale offensive actions. Ambushes, direct assault tactics, emplace mines.

Special Reconnaissance, SR: Infiltration behind “enemy” lines. Collect meteorological, hydrographic, geographic, and demographic data.

Psychological Operations, PSYOP: Induce or reinforce foreign attitudes and behavior favorable to Cuba objectives.
Influence emotions, motives, and behavior of foreign governments, organizations, groups, and individuals. They also receive additional training and skills in freefall parachuting, underwater operations, target interdiction strategic reconnaissance, and operations and intelligence. Obviously, this group is strictly an offensive military group. Cuba is an island, and therefore has not borders to defend from neighboring countries. The most serious threats from the Special troops are: biowarfare operations, cyber warfare operations, infiltrations, commando attacks, kidnapping, espionage.

Of the countless scenarios of terrorist mayhem, none quickens the pulse quite like the menace of a nuclear bomb, and for good reason. A nuclear weapon embodies essentially everything a terrorist could hope for: the ability to kill at least tens of thousands of people at once, a fiery explosion that reverberates globally in images of death and destruction, and a lingering, lethal legacy, in the form of radioactive fallout.

Fortunately, most groups and terrorist nations are limited in their resources and lack the infrastructure to build a nuclear bomb. But, why build a bomb when there are far cheaper and simpler ways of waging nuclear terror?

There are two other possibilities that, for their comparative simplicity, would deliver much of the bang of a bomb. Flying a fully fueled jumbo jet into a nuclear reactor is one. The other is using radioactive nuclear materials to kill or sicken people or render tracts of land uninhabitable by, for example, scattering the materials with a conventional explosion.

Nuclear reactors are surrounded by a massive containment structure with concrete-and-steel walls more than a meter thick. These containments were designed to withstand earthquakes and extremely violent impacts, but not the sort a plunging jumbo jet would cause if fully loaded with fuel, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), in Vienna, Austria.

In a September 26 release the agency suggested that such an impact would not trigger a runaway nuclear reaction, because automatic safety systems would flood the reactor with water. A direct hit by a large, fueled aircraft might nevertheless breach the containment and damage the reactor, possibly causing a leak of radioactive steam and fallout.

The IAEA’s assessment predicts that the worst damage would be confined within 10 kilometers of the plant. Even so, dangerous levels of radioactivity would likely persist for 10 to 15 years.

Radiological dispersion devices - the poor man’s nuclear weapon - or dirty bomb, are another possibility likely to attract increasing interest from terrorists. Scattering radiation without a nuclear explosion, they are a near-term terrorist threat. Several nations - including a few sponsors of terrorism-have dabbled in dispersion devices. In the 1980s, Iraq produced and tested conventional bombs filled with radioactive materials-apparently, spent fuel from its research reactors, according to a 1991 report by the CIA. Cuba, by the way, has two research reactors.

Spent fuel is the obvious choice for the radioactive material in a terrorist device. Many tens of thousands of tons of it lie scattered around the world, including small accumulations in Iraq, Iran, Algeria, Libya, Syria, Pakistan, North Korea, and Cuba.

A single, half-ton spent fuel assembly from a reactor contains more than enough radioactivity to put a transportation terminal or some other strategic location out of action for months, or years, if the radioactivity is well dispersed.

The most accessible nuclear device for any terrorist would be a radiological dispersion bomb. This so-called ‘dirty bomb’ would consist of waste by-products from nuclear reactors wrapped in conventional explosives, which upon detonation would spew deadly radioactive particles into the environment.

This is an expedient weapon, in that radioactive waste material is relatively easy to obtain. Radioactive waste is widely found throughout the world, and in general is not as well guarded as actual nuclear weapons. In the United States, radioactive waste is located at more than 70 commercial nuclear power sites in 31 states. Enormous quantities also exist overseas — in Europe and Japan in particular. Tons of wastes are transported long distances, including between continents (Japan to Europe and back).

Since 1988 Cuba has had two experimental nuclear reactors in La Habana. Very low power. One is a 10 Watts. The other is referred to as zero Watts. They are used for nuclear medicine and research on nuclear biotechnology. But they do generate nuclear waste.

In Russia, security for nuclear waste is especially poor, and the potential for diversion and actual use by Islamic radicals has been shown to be very real indeed. In 1996, Islamic rebels from the break-away province of Chechnya planted, but did not detonate, such a device in Moscow’s Izmailovo Park to demonstrate Russia’s vulnerability.

This dirty bomb consisted of a deadly brew of dynamite and one of the highly radioactive by-products of nuclear fission — Cesium 137. Extreme versions of such gamma-ray emitting bombs, such as a dynamite-laden casket of spent fuel from a nuclear power plant, would not kill quite as many people as died on Sept. 11.

Worst-case calculation for an explosion in downtown Manhattan during noontime: more than 2,000 deaths and many thousands more suffering from radiation poisoning. Treatment of those exposed would be greatly hampered by inadequate medical facilities and training.

The United States has only a single hospital emergency room dedicated to treating patients exposed to radiation hazards, at Oak Ridge, Tenn. A credible threat to explode such a bomb in a U.S. city could have a powerful impact on the conduct of U.S. foreign and military policy, and could possibly have a paralyzing effect. Not only would the potential loss of life be considerable, but also the prospect of mass evacuation of dense urban centers would loom large in the minds of policy-makers.

The threat from radiological dispersion dims in comparison to the possibility that terrorists could build or obtain an actual atomic bomb. An explosion of even low yield could kill hundreds of thousands of people. A relatively small bomb, say 15-kilotons, detonated in Manhattan could immediately kill upwards of 100,000 inhabitants, followed by a comparable number of deaths in the lingering aftermath.

Fortunately, bomb-grade nuclear fissile material (highly enriched uranium or plutonium) is relatively heavily guarded in most, if not all, nuclear weapon states. Nonetheless, the possibility of diversion remains. Massive quantities of fissile material exist around the world. Sophisticated terrorists could fairly readily design and fabricate a workable atomic bomb once they manage to acquire the precious deadly ingredients (the Hiroshima bomb which used a simple gun-barrel design is the prime example).

Obviously, intelligence that helps localize the bomb is the main key to success. Just as obviously, intelligence of such quality is seldom available — as proven on Sept. 11. Such a search could be truly looking for a needle in a haystack, as detection normally would succeed only if the detectors come within a few feet or so of the hidden bomb.

Disabling a bomb is easy by comparison. A radiological bomb might be surrounded by a tent enclosure several tens of feet in height and width, then filled with a special foam to contain the deadly radioactive material (such as Cesium 137) if the bomb explodes during further defusing attempts. For a nuclear device there are a set of options available for disabling the weapon, including using explosives to wreck the bomb’s wiring, to prevent the triggering of the nuclear detonators. Because of the difficulty inherent in finding a nuclear weapon once it entered the country, near-term U.S. response efforts would be best focused on prevention and intervention to secure possible sources of nuclear terrorism.

A state sponsor of terrorism would simply give the spent fuel or perhaps even an entire dispersion device to terrorist groups. We must be on the alert, and start thinking from the terrorist’s perspective of maximizing the destruction.

Executive Summary: Please make your own executive conclusions.

¿Del tirano? Del tirano dí todo, ¡dí más! y clava con furia de mano esclava sobre su oprobio al tirano. ¿Del error? Pues del error dí el antro, dí las veredas oscuras; dí cuanto puedas del tirano y del error. José Martí

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