U.S. Warns Cuba, Weighs Retaliation

WASHINGTON —  Charging that the two small civilian planes shot down by a Cuban MIG-29 over the Florida Straits were in international airspace, Secretary of State Warren Christopher on Sunday accused the Cuban government of blatantly violating international law and warned that the United States is considering a range of retaliatory actions.

After 15 hours of silence, the Cuban government admitted to downing the aircraft but declared the action justified because the “pirate Cessna planes” had invaded Cuban airspace.

The two downed Cessnas, each with two people aboard, belonged to a group called Brothers to the Rescue, whose Cuban exile pilots regularly fly over the Florida Straits searching for rafters trying to flee Cuba.

Tensions between the group and Fidel Castro’s government in Havana scaled new heights in recent months when the Brothers flew over Cuba at least twice to drop anti-Castro leaflets.

“The shooting down of these pirate planes should be a lesson for those who support and carry out such acts and have the tendency to increase the tension between the United States and Cuba,” the Cuban Foreign Affairs Ministry said in a statement.

But in a briefing to reporters at the White House before departing on a trip to Latin America, Christopher and other senior U.S. officials made it clear that by downing the unarmed private planes, Castro’s government was provoking the United States.

Clinton’s advisors met for three hours Sunday and provided the president with a list of possible actions.

At the president’s request, the U.N. Security Council held an emergency consultation Sunday evening to discuss the incident and possible international responses. The council took no action but planned to reconvene today.

Christopher stressed that the United States would not “limit ourselves to multinational action,” but he refused to specify what options the president was considering.

On the campaign trail in Arizona, Republican presidential hopeful Bob Dole said that Castro, in permitting the attack on private planes carrying American citizens, “has demonstrated his contempt for the carrots dangled by the Clinton White House.” He said Clinton shares the blame for the tragedy, saying it was “probably a result of a lack of any real policy toward Cuba.”

Dole said Clinton should call on U.S. allies to halt international civilian air traffic to Cuba, enforce the ban on U.S. travel to the island and endorse a GOP congressional measure that would tighten the 34-year-old economic embargo on it.

Under the measure, versions of which have passed both the House and the Senate, the U.S. would punish foreign firms that engage in trade with Cuba. Dole said the bill will reach Clinton in the “near future.” The administration has opposed it, saying it would infuriate U.S. allies, but Saturday’s episode could change that.

The U.S. and Cuban versions of what happened Saturday differ substantially.

According to senior Clinton administration officials, only the plane that survived Saturday’s attack had ventured into Cuban airspace. The MIG-29 blasted the first plane, a Cessna-337, with an air-to-air missile at a time when the Cuban exiles’ plane was five miles north of Cuban airspace, they said.

The Cuban government, however, charged that the two downed planes were inside Cuban airspace and that the third remained outside. It also asserted that a communication among the pilots indicated that they were headed for Havana.

The Brothers’ founder, Jose Basulto, who was in the plane that escaped the MIG’s attack, had a third version. He insisted that all three planes--including his own--were over international waters.

He confirmed assertions from both Havana and Washington that when he and the other pilots flew across the 24th Parallel, a line 40 miles north of Havana that the Cuban government considers its air-defense zone, they were warned of the danger. But he said that, as a Cuban, he has every right to fly in Cuban airspace.

“Like many times in the past, they warned us we were entering a dangerous area,” said Basulto. “But as free Cubans, we proceeded.”

Senior administration officials stressed that regardless of whether the planes penetrated Cuban airspace, the Cuban military failed to abide by customary procedures for dealing with unarmed foreign aircraft before shooting them down.

Under international law, the MIG-29 should have attempted to communicate with the Cessnas by radio, tipped its wings in warning and tried to lead the small planes out of the airspace.

“An armed plane confronting an unarmed aircraft has no right to shoot,” a senior administration official said.

The U.S. Coast Guard and Navy conducted a search for the four men aboard the downed planes but found nothing more than two oil slicks.

As Clinton administration officials contemplated a response, Cuban Americans reacted in anger, holding protests in Miami, New York and Los Angeles.

“This is murder carried out by the Cuban government, “ said Ramon Saul Sanchez, a Cuban American activist in Miami. “This one was out in the open, so everyone saw it. But Castro has done this many times before.”

In Miami, crowds gathered at the monument to those who died at the Bay of Pigs in 1961, denouncing Castro and calling for U.S. military intervention and a full naval blockade of the island.

Stoking their rage, Miami television stations throughout the day broadcast videotape made by a passenger on the Majesty of the Seas, a cruise ship passing about 20 miles north of Cuba on Saturday afternoon. On the video is a plume of black smoke, which passengers said followed the MIG attack on one of the planes.

Times special correspondent Mike Clary in Miami, and staff writers Juanita Darling in San Salvador and Samuel Fulwood III in Phoenix contributed to this report.