CUBAN DEFECTOR SAYS CASTRO FINANCES SALVADORAN REBELS' ARMS PURCHASES

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP90-00965R000403710010-9
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: K
• Document Page Count: 2
• Document Creation Date: December 22, 2016
• Document Release Date: February 9, 2012
• Sequence Number: 10
• Publication Date: November 19, 1984
• Content Type: OPEN SOURCE

STAT
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/09: CIA-RDP90-00965R000403710010-9
By George Lerdner Jr.
a?.hingtoo P..e S a1 Wr r
NEW YORK, Nov. 18-Cuban
Salvadoran-Rebels' Arms Purchasles
?EARED
' '~ `'^" ?- f (~ -~ WASHINGTON POST
...'f 19 November 1984
Cuban Defector Says Castro inaices
President Fidel Castro has been
financing arms purchases by El Sal-
vadoran guerrillas on the black mar-
ket in the United States and else-
where, according to a former Cuban
official recently granted asylum
here.
Jose Luis Llovio Menendez, once
the chief adviser in Cuba's Finance
Ministry, said Castro is too shrewd
to risk direct shipments of arms or
to send advisers into El Salvador.
"He has other ways to fight the
Americans," Llovio said in an inter-
view arranged partly to attract at-
tention to memoirs he is trying to
publish. "When he had to have gun
machines for El Salvador, he gave
money and they buy it on the black
market here in the United States."
Llovio has been described by gov-
ernment officials as the most prom-
inent defector from Cuba in recent
years. Llovio said he and his wife
fled the country in 1981 after he
had spent more than a decade look-
ing for a way out. He said Cuba has
a sluggish economy, a reluctant
work force, and a ruling "revolu-
tionary bourgeoisie" corrupted by a
constant scrambling for perquisites
and power.
At the top, he said, Castro re-
mains an "egocentric" leader,
shrewd, charming and gripped by
an abiding hatred for the United
States.
But Llovio said Castro is' too
smart to enter combat with the
United States in Nicaragua or else-
where. "He cannot afford that,"
Llovio said.
Llovio said he left Cuba so quietly
that he had difficulty convincing
U.S. consular officials, first in Can-
ada and later in Venezeula, that he
was who he said he was.
Interviews with The Washington
Post and others were arranged by
Roger Young, a former assistant
FBI director and spokesman, who
said he had been asked to help out
as "a friend of a friend."
Already interviewed numerous
times by "U.S. officials," Llovio told
of life as a reluctant Cuban bureau-
crat, interrupted near the outset by
a :still-unexplained imprisonment, i
and finally concluded at the Mon-
treal airport on Dec. 13, 1981,
R_ when he nervously asked a Cana-~
dian immigration official for asylum.
His plane had stopped in Montreal
for refueling during a flight from
Czechoslovakia to Cuba.
Llovio said his disenchantment
with the Castro revolution began
early. He said he did not "defect" in
the usual sense because "you have
to believe in something to
defect ....
"I believed in the revolution," he
said. "It was not the one I saw. I
believed in a better Cuba. It was not
the one I saw .... I don't believe
in socialism there. Because it does
not exist." -
He said he is "sure" that when he
left in 1981, Cuba had been supply.
ing El Salvadoran guerillas with
money to buy U.S. and other west-
ern arms;' using the Interior Min-
istry's "exterior expenses" budget.
"He [Castro] gave money, he is
giving money, and he will give mon-
ey [to the guerrillas],* Llovio said.
"But he will do it in a [secret]
way-because he knows very well
that if there is somebody that is
going to catch one Cuban adviser in.
EL Salvador [or] catch some
Cuban gun.machine in El Salvador,
he will have a lot of problems."
Llovio said, however, that the
Cubans still were anxious to avoid
any direct arms shipments to El
Salvador. He agreed that "Cuba
sends a lot of guns to Nicaragua.-
but-said what Nicaragua does with
them "is a Nicaraguan problem, not
a Cuban problem."
Born in Camaguey of a middle-
class family, Llovio signed up as a
revolutionary in the early 1950s
when he became a medical student
at the University of Havana, "smug-
gling guns ... [engaging in] a lot of
manifestations, [doing] the normal
thing."
He said he met Castro in 1955,
but thought him "a very strange
Person ... a little bit egocentric."
Llovio stayed away from Castro's
26th of July Movement for some
time but eventually joined it.
By early 1958, Llovio said, he
had had enough. "Everything was
'Fidel says this, Fidel says that,' "
he said.
Llovio went to France to study
medicine at the Sorbonnne and re-
joined the revolution from afar,
helping to raise funds and stick -a
26th of July flag in the Eiffel Tower
.
Not long after his return to Cuba,
Llovio said he received a visit from
State Security police, assigning him
"a little job." He was to "infiltrate all
the elite" in positions of power and
"inform them [the police) every 24
hours .... I did not have a choice."
Llovio said he was shocked. "The
corruption was very big-living
high, drinking, women, not work-
ing, taking all of the things from the
state for personal purposes."
Meanwhile, Llovio was given a
job in the Ministry of Construction
although he knew nothing about it.
In Cuba. he said, "you haves a Min-
ister of Education who was a bas-
ketball player. In a revolution, you
have to go where they want you to
go?"
In March 1966, he was eating a
pizza when someone from the In-
terior Ministry stuck "a pistol in my
back" and sent him to a windowless
cell in an old seminary with some of
those he had informed against. He
said he now suspects that it was to,
keep his role a secret, but he still
isn't-sure.
Before long, he was assigned as a
medical officer to a camp in Cama-
guey, part of a brutal, punitive sys.
tem for misfits such as homosexuals
and Jehovah's Witnesses. Llovio
said he protested the conditions to
the Army, which promptly assigned
him to help "get rid of [the camp] in
six months."
Mission accomplished, he was
sent back to Havana where he
Continued
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/09: CIA-RDP90-00965R000403710010-9
 Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/09: CIA-RDP90-00965R000403710010-9
worked five years for the Cinema
Institute, first "as a laborer," then
as "investment director." He did so
well, he said, that in 1972, he was
named "investment director of the
whole sugar industry," another field
about which he knew nothing.
Llovio said he muddled through,
primarily by going to work as a sug-
ar mill laborer before taking on big-
ger chores. Along the way, he met
his present wife, Maggie Hofands
a graphic design student who later
became art director of Cuba's
monthly Revolution and Culture.
Llovio said he was tapped by F.
nance Minister Francisco Garcia
Valls in early 1977 to be This chier
of advisers," aided by 12 officials
from the Soviet Union.
"They [the Soviets) handle all the
budget, all the money," he said.
A new assignment came up in the
spring of 1979: inspecting Cuban
embassies in Western Europe. "1
discovered a lot of things that,was
not good ... a very big corrup-
tion," Llovio said. ' He told the fi-
nance minister, who told Castro,
but he only received more such
thankless assignments, to Panama
and then to the Fisheries Ministry,
"the most corrupt in Cuba."
Llovio apparently stepped on too
many toes. He told the finance min-
ister of his findings about the Fish-
eries Ministry, and was told "yoo
are fired," ostensibly because.of his
imprisonment 13 years earlier. ,
Devastated, especially since he
had been planning to use, his official
position to take a vacation and flee,
Llovio wrote Raul Castro and was
soon restored to respectability, this
time as an adviser in the Ministry of
Culture. He worked there' until
1981 when he and his wife took the
plane to Czechoslovakia.
During all those years, Uovio
said, he kept his own counsel, to the
point that he found himself walking
along the beachfront, talking to
himself to relieve the tension.; ie
first told his wife of his escapeplags
while they were swimming, hud-
dreds of feet from shore.
It took Llovio more than a year to
get to the United States after his
arrival in Canada. Although he had
been "a very high-ranking official"
in Cuba, he said he ran into a blank
wall on a visit to the U.S Consulate.
Frustrated, Llovio said he decid-
ed to visit his mother in Venezuela
and finally received permission to
enter the United States from there
on Jan. 23, 1983. He was granted
one-year asylum status in October
but said he did not receive the pa-
pers "until a few days ago."
Declassified in Part - Sanitized Copy Approved for Release 2012/02/09: CIA-RDP90-00965R000403710010-9