The Bulgarian Treatment
Carlos Alberto Montaner
Dec. 28, 1997, in El Nuevo Herald and other newspapers.
Nine years ago, following the death of Sebastián Arcos,
Carlos Alberto Montaner published an article titled The Bulgarian
treatment, about the possible utilization of radioactive isotopes to
murder Cuban dissidents. It was not an unfounded speculation: some time
earlier, the author had met in Madrid a defector from the Cuban intelligence
services who had received special training in Bulgaria to utilize that
method of assassination. The death Nov. 23 in Londres of Alexander
Litvinenko, precisely the victim of a radioactive isotope (Polonium 210)
presumably injected by Russian spies, again brings up the theory posited in
that column, which is reproduced below.
Madrid -- He so looked
forward to his daughter-in-law's delivery. After all, it would be his first
grandchild and he didn't want to die without seeing the baby's face. It
wasn't to be. Fate is almost always miserly. Then 65, he missed the child's
birth by a few weeks. After a very long agony -- three years of unspeakable
suffering -- Sebastián Arcos, one of the heroes of the Cuban resistance
during the tyranny, former fighter against Batista and Castro, former
political prisoner, former university professor, the founder -- along with
his brother Gustavo and Ricardo Bofill -- of the Committee for Human Rights,
died surrounded by his children, his faithful wife, the remarkable María
Juana, and a few friends he made in the prison cells during his misfortune.
He was a good and tough fellow, straight as an arrow, the kind who knows
neither disloyalty nor deceit.
But I'm not going to
write a panegyric to my friend Sebastián, whose death I feel like a stroke
of the lash. Rather, I'll venture a terrible hypothesis: it is very likely
that Sebastián Arcos' captors induced cancer on him in the Cuban prison
where he served a sentence for political rebellion. His jailers liked to
boast of that. They warned Leonel Morejón Almagro: "We're going to put you
in the cell once occupied by Sebastián, so you can come down with cancer
like he did." The truth is that, when Sebastián complained of back pain and
was taken to the prison doctor, the diagnosis was cynically benign: "It's
nothing. It's only fatigued vertebrae or muscles."
At the end, when they
allowed him to go into exile, the metastasis was implacable and the
government knew it. That's why they authorized his expatriation. They didn't
want another "martyr" in a Cuban prison, much less of his international
dimension. After he arrived in Miami, it took the doctors barely half an
hour to reach the correct diagnosis. The chances of cure were nil. At the
most, doctors could only lengthen his life and reduce the pain with a
merciful combination of morphine and severed nerves. Am I exaggerating? Is
this article just another example of exilium tremens? Read the
following with extreme care.
Nineteen years go, a
young Cuban biologist -- let's call him David -- "defected" at Barajas
Airport. He was traveling from Bulgaria to Cuba, with a stopover in Madrid.
He was so clever that he not only escaped from the Cuban Security Service
guards who accompanied him in the plane but also slipped out of the airport
without being detected by the Spanish authorities. The following day, he
turned himself over to the police and told his story. That same afternoon,
he repeated it to me, in hair-raising detail.
He was coming from
Sophia, where Zhivkov's sinister political police had given him special
training on how to induce cancer on adversaries who were slated for
elimination by unsuspicious means. He called it the Bulgarian treatment. "The
simplest way," he told me, "is to place a radioactive isotope on the
target's favorite chair" -- he already talked the Security Service jargon --
"or in a jacket he wears frequently, or in his mattress, or the car seat.
After a few months, chances are good that a cancerous process will begin in
his mediastinum."
A "radioactive isotope"
is not a strange element. Almost all the big hospitals use them,
paradoxically to combat certain forms of cancer. They are small metallic
filaments that are easily concealed. "The ideal thing is to place it and
then, after six months, remove it so no signs of the crime remain." "Have
you already put it into practice?" I remember asking, quite alarmed. "No,
but I thought about doing it as soon as I arrived in Cuba, if I couldn't
manage to defect." "On some dissident?" I asked, nervously.
"No," he said, with an
absolutely convincing straight face. "I was thinking of trying it out on my
mother-in-law, an odious Spanish-Russian woman who shattered my marriage."
Fortunately, David met a wonderful Spanish girl, married her, and now lives
in the United States far and away from the ignoble "profession" he learned
from the Bulgarians.
More information. In
Cuba, there are two supersecret, high-security laboratories in the Siboney
district, both with decontamination chambers. They are situated in the
Center for Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology, which produces aflatoxin
-- another strongly cancerogenic substance that attacks the lungs -- and a
variety of toxic and chemical weapons similar to those apparently hidden in
the palaces of Mr. Saddam Hussein, a good friend of Castro's who shares both
the Cuban leader's hatred for the gringos and Castro's personal physician,
Dr. Alvarez Cambra, an eminent orthopedist.
Why those weapons? To
face "Yankee imperialism" in the event of a military conflict. Chemical and
biological weapons are said to be the atomic bombs of the poor. Some plagues
have already been tested by the least-risky means, using as a method of
transmittal the migratory birds that fly between Cuba and Florida during
specific periods of the year. The experiments -- co-conducted by a Cuban
ornithologist, a specialist in birds of prey, who is today living in exile
-- were made using relatively harmless mites, but the purpose was to
ascertain the effectiveness of the means of transport. If the method proved
to be effective, ducks could later be used to carry much more lethal viruses
and bacteria.
Castro is a dangerous
enemy who is guided only by his survival instinct and does not hesitate to
order the assassination of an adversary if he thinks that person is a
potential risk to the stability of his regime. He ordered the deaths by
shooting of comandante Aldo Vera, a former comrade-in-arms, on a
street of Puerto Rico, and José Elías de la Torriente in Miami.
It is probable that he
ordered the death by cancer induction -- a more subtle technique -- against
Manuel Artime Buesa, his arch-enemy of the 1960s, who died at the age of 38
with his lungs inexplicably ravaged. And against Rafael García Navarro, an
active anti-Castro militant, an economically powerful man, a partner and
friend of Rafael Díaz-Balart, Castro's former brother-in-law and the person
most hated by the Cuban dictator, who died at 41 of the same symptoms. And
even against Jorge Mas Canosa, who -- at the age of 53 and after a healthy
life untainted by cigarettes -- discovered that he had only five years left,
a coldly exact death sentence.
Someday, perhaps, all
the pieces of the puzzle will fit together. Or maybe everything will become
a rumor that will fade with time. Lamentably, the crimes of state are
usually "perfect." I would have liked to write a heartfelt obituary of
Sebastián, but I know that the best homage is to tell what we know and what
we intuit. Sebastián was a good, upright and tough man. That's the way he
lived. That's why he knew how to die.
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