20000224

Cuba insists

diplomat targeted

for expulsion

was not a spy

HAVANA: Cuba has reiterated its denial of US charges that one of its diplomats in Washington engaged in-espionage, saying that all of the officials' dealings with a US immigration officer suspected of spying for the communist country were public and legal.

"To recruit people to undertake espionage is not conceivable nor has ever been undertaken by officials in our Interests Section in Washington," the Cuban government said in a lengthy statement carried by state news media on Tuesday.

Instead, the government said, it is the US Interests Section that promotes "counterrevolutionary" activities in Cuba. US authorities have repeatedly rejected that charge.

The statement admitted that Mariano Faget, a Cuban-born supervisor with the US Immigration and Naturalisation Service, had contact with officials at the Cuban Interests Section in Washington.

But they discussed migration accords between the two countries and illegal entries into the United States by Cubans, not sensitive intelligence matters, the government said.

Faget was arrested in Miami last week on charges of passing classified information to Cuba's communist government.

The Miami Herald on Tuesday identified the diplomat targeted for expulsion as Jose Imperatori. Neither Washington nor Havana has named the Cuban official ordered to leave the United States by the end of this week, but the government statement did name Imperatori as someone Faget had talked to in the past.

Havana has accused Washington of inventing the spy charges to block the return of 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez to his father in Cuba and has said it will not willingly withdraw the official.ÑAP