By Angus MacSwan
MIAMI, Oct 21 (Reuters) - Inspired by the arrest of former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, right-wing Cuban Americans in Miami are demanding ``What about Castro?'' and say they want Cuba's communist ruler arrested too.
In a city whose Cuban population is obsessed by Fidel Castro and dreams of his downfall, news of Pinochet's arrest has been seized upon as a fine opportunity for yet another attack on the Cuban leader.
``Demands for Castro arrest, like Pinochet,'' trumpeted El Nuevo Herald Spanish-language newspaper in a front-page banner headline on Wednesday, accompanied by large photographs of the two men.
The main exile organisation, the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF), said it was looking at ways to bring a lawsuit against the Cuban president.
Cuban American politicians demanded the U.S. government act against him. And newspaper columnists compared the alleged crimes of the two strongmen from opposite ends of the ideological spectrum.
Pinochet, who seized power in a bloody military coup in 1973 and ruled for 17 years, was arrested in London last week pending an extradition request from a Spanish judge on charges relating to the Chilean military's campaign of repression.
Castro was in Portugal at the time of the arrest, attending an Ibero-American Summit. The 72-year-old revolutionary, who has ruled Cuba since his guerrilla army's victory in 1959, declared himself ``very interested'' in the news.
``The ghosts of (Pinochet's) vicious past had returned to haunt him...but the ghosts of Castro's violence could not be heard. They were upstaged by the continuous fanfare that surrounds him,'' complained Miami Herald columnist Liz Balmaseda.
Florida Republicans Lincoln Diaz-Balart and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, both Cuban Americans, headed a group of eight congressmen asking the U.S. government to indict Castro immediately.
Diaz-Balart said in a statement that in light of Pinochet's arrest, ``an indictment of Fidel Castro is clearly in order given his responsibility for tens of thousands of deaths in Cuba, Central America and elsewhere, his training, financing and support of terrorism, and his participation in narcotrafficking (drug-trafficking).''
The statement noted that three of four people killed when Cuban jets shot down two planes of the Brothers to the Rescue exile group over the Florida Straits in February 1996 were Americans.
While Cuban Americans critics often accuse Castro of a range of crimes, even strong critics such as the U.S.
government have not accused him of mass killings. But in the months after his revolution several hundred supporters of former dictator Fulgencio Batista were shot by firing squad.
Ros-Lehtinen, in a separate statement, accused the administration of U.S. President Bill Clinton of ``kowtowing to Castro and his foreign supporters.'' She demanded the U.S.
government call for the setting up of an international tribunal to try Castro.
Ninoska Perez, spokeswoman for the Cuban American National Foundation, said the influential organisation was assembling a a legal team to make a case against Castro in U.S. courts.
``Castro is responsible for the same crimes as Pinochet -- genocide, missing persons, killings,'' Perez told Reuters.
``Certainly what they have done to Pinochet, they should to Castro. He has been in power for 40 years and has not been held accountable for his crimes.''
Many Cuban Americans, their political beliefs forged amid the tensions of the Cold War, are sympathetic to Pinochet, 82.
Salvador Allende, the elected Chilean president who died in Pinochet's coup, was a friend of Castro and was taking his country down a Socialist path that his opponents feared would make it another Cuba.
El Nuevo Herald and the Miami Herald both reprinted in Wednesday editions a Wall Street Journal editorial which hailed Pinochet as Chile's saviour, poured scorn on Allende and blamed Castro for spurring on brutal military dictatorships in Latin America through his efforts to spread the revolution.
17:44 10-21-98
Copyright 1998 Reuters Limited.