By Nick Madigan
Special to The Washington Post
Tuesday, February 25 1997; Page A03
The Washington Post
OVER THE STRAITS OF FLORIDA, Feb. 24 -- Through the open door of a small plane at 500 feet, Jose Basulto tossed white carnations into the calm blue waters 21 miles north of Cuba.
Circling around him this afternoon were half a dozen other aircraft, all testing the limits of the Castro regime's forbearance by visiting the site of the downing one year ago of two planes belonging to the exile group Brothers to the Rescue in which four men were killed.
Next to Basulto in the cockpit of the Cessna Skymaster 337, pilot Guillermo Lares offered the Lord's Prayer in memory of the fallen fliers, whose planes were shot out of the sky in international airspace by Cuban MiG-29 fighters. Over the static of the radio connecting the exiles' planes, other pilots joined in the oration.
"Mission accomplished," Basulto, the group's founder, relieved that the anniversary flight had not brought a repetition of last year's belligerence, told another pilot.
But Cuba was listening. An air-traffic controller warned three times from Havana that the fliers were using an unauthorized frequency that could jeopardize other flights in the area.
"You sound like a broken record," Basulto responded, his patience with the government of his native land worn thin long ago.
The downing of the two unarmed planes on Feb. 24, 1996, created a cacophony of diplomatic noise that echoed across the hemisphere. After the incident, the MiG pilots' chest-beating was denounced in vehement terms by Madeleine K. Albright, then the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. The shoot-down prompted President Clinton to sign the Helms-Burton Act, which codified the three-decades-old embargo against Cuba and enabled Americans to sue foreign companies and individuals who benefit from property and businesses seized after the Castro revolution of 1959, although Clinton has twice suspended the latter provision.
The Cuban government's initial assertion that the Brothers planes had been shot down in Cuba's airspace was contradicted by U.S. intelligence reports that put the planes well outside the island's 12-mile territorial radius.
For Cuban Americans, the anniversary is the newest among many painful reminders of an almost powerless exile, and the dead men -- Armando Alejandre, Carlos Costa, Pablo Morales and Mario de la Pena -- the latest martyrs in a pantheon of liberation fighters dating to Cuba's struggles with its colonial ruler, Spain.
A subject still of intense debate among the exile community, the shoot-down continues to raise questions. Not least is the possibility that U.S. military air-traffic controllers were aware that the Cuban fighter jets were closing in on the two Cessnas and did nothing to scramble American fighters to protect them.
Basulto, who took part in the ill-fated Bay of Pigs invasion in 1961 and a year later fired a cannon toward Havana from a boat, said today that the downing of the two aircraft, while tragic, brought good tidings.
"The change in policy that has resulted from this is the most positive thing that has occurred in United States policy toward Cuba," he said. "Not only do we have Helms-Burton, but we have an agreement from the U.S. government to help Cuba with billions of dollars once Castro is gone. That's a window of opportunity, and it's encouraging for the Cubans who remain there.
"Before that," he went on, "Cubans had no alternative but to take to the water in rafts."
Basulto, who was aboard a third plane a year ago that made its way safely back to Miami, is convinced there was a conspiracy at the highest levels of the U.S. government to let the attack on the fliers proceed, but he made no mention of that today.
Brothers to the Rescue's anniversary mission was joined by the Democracia Movement, a group that for years has taken to the seas in anti-Castro flotillas but that recently formed what it calls the Democracy Air Group. Its small squadron today was to have included two former military training jets, but in a change of heart they were left on the airstrip. The jets, English-made Provosts that flew for the Royal Air Force in the 1950s, carry no weapons but raised concerns that Cuba might interpret the flights today as an act of war.
Today's events included included the renaming of a bridge in Sweetwater, a Miami suburb, in honor of the four slain fliers. Before the flights, there was a memorial ceremony at Opa-Locka Airport, where the Brothers planes are based. There was also a memorial service at Chopin Plaza in downtown Miami during which a Democracia Movement flotilla sailed past in Biscayne Bay.
At 3:21 p.m., a seven-minute period of mourning was observed, both over the site of the downings and on the ground in Miami.
c Copyright 1997 The Washington Post Company