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The Spanish connection
In 1996, the fate of Sistemas e Instalaciones de Telecomunicacion, S.A. (Sintel) a subsidiary of Telefonica, the Spanish state-run telecommunications monopoly, crossed paths with Jorge Mas Canosa. Canosa's firm Mastec International, a subsidiary of Mastec Inc., acquired Sintel for $39.5 million.
At the time of this privatisation, Sintel was the strongest company in its sector. By 1999, the company had become bankrupt and was sold for 2 euros. 1800 Spanish workers were left on the streets.
Economics professor Juan Torres López described the scenario as “a fraud to democracy, allowed by the political class.” Sintel employees soon came to learn who Jorge Mas Canosa was, and understood that their fight would be long and difficult.
The CIA Cubans
Back in 1960, the young anti-communist dissident Jorge Mas Canosa, who was the leader of the clandestine Movimiento Democrata Cristiano in Oriente, Cuba, left the island as an emigre to the United States. By 1963, Jorge together with other Bay of Pigs veterans was invited by the CIA to an intelligence training course at Fort Benning, Georgia, where he became close friends with one Luis Posada Carrilles.
As revealed in the New York Times following the release of CIA documents under the Freedom of Information Act, a series of July 1965 cablegrams between Posada and Mas Canosa disclosed that ''Jorge Mas Canosa of RECE (Cuban Representation in Exile) had paid an assassin $5,000 to cover expenses of a demolition operation in Mexico”. Another document also revealed that Mas Canosa ''had in his possession 125 lbs. of Pentol to be placed as charges…” and ''proposed to demolitions expert he travel to Spain and Mexico” to “place bombs in Communist installations in those countries.''
In 1971, Mas Canosa bought Church & Tower, an underground utility construction firm in Miami; twenty-three years later, Church & Tower merged with its biggest competitor, Birnup & Sims, and became MasTec. Inc.
By 1974, as FBI documents have revealed, Jorge Mas Canosa coordinated with Julio Durán, Chilean ambassador in the United Nations, a deal with Chile (at that time under the regime of General Pinochet) that offered paramilitary training to Cuban exiles, together with passports and necessary support to a certain Orlando Bosh for terrorist activity outside of Chile.
On October 6th, 1976, an Air Cubana jetliner with 73 people aboard was blown out of the sky. Orlando Bosh and Luis Posada Carrilles were arrested and served a jail sentence in Venezuela. Mas Canosa used his brother Ricardo to help Posada escape: “he [Mas Canosa] said that he needed me to go down and bring back $50,000, that it would be used to get Luis Posada Carriles out of jail.”
In 1980, just months after the U.S. election which put Ronald Reagan in power, the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) was formed. U.S. National Security Council employee Richard Allen invited Mas Canosa to become president of the foundation’s board. CANF become part of Reagan’s public diplomacy program, supporting the contras in Nicaragua, supporting rebels in Angola, helping to repeal the Clark amendment, building support for the Grenada invasion, and assisting President Reagan to pass his Caribbean Basin Tax Plan. By 1988, CANF had received $390,000 in federal funds via the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).
Reagan had taken a liking to CANF and soon enough Radio Martí, the U.S. government radio station beamed at Cuba, with an editorial board responding directly to the White House, was created. Reagan named Ernesto Betancourt, a member of the CANF speakers bureau, as its director. Then Carlos Benitez from the CANF board was invited to join the Republican Finance Committee, and a $1.7 million State Department contract was awarded to CANF, to make recommendations to the Immigration and Naturalization Service on whether to provide visas to Cubans living outside of Cuba and wanting to be relocated in the United States.
By this time Mas Canosa had become so influential in the United States that Wayne Smith, who headed the U.S. Interest Section in Havana during the Carter administration said, "had it not been for Jorge Mas Canosa, we probably would have had normal relations with Cuba."
From Madrid to Miami
In 1995, members of the CANF travelled to Spain and met with the right wing political party Partido Popular (PP) in their headquarters in Madrid. PP leader José María Aznar, Guillermo Gortázar, Jorge Mas Canosa and José Antonio “Toñín” Llama were present.
In November of that year, Jose Maria Aznar travelled to Miami where he lunched with CANF executives; he also flew to El Salvador and Costa Rica with Jorge Mas Santos on Mas Canosa’s plane.
Claiming that Aznar has received funding for his electoral campaign during the trip, the leader of the political party Nueva izquierda, Diego López Garrido, and other leaders on the left requested a “public clarification” from the PP, but the request was ignored. Luis Yañez, representative of the Partido Socialista Obrero Español (PSOE), described Mas Canosa as a “Florida Gangster” who had “financed certain aspects of the Partido Popular.”
In 1996, Mas Canosa directed Llama to organize the creation of “Fundación Hispano-Cubana”, the CANF subsidiary in Spain. Guillermo Gortázar Echeverría, a member of the national executive committee of the Partido Popular (Aznar’s political party), was elected Secretary General. The invitations for the launch were handed out at the headquarters of the PP. Mas Canosa was present at the presentation and later that year, was also present at the PP congress.
That same year, José Antonio “Toñín” Llama admitted to the Miami Herald that he and other members of the CANF hierarchy had acquired “a freight helicopter, 10 ultra-light remote control aircraft, seven vessels and a large volume of explosive material with the explicit objective of acts of terrorism.”
Indifferent to all these revelations of terrorist activity and corruption amongst Mas Canosa and his friends, both Felipe Gonzalez, who was running a provisional government in Spain, and Cándido Velázquez, running Telefónica, agreed on the sale of Sintel to Mas Canosa’s Mastec International. The deal was closed when, after the Partido Popular won the Spanish general election, José María Aznar became Spain’s Prime Minister and named Juan Villalonga as chairman and CEO of Telefónica.
At the time of its sale to Mastec International, Sintel was a company which had 21 affiliates in the world and around 5000 employees, 1800 of them in Spain. Telefónica had just invested more than 90 million to stabilize the company, and Sintel had future contract guarantees of around 450 million euros. The day the acquisition was announced, Mastec stock went up 400% on Wall Street. A fact, which didn’t stop Telefónica spokesman Alberto Martinez from claiming later that "Sintel didn't have a very bright future in our hands… so we decided to sell it at a very cheap price."
In 1997, Jorge Mas Canosa died and his sons Jorge Mas Santos and Juan Carlos Mas Santos took over the running of Mastec. Ten years later, after an arduous legal and political fight by the ex-workers of Sintel, which has involved three different judges, (Ruiz de Polanco, Baltasar Garzón and now Pedraz) the financial loss of Sintel is estimated at 268,839,154.87 euros, and the judge believes that Sintel was acquired by the Mas Canosa family to “dismantle it for their profit.”
Jorge Mas Santos says his company tried to diversify Sintel, and accuses Telefónica of violating the sale terms by cancelling its orders when Sintel "was heavily dependent on Telefónica.” The ex-workers are still demanding justice and proclaiming “suspicion” of the existence of “pressures at the highest political and financial levels.”
The workers' struggle
While the workers of Sintel have spent the last eleven years fighting for their rights, Ricardo Pascoe, who was Mexican Ambassador in Cuba from 2000 to 2002, says that during that time the Mas Canosa family financed the PP campaign of 2000, a fact which according to him “was known by numerous government officials in the U.S. and diplomats in Europe.”
Also in 2001, Aznar together with Josep Piqué, Spain’s Minister for foreign Relations, invited the King and Queen of Spain to Miami where they met at the Vizcaya Mansion with Jorge Más Santos, president of CANF Pepe Hernández, and José Antonio Llamas, former director on the executive board of the CANF.
It is shameful that as many hundreds of Spanish families were struggling with the harsh realities of unemployment, the Spanish monarchy and the government were meeting with the person who, as judge Pedraz believes, was responsible for the loss of those 1800 jobs. It seems even more shameful that Spain would subsidize the local branch of the CANF (an organization with direct links to terrorist activity) while its chairman, Jorge Mas Santos is yet to respond to the employees of Sintel, whose lives were shattered by the lofty dreams of dissident Cuban exiles. Since 2004, the autonomous community of Madrid has awarded over 380,000 euros in grants to the 'Fundación Hispano Cubana'.
In a phone conversation I held with Adolfo Jimenez, spokesperson for the Sintel Workers Association, I was told: “Sintel is the biggest fraud in the history of Spanish democracy, Felipe Gonzalez, Jose María Aznar and Rodriguez Zapatero are all interested in silencing us.” He added, “unless a solution is agreed upon soon, the whole world is going to hear us during the next Spanish elections.”
One could speculate for days about why Sintel was sold and the reasons why Spain’s leaders have such close relationships with the Mas Canosa family, their company and the CANF; but what remains is the continuing 'silenced' struggle of the Sintel employees. Their faith lies in each other and the hope that their struggle will serve, at least, to scare the corrupt institutions which decided their fate, and hold the fate of many others in their hands.
Former Sintel workers campaigning for justice
Pablo Ouziel is a sociologist and a freelance writer based in Spain.