nrh@inmet.UUCP (08/01/85)
I'm reading "Endless Enemies: The Making of an Unfriendly World", by Jonathan Kwitny. In it, he recounts the following story in a list of things that the US government has done to Cuba: A CIA team entered a warehouse in Vera Cruz, Mexico, in 1966 and sabotaged a mechanical sugar cane harvester on its way to Cuba. The $45,000 machine, which could do the work of 300 men, had been built in Thibodaux, Louisiana. A man bought it there for shipment to Mexico, not revealing that he was a Cuban agent, or that the machine would be transshipped to Cuba to evade the U.S. trade embargo. The CIA learned of the deal, and intimidated the Thibodaux factory manager into letting operatives take apart an identical machine and copy the operating manuals. With what they learned in Thibodaux, the CIA team was able to go to Vera Cruz, reverse all the gears on the machine, and substitute forged operating manuals for the real ones, to insure that any attempts to get the machine to work would be futile. When the machine reached Cuba, the Cubans--unable to buy machines in the U.S.--sent it as a prototype to the Soviet Union where twenty-six copies were reproduced, and shipped back to Cuba; none of them worked. All this infuriated Edward Lamb, of Toledo, Ohio, who owned the Thibodaux factory. A believer in free trade, Lamb figured the embargo had just cost $2 million in sales of his harvester. He traveled to Cuba and the Soviet Union to piece together the above story.