Some long-time Cuba watchers expressed skepticism Tuesday over a report by a former Mexican foreign minister that Communist leader Raul Castro removed two top-ranking officials earlier this month because they were plotting to overthrow him with the support of Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez. 

Jorge G. Castaneda, who served as Mexico’s foreign minister from 2000 - 2003, wrote in the March 23 issue of Newsweek, which became public Saturday, that Deputy Prime Minister Carlos Lage Davila and Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque were concerned that Raul Castro would make concessions that would betray the 50-year-old Cuban Revolution.

But Robert Pastor, who served as a Latin America National Security adviser for President Jimmy Carter in the late 1970s, said he wrote Castaneda a letter expressing his disbelief in Castaneda’s contentions. “This is Jorge at his most creative,” Pastor said Tuesday.

And Louis A. Perez Jr., a Cuba scholar who has written 12 books on the nation, also expressed his doubts. “Where is this coming from?” Perez asked. “I operate with the idea that there has to be some standard of plausibility. Is there discontent in Cuba and was Lage seen as the heir apparent? Yeah, that’s the conventional wisdom since last year. But that there’s a conspiracy between Lage and Perez Roque? I don’t think so.”


Source: The CNN Wire