Sinn Fein President Pressured to Cancel Cuba Trip Via NY Transfer News * All the News That Doesn't Fit GERRY ADAMS PRESSURED TO CANCEL CUBA TRIP TO AVOID US FRICTION' SINN FEIN PRESIDENT SAYS HE'S GOING ANYWAY. Reuters, via Yahoo By Martin Cowley September 6, 2001 BELFAST - Northern Irish republican leader Gerry Adams confirmed Thursday that he would go ahead with a trip to Cuba, although it could potentially damage his Sinn Fein party's standing in the United States. "I have a long-standing commitment to go to Cuba and I intend to go there,'' Adams told Reuters at the end of a meeting with reporters in Belfast, where he talked about tension between Protestants and Roman Catholics at a North Belfast school. He declined to give further details about the trip or say when it would take place, adding more information would be given out in due time. There has been widespread speculation that Adams would call off the trip, which the Cuban government had said he was expected to make in September, after the arrest of three alleged members of the Irish Republican Army in Colombia on charges that include training Marxist rebels. Sinn Fein, of which Adams is president, is the political ally of the IRA and has been working hard to build up its political standing in Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic, and to forge stronger ties with the political establishment in the United States. The U.S. administration has said it would "raise troubling questions" if it turned out that the IRA had links to Colombia's FARC, Latin America's oldest and most powerful guerrilla group. "There's no support for that kind of thing in the State Department, or in the Republican White House," said political analyst Brian Feeney. Late last month, the United States renewed its warning on Irish contacts in Colombia. "No one should be in any doubt that the United States would be greatly concerned about any assistance, information sharing, training or collaboration with FARC," a U.S. State Department spokesman said. NO HOME DAMAGE EXPECTED Analysts said the trip to Cuba would probably not damage the standing of Adams or Sinn Fein in Northern Ireland or the Irish republic. The party's support in Ireland comes mainly from young voters who do not share fears held over from the Cold War about contacts with communist Cuba and its aging leader Fidel Castro. "Castro is a cuddly grandfather ... and if he annoys the hell out of the Americans, so much the better," Dennis Kennedy, a political analyst recently retired from Queens University, Belfast, told Reuters. But the Irish American community, much of which is fairly conservative, could well take a different view, Kennedy said. Many Irish Americans "don't like to think of good, pure Irish nationalism getting mixed up with world revolution," he said. The Bush administration also has not so far shown the same interest in Irish politics as Bill Clinton, who invited Adams to the White House after the landmark 1998 Good Friday Agreement was signed, establishing Protestant-Catholic power sharing in Northern Ireland, and may take a harsh view of the trip. "I don't know why he (Adams) is taking the risk unless it's simply to appease his own hardmen within the organization to show he's not kowtowing to pressure from outside," Feeney said. But Kennedy noted that Adams is an astute politician and probably has gauged that there is not too much risk. "I think he was probably waiting to see how the Colombia thing would play out and whether going to Cuba would somehow confirm the worst suspicions of what was going on in Colombia," Kennedy said. "I presume he has now decided that that has subsided sufficiently." ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us 339 Lafayette St., New York, NY 10012 http://www.blythe.org e-mail: nyt@blythe.org ================================================================= nytire-09.07.01-07:59:12-22432