Former U.S. spy touts tourism
By Vanessa Bauza HAVANA BUREAU Posted November 4 2001
HAVANA · Philip Agee, former CIA agent-turned-travel agent, is hawking his tours to Cuba with a new marketing campaign:
"Stressed out from the world crisis?" reads the hypertext link on his travel Web site. "Give yourself a break in Cuba, the safest country in the world!"
A photograph of a couple cuddling on a secluded beach beckons the potential embargo evader -- click here. "I was going to say, `Stressed out from anthrax anxiety?'" he says of his newly designed site. "But I toned it down."
Agee does not tone down many things. His 1975 tell-all account of alleged CIA offenses in Latin America, Inside the Company: CIA Diary, included a list of undercover CIA officers and reports of subversive actions and crimes against leftists. The book made him famous.
In 1979, during the Iranian hostage crisis, he called the U.S. Embassy in Tehran and suggested the American hostages be exchanged for CIA files on Iran. Hours later U.S. officials revoked Agee's passport on grounds that he had threatened national security. Since then there have been allegations that Agee also had ties to the KGB and that he received a million dollars from the Cuban government after his book came out.
He calls the claim "one more invention" perpetuated by the CIA, which he quit in 1968 after 12 years with the agency.
"I wrote a lot of lies about Cuba when I was in the CIA, as did hundred of others," he says. "This country and the revolution have been maligned for 42 years. Only after I got out of the CIA did I begin to learn about Cuba and the revolution."
Showing Americans "the real Cuba" in defiance of the travel embargo is a way of paying his dues, says Agee. No doubt, he and his online travel agency, Cubalinda.com, are a perfect fit in a country where anti-CIA propaganda abounds and tourism is the No. 1 industry.
It is illegal for a U.S. citizen to run an unlicensed business in Cuba. Agee, 66, has no permission. Neither is he seeking it.
He started his company in January 2000 in a spacious fourth-floor apartment where he lives with his wife when they are not in Hamburg, Germany.
Last year Agee brought 135 tourists to the island. This year he was hoping to bring six times that number. However, like many other travel agencies throughout Cuba and the Caribbean, Agee was inundated with cancellations after Sept. 11.
That was when he hit on his new marketing strategy and began offering discounted trips, ranging from three nights in Havana for $150 to deluxe weeklong packages in Havana and the tourist playground of Varadero for $765.
"It just occurred to me that Cuba is the safest place around," he says. "It's not just safety either, it's an escape. A change of scenery."
Although Agee has been a staunch defender of Fidel Castro and Cuba's revolution, he criticized the growing schism between those who have access to dollars and those who subsist solely on Cuban pesos.
Asked about the Cuban government's prohibition against Cubans in many hotels and beaches -- a practice commonly known as tourism apartheid -- Agee recalled that one of his customers, a Cuban American, once became irate when Agee's staff was not able to accommodate her request to have her family stay with her.
"I can see why people would be upset by it," he said. "Particularly from countries where you can get anything you want if you can pay for it. That isn't the system here."
Vanessa Bauza can be reached at vmbauza1 at yahoo.com