The Foreign Ministry announced today that Gabriel Doron, Israel’s Minister in Havana, has been instructed to look into a report that El Fatah members were being trained by Cuban army officers on Cuban soil. The report appeared yesterday in the newspaper Yediot Achronot. Cuban diplomats here could neither confirm nor deny it and said they were awaiting word from Havana.
The Foreign Ministry said that if the report turned out to be correct, Israel would regard it as a hostile action and would consider a proper counter-action. Israel and Cuba maintain “correct”, but not warm diplomatic relations, as one source put it. They had cooled when Cuban leaders made anti-Israel statements during and after the Six-Day War. According to sources here, leftist circles in Israel supported Premier Fidel Castro with money and material in the initial stages of the Cuban revolution 10 years ago. Israeli experts were sent to Cuba to help in reconstruction, but that aid was suspended as a result of anti-Israel remarks by Cuban authorities.
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