Hanoi - Former Vietnamese prisoner-of-war camp officials Tuesday denied claims made by Senator John McCain, and supported by US government research, that Cuban interrogators tortured American POWs in Hanoi during the Vietnam War. Campaigning last month, Republican presidential candidate and former Vietnam POW McCain said fellow POWs had been tortured by "a couple of Cubans."
On Monday, Cuban President Fidel Castro denounced McCain for making the claim, calling it "a strange legend."
Vietnamese officials and former POW camp administrators supported Castro.
"I don't think there was any Cuban involvement in any camp for US POWs," said Tran Trong Duyet, who was director of Hoa Lo prison, known by the Americans as the "Hanoi Hilton," from 1970 to 1973.
"No Cubans ever came to the prison while the US pilots were there," said Nguyen Thi Don, former manager of the Hoa Lo prison museum. "It is incorrect for John McCain to have made such a statement."
McCain's claims are backed up by substantial US government research and by the testimony of other former POWs. When they returned to the US in 1973, POWs who had been held at a camp they nicknamed "the Zoo," separate from Hoa Lo prison, reported that between 1967 and 1968 several Caucasians with Spanish accents ran an interrogation programme there which involved severe beatings and torture.
The Americans nicknamed the leader of the group "Fidel." The longest-held US pilot, Everett Alvarez Jr, wrote in his memoirs that he surmised "Fidel" was Cuban because of his accent and his familiarity with Central America and the south-east US.
According to Alvarez and other former POWs, Vietnamese camp administrators became increasingly skeptical of the Cubans, and terminated their programme after it caused the death of an American pilot.
In testimony to Congress in 1999, the US Department of Defense said it had researched what it called the "Cuban Programme" from 1973 on, and had tentatively identified "Fidel" as a Cuban Interior Ministry official who had lived in the US in the 1950s.
Vietnamese officials routinely deny American POWs' claims that they were tortured or mistreated.
McCain is viewed positively by some Vietnamese, due to his advocacy in the Senate for improved US-Vietnam relations. But other Vietnamese, including Duyet, criticize his hawkish views on the war.
Duyet said he had met McCain many times during the five years he spent as a POW. "He was very extreme, conservative and warlike," Duyet said.
