Bitter Sugar

The 5,200-ton Cuban freighter Imias has been swinging idly at anchor between two locks in the Panama Canal since Oct. 3. Throughout that tune a U.S. Zone policeman hi a tiny launch has circled the ship with unceasing vigilance. The bizarre scene is part of an international legal tangle that involves money, politics, diplomacy, a violent coup, and howls from all sides directed at the U.S. and the federal judge who is responsible for the launch's vigil.

The mess began during the military overthrow of Chilean President Salvador Allende Gossens. During the coup, a Cuban ship left Valparaiso so quickly that its crew had no time to put ashore four Chilean cranes that were being used to unload sugar. The Cuban captain's haste seemed justified; his vessel was bombed and strafed before escaping to sea. Another Cuban ship laden with sugar turned back to Havana before it made port in Chile. In each instance, Chile's new junta cried foul. It contended that Cuba had to deliver 18,000 metric tons of sugar because the Allende government had paid in advance. If the sugar was not forthcoming, said the junta, then Chile was owed $8,000,000, including the cost of the cranes.

Cynical Marriage. Chilean lawyers filed papers in the U.S. District Court for the Canal Zone seeking attachment of the ships as they sailed through the canal. Judge Guthrie Crowe granted the order, but authorities just missed nabbing the two sugar-bearing ships. So the attachment was simply applied to the Imias, the next Cuban ship that happened along. Meanwhile, in the wake of the coup, a Soviet captain had also decided not to deliver his cargo of chemicals to Chile, and a similar legal action trapped his ship.

Seizures in the canal are not uncommon: the Cuban and Soviet ships were the 17th and 18th to be impounded this year under the legal theory that the presence of the property confers jurisdiction on the U.S. Zone court. In accordance with admiralty law, such actions can be ordered on behalf of claimants who show an apparent debt of the shipowner. The issue is then formally tried in court. Usually, however, the disputes are conventional commercial squabbles.

This time a Havana paper was soon complaining about "the cynical marriage between Washington and the criminal fascist junta of Chile." At a State Department hearing, lawyers for Cuba claimed that the Imias is owned by the Castro government and is therefore protected by the doctrine of sovereign immunity. In most cases involving commercial cargo ships, a claim of immunity is not ruled upon until after a full trial. But Washington apparently decided that in view of the politics involved, discretion was the better part of precedent. The State Department advised Crowe to let the Imias go.

The court duly deferred to the diplomats, and the Cubans were delighted. The Russians meanwhile worked out a political face-saver by agreeing to deliver to Peru for transshipment to Chile; their vessel was released. But last week, just before the Imias would have sailed, the angry Chileans put up a required $25,000 appeal bond, and the case is now before the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals. Thus at week's end the Imias was still stuck in the canal, where its captain says he will sink her rather than give her up. The whole episode has left Panamanian officials outraged. With U.S. control of the canal about to be renegotiated, they plan to cite the seizures in support of a demand that U.S. courts be removed from the Canal Zone.

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