Havana Orders Alleged Spy to Stay, Requests 30-Day Visa

                  By Steven Pearlstein
                  Washington Post Foreign Service

                  TORONTO, Feb. 28—The Cuban diplomat forcibly expelled from the
                  United States after being accused of spying remained holed up in the
                  Cuban Embassy in Ottawa tonight, apparently ignoring a deadline to leave
                  Canada. The Cuban government told him to stay and asked Canada to
                  grant him a 30-day visa.

                  Canada refused, and said it expected Jose Imperatori to leave the country
                  tonight on a flight from Montreal to Havana. As of late tonight, there was
                  no indication he had complied.

                  Acting on a U.S. request, Canada gave the Cuban a 48-hour transit visa
                  on Saturday, and he was flown to Montreal on an FBI plane late that night.
                  He had a reservation to leave Sunday night on a Cubana Airlines flight to
                  Havana.

                  But Imperatori never made that plane, staying on orders from the Cuban
                  government. It said that Imperatori wanted to remain in Canada for the
                  "time necessary to find an honorable solution" to the diplomatic imbroglio
                  that began a week ago when the State Department declared him persona
                  non grata and ordered him out of the United States.

                  To protest his expulsion, Imperatori also began a hunger strike, which he
                  has continued in Canada, according to Cuban officials.

                  In Ottawa today, Canadian officials were said to be furious at Cuba for
                  trying to extend Imperatori's stay and dragging Ottawa into the diplomatic
                  spat between Washington and Havana. Over the years, Canada has
                  resisted intense pressure from the United States to join the economic and
                  diplomatic embargo of Cuba. But relations between Ottawa and Havana
                  have soured in recent months over what Canada views as harsh sentences
                  meted out to critics of the Castro regime.

                  According to diplomatic sources, Canada today turned down Cuba's
                  request for a 30-day visa for Imperatori. Outside the House of Commons,
                  Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy said the government expected the
                  diplomat to "live up to the obligations" under his transit visa, which was set
                  to expire tonight just before midnight.

                  The Foreign Ministry did not return phone calls this evening.

                  At his daily briefing in Washington today, State Department spokesman
                  James P. Rubin said the Cuban government's actions in the Imperatori
                  affair violate its "international obligations" by not quickly and voluntarily
                  removing its diplomats from countries that do not want them.

                  The FBI alleges that Imperatori, 48, a vice consul at the Cuban Interests
                  Section in Washington, collaborated with Mariano Faget, an official of the
                  Immigration and Naturalization Service in Miami, in a Cuban intelligence
                  operation in the United States. Faget was arrested Feb. 17 in an FBI sting
                  operation. Imperatori has since denied he is a spy and said he wanted to
                  remain in the United States to help clear himself and Faget of the
                  charges--even if that meant standing trial. He and other Cuban officials
                  accuse the FBI of trumping up the espionage charges as part of a
                  campaign to impede the return to Cuba of 6-year-old castaway Elian
                  Gonzalez. Rubin today denied any link.

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