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CUBA
NEWS
The Miami Herald
U.S.: Cuba to blame for held-up visas
By Pablo Bachelet, pbachelet@MiamiHerald.com.
July 18, 2007.
WASHINGTON -- The State Department on Wednesday
released more details of how Cuban authorities
were preventing its mission in Havana from
fulfilling its duties, citing containers
being held up for a year and technical staff
stopped from conducting needed repairs.
The actions, according to the State Department,
meant the U.S. Interests Section, which
acts as an embassy since both nations do
not have formal diplomatic relations, was
falling behind in processing visas for Cubans
wanting to leave the island.
Cuba on Tuesday accused the Bush administration
of deliberately handing out fewer visas
to cause instability on the island. The
foreign ministry said the State Department
had issued fewer than 11,000 visas in the
nine months ending June 30, well short of
the 20,000 quota. U.S. officials did not
dispute the number.
''They're not holding up their end of the
bargain,'' said Eugene Santoro, a spokesman
for the State Department.
The Cubans have retained 26 containers
with supplies for the U.S. Interests Section
in Havana for a year, he said, and Cuba
has refused to issue visas to U.S. personnel
who need to go to Havana to maintain technical
systems.
He said U.S. personnel who need to go to
the mission to conduct electrical repairs
have been waiting for visas for one year.
Cuba has refused to allow the mission to
replace local staffers that have left or
retired. In a separate statement, the U.S.
Interests Section said it needed to hire
47 staffers.
''We repeatedly raised these concerns with
the government of Cuba and got no response,''
he said.
Asked whether the United States should
resume the migration talks suspended by
the Bush administration in 2004 to discuss
these concerns, Santoro said the Cubans
refused to talk about matters that were
of interest to the United States.
The Cubans refused to provide a deep-water
port for U.S. Coast Guard vessels returning
Cubans caught at sea attempting to flee
to the United States. Havana also refused
to receive Cuban nationals that were being
returned to the island, known as "excludables.''
Legless Cuban survivor finally reaches
U.S.
After 15 years and the
loss of both legs, a Cuban rafter finally
arrived in Miami to tell about his harrowing
escape.
By Wilfredo Cancio Isla,
El Nuevo Herald. July 18, 2007.
Amado Veloso Vega lost both legs to a mine
as he tried to slip into Gitmo in 1992.
He had managed to crawl through the third
barrier between Cuban territory and the
U.S. Naval Base at Guantánamo when
the warning flares lit the night sky.
Amado Veloso Vega thought he'd stay there
till dawn, confident the Cuban guards could
not enter the mine-laden strip dubbed ''no-man's
land.'' But then he heard shots, and when
he tried to move, a mine exploded, destroying
his legs and flinging him 15 feet.
With no strength to shout, Veloso lay there
until he heard the soldiers approach.
It was the beginning of a 15-year odyssey
to get to the United States that ended this
week. Veloso, 36, arrived in Miami on Monday
with a U.S. State Department humanitarian
visa.
Veloso is headed for Louisville, Ky., where
the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops,
which sponsored him, has found him a home.
''I'm still pinching myself, because I
can't believe it. I'm in Miami!'' he said
this week at his Miami hotel. "I want
to laugh because I believe I suffered enough.
In Cuba, I was a walking dead man.''
The details of his horrific 1992 experience
with the mine remain vivid today. ''Strips
of flesh dangled from my legs. I was disfigured
and my mouth was torn,'' he recalled. "I
couldn't react, though I didn't lose consciousness
altogether.''
He'll never forget one man and what he
said. Vega, a short man in uniform, told
another that Veloso ''wouldn't make it alive''
to the hospital in Guantánamo.
''They started to play with me. They bayoneted
me in the hand and in the leg and then pulled
me off the fence,'' Veloso said, showing
his scars.
Veloso was taken directly to the morgue.
There, a doctor wouldn't give up, injecting
him with adrenaline. Veloso was revived.
He slowly returned to health, but his nightmare
wasn't over. For the attempted escape, Cuban
authorities sentenced Veloso to two years
of detention at his Havana home. A mystery
remains: The mine that did so much damage
was in Cuban territory, but at the time,
some U.S.-planted mines were in the area,
too.
Veloso said he tried to remake his life
but that even relatives and friends turned
their backs on him. He sought prosthetic
legs at a Havana hospital. "They concluded
that my accident was due to my attempt to
leave the country illegally and told me
the [prostheses] they had were for revolutionaries
and fighters back from Angola.''
Then he met activist Francisco Chaviano
-- now a political prisoner in Cuba -- who
arranged for the Cuban American National
Foundation to send him a wheelchair. The
chair was presented to Veloso in the name
of Jorge Mas Canosa, the organization's
founder. Veloso and a medical specialist
friend fashioned a pair of plaster prostheses.
Early in 1994, Veloso applied for a refugee
visa at the U.S. Interests Section in Havana,
but he says the office turned him down.
He then wrote to U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen,
who answered his letter and agreed to support
his application, as did Rep. Lincoln Díaz
Balart.
The association with Miami exile politicians
caught the attention of the Cuban government.
'State Security constantly visited my home.
'Who are you? First, Mas Canosa. Then, Ros-Lehtinen
and Díaz-Balart. What are you up
to?' they would ask me,'' Veloso said.
During the 1994 Cuban rafter crisis, Veloso
tried to escape on a makeshift boat, but
he was caught. Ensuing attempts failed as
well.
"I lost track of all the arrests and
fines. Something compelled me to look for
what I couldn't find in Cuba: respect for
a human being, respect for life and the
right to overcome my handicap.''
In September 2006, during the police raids
that preceded the Summit of Non-Aligned
Countries in Havana, Veloso made his final
attempt to flee. With 15 others he bought
a homemade boat made of aluminum tubes.
Police intercepted the others before they
arrived at the beach, so he decided to travel
alone from Cajío Beach in Havana.
'The boat was known as a 'tube of toothpaste.'
They are made of six aluminum tubes and
cost about $4,000,'' he said.
The U.S. Coast Guard intercepted him 27
miles from the Mexican island of Cozumel
and sent him to the place that reminded
him of his personal tragedy: the U.S. Navy
base at Guantánamo.
There he remained for nine months, working
as a bowling alley assistant. Part of the
money he earned he sent to his mother, wife
and two children who remain in Cuba.
''That people would risk their lives, like
Amado did, that they would risk everything,
clearly demonstrates the desperation of
Cubans on the island,'' Ros-Lehtinen, R-Miami,
told El Nuevo Herald on Tuesday.
Today Veloso wants to place flowers on
Mas Canosa's grave. ''When I look at it
from afar, I feel it was worth it,'' he
said of his odyssey. "It's a high price,
but it's the price of liberty.''
wcancio@elnuevoherald.com
U.S.-Cuba visa flap swells tensions
The United States admitted
it would not meet its obligations under
a 1994 migration accord, triggering a squabble
with Cuba.
By Pablo Bachelet And Frances
Robles, pbachelet@MiamiHerald.com. July
18, 2007.
WASHINGTON -- The United States will not
meet its commitment to provide at least
20,000 visas for Cubans to migrate from
the island this year because the Cuban government
has placed ''unreasonable constraints''
on its diplomatic mission there, the State
Department said Tuesday.
The surprise admission that Washington
would for the first time in nearly a decade
fail to meet a key obligation under a 1994
migration accord with Havana came after
the Cuban foreign ministry accused the Bush
administration of withholding immigration
visas in an attempt to destabilize the island.
The accusation touches a raw nerve as both
sides have often traded allegations that
the other uses migration for political ends.
The matter has taken renewed importance
now, a year after a sick Fidel Castro handed
power to his brother Raúl -- setting
the stage for the first leadership transition
in nearly a half-century.
''People who had their exit interviews
at the U.S. Interests Section in Havana
a month after me are still waiting in Cuba,
and I've been here almost a year,'' said
Lizette Fernández, a former Cuban
dissident who now lives in Hialeah. 'When
you call Cuba and ask, 'How's so-and-so?'
people say, 'Ay, chica, he's still waiting
for his visa.'
"Not everybody throws themselves to
the sea. People want to go legally.''
The United States has only awarded 10,724
visas in the nine-month period ending June
30, just 54 percent of the 20,000 annual
quota of visas agreed to in the 1994 migration
agreement, according to the Cuban statement
published in Tuesday's edition of the Communist
Party newspaper Granma.
A U.S. failure to meet its quota would
be a ''grave and unjustifiable'' violation
of the agreements, the statement added.
The visa flap appears to be the latest
volley in a diplomatic exchange that began
last year when the U.S. Interests Section
in Havana put up an electronic billboard
on the side of the building broadcasting
human rights messages. The sign infuriated
Havana, which quickly built a plaza of black
flags to block the sign and later temporarily
cut the building's water and power.
Now, the U.S. government said the Cubans
are putting up obstacles that thwart the
visa process.
The Cuban government has denied visas for
U.S. State Department employees to work
in Cuba and has impeded the hiring of locals
to fill 47 job vacancies, the U.S. Interests
Section said in a statement. The government
has also blocked the State Department from
importing materials and supplies to improve
visa facilities.
'FULLY COMMITTED'
'Despite the actions of the Government
of Cuba, the U.S. government remains fully
committed to the Migration Accords' goal
of safe, legal, and orderly migration,''
the statement said. "Unfortunately,
the Cuban Government has thwarted our efforts
to treat Cuban refugees in a respectful
manner due to the numerous constraints placed
on the U.S. Interests Section.''
In the past, U.S. officials have complained
that Havana was not giving all visa recipients
-- particularly doctors -- exit permits
to go to the United States.
The migration accords were designed to
discourage illegal crossings of the Florida
Straits by providing a safe way for Cubans
to leave, but Cuba now suggests the Bush
administration is slowing the process, presumably
to create more tension on the island.
FOCUS ON BUSH
The Cuba statement asks whether President
Bush's desire for change on the island was
behind the delay in granting visas, "even
though this provokes a situation of instability
that would almost surely also affect the
United States.''
A U.S. failure to meet its visa quota would
be a ''gift'' to placate opponents of the
migration accords, which the statement identified
as "the Cuban mafia and its representatives
in the U.S. Congress.''
Fearing a political or economic meltdown
in Cuba triggered by the transition, the
U.S. government has been preparing for a
potential wave of illegal migrants from
Cuba, with the Coast Guard leading interagency
exercises to intercept Cubans at sea and
prevent Cuban Americans from picking up
rafters. The Department of Defense is also
expanding its installations in the Guantánamo
Naval base in Cuba to receive thousands
of additional refugees.
''The immigration issue has been a conflict
zone ever since Jimmy Carter left office,''
said Manuel Vazquez Portal, a former Cuban
independent journalist. "When it isn't
the United States putting up obstacles,
it's Cuba.''
Cuba says U.S. deliberately behind on
visas
By Pablo Bachelet, pbachelet@MiamiHerald.com.
July 17, 2007.
WASHINGTON -- Cuba said Tuesday the United
States has fallen behind in the number of
visas allotted for Cubans, suggesting this
was a deliberate attempt by the Bush administration
to stir trouble on the island.
Cuba's foreign ministry said the United
States had only awarded 10,724 visas in
the nine-month period ending June 30, or
54 percent of the 20,000 annual quota of
visas agreed to in the 1994 migration accords.
A U.S. failure to meet its quota would
be a ''grave and unjustifiable'' violation
of the agreements, according to a statement
published in Tuesday's edition of the Communist
Party Granma newspaper.
The United States and Cuba have often traded
allegations that the other uses migration
for political ends, but the matter is especially
sensitive now, after a sick Fidel Castro
handed power to his brother Raúl
last summer -- setting the stage for the
first leadership transition in nearly half
a century.
The migration accords were designed to
discourage illegal crossings of the Florida
Straits by providing a safe way for Cubans
to leave, but Cuba now suggests the Bush
administration is deliberately slowing the
process.
The Cuba statement asks whether President
Bush's desire for change on the island was
behind the delay in granting visas, "even
though this provokes a situation of instability
that would almost surely also affect the
United States.''
The foreign ministry said the United States
should stop ''the manipulation of the migration
issue with political ends'' and criticized
Washington's policy of allowing Cubans who
make it to the U.S. mainland to stay while
returning those caught at sea, a policy
known as "wet-foot, dry-foot.''
Presumably, fewer visas could result in
more Cubans taking to the sea to reach the
United States.
Castro: U.S. falsely justifies war on
terror
The Bush administration
has failed to stop attacks against Americans
to justify its war on terrorism, Cuban leader
Fidel Castro wrote in an essay.
By Will Weissert, Associated
Press. July 16, 2007.
HAVANA -- Fidel Castro suggested Sunday
that Washington has deliberately failed
to stop terrorist attacks against Americans
because it needed ''to deliver a bang''
that would justify its war on terrorism.
In the latest in a series of essays that
Cuba's 80-year-old Maximum leader has begun
writing every few days, Castro seized on
Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff's
comments this past week expressing a ''gut
feeling'' that the United States faces an
increased risk of attack this summer.
''The government of the United States sees
and hears all, with or without legal authority,''
Castro wrote. "They can prevent any
attack on their people, unless there is
some imperial need to deliver a bang so
that they can carry on with and justify
the brutal war which has been declared against
the culture, religion, economy and independence
of other peoples.''
The accusation came at the end of an essay
titled Bush, Health and Education, in which
Castro claimed Cubans are better cared for
than Americans, and that his poor island
nation and its legions of doctors working
around Latin America have done more for
the region than the United States ever will.
Published in the Communist Party youth
newspaper Juventud Rebelde, the essay criticized
President Bush for suggesting that recent
U.S. initiatives have provided quality medical
care to Latin Americans.
''In Cuba, where healthcare is not a commodity,
we can do things that Bush cannot even dream
of,'' Castro wrote.
Castro criticized the USNS Comfort, a Navy
medical ship staffed by hundreds of American
doctors and nurses dispatched to treat the
poor in Central America, saying it will
"not be able to look after great numbers
of people.''
''Bush knows that he is lying and that
his tall tales are hard to swallow, but
he doesn't care,'' Castro wrote. "He
is confident that if he repeats it a thousand
times, many will finally believe him.''
He added that despite Washington's 45-year-old
trade embargo, "Bush is discovering
that the economic and political system of
his empire cannot compete with Cuba in vital
services, such as healthcare and education.''
Castro did not mention the recent U.S.
movie Sicko, in which filmmaker Michael
Moore compares Cuba's healthcare system
favorably to the United States'.
Castro has not been seen in public since
announcing on July 31, 2006, that emergency
intestinal surgery had forced him to cede
power to a provisional government headed
by his 76-year-old brother, Raúl.
For weeks now, he has published the frequent
essays, known as Reflections of the Commander
in Chief, in which he has touched on issues
including U.S.-backed plans to use food
crops for biofuels, complaints about Cuba's
economy and hints about why his recovery
from surgery is taking so long.
So when is Andy Garcia not the biggest
star in the room?
Jordan Levin, jlevin@MiamiHerald.com,
July 15, 2007.
So when is Andy Garcia not the biggest
star in the room? When he's playing with
some of the best Latin and jazz musicians
around, like he was Sunday night at the
Deauville Beach Resort on Miami Beach.
The friends for the concert called "Andy
Garcia and Friends" included virtuoso
jazz trumpet player Arturo Sandoval, who
presented the show, saxophonist Ed Calle,
pianist Paquito Hechevaria, singer Cheito
Quinones, and a battery of lesser-known
names that are some of the most stellar
quality Latin jazz musicians to be found
in Miami or anywhere.
Oh yes, and a quietly beaming Andy Garcia,
better known for playing gangsters (Godfather
III, Ocean's 13) than the bongos and cowbell
he was pounding for 500 enthusiastic people
at the Deaville's Lejardin ballroom. (The
show was originally supposed to take place
at the much smaller Arturo Sandoval Jazz
Club, also in the Deauville, but response
was so overwhelming that the concert was
moved to a larger space.)
"I came for Arturo Sandoval,"
said Dr. Maria Hankerson, who had changed
her flight home to Maryland in order to
catch the concert. "Andy Garcia is
the icing on the cake."
Garcia has turned his lifelong love of
Cuban and jazz music into a second career
that has brought major attention to some
of its best artists. He was instrumental
in the rediscovery of Cuban bass maestro
Israel "Cachao" Lopez, and has
produced (and played on) several of his
recordings. He was also executive producer
of the HBO biopic of Sandoval's life, For
Love or Country, in which he played Sandoval.
So this concert was a way for Sandoval to
return the favor. "These guys have
always embraced me," Garcia said on
Sunday afternoon before the concert.
It was also a kind of homecoming for Garcia,
who lived less than 20 blocks north of the
Deauville in a tiny Collins Avenue efficiency
apartment when his family came from Cuba
in 1960. He was five and a half. His older
brother was a pool attendant at the Deauville,
which hosted legends like Frank Sinatra
and the Beatles, and Garcia used to help
him out.
"I worked here at the pool, picking
up cigarette butts so they'd let me swim,"
he told the crowd. He picked up Coke bottles
on the beach to turn them in for a deposit
of a few pennies, saving up until he had
enough to go to the White Castle hamburger
stand nearby. And he had his musical revelation
when he was 12, at a nearby club on 71st
Street, when a sympathetic bouncer let a
12-year old Garcia and his buddies, listening
longingly from outside, in the back door
to hear Mongo Santamaria. "He was this
close to me, and the first thing he played
was Watermelon Man, which was a big hit
at the time," Garcia says. "It
changed my life."
You could see a bit of that boy in Garcia
as he kept looking admiringly at Sandoval,
a whirlwind of energy who played trumpet,
timbales, and even piano with laser intensity.
Garcia's first percussion teacher, Miguel
Cruz, was on congas behind him. At a table
in front sat the actor's family, including
his wife Marivi, several of his four children,
assorted siblings, nieces and nephews, and
his mother, who at one point waved to her
son.
The band played Cuban favorites - Quimbara
and Como Fue - and Latin jazz classics like
Night in Tunisia and Manteca. And Garcia
sat there beaming and playing, happy as
a kid to be in the center of the musical
stage instead of watching it.
Bebo and Chucho reunite for tour
Jordan Levin, July 14, 2007.
Cuba's greatest exile jazz pianist, Bebo
Valdés, and his son Chucho Valdés,
Cuba's greatest resident jazz pianist, are
joining up for a tour of Spain and an album
coming out next year. It is the first tour
and full-length recording to reunite the
two musicians, regarded as among the greatest
jazz pianists in the world. The eight-city
Spanish tour of the Chucho Valdés
Quintet and Bebo Valdés launched
July 7 in the Canary Islands and includes
Barcelona (July 22 and 23) and Madrid (July
26). A live recording will be released next
year on Calle 54 Records, the jazz label
co-owned by Miami's Nat Chediak, who has
produced recordings and concerts with the
senior Valdés, a renowned composer,
arranger and bandleader from pre-revolutionary
Cuba.
After a long separation, Bebo, 88, who
left the island in 1960 and settled in Sweden,
and Chucho, 65, who currently resides in
Argentina but has largely lived in Cuba,
played together on the 2000 Latin jazz documentary
Calle 54, for which Chediak was associate
producer. Since then "they've been
inseparable," says Chediak. "They're
very close. They actually think alike."
Cuban fencer was Pan-Am champion
Wilfredo Cancio Isla El
Nuevo Herald, July 14, 2007.
Renowned Cuban fencer Mireya Rodríguez,
who made history at the Pan-American Games
in 1963 in Brazil by becoming the first
Cuban woman to win a gold medal in a hemispheric
sports contest, died in Havana on Monday
of a heart attack. She was 70. Rodríguez
also was an Olympic finalist at the Tokyo
games in 1964 but earned no medal. In 1962
she won the foils competition at the Central
American Games in Kingston, Jamaica.
Born in Havana to a poor family, Rodríguez
made her living as a barber. She learned
fencing at a neighborhood sports complex.
As a reward for her accomplishments, the
Fidel Castro government gave her a house
in Havana, where she resided until her death.
But she became disenchanted with the political
system and gave up fencing.
In later years, she supported herself by
selling custom jewelry in Havana.
She is survived by an adopted son, Julio,
and sister Coppelia, who live in the United
States. Another sister, Carmita, lives in
Cuba.
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