Cuba raises specter of hunt for a 'new Elián'
Andres Viglucci. aviglucci@herald.com. Published Saturday, July 15, 2000, in the Miami Herald
The Cuban government has formally asked the Clinton administration for the names of Cubans who have landed on U.S. shores in recent days, with particular emphasis on some two dozen minors -- raising fears in the Clinton administration that President Fidel Castro may be searching for ``another
Elián.''
NO NAMES
Immigration officials said they will not disclose the names, citing policies and privacy laws that restrict release of information about people who seek U.S. refuge.
U.S. State Department officials said the Cuban diplomatic note appears to be the latest wrinkle in a post-Elián campaign against U.S. laws and policies the Cuban government says encourage illegal departures from the island by granting special status to Cuban immigrants.
The Cuban government note, citing press reports, asks for information on more than 170 Cubans, including 22 minors, who had reached U.S. soil during the preceding week.
The presumption, one State Department official said, is that some of the 22 minors may have parents or guardians back in Cuba willing to demand their return.
``They are making an effort on this to search for a new Elián, to keep up, from their perspective, the excitement they had over Elián,'' the official said, referring to the 6-year-old boy who was the subject of a custody struggle between his relatives in Miami and his father in
Cuba.
Castro has explicitly sought to blame the Elián saga and other illegal departures from the island on U.S. laws such as the Cuban Adjustment Act and the so-called ``dry-foot'' policy that allows Cubans who reach U.S. soil to remain in the country.
Wednesday, Castro bitterly complained in a speech to the Cuban National Assembly in Havana that the United States was ``not interested'' in helping Cuba curb illegal smuggling.
U.S. BLAMED
``The government of the United States gives Cuba absolutely no information [and] is not interested in offering a single bit of information about these cases,'' Castro said after reading to the Assembly press accounts about recent smuggling incidents.
Castro blamed ``the murderous [Cuban] Adjustment Act'' of 1966 for the increase in illegal migration from Cuba. The National Assembly on Wednesday issued two proclamations demanding the repeal of the Adjustment Act and the Helms-Burton Act of 1996, which tightened the U.S. trade embargo on the
island.
One of the proclamations states that Washington ``has permitted the vile business of people-smuggling to flourish . . . and takes no effective measures to combat it.''
U.S. immigration authorities say they have taken measures to deter smuggling, including beefing up Border Patrol staffing in the Florida Keys, that have resulted in the arrest of half a dozen suspected smugglers in the past two weeks.
But they say they cannot release the names of anyone who is not criminally charged.
``U.S. law and Justice Department policy establishes a right of privacy for individuals and restricts the release of information without their permission,'' said Russ Bergeron, spokesman for the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Washington.
Life in Cuba is bittersweet for Louisiana jail mutineer
Herald Staff Report. Published Sunday, July 16, 2000, in the Miami Herald
CARDENAS, Cuba -- Little did Johnny Ponte Landrian know when he took hostages in a Louisiana jailhouse uprising last year that the freedom he sought would be this:
Life in a hut where light and rain pour through the wooden slats. Showers with a water-filled pail. Playing marbles on a street corner all afternoon because there's no work to be had.
In other words, life in small-town Cuba.
``If you're in prison the rest of your life, what choice do you have? said Ponte, 28, who left this island at age 9 in the Mariel boatlift and returned Dec. 20, 1999, in U.S. marshals' shackles under a rare deal to repatriate Cubans to their homeland.
Just a year ago, Ponte was a detainee of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, doomed to indefinite detention in an American lockup after committing a string of burglaries and a car theft.
He and other Cubans were caught in a legal limbo: ordered deported under immigration law because they were noncitizen convicts, but unable to be sent back to their homeland. While the Cuban government takes back migrants who have been stopped at sea, it doesn't accept Cubans who have settled in
the United States and then been deported.
So the inmates staged a revolt in the St. Martinville, La., jail and a surprising thing happened: Cuba welcomed them back. Earlier this month, a visit found the former felon coping with the daily struggles of adjusting to a system he never knew, in Cardenas, a Cuban coastal community best known
as the hometown of Elián González.
Ponte likens living in Cuba to being on probation. Everybody -- the neighbors, the government -- wants to know everyone else's business, he said.
In the space of a few minutes, Ponte cursed the town market for not having tomatoes for sale and then gave thanks for being in the village where he was born, far away from his former Louisiana jail cell.
``Sometimes I sit back and think, `I can't believe I made it,' he said.
Neither can his mother, Martha Landrian, a disabled hotel worker who lives on the outskirts of Hialeah. She is happy he's out of jail but worried he may not be able to adapt.
``He is from here. He was raised here,'' Landrian said from her Northwest Miami-Dade County home. ``Cuba is not like here.''
EARLY PROBLEMS
Ponte's troubles began early, at age 3, his mother said, when he fell from a second-floor window, bumped his head and lost consciousness.
From that moment, his attention span has been short.
He rarely paid attention in class at Booker T. Washington Junior High and Miami High and was essentially illiterate, she said.
He took out his frustration in the streets.
At 12, he started packing an automatic pistol.
He was initiated into the Miami gang the Latin Disciples at age 15 and was jailed within months. By 1995, he was designated a habitual felon.
Ponte was serving a burglary sentence in 1992 when the INS first ordered him deported and and had him detained in a Louisiana jail under contract with the agency. Ponte couldn't stand the idea: He pried open a jail window and lowered himself out with a rope, INS records show.
He escaped to Miami but wasn't out of trouble for long. In 1995, Ponte was arrested again -- this time for stealing a pickup truck and crashing into a Miami Police car as he tried to flee.
After serving two years in prison for stealing the truck and assaulting a police officer, he still faced the deportation order.
The INS indefinitely detained him for the second time in a Louisiana jail.
SPURRED TO ACTION
He steamed in his cell, fuming after the INS declined to give him a pass to two funerals in 1999: his father's and that of his 6-year-old niece who died Nov. 25 of heart problems. So he hatched a plan with a buddy to take over the jail's control room on the walk to the rooftop recreational area.
Their weapon: a drawer handle sharpened like a knife.
On Dec. 12, Ponte called his mother.
``Mami, I'm leaving here,'' he said from the Louisiana jail. ``If they do anything to me, I'll kill them.''
Martha Landrian had no idea what would unfold in the coming hours.
Ponte and seven others who joined the takeover initially demanded to be sent anywhere -- Libya, China, Cuba. The U.S. government contacted Havana, which in an unusual agreement accepted the men by substituting their names for others on a 1984 list of career criminal deportees that Cuba would
accept.
All had come to the United States during the Mariel boatlift in 1980.
Eight days after taking over the jail, Ponte and most of those involved in the revolt landed in Cuba and were immediately taken to a Havana prison. One, Roberto Villar Grana -- whose mother helped broker the deal -- was left behind in Louisiana to face state drug charges on which he was
subsequently convicted.
WARM WELCOME
The Cubans disappeared from the eye of the media and their future seemed uncertain. The Cuban government said only that they were being held pending an investigation.
But Ponte said he and the others were warmly welcomed as people who had outwitted the Americans, and as rare Cubans who wanted to return.
``You could tell they were happy in their hearts, he said.
During what was called a 46-day ``quarantine,'' doctors examined the men's blood and gave them HIV tests. Psychologists asked them about why they had risked their lives to stage the tense revolt. Cuban security personnel wanted to know just how the men had taken over a seemingly secure jail.
The freed inmates, meanwhile, had access to a basketball court, television and a 24-hour food and beverage service that allowed them the entree of their choice.
``It was nice,'' said Ponte, who added he does not keep in contact with the other inmates who were returned to Cuba.
The Cuban government gave Ponte two gifts, he said: a clean police record and permission to travel outside the country -- a privilege ordinary Cubans do not enjoy -- as long as the visit isn't to the United States.
The government also issued him Cuban citizenship papers that don't mention his 20-year stay in the United States, making it appear he never left. The papers, he said, even mention his Cuban elementary school, as if he had completed the sixth grade there.
PHANTOM LIFE
Ponte has gone along with that story ever since a patrol wagon dropped him off at his brother's Cardenas home in February.
Although he walks with the swagger of the American streets, he rarely mentions his phantom life.
He keeps up with contacts in Miami, though.
When a Herald reporter asked to meet with him, Ponte called up an old friend at the Miami Police Department, he said, and asked him to run the reporter's name through the Internet to make sure the interview was legitimate.
Most days, Ponte wakes up each morning in the bedroom he shares with his girlfriend, Lidia, and her two children, Yandy, 13, and Lidia, 3. It is the hardest part of the day, he said. His eyes open, and he begins to worry about how he's going to make money.
He doesn't have a job, per se. His English would make him a good candidate for employment at one of the nearby resorts in beach-town Varadero, but he thinks his 31 tattoos, which form a green carpet from his calves to his neck, would disqualify him.
He entertained teaching English, but said, ``I don't have no dictionary, no books.''
BLACK MARKET
Instead, he has sought out a living in Cuba's black-market economy -- a calculated risk. Before beginning work as an under-the-table VCR repairman and tattoo artist -- skills he picked up while in prison -- he headed to the library and memorized which crimes carried jail sentences and which --
such as black-market work -- carry a fine. He walks that fine line.
When there's no work, he kneels in the street and plays marbles with his 7-year-old nephew, his namesake, Johnny. Sometimes Ponte enjoys nighttime hide-and-seek games on the Cardenas rooftops or rides a horse to the beach. When it rains, he runs through the flooded streets in his INS-issued
shower shoes.
He aches for the Miami Beach nightclubs.
And there are some parts of Cuban life he flatly rejects. He refuses to get a ration card, which ensures each Cuban receives a certain amount of daily food at a reduced price, and instead buys fresher meats and vegetables with the few U.S. dollars he earns or his mother sends.
Ponte also hopes to live the American dream in Cuba. His goal is to save money, buy a plot of land, build a house and open a business -- even though Cuban law forbids private property ownership and puts heavy restrictions on private enterprise.
The man who caused an international incident with a handmade knife insists it can be done.
``There's no telling what I'm capable of, he said.
That's what worries his mother.
She fears he's going to ``do something crazy,'' perhaps hop a boat to Miami to visit her. They haven't seen each other in five years.
``It's coming. It's coming. He's not well in the head, she said, pointing to her temple. ``It's coming.
Cuban doctors ready to seek asylum in U.S.
By Sandra Marquez Garcia. smarquez@herald.com. Published Sunday, July 16, 2000, in the Miami Herald
In their first interview since defecting in Zimbabwe, two Cuban medical workers said Saturday they plan to go to the U.S. Embassy in Stockholm, Sweden, on Monday and make good on a written offer for asylum in the United States.
Noris Peña Martínez and Leonel Córdova Rodríguez, who arrived in Sweden a week ago, told The Herald that they have recuperated from the trauma of being abducted and jailed in Zimbabwe for 32 days and now ``we want to complete the [asylum] process we began'' and go to
Miami as soon as possible.
Expected to help sway their case: a written offer for provisional refugee status that was given to them by a U.S. immigration official while they were jailed in Zimbabwe. The two Cubans said they had been waiting to approach the U.S. Embassy, taking cues from United Nations officials.
``It appears the U.N. wanted things to cool down,'' Peña said by telephone.
Added Córdova: ``Our decision was and will be to go to the United States. . . . Undeniably that is the end of the story. We don't have any intention of staying in Sweden.''
Since their arrival in Sweden on July 8 on a two-month humanitarian visa, the two medical workers have maintained a low profile.
``In reality, we are disoriented,'' said Córdova, adding that officials had not placed any limits on their movements.
Gradually, the two have adjusted to their new environment, spending time ``getting rid of the fear inside, walking around, seeing the sights,'' Peña said. But being around crowds of people ``after so much time locked up'' seems strange at times, she added.
Although they are being careful, they are not worried for their security, Córdova said.
``Sweden is very safe. It's a very special place simply to walk, to feel free,'' he said. ``But I think it has been more than enough. We don't need to relax anymore.''
Coming to Miami, where Córdova has cousins and an uncle, and Peña has a second cousin and other relatives, is now a top priority, they said.
``I think Miami is the ideal place. We have people who know us. Our family is waiting for us,'' Córdova said.
Peña, 25, a dentist, and Córdova, 31, a doctor, were sent to Zimbabwe as part of a contingent of 152 Cubans on a medical assistance mission. Within weeks, the pair approached the Canadian and U.S. embassies to request political asylum and gave an interview to a local newspaper
criticizing the policies of Fidel Castro.
Zimbabwean soldiers acting with Cuban agents abducted the pair June 2 and flew them to Johannesburg, where they were nearly boarded on an Air France jet with a connection to Havana. They were later sent back to Zimbabwe, where they spent weeks in jail.
Peña said the bitter memory of their abduction in Zimbabwe, which occurred after the pair left a U.N. safe house to stay with friends, has made them more cautious.
They have found support in Vidal Fajardo, a Cuban dissident who is vice president of the Union of Cubans in Sweden.
The pair learned of Fajardo's efforts to locate them after reading an article published in The Herald.
Justo Fajardo, Vidal's brother who lives in Miami, said the medical workers' decision to get in touch with representatives of Sweden's 3,000 member Cuban community would help them make informed decisions and offer important emotional support.
Both Peña and Córdova declined to give a detailed account of their detention in Zimbabwe, but hints of anguish surfaced during the conversation.
``If we had been alone, I don't think we would have survived,'' added Peña, her voice choked with emotion.
Copyright 2000 Miami Herald |