NewsMax.com. Tuesday, June 6, 2000
Two Cuban doctors seeking to defect have disappeared and are believed to have been kidnapped by Castro agents.
The doctors, members of a Cuban medical assistance mission in Zimbabwe who had publicly denounced Castro and sought political asylum in Canada, were forced from their home by armed soldiers hours before they were to be interviewed by the Zimbabwe government about their request for political
asylum, according to the Miami Herald.
Leonel Cordova Rodriguez, 31, and Noris Peña Martinez, 25, members of a Cuban medical assistance mission in Zimbabwe, were last seen in neighboring Johannesburg, South Africa, where Zimbabwean soldiers had tried to put them on a flight to Paris.
The two slipped a note to an Air France employee in which they wrote the word "KIDNAPPEDS" in large letters. "Please, we are very concerned about our lifes and the well being of our family," Cordova wrote. "The High Commissioner of the United Nations for Refugees was to
be informed [of] what happened and that we are traveling, kidnapped, to Cuba."
An eyewitness at the gate of Flight 993, scheduled to leave for Paris at 7:40 p.m., said the Cubans, flanked by two Zimbabwean soldiers, were crying and shouting, "We don't want to go back."
When the panicked doctors threatened to kill someone if they were taken aboard the Paris flight, the plane’s captain refused to board them and left without them. According to the Herald they were taken back to Zimbabwe and put in a jail, a United Nations official said.
Oluseyi Bajulaiye, U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees representative for Zimbabwe, said the two doctors were in police custody in Harare, the nation's capital, Monday, although he had not seen them.
His agency was negotiating access to the Cubans. "I am rather concerned about the way that the [asylum] application has been handled so far," Bajulaiye said.
The three-page letter, slipped to the airline employee, and an eyewitness account both told of the doctors’ terrifying abduction: dragged out of their beds at 4:17 a.m. by two machine-gun-carrying Zimbabwean soldiers, they were not allowed to pack their belongings but were rushed outside,
put in a jeep and taken to an immigration office. They were not allowed to call their lawyer, and their captors tried to force them to sign papers they were handed and provide their fingerprints.
The doctors were told they would be taken to the president's office but instead were spirited to Harare International Airport, where they were met by the Cuban ambassador, the Cuban consul and the chief of the Cuban medical mission.
They boarded an airplane and were taken to Johannesburg.
They had been in Zimbabwe for only a month when they sought asylum at the Canadian embassy. The next day, on May 24, they appeared at the Harare office of the Daily News, Zimbabwe's only independent daily newspaper, and Cordova told reporters: "We want to go to Canada and work there if
possible. ... We were sent here under the policies of Fidel Castro so that he can appear to the world as a good man."
Luis Zuñiga, director of human rights for the Cuban American National Foundation, told the Herald that Cuban doctors enlisted to serve in Third World countries are "slave workers" who work for meager wages while bolstering Cuba's image as a donor nation.
"Most of the world thinks these doctors are there voluntarily to help less fortunate people," Zuñiga said. "That is not true. The Cuban government exports these doctors as merchandise."
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