Published Thursday, June 8, 2000, in the Miami Herald
Ordeal shames Cuba and Zimbabwe
Zimbabwe violated international law and acted beyond shame. The on-going ordeal of two Cuban doctors seeking asylum while in Zimbabwe holds lessons to be learned by those who value basic freedoms. First among these lessons is that Cuba remains a national prison and it will stop at nothing to
prevent its people from escaping.
Anyone deluded by the Elián González saga into regarding Fidel Castro as a benevolent father figure should pay careful attention to this case. Were it not for the chance intervention of an Air France employee, who relayed a desperate note from the two physicians that they were
being kidnapped and forcibly returned to Cuba, the world might not have been reminded of just how ruthlessly the Cuban regime is prepared to act.
We credit the office of United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees for locating the two doctors yesterday. But their fate remains dependent upon the whims of the Zimbabwean government, a rogue regime allied with Cuba in its distrust of basic freedoms. So it is critical that the UN and other
countries demand that Drs. Leonel Córdova Rodríguez, 31, and Noris Peña Martínez, 25, now receive the internationally protected chance for asylum that the Zimbabwean and Cuban governments outrageously conspired to steal from them.
Just days after the pair sought refuge in the Canadian Embassy in Harare, the Zimbabwean capital, and were sent away, two Zimbabwean soldiers toting machine-guns dragged the two out of their beds at 4:17 a.m., interrogated them for hours, then -- under the watchful eye of the Cuban ambassador --
ordered them sent forcibly back to Cuba.
The doctors reported their fate in the desperate note they slipped to the Air France employee before their connecting plane was to leave South Africa. And they protested so vociferously that Air France, fortuitously, kept them off the plane. Then the doctors disappeared for four days -- into a
Zimbabwean prison as it turned out, as Zimbabwean officials lied about their complicity.
That government's behavior has not only violated international law, it is beyond shame. The two asylum seekers were among some 150 doctors sent by Cuba's government to work in the African nation. Although Cuba's ``doctor diplomacy'' appears humanitarian to some, it is also a form of impressed
servitude that earns the regime hard currency and the doctors a pittance. In Cuba, none should forget, it's a crime to leave the country without the regime's blessing -- yet another violation of human rights.
When Drs. Córdova and Peña sought asylum, their lives were instantly at risk -- something the Canadian diplomats and the local UN representatives failed to appreciate. These defections were a black eye for both Zimbabwean and Cuban governments, which share anti-First World views
and nasty human-rights records. Clearly Cuba's regime fears that if the two were allowed to escape, they could easily set off a stampede of defections that would destroy the ``doctor diplomacy'' program. Three other Cuban doctors sent to Venezuela had sought asylum early this year.
In hindsight, Canada's local diplomats and the local UN officials erred in not extending immediate protection to the Cuban doctors. That lesson must be spread to other countries where Cuban physicians work so future asylum seekers won't face similarly harrowing ordeals.
Copyright 2000 Miami Herald |