By Karen DeYoung. Washington Post Staff Writer. Thursday, June 8, 2000; Page A24
Two Cuban doctors who disappeared last week in Zimbabwe after announcing they planned to defect were visited yesterday by a U.N. representative at a prison outside the Zimbabwean capital of Harare, U.N. officials said.
The U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees was assured by the Zimbabwean government that the two men would be released shortly and would be allowed to continue the process of applying for refugee status, said Dominik Bartsch, the UNHCR spokesman in Lusaka, Zambia.
U.N. officials said the Zimbabwean government had told them where to find the men but had offered no explanation for their detention or comment on allegations they had been kidnapped by Zimbabwean security officials acting in concert with Cuban diplomats.
The Cuban government, in a statement issued yesterday through the Cuban Interests Section in Washington, said it was "not responsible" for the two doctors. It said they had decided to "renounce their legal status, becoming illegal aliens" in Zimbabwe. The Zimbabwean
government was in charge of the situation, the statement said, "because the doctors refused the assistance of the Cuban diplomatic mission" there.
According to Kris Janowski, a spokesman at UNHCR headquarters in Geneva, the doctors "are in good shape. . . . We haven't really asked yet what happened; our focus at the moment is to have them released."
Nine days before their disappearance, Cuban physicians Leonel Cordova Rodriguez, 31, and Noris Pena Martinez, 25, told a Harare newspaper they planned to seek political asylum in Canada and visited the Canadian High Commission, the embassy in Harare. Both were part of a Cuban medical mission in
Zimbabwe.
The U.N. refugee agency became concerned after the physicians failed to appear for a scheduled interview with agency officials in Harare last Friday morning. On Friday evening, the Geneva office was faxed a note from the two, slipped to an Air France official in Johannesburg, saying they had
been kidnapped and were being placed against their will aboard a Johannesburg-to-Paris flight with a connection to Cuba.
Air France refused to allow the doctors, and security guards accompanying them, to board the flight, and South African authorities sent the group back to Harare. The airline official who received the note transmitted it to UNHCR. In it, the two claimed to have been abducted at gunpoint by
Zimbabwean police early Friday morning. In the presence of Cuba's ambassador to Zimbabwe and other Cuban officials, they said, they were flown from Harare to Johannesburg.
In a letter to the Zimbabwean government Monday, UNHCR insisted that the two be produced.
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