Yahoo! June 9, 2000
Two Cubans Visited U.S. Embassy
By George Gedda, Associated Press Writer.
WASHINGTON, 8 (AP) - Before an abortive attempt to forcibly return them to Cuba, two Cuban doctors in Zimbabwe sought advice from the U.S. Embassy in Zimbabwe on how to seek political asylum, a State Department official said Thursday.
The meeting May 26 was a week before the doctors - Leonel Cordova Rodriguez and Noris Pena Martinez - were picked up by Zimbabwean security officers and put on a plane out of the country. The doctors managed to escape repatriation with the help of a note alerting an Air France crew member that
they were kidnap victims.
On Thursday, Cordova and Pena were allowed to formally apply for refugee status in Harare, the Zimbabwean capital. They were part of a group of 152 doctors sent to Zimbabwe as part of Cuba's ``doctor diplomacy'' program.
During their visit to the U.S. Embassy, the two were told that a determination about obtaining refugee status would have to be made by the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees in Zimbabwe, said the State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The doctors informed the embassy that they had an appointment scheduled with UNHCR the following week.
Word of the visit to the embassy was disclosed in Thursday's editions of The Miami Herald, which cited an e-mail sent by Pena to Miami relatives the same day of the visit.
``Today I went to the U.S. Embassy and they seemed interested in the case,'' Pena wrote, according to a Herald translation. She said she was taking the ``decisive step'' of abandoning the doctors' mission in favor of seeking asylum.
Marc Thiessen, spokesman for GOP Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said the doctors could have been spared the kidnapping if the embassy had advised them they had the option of receiving temporary sanctuary until their refugee status was
determined.
``The lesson of the whole incident is, if a Cuban comes knocking on your door seeking asylum, give him sanctuary,'' Thiessen said.
Cuba Assesses U.S. Migration Policy
By Anita Snow, Associated Press Writer.
HAVANA, 8 (AP) - Cuba praised the U.S. decision to refuse asylum to Cuban baseball star Andy Morales, but on Thursday assailed American policies that Havana says encourage people like Morales and Elian Gonzalez's mother to migrate illegally to the United States.
The state-run media renewed its attacks on the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act, saying it lures Cubans hoping to live in the United States to risk sometimes deadly boat trips across the ocean toward American soil.
The government announced that 150,000 children would march outside the U.S. Interests Section on Friday to protest American immigration polices and continued delays in Elian's return to his communist homeland.
Morales, who along with 30 other Cubans was picked up by the Coast Guard off Key West on May 31, was repatriated Wednesday after U.S. immigration officials determined the 25-year-old third baseman did not qualify for political asylum.
Participants in a seminar on U.S. immigration policies aired on Cuban state television called the American decision ``correct,'' the Communist Party daily Granma reported. The seminar, aired Wednesday night, was not seen in much of Cuba because of a power outage.
``This baseball player will return to his home like the rest of those who have no pending problems with justice,'' Granma said.
But the seminar and the newspaper blasted the Cuban Adjustment Act, which allows Cubans who reach American soil to stay and apply for permanent U.S. residency.
``The true cause of the tragedy of Elian Gonzalez, whose kidnapping has moved the American public, is the Cuban Adjustment Act,'' Granma said in a front page story on immigration policies.
One in every five Cubans who sets off for the United States illegally by sea dies in the attempt, seminar participants said. They also estimated that 85 percent of boat trips to the United States are conducted by illegal immigrant smugglers.
Elian, now 6, survived a shipwreck that killed his mother and 10 others trying to reach the United States in November. Since then, he has been at the center of an international custody battle.
After Morales' boat was picked up, two suspected smugglers were turned over to the U.S. Border Patrol.
Branding the act ``arbitrary, killer law,'' Granma said that of the 399 Cuban migrants the U.S. Coast Guard has picked up sea during the first five months of this year, 290 were repatriated. It said that 612 other Cubans reached land and were covered by the adjustment law.
Morales hit a home run last year in a 12-6 victory by the Cuban national team over the Baltimore Orioles in Baltimore.
In Miami, Emilio Vazquez of the Cuban-American National Foundation - a top exile group opposed to Cuban President Fidel Castro - said he was disappointed by Morales' repatriation.
``Mr. Morales, being a well-known ballplayer, might be made to be an example to instill fear in the Cuban people that anyone who tried to defect or has an opinion different from the Cuban government will be subjected to human rights violations,'' he said.
Jose Cardenas, the Cuban-American foundation's Washington representative, compared the Morales case to U.S. justice officials' decision to return Elian to his father, who wants to take the boy home to Cuba.
Both cases, he said, show the Clinton administration has decided to ``whitewash the situation in Cuba, to pretend it is some sort of normal country, where human rights are abused not any more than in the next country.''
After his rescue, Elian was placed in the temporary custody of his Miami relatives, who are still fighting for custody of the boy. An April 22 armed raid on the Miami relatives' home reunited Elian with his father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, who remains in the United States pending court appeals.
Cuban Defectors Get Zimbabwe Asylum Hearing
By Manoah Esipisu.
LUSAKA, Zimbabwe 8 (Reuters) - Zimbabwe Thursday granted two Cuban defectors the right to an asylum hearing after failing to deport them back to Cuba, U.N. officials said.
The hearings for Leonel Cordova Rodriguez, 31, and Noris Pena Martinez, 25, were scheduled for Thursday, but officials with the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) could not confirm that the hearings had taken place.
Officials in Zimbabwe's Home Affairs Ministry were unavailable for comment.
``Irrespective of what the status determination procedure may yield, we are appreciative of the fact that the Zimbabwe authorities have honored their legal commitment,'' said Oluseyi Bajulaiye, the UNHCR's representative in Zambia.
The UNHCR had argued that under Zimbabwean and international law, the government could not deport asylum seekers to a country where their lives could be in danger.
Several Western envoys had backed the UNHCR's campaign urging Zimbabwe to hear the Cubans' asylum case.
The agency said the two Cubans were in relatively good condition and may be released shortly from a Harare prison where they were detained without charge following their attempted deportation last week.
Rodriguez and Martinez were sent to Zimbabwe in February as part of a group of 150 doctors under a Cuban scheme to send health experts to under-developed countries.
Thousands of Cuban doctors are working in hospitals across southern Africa, including Zimbabwe, Zambia, Namibia, Mozambique and Botswana.
The two doctors had been in Zimbabwe for about a month when they sought refuge at the Canadian embassy in Harare on May 23. The embassy has declined to comment on the case.
The UNHCR said the doctors were arrested by Zimbabwean security agents on May 24, a few hours before a scheduled asylum interview, and taken to Harare's airport where officials put them on a European aircraft with Havana the final destination.
But the doctors got only as far as Johannesburg. The pilot of the commercial flight refused to carry them any further after they slipped a note to him claiming that they had been kidnapped after they had denounced Cuban leader Fidel Castro.
South African authorities then sent them back to Harare, where they have been held without formal charge.
UNHCR said that depending on Zimbabwe's decision on the Cubans' asylum status, the agency would review the doctors' claim under applicable refugee legislation.
Cuba's Economy May be Down, But It is a Long Way From Out, Says Julia Sweig of the Council On Foreign Relations in the Latest Issue of the Milken Institute Review
Company Press Release.Thursday June 8, 11:47 am Eastern Time
LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 8, 2000--Sometimes the inevitable doesn't happen. Ten years after the collapse of the socialist bloc, the Cuban economy is still muddling through. Indeed, Cuba managed a 6.2 percent growth rate last year, one of the highest in Latin America, reports Julia Sweig
of the Council on Foreign Relations in the latest edition of The Milken Institute Review.
Fidel Castro's method of coping involves a clever mix of pragmatism and principle, Sweig writes in ``Hanging On.'' The dollarization of the economy and the inflow of private aid from Cuban-Americans keeps living standards above water. But, in deference to hard-liners who defend Fidel's
revolution, there has been remarkably little give on issues that would undermine the legitimacy of the regime.
``Over Chinese food in Old Havana a couple of years ago,'' writes Sweig, ``a retired Cuban intelligence officer told me that the heart of Cuba's policy toward the United States is to keep us `not too close and not too far.' There is an unspoken and unintentional complicity at work between the
two governments, each of which must contend with domestic constituencies that resist more accelerated transformations.''
Also in this quarter's Review:
Robert Mendelsohn, an economist at Yale University, says that incentives to reduce ``greenhouse'' emissions that existed when countries signed the Kyoto agreement have mostly vanished.
Rudy Penner, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office, offers straight talk on the budget surplus. ``We can carp all we want about the relative benefits of paying off the debt versus cutting taxes versus increasing spending,'' he writes, ``but it is like arguing over the choice
between chocolate cake and a hot fudge sundae.''
Larry White, an economist at New York University's Stern School of Business, offers a primer on network economies and how government should deal with them.
Bill Frey, a Senior Fellow at the Milken Institute, writes about the aging of the baby boomers and the schisms it will create between central cities and suburbs.
This issue's book excerpt comes from ``Incentives & Institutions: The Transition to a Market Economy in Russia,'' by Serguey Braguinsky and Grigory Yavlinsky (the leader of Russia's Yablonko political party), who suggest a new social contract in which those who want to do business in the New
Russia openly pay the state for protection against organized crime.
To view the magazine on-line, go to www.milkeninstitute.org.
About the Institute: The Milken Institute is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit, nonpartisan, non-ideological, independent economic think tank based in Santa Monica, California. Its mission is to explore and explain the dynamics of world economic growth.
Cuban Baseball Player Home After Defection Attempt
By Isabel Garcia-Zarza
SAN JOSE DE LAS LAJAS, Cuba, 8 (Reuters) - Cuban baseball player Andy Morales, repatriated after being picked up at sea by the U.S. Coast Guard while trying to flee to the United States, returned dejected Thursday to his wife and baby boy at their provincial home.
``Here I am back again. I'm OK,'' Morales, 28, told Reuters, minutes after reaching his modest house in San Jose de las Lajas, a small industrial town about 30 miles southeast of the Cuban capital, Havana.
Morales, visibly depressed at his failed attempt to flee the Caribbean island by boat and have a shot at making it into the U.S. Major Leagues, was greeted by his wife Daiyana Castillo, 20, and their four-month-old child Yandi.
The third baseman, who made his name playing for Cuba's national side in a 1999 home-and-away series against the Baltimore Orioles, chatted at length with a reporter but did not want to be quoted beyond a confirmation he was home.
His family fear he will now be banned from playing here.
Morales is the latest in a line of morale-hitting defection attempts from Cuba's amateur-only baseball players, eager to seek fame and fortune in the U.S. professional game.
Here, they play for the equivalent of about $25 a month, although the best players enjoy a hero status and state- bestowed privileges like a car or good house. In the United States, however, they could earn millions if they are good enough for the big leagues.
Perhaps the most famous recent defector was pitcher Orlando ''El Duque'' Hernandez, who left Cuba on a small boat in December 1997. He later signed a $6.6 million contract with the New York Yankees and pitched in the Yankees' triumphant win at the 1999 World Series.
Morales was sent back Wednesday on a U.S. Coast Guard cutter and was held until Thursday afternoon by Cuban authorities for routine medical and bureaucratic procedures for repatriated boat-people. Those procedures include a visit by U.S. diplomats from Washington's Interests Section here, who
monitor such cases in a bid to prevent persecution.
``According to the established procedure, he should return to his home,'' Cuban Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Aymee Hernandez said earlier Thursday, when asked about the case.
``If he has no penal matters pending, he has nothing to worry about returning normally to where he lives,'' she added, declining to comment, however, on his possibilities for continuing a baseball career in Cuba.
Both Morales' father and wife predicted that Cuba's state- affiliated sports' authorities will ban or restrict him in retribution for trying to abandon the island.
Havana insists there are no reprisals for repatriated boat- people, but sporting defectors have in the past been routinely condemned by the government as ``traitors'' and ``mercenaries.''
Hernandez criticized the media ``spectacle'' over Morales' case, saying it was no different than the other 41 people repatriated with him Wednesday, or the hundreds of others similarly treated under bilateral migration accords.
Under a 1995 agreement intended to stem the flow of Cuban boat-people, Washington agreed to send back those caught at sea, unless they were deemed at risk of persecution. Under its ``wet foot/dry foot'' policy, however, those who reach U.S. shores still normally gain the right to stay.
``Here the names are not important. What is important is that Cuba has fulfilled the procedure ... clearly established'' in the 1995 accord,'' Hernandez said of the Morales case.
She said the matter ``goes beyond Andy Morales'' and highlighted what Havana blames as the root cause for illegal immigration -- the Cuban Adjustment Act, a U.S. law giving preferential treatment to Cuban immigrants.
U.S. officials, and Cuban dissidents opposed to Castro's one-party system, say internal economic problems and a repressive political system are the main causes of the flow of migrants, rather than American legislation.
Morales had a mediocre season this year with his local Havana Province side, and was unlikely to make it into the Cuban national side going to Sydney for the Olympics.
His case comes amid the still unresolved feud over Elian Gonzalez, a 6-year-old boy who survived a migrant voyage to the United States in which his mother and 10 other people died but was then caught in a battle between Miami relatives seeking to keep him in the United States and his father. The
boy is now in Washington with his father, who is waiting for a U.S. court ruling that would allow them to return to Cuba.
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