Cuban Doctors Freed From Jail in Zimbabwe
By Karen DeYoung. The Washington Post. Washington Post Staff Writer. Friday, June 9, 2000; Page A28
Two Cuban doctors who say they were abducted and imprisoned in Zimbabwe after they tried to defect were allowed to apply formally for refugee status yesterday, the office of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees said.
Leonel Cordova Rodriguez, 31, and Noris Pena Martinez, 25, were released from the prison where they had been held after they thwarted an attempt to send them home last Friday. They were interviewed by Zimbabwe's refugee eligibility committee, the first step toward attaining political asylum in a
third country. Dominik Bartsch, the spokesman for the U.N. refugee agency in neighboring Lusaka, Zambia, said it was expected that their status would be resolved quickly.
Bartsch said the doctors were in good condition and had been moved from a prison outside Harare to a less restricted facility in the capital, although they were still technically in Zimbabwean government custody.
The two disappeared last Friday morning, nine days after publicly denouncing the Cuban government and declaring their intention to seek political asylum in Canada. Both were members of a medical team in Zimbabwe, among thousands of Cuban doctors their government sends to poor countries on aid
missions.
Hours after they vanished, the doctors appeared at the Johannesburg airport, where Zimbabwean officials attempted to place them aboard an Air France flight bound for Paris, with a connection to Cuba.
The plan was thwarted when the doctors slipped a note to Air France officials saying they had been kidnapped by Zimbabwean police, in the presence of Cuban diplomats, who were attempting to send them back to Havana. South African authorities forced the group to fly back to Harare, and Air France
sent a copy of the note to the headquarters of the U.N. refugee agency in Geneva. Despite repeated U.N. queries, it was not until Wednesday that Zimbabwe acknowledged that the two were in a local prison and allowed U.N. officials to visit them.
In a statement yesterday, the refugee agency described what had happened to the doctors as "attempted deportation to Cuba."
Zimbabwean government spokesman George Charamba said the two were seized because they had left a refugee holding center, where they were sent after their initial application, to stay with a friend, the Associated Press reported. The U.N. agency said the doctors did not realize they were not
allowed to leave the refugee center, but noted that Zimbabwe is a signatory to international conventions that require it to protect any applicant for refugee status.
In Havana, the Associated Press reported that a Cuban Foreign Ministry spokeswoman denied involvement in the attempt to repatriate the two doctors forcibly and said that Zimbabwe had the right to make such decisions.
"Cuba had nothing to do with that," Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Aymee Hernandez said. Cuban diplomats, she said, "don't have any authority to extract people from one country and take them to another."
Hernandez accused the two defectors of "embarrassing moral conduct" in their attempts to obtain political asylum. She said they had committed no crime in Cuba, but "they have failed to fulfill the obligations of their work . . . as well as the labor and migratory regulations of
this brother nation." As a result, she said, "it corresponds to the authorities of Zimbabwe to adopt the decisions that they deem pertinent."
Food for Cuba
Friday, June 9, 2000; Page A32
THE DEBATE over U.S. policy toward Cuba has been transformed by Elian Gonzalez. Public opinion is running strongly against the Cuban American community because of the insistence of so many in Miami that the little castaway remain with his relatives instead of going back to his father in Cuba.
Many Republican members of Congress feel politically liberated to buck their party leaders and support an end to the ban on the commercial sale of food and medicine to Cuba.
The China trade debate also has played a role. The Clinton administration advocates trade with another Communist country that violates human rights as much or more than Cuba does, the argument goes, and it does so on the theory that this will lead to China's gradual political liberalization. So
why not Cuba? Fair question. But China's recent history by no means bears out the administration's theory, and is foreseeably even less likely to apply in Cuba. Still controlled by a micromanaging dictator, Cuba has not permitted nearly the degree of market freedom that China has; consequently,
there are even fewer social spaces through which trade could smuggle democracy.
The better reason to support sales of food and medicine has to do with U.S. ability to mobilize diplomatic support and international opinion in opposition to the continued denial of basic freedoms in Cuba. A policy of total embargo isolates the United States, making it more difficult to enlist
Canada, Latin America and Europe in such a campaign--despite their own differences with Mr. Castro on both human rights and economic issues. Removing the ban on food and medicine would change that political equation without giving up all U.S. leverage.
The change would likely have little practical impact on daily life in Cuba, nor would it help U.S. farmers as much as their congressmen are claiming in an election year. Under current U.S. policy, certain sales and donations are already permitted--not to mention up to $1 billion in cash
remittances. In the first half of 1999, the Commerce Department authorized the shipment of $450 million worth of food donations to Cuba, channeled through families and the Roman Catholic Church's Caritas relief agency. It's unclear that Cuba, an economic basket case thanks mostly to years of
mismanagement, could scrape up the hard currency to afford huge new quantities commercially. And much food and medicine bought by the Cuban state would be used to supply its dollars-earning hotels and medical facilities for foreigners only.
But if only to change the subject, lifting the ban makes sense. In its most recent report on Cuba, Human Rights Watch noted that Cuban political prisoners commonly suffer from a lack of food and, if they protest their treatment, can expect to be denied medical attention. The more attention
focused on realities like those, the better.
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