CUBA NEWS
The Miami Herald

Congressman: Bush hurting Cuban families

By Michael A.W. Ottey, mottey@herald.com. Posted on Tue, Oct. 19, 2004.

Rep. Bob Menendez, D-N.J., the highest-ranking Hispanic in Congress, told a Miami audience Monday that President Bush has ignored the needs of Latin America and enacted policies on Cuba that hurt families more than they hurt Fidel Castro.

''As it relates to Latin America, I can cover the Bush administration so-called policy in less than 30 seconds,'' said Menendez, chairman of the Democratic Caucus. "The Bush administration, in my view, has no policy on Latin America, aside from trade and counternarcotics programs.''

Addressing an audience at Florida International University, he said Sen. John Kerry "promises a vision that I hope to see become a reality. It is a new vision and a dramatic change in U.S. foreign policy towards Latin America.''

On Cuba, Menendez said the Bush administration punishes Cuban-American families, tightening restrictions on visits to relatives on the island even as U.S.-Cuba commercial exchanges have increased.

He said Kerry supports the U.S. embargo on Cuba but would push for a more ''humane'' policy and would provide massive U.S. humanitarian aid to Cuba through the International Red Cross, not the Castro government.

''We must act to create new additional external pressures to the Castro regime,'' Menendez added. "Under this administration, that's impossible. That's one of the key opportunities we have with Senator Kerry, who is committed to maintaining the embargo, but also commited to family travel.''

Cuban government pledges to guarantee jobs for young people

Associated Press. Posted on Mon, Oct. 18, 2004.

HAVANA - The Cuban government will guarantee jobs for young people, particularly those who perform military service, are handicapped or are coming out of jail, state-run media reported Monday.

"In a society like ours it is inconceivable that there is even a single young person not studying or working," Alfredo Morales Cartaya, the socialist government's labor and social security minister, said over the weekend, according to the official Prensa Latina international news agency.

The announcement to strengthen the job market comes the same month officials halted new licenses for some types of self-employment, from magician to masseur to restaurateur, as the government steadily reasserts control over the economy.

With the latest round of measures, Cuba promises to give young people finishing their military service at least two job offers, which may be within the armed forces, Morales said. Two-year service is compulsory for young Cuban men, and optional for young women.

The government also pledges to provide jobs for all young people coming out of jail, and improve job opportunities for handicapped youth.

It was not clear when the new measures would take affect.

According to Morales, unemployment in Cuba is down to 2.2 percent through June of this year. Last year it was 2.5 percent.

Cuban who shipped herself to Miami hero to Cubans risking life

Andrea Rodriguez, Associated Press. Posted on Wed, Oct. 20, 2004.

HAVANA - Sandra de los Santos became famous this summer when she left Cuba for the Bahamas and then, after a brief disappearance, climbed out of a wooden cargo crate in Miami. Her odyssey was one of the more creative ways that dozens of Cubans have made bids to reach the United States in recent years.

De los Santos was allowed to stay, though she has called home several times. Weeks after the journey, those who know her in Havana are still just as shocked as the U.S. authorities who were forced to acknowledge a gaping hole in border security.

"I couldn't even watch the videos people brought showing her being interviewed there," said Milena Chacon, who lives next door to De los Santos' apartment building in the central neighborhood of Casino.

De los Santos, 23, tucked herself inside a wooden crate that was flown by a cargo plane from the Bahamas to Miami. A DHL cargo crew found her curled up inside the crate, the size of a small filing cabinet, after workers unloaded it Aug. 24 at Miami International Airport.

As her family knew, de los Santos had traveled to the Bahamas from Cuba weeks earlier, though they didn't know where the money came from to pay for the travel. They also had no idea she had her eyes on U.S. shores.

De los Santos was raised by her 90-year-old grandmother, whom she has called frequently since her adventure began. Younger sister Oyaima painted a picture of a responsible, warm woman who helped keep the family together.

"She set up this home," said Oyaima, speaking from the family's apartment. "She is a very good girl, sweet and loving."

Evelinne Suarez, the family's doctor and a former schoolmate of De los Santos, said she was intelligent and reserved.

"Ever since she was little she studied really hard," Suarez said. "She's a survivor."

De los Santos had once begun working on a law degree but never finished, Suarez said. She said the woman's urge to leave was understandable.

"Why did she go? There are many young people who want to go. In Cuba, they don't see the fruit of their efforts, of their labor," she said.

Resources are scarce in Cuba, where salaries average less than $20 and things like cars, washing machines and new furniture are considered luxury items.

De los Santos is not the first Cuban stowaway, but she's among the luckier ones.

In January, 2001, two teenage Cuban military cadets tucked themselves into the belly of a plane they thought was heading to the United States. Their frozen bodies were found when the plane landed in London.

A dozen other Cubans, including children, made headlines in July last year when the U.S. Coast Guard spotted them floating on a 1951 Chevrolet pickup truck converted to a pontoon boat. They were sent back to Cuba.

Under the so-called wet-foot, dry-foot policy, Cubans who reach U.S. land are usually allowed to stay, while most picked up at sea are returned home.

In a second try in February on a 1959 Buick, most of the would-be migrants were repatriated again, though a couple and their 4-year-old son got a reprieve and were sent to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, for further investigation of their political asylum claims.

U.S. officials say fewer than 1,000 Cubans now reach American shores by sea annually. It is unknown how many attempt the risky voyage and don't make it.

Cuba claims that U.S. migration policy encourages Cubans to take to the waters despite sharks and sudden bad weather. U.S. officials, who deny the claim, have launched campaigns to discourage people from trying to make the crossing.

Mel Martinez | 'I'm bottom-line oriented'

By Gail Epstein Nieves , gepstein@herald.com. Posted on Sun, Oct. 10, 2004.

Wrenched from his family and his homeland of Cuba, 15-year-old Mel Martinez wound up with a foster family in Orlando, where the mother of the house served him his first-ever peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and asked, "What do you want to call me?''

''Mami?'' Martinez answered tentatively.

But Eileen Young -- who took in the frightened teen in 1962 as part of Operation Pedro Pan -- proposed using the Spanish word for aunt, tía, instead. Big tears rolled down Martinez's face.

''I realized what a relief that was,'' Young, now 79, said recently. 'Here's a young boy who, if he had to call us mami and papi, was willing to do that. His parents told him 'Whatever you've got to do, do it,' and he took that to heart.''

For Melquiades Rafael Martinez, failure has never been an option.

''My parents raised me that way,'' affirms Martinez, 57, the Republican candidate for the U.S. Senate seat being vacated by Bob Graham. 'It was the idea of, 'You've got to succeed, you can't fail,' and that involves sacrifices, accommodations.''

But after a bruising primary battle with his strongest opponent, former U.S. Rep. Bill McCollum, and controversial comments from his campaign since, some observers ask of Martinez's ambitions: Will he stop at nothing to get elected?

Character issues are new territory for Martinez, who cultivated a conservative, good-guy image during his years of legal, civic and political service.

His compelling life story helped: Martinez was separated from his parents for four years after leaving Cuba through Pedro Pan, the Catholic Church program that brought 14,000 unaccompanied children from the island in the early 1960s.

Thrust alone and penniless into a strange environment, Pedro Pan kids like Martinez lived in what he calls a ''sink or swim'' world filled with unfamiliar food, language and culture. Despite the trauma, a good many of them thrived and went on to great success.

Martinez's resume tracks his accomplishments: Twenty-five years as a top personal injury lawyer in Orlando, chairman of Orange County government, and secretary of the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development until last year.

In January, the Akerman Senterfitt law firm hired him for a salary of about $400,000 a year.

Martinez tells what he calls ''my incredible life story'' in nearly every stump speech.

It allows him to emphasize how far he has come from his poor, immigrant beginnings through a combination of smarts, hard work and networking, and it explains what he says is his prime motivation for public service: a desire to "give back.''

''The things I've been able to do with my life, I just thank this country for just providing me the opportunity, for being the kind of place where someone can land on these shores at age 15 not knowing a word of the language and be able to develop and grow, be part of the whole,'' he told a Broward group recently.

ON CAMPAIGN TRAIL

Comfortable with public speaking after years of trial work, Martinez easily hits his major themes on the campaign trail.

Foremost is bashing his Democratic opponent, Betty Castor.

He plays up his first-name relationship with the presidential family, tossing out references to "George and Laura.''

He stresses his bona fides as a ''compassionate conservative'' Republican who opposes abortion and gay marriage, favors tax cuts, supports the war in Iraq.

He highlights his Hispanic heritage -- one of the reasons White House strategists courted him to run so he could help the president attract the Hispanic vote. If elected, he would become the first Cuban-American senator.

Martinez's background is a big selling point in Miami-Dade County, flush with Cuban Republicans. Martinez racked up 102,441 primary votes in Miami-Dade, compared with Castor's 43,371 votes. The point spread was the largest in the state.

Martinez also appears popular with some non-Cuban Hispanics who relate to his immigrant experience.

MEMORIES OF CUBA

Get Martinez off politics to talk about his childhood in Cuba, and his whole body relaxes. The memories spill out -- of his house in Sagua la Grande surrounded by coconut and guava trees and singing tomeguines, a small bird.

Of afternoons spent fishing in his very own rowboat or traveling around to farms with his dad, a large-animal veterinarian, in their 1950 burgundy-colored Chevy.

Of special trips to Havana and Santa Clara to watch a professional baseball game -- Mickey Mantle was his greatest hero -- or to pick out a trinket at the Woolworth Ten Cent store, popularly called "el tencén.''

''I also remember sitting at the counter eating an American-style sandwich, like a BLT, for the first time,'' he said. "That was cool.''

SETTLES IN ORLANDO

Shipped abroad in the wake of Fidel Castro's 1959 revolution, the loving, secure childhood Martinez enjoyed had come to an end.

Martinez settled in Orlando with the Young family for his junior and senior years of high school. He lived with another family for two years while attending junior college.

Despite facing occasional bigotry, Martinez is forever grateful that he didn't wind up in Miami.

The Pedro Pan kids who settled outside of Miami ''Americanized and truly became bicultural, and I think that truly opened a lot of opportunities in life,'' he says.

Then his parents arrived with his sister, presenting a new set of challenges. Martinez became their bill-payer, their interpreter, their chauffeur, their grocery shopper.

''Mel became the father figure,'' Young recalled. "None of this was easy.''

Martinez still considers his exile via Pedro Pan one of the most formative experiences of his life.

''I'm a no-nonsense kind of guy, bottom-line oriented,'' he says. "I know what it's like to be poor, to want to get ahead in life, the bumps in the road because you're different from others. I know how hard it is for immigrants to make it in America.''

He has a soft spot for children, Martinez said, "because I remember those days when I'd look in the bleachers and every other dad was there, but I didn't have my dad there. So all of those experiences, out of the hardness of all that, does come some good. It makes you who you are.''

But just who is Mel Martinez? After several mis-steps by his campaign, even some Republicans are wondering: Is this the real reflection, and is he determined to win at any cost?

''Mel Martinez is one of the more driven, fire-in-the-belly candidates that I've seen,'' said Richard Pinsky, a consultant for failed Republican Senate candidate Doug Gallagher.

After the Aug. 31 primary, Martinez expressed regret for his advertising attacks on opponent McCollum and said he had not signed off on them.

The campaign had said McCollum, a 20-year Republican congressman with a conservative record on social issues, was ''antifamily'' and pandering to the ''radical homosexual'' agenda.

The attacks cost Martinez the editorial recommendation of The St. Petersburg Times, which wrote, "No matter what else Martinez may accomplish in public life, his reputation will be forever tainted by his campaign's nasty and ludicrous slurs of McCollum in the final days of this race.''

Then in September, a Martinez campaign statement referred to law officers involved in the seizure of rafter child Elián González as "armed thugs.''

Again, Martinez said afterward that he wasn't responsible for the ''inappropriate'' comment.

Martinez denies that he's willing to do anything to win.

''I don't think you're any better than the means you use to achieve your goals,'' he said. "I'm not so full of ambition that I forget ethics.''

But politics is a rough game that requires rough tactics, he said.

''Do you do an ad that's tough?'' he said. "Of course, or else you don't win. But at any cost? No. The fact is I ran an upbeat campaign save for one mistake. I think a person ought to be judged by a lifetime, not by one event.''

Charges against mayor dismissed

By Phil Gunson, Special to the Herald. Posted on Tue, Oct. 19, 2004.

CARACAS - An appeals court threw out the charges against a Caracas area mayor who spent four months in jail in connection with disturbances outside the Cuban Embassy in 2002. But the prosecution said it might take the case to the Supreme Court.

Henrique Capriles, of the opposition Justice First party, is mayor of the Baruta municipality in the Venezuelan capital. Although freed last month, he had been ordered to sign in with police once a week, pending a trial on charges that included kidnapping, property damage and invading private property.

Defense counsel Juan Martín Echeverría said on Venezuelan radio that Monday's ruling by three appeals court judges "eliminates the case. It no longer exists.''

But the prosecutor, Danilo Anderson, said he disagreed with the ruling, adding that the prosecution would consider further moves once it received formal notification of the appeals court decision.

Capriles, who is seeking reelection later this month, thanked the judges, who he said "had the courage to take a decision in accordance with the law, despite all the political pressure.''

He also insisted, at a news conference Monday, that his visit to the embassy during the disturbances had been at the request of Cuban Ambassador Germán Sánchez Otero.

During an unsuccessful coup attempt against leftist President Hugo Chávez in 2002, the embassy was surrounded by anti-Chávez demonstrators who threw rocks, thrashed several embassy cars and cut off water and electricity lines to the mission.

They apparently believed that members of the Chávez government had taken refuge in the embassy. Capriles is a critic of Chávez and his district is known as a redoubt of critics of the president, who on Aug. 15 survived a recall referendum.

Ironically, the judge who put Capriles in jail now occupies the same cell at secret police headquarters recently vacated by the mayor. He awaits trial on unrelated extortion charges.

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