Published Saturday, June 17, 2000, in the Miami Herald
Radio host: Elián talk killed show
By Ana Acle. aacle@herald.com
Radio talk show host Gustavo Roca thought he had a news scoop: Guests Donato Dalrymple and Jack Thompson criticized the local legal team handling the Elián González asylum case.
Two days later, WQBA-1140 AM canceled Roca's two-hour Sunday show.
Roca believes the station fired him for hosting the two controversial guests -- who accused attorney Kendall Coffey of railroading the asylum case because of his ties to the Democratic Party and attorney Manny Diaz of traveling to Cuba for business.
``This reminds me of when I was in Cuba falsely accused of destabilizing the regime for [writing] false news,'' Roca said. ``It brings me bad memories and I can't believe it is happening here.''
But WQBA has another explanation.
Annie Lanz, program director for WQBA, said Roca's show, Vida en condominio (Life in a Condominium), was canceled because he deviated from the program's subject matter. Roca is a licensed community association manager.
CONDO CONVERSATION
``He was supposed to talk about condominiums,'' Lanz said. ``Why speak of something else? It had nothing to do with politics. It would be the same if he had suddenly started talking about fashion.''
Such is the world of Spanish-language radio in Miami, where reputations can be made or broken -- especially on a topic as sensitive as the Elián case.
Roca says his departure from the show's format resulted in a flood of calls. Soon, other Spanish-language radio stations hosted the duo -- and the controversy.
Diaz said he found out about the radio talk when his mother called him in tears. He went on the air to dispute the comments. ``I was personally very offended, because it's not true,'' Diaz said. ``It hurts, it divides the community, and it's irresponsible.''
Roca, who received no pay to do the show but advertised for private consultations, says he had spoken about other issues before without repercussion.
``Do you know what it's like to talk about condominiums for two hours?'' he said.
JOURNALISM CAREER
Roca, 66, began his journalism career in Cuba in 1962 as a photojournalist. He migrated to the United States, and, after saving some money, in 1989 began a twice-a-month Spanish newspaper in New York's Westchester County. It folded in 1996. He came to Miami four years ago, he said. Afraid that
now his reputation will be attacked, Roca said he must clearly state his position on Elián, the Cuban boy rescued at sea Thanksgiving Day after a boat sinking in which his mother and 10 other adults drowned. Roca said he believes the international custody dispute should be decided in family
court and that the boy should stay in the United States.
In actuality, Roca didn't break the news of the accusation against Coffey. Thompson's accusations had already been posted on the newsmax.com Web site, in letters exchanged between Thompson and Coffey, and even in Dalrymple's May petition asking the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta
to name a separate attorney for Elián.
Thompson has told The Herald he wanted criminal defense attorney Richard Sharpstein to take over the Elián legal case and sue the government for the raid that removed the boy from Miami and gave him to his father.
Herald staff writer Elaine de Valle contributed to this report.
Neighbors to launch ad campaign in Italy
Cuba and Jamaica will market a joint tourism package -- dubbed the "Reggae-Salsa Holiday'' -- to European visitors, according to Jamaica's tourism minister. The two Caribbean countries, which are separated by about 100 miles of sea, will begin an ad campaign later this year in Italy,
Tourism Minister Portia Simpson Miller said. The effort may later be expanded to Germany, the Netherlands and France, she said. The idea developed from a tourism cooperation pact signed between the two countries in 1997, Simpson Miller said.
Trade with Cuba benefits only Castro
Don Feder. Published Monday, June 19, 2000, in the Miami Herald
BOSTON -- An amendment to an agriculture bill allowing the unrestricted sale of food and medicine to Cuba is the camel's nose under the tent. The amendment, which could be voted on this week, is sponsored by Rep. George Nethercutt, R-Wash., who apparently wants to be known for more than breaking
his term-limitation pledge. In a New York Times column, he writes that arguments in favor of granting permanent normal trade relations to the People's Republic of China apply to Cuba as well.
Nethercutt contends that ``trade promotes democratization'' and that our trading with China helps us to resolve ``thorny issues [such as] human rights, religious persecution and national security.'' It does no such thing. We've been engaged in trade with China for more than 20 years, and Beijing
is every bit as repressive, ag- gressive and un- democratic now as then. I was against permanent normal trade status for China.
Still, it's possible to have supported China trade and logically oppose the Nethercutt proposal. Unlike China, Cuba does not have even the semblance of a market economy. On The Wall Street Journal's Index of Economic Freedom, Cuba ranks dead last among 154 nations. U.S. trade may not have made
the average Chinese freer, but it has made him more prosperous. Commerce with Cuba will benefit no one but dictator Fidel Castro.
Unlike Beijing, Cuba is broke. Between 1989 and 1997, its exports declined 65 percent. Since 1986, Havana has suspended payments on its $15 billion debt to Western nations.
TERROR IN OUR BACKYARD
Nethercutt's amendment prohibits the U.S. government from subsidizing Cuban purchases. The restriction is meaningless. The dictator can no more pay for food with hard currency than he can start his own space program. Still, Castro knows that once companies such as agri-giant Archer Daniels
Midland begin selling to him, even on a modest scale, the farm lobby will push for taxpayer support.
``Just think of the access we could have to the emerging Cuban market with loans, guarantees and credits,'' they'll plead. Castro awaits the day when his apparatus of state terror will be underwritten by his avowed enemies. He also believes that trade will lead to lifting the tourism embargo.
Then vacationing Americans can help keep his Stalinist regime afloat.
China is halfway around the globe. Cuba is within rafting distance of Miami. We have historic ties to the island and are home to 1.5 million Cuban exiles.
It's not that we don't care about human-rights violations in China, but communist brutality in our backyard is even more of an affront. Mao Zedong has been dead for 24 years. But Cuba is ruled by the same tyrant who was in power for most of the Cold War. During the missile crisis, Castro urged
then Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to use nuclear weapons against the United States.
Until Castro lost his Soviet subsidies, his foreign legion spread revolution from Nicaragua to Angola. The State Department lists Cuba as a sponsor of international terrorism. The regime is currently harboring nearly 80 fugitives from U.S. justice, including several cop killers.
Despite the embargo, the United States allows unlimited humanitarian aid to the island, provided it's distributed by nongovernmental agencies. In 1999, the Commerce Department approved the export to Cuba of an estimated $550 million in food, medicine and medical supplies.
But Castro wants this nation to do business with him directly. He wants to control distribution. (The maximum leader withholds food as punishment.) Amnesty International says Cuba's political prisoners routinely are denied medical care to break them. Castro looks forward to the day when the
Yankee imperialists toss him a subsidized lifeline.
Two Cuban doctors in Harare, who sought asylum at the Canadian embassy, are being held by the government of Zimbabwe. Castro desperately wants them back. If he gets them, they could end up floating face down in Havana harbor.
Castro is the type of thug that Nethercutt wants us to slip between the sheets with. The congressman alleges that trade with Castro will ``support American farmers and American values.''
Farmers are certainly familiar with the stuff of which that pledge is made. They spread it on their fields every spring.
©2000 Creators Syndicate
Dry-foot decisions on asylum all wet
LIZ BALMASEDA. Published Monday, June 19, 2000, in the Miami Herald
The incoherence of the Clinton administration's so-called wet foot/dry foot policy is told in the story of Francisco Abreu's wife and son.
Caught at sea, they were deemed deportable. But just months later, having reached American soil, they were welcomed in.
Same mother and son. Same story of oppression back home. Yet their acceptance hinged on sheer logistics.
The policy, part of the 1995 U.S.-Cuba migration pact, orders refugees intercepted at sea, even in U.S. territorial waters, returned to Cuba unless they can prove they face political persecution back home. Even many who do so are returned just the same.
Refugees caught at sea must state their case under dismal conditions, aboard U.S. Coast Guard vessels and without the benefit of legal counsel. It is a quick dance they must do before the inevitable: Nearly all are sent back.
If those same refugees were to reach dry land, however, they are home free.
Abreu, a Miami electrical engineer, brought his plea to immigration attorney William Sánchez last August. He had learned from relatives in Cuba that his wife, Liset Llerena, and their 4-year-old son, Franco, had fled the island on a boat. He heard the Coast Guard had stopped a similar
vessel three miles off Key Largo.
Desperate, Abreu wanted to know if his family was on that boat.
Sánchez got nowhere with Coast Guard and Immigration and Naturalization Service officials, who refused to reveal the names of the intercepted refugees. So the lawyer filed a class action suit in federal court, hoping to stop the government from repatriating the Cubans. He argued that
refugees picked up in U.S. territorial waters should be afforded the same rights to hearings as they would on dry land.
After all, the U.S. government makes no such distinctions when it nabs drug boats or arms-laden vessels. Those suspects get lawyers and their day in court. Why not the refugees?
U.S. District Senior Judge William M. Hoeveler asked Sánchez for more case law regarding the release of the names. The attorney came back the next day with a U.S. Supreme Court precedent.
But it was too late. The Coast Guard had returned the boat, which indeed carried Abreu's family.
The same migration pact that allowed the repatriation of Liset and young Franco forbids Cuba from persecuting returning refugees. That's the deal. Of course, what really happens is another story.
``When they got back to Cuba, the first thing the state security did was threaten them. They tossed a bar of soap at my son and told him to scrub off the stench of the enemy,'' says Abreu, 34, a U.S. resident who came to this country legally in 1996.
He says his wife and son were taken to a detention cell with no bed and kept there until state security agents from their central mountain town, Cumanayagua, came to get them. When they arrived in their town, they were taken to the neighborhood Committee for Defense of the Revolution, marking
them as intended escapees.
After that, state security continued to harass her. Liset, a physics teacher, was not allowed to work.
``They were making her life impossible,'' says Abreu.
In December, they tried leaving again. This time they were intercepted by Cuban border officials, who took their supplies and detained them.
Undeterred, Liset took her son in March and boarded yet another boat. This time, they made it to Marathon.
These same refugees who had been rejected as ``wet foots'' were allowed to stay, now that they had reached dry U.S. soil and the safe harbor of the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act.
Reunited with her husband, Liset, 29, is now studying to be a nurse's assistant. Their son just graduated from kindergarten.
``He's singing in English,'' Abreu proudly reports.
So where's the logic here?
There is none. The wet/dry policy sets up a blatant contradiction in the way the administration handles asylum cases.
Critical issues affecting the lives of refugees are glossed over at sea, then ruled upon by some faceless functionary in Washington, D.C. Where is the follow-up? Where is the accountability? Where is the access to counsel?
``What's the point in interviewing them at sea if you're going to deny more than 90 percent of them? Yet, if they make it, they're in. So which part of the process is flawed? One of them has got to be,'' says attorney Sánchez.
In his suit, Sánchez argued his client's family should be granted an asylum hearing before a proper tribunal because they were intercepted in U.S. waters.
He also argued the policy contradicts the congressional act that, for 34 years, has been granting protection to Cubans fleeing the Communist dictatorship.
``How could the executive branch contravene congressional intent?'' he asked.
Last week, in the first ruling on the wet/dry policy, the judge tossed out the lawsuit, saying Abreu cannot challenge the power of the executive branch.
That ruling does not reinforce U.S. law. It only reinforces bad policy, one that was spawned in irony: On one hand, the Clinton administration embargoes Cuba for its abysmal human rights record.
Yet it deports refugees to that same condemned nation.
In the process, it has generated a booming smuggling industry.
``It's schizophrenic,'' concludes Sánchez, who has not decided if he will file an appeal.
Another unfavorable verdict could prove worse for refugees, making bad law at a higher level.
Copyright 2000 Miami Herald |