By Juan O. Tamayo . jtamayo@herald.com. Published Thursday, March 30, 2000, in the Miami Herald
A senior Cuban scientist who defected last year charged Wednesday that President Fidel Castro is refusing to allow his wife and daughter to join him in exile, even though they are Spanish citizens.
Jose de la Fuente, former research director at the Genetic Engineering and Biotechnology Center in Havana, said his family is so desperate to leave that they sought asylum Tuesday at the Spanish Embassy in Cuba.
In a letter to Secretary of State Madeleine Albright, de la Fuente contrasted Castro's treatment of his family to the case of child rafter Elian Gonzalez and called it a ``vile retaliation against me for my escape.
NO FAMILY CONTACT
Spanish diplomats in Havana declined to comment on de la Fuente's case, and the scientist said he had not been able to talk to his wife and daughter since they entered the diplomatic mission Tuesday.
De la Fuente, 40, was considered one of Cuba's top scientists, heading the research and development programs at the government-run Biotechnology Center, the island's top biological research facility, from 1991 to 1998.
Castro has sunk hundreds of millions of dollars into an effort to turn Cuba into a biotechnology research power, and tried to protect his investment by banning scientists from traveling abroad to keep them from defecting.
The Biotechnology Center has been at the heart of suspicions that Cuba is trying to develop biological weapons, although U.S. officials say they have seen no evidence of any such programs.
CAPITALIST LIFESTYLE
The head of the biotechnology center for more than a decade, Dr. Manuel Limonta, was replaced last July amid complaints that he had been traveling abroad and enjoying the capitalist lifestyle too much. Limonta had represented the Castro government in meetings with foreign investors trying to
make deals for the manufacture or marketing of some of the biotechnological products developed in Cuba.
De la Fuente said he was fired from the center about a week after Limonta, accused of ``ideological diversionism and ``positions incompatible with this responsibility.
The charges appeared to stem from the decision by his Cuban-born wife, Karelia Deulofeu, 38, and daughter Gabriela, 12, to claim Spanish citizenship in 1991 and 1993 based on Deulofeu's Spanish mother.
They obtained Spanish passports two years ago and asked the Cuban government for permission to leave the island last Dec. 10 but were flatly rejected, de la Fuente said.
A QUIET ESCAPE
He defected Aug. 10 on a boat that took him to Key West. Friends said that like many other top defectors, he kept his escape quiet once abroad in hopes of averting Cuban government retaliation against his family. But now the Castro government has officially told his family that they will not be
allowed to leave Cuba.
``My wife and daughter have become hostages of the Cuban government, de la Fuente said in his letter to Albright.
``The Cuban government, currently involved in an international struggle for the defense of the rights of the father of the Cuban boy Elian Gonzalez, contradicts itself by denying my wife and daughter the right to leave the country, he wrote.
Copyright 2000 Miami Herald |