CUBANET ... CUBANEWS

December 28, 2001



Cuba News

Miami Herald

Published Friday, December 28, 2001 in The Miami Herald

Dissident family flees Cuba, lands in Miami

By Elaine De Valle . Edevalle@herald.com

Books are what got Berta Mexidor Vazquez and Ramon Humberto Colas Castillo in trouble in their native Cuba.

The husband-and-wife team, who founded the Project for Independent Libraries in 1998, have been persecuted by the Cuban government, their jobs taken away from them, their daughter kicked out of school and the family evicted from their home. Late Thursday, they finally arrived at Miami International Airport with dreams of a new start.

Welcoming them were more than a dozen supporters, friends and old neighbors who took them in when they were thrown out of their homes.

The family's troubles with the Cuban government began when they filled a small space in their Las Tunas home with books and called it the Felix Varela Library.

They meant to provide a place where neighbors could read forbidden works of literature, history books printed outside the communist-ruled island and magazines and other publications not available at state-run libraries and schools and discuss any subject outside of the government's control.

By August 1999, as more than a dozen other living room libraries popped up all over the island, their reading center had been raided by Cuban police, and the couple and their two children were evicted from their home.

Until last year they lived in the living room of Magdelivia Hidalgo. When she took the family in, her husband, Elio Peña, lost his job as an air-conditioning and refrigeration technician.

All jobs in Cuba are controlled by the government.

After Hidalgo and Peña came to the United States last year, the family moved in with Mexidor's family in a rural town called Amancio Rodriguez.

"They can't live in peace there. It's horrible conditions. It's a small town -- the persecution is worse,'' Hidalgo said.

One of the members of the welcoming party was Janisset Rivero, executive director of the Cuban Revolutionary Democratic Directorate, an exile organization that supports Cuba's independent libraries.

She said the group was going to find a home for the family for the next few weeks. Jobs would be found for Mexidor Colas and schools would be arranged for 15-year-old Talía and 10-year-old Zeus.

"In Cuba, the children were threatened and harassed at school,'' Rivero said. "They have suffered a great deal of repression.''

Rivero and other activists say the couple has been harassed for nearly four years and detained several times for days without formal charges. Colas was detained once for a week and his wife didn't know where he was, Rivero said.

Even as they left Cuba, the government continued to hound them, she said. They were scheduled to arrive in Miami at 11:45 a.m., but were detained at the Jose Marti International Airport in Havana by state security agents, Rivero said.

"All their papers were in order. They had already boarded the plane and were taken off the plane,'' she said. "That is the extent of the repressive design the Cuban government has had on them. They were kept guessing until the last moment.''

Rivero -- whose organization has found a place for them to live while they get their feet on the ground -- said state security wanted to separate the family and send some on a later flight to Cancún, where they made the connection to Miami, arriving at 9:21 p.m. on American Airlines flight 2158 from Cancún.

Guantanamo to hold terror prisoners

By Carol Rosenberg. crosenberg@herald.com

The U.S. naval base at Guantamano Bay, Cuba, once a detention center for thousands of Cubans and Haitians seeking freedom in America, may soon become a prison for men with a radically different view of the country.

The Pentagon is planning to house captured al Qaeda terrorists and Taliban fighters for an undetermined time at the base on the island's isolated eastern coast, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said Thursday.

Despite the logistical hurdle of moving at least several dozen presumably dangerous men around 8,000 miles from Afghanistan, Rumsfeld called Cuba "the least worst place.''

U.S. Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, R-Miami, said she supported the idea, in part, because it would underscore the naval base's strategic importance at a time when some members of Congress have urged returning the territory to Cuba.

"It's an excellent location,'' she said. "It gives new life to Gitmo,'' as the base is often called.

Because the base is not on U.S. soil, people detained there are not entitled to American residency and eventual citizenship privileges. U.S. officials began using it as an offshore holding station during a Haitian refugee crisis in 1991. During the 1994-95 rafter crisis, 50,000 Cubans and Haitians were housed there in a tent encampment after U.S. naval vessels had picked them up at sea.

The prisoners from Afghanistan are not expected to arrive for weeks, and Rumsfeld said there are no plans to stage military tribunals or trials at the base, which is home to about 1,100 members of the Navy and Marine Corps.

The biggest challenge may be getting prisoners from South Asia to the Caribbean. Some prisoners are reportedly being held on warships in the Afghan region. Others are at a U.S. military compound in Kandahar, Afghanistan, where U.S. forces built a stockade of sorts to house them.

1999 PLANS

At the Southern Command in Miami, the Pentagon's base for military operations in Latin America and the Caribbean, spokesman Steve Lucas said planners had pulled out blueprints from April 1999 -- when the Clinton administration had briefly considered housing up to 20,000 refugees from the Kosovo conflict at the base.

Then, the concern was how to make comfortable traumatized victims of civil war uprooted from a violent, cold climate. Planners scrambled to deploy healthcare workers and Muslim clergymen before the White House abandoned that idea.

In this instance, military sources said, the number of prisoners would be much smaller -- perhaps in the dozens -- and the logistics would focus more on security at the 45-square-mile base and less on the comfort of prisoners who are considered either members of a terrorist network or supporters of terrorists.

As of Thursday, the United States had an estimated 45 prisoners in custody. Guantanamo has detention space for about 100 people.

"All of this is pretty well-planned out because we have used it to house illegal migrant detainees in the past, Cubans and Haitians,'' Lucas said. "It will be a little bit of a different situation but a lot of the basic stuff is the same.''

SLICE OF U.S.

With an outdoor movie theater, bowling alleys, a McDonald's and a mini-mall, Guantanamo Bay is a curious slice of Americana on the edge of the Caribbean. As of 1999, 2,400 civilians were on the base, including the families of the sailors and Marines who manage the port and patrol the fence line that separates the base from communist-ruled Cuba. No updated figure was available Thursday.

The base is extremely isolated. Visitors can reach it only under strict military escort and with prior permission from the Pentagon, aboard special small shuttle flights that reach the base by a circuitous flight from the United States. On rare occasions, Cuban defectors get there by swimming through dangerous waters or by traversing a Cuban minefield.

There is also a gate between Cuba proper and the base that is sometimes opened for meetings between military commanders, or to repatriate Cubans who have been taken to the base.

Cuban leader Fidel Castro has long argued that the U.S. military occupation of the base is illegal, while U.S. officials say the base exists under a lease agreement that was part of a 1934 treaty with Cuba. Some Washington diplomats consider giving back the land a potential carrot for negotiation with a democratic Cuban government.

Ros-Lehtinen suggested Thursday that the move might raise the hackles of Cuba's government, but Rumsfeld dismissed those concerns.

"We don't anticipate any trouble with Mr. Castro,'' he said.

Copyright 2001 Miami Herald

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