More Cuban Americans face tougher jail terms in Havana, but Castro's
Border Guard unit confesses to being overmatched.
By Mark Fineman, Times Staff Writer.
Los Angeles Times. Friday, January 5, 2001
HAVANA--Convicted smuggler Joel Dorta Garcia sat inside the forbidding
compound of Cuba's Department of State Security and showed little remorse while
describing the journey that killed a man.
Dorta was trying to outrun the Cuban Border Guard and reach U.S. waters
in 1999 in an overloaded 32-foot Scorpion speedboat when the cap blew off a
200-gallon gas tank on deck.
The 14 paying passengers screamed as gasoline soaked their legs. The
seas were rough. There was no moon. And the Border Guard officers speeding
alongside the boat were shouting for Dorta to stop, to save the men, women and
children on board from almost certain disaster and to turn himself in.
"I said, 'I'm not stopping,' " the Cuban American said coolly
in an interview room here last month, reliving that night. "I didn't force
these people to get on the boat. And I thought, 'If I stop, we'll capsize and
I'll never get home.' "
Now, Dorta most likely never will. The Scorpion did flip over, killing
47-year-old Sergio Maurilio Martinez. The Border Guard captured the 29-year-old
smuggler and saved the rest of his human cargo, who, according to prosecutors
and survivors, had paid $8,000 each for the crossing.
Dorta is among nearly a dozen Cuban Americans who have been convicted
under Cuba's tough new anti-smuggling laws and one of two sentenced to life in
prison in this nation's effort to deter the multimillion-dollar trade in illegal
migrants.
But the smuggling continues to grow exponentially, driven by the
yearning of about 1 million divided families, the Border Guard's limited
resources and, critics say, a U.S. policy that permits any Cuban who illegally
reaches American soil to remain. Virtually nonexistent before the implementation
of that policy in 1996, the smuggling of Cubans for profit has roughly doubled
in each of the past four years, Cuban statistics show, while scores of people
have died in failed attempts to illegally cross the treacherous seas between
here and the U.S. shoreline.
Those are among the findings of a rare look inside the Cuban
government's secretive Border Guard, its judicial system and its prisons--all
long off limits to outside observers.
For a week, Cuban authorities permitted a reporter to tour their aging
naval fleet, accompany a Border Guard patrol in a speedboat confiscated from
Florida smugglers and interview several of the more than 70 Cuban Americans who
have been jailed here for illegally transporting humans.
For the government of President Fidel Castro, the unique access was
meant to show Cuba's commitment to policing a trade that U.S. authorities
privately concede they are powerless to deter.
A Castro Campaign During Elian Episode
Castro's campaign against the U.S. immigration policy reached new
heights during the prolonged legal battle over custody of young Cuban castaway
Elian Gonzalez, who survived a smuggler's journey that killed his mother and 10
others in November 1999. The Cuban leader insists that the policy is a magnet
that draws economic migrants to their deaths with little or no official
deterrence from the U.S.
Cuban court records show that smugglers caught and prosecuted here
routinely have been sentenced to 20 or 30 years in prison since tougher laws
took effect in April 1999.
By contrast, thousands of pages of U.S. federal court records on file
in South Florida show that smugglers convicted for similar offenses in
Miami--even for those in which deaths occurred--received far lighter sentences
from U.S. judges.
"The problem is that the U.S. side isn't doing its part to stop
this terrible business," said Maj. Ernesto Hernandez Gomez, a Border Guard
commander. "The American government doesn't punish them. If they were doing
what we're doing, the number of these journeys would diminish very quickly."
Hernandez and half a dozen other Border Guard commanders interviewed
along the island's northern coast, where they patrol a 12-mile territorial
limit, echoed the frustration of many U.S. Border Patrol and Coast Guard
officers, who are responsible for stopping the smugglers after they leave Cuban
waters but before they reach the Florida coast.
Under the U.S. policy informally known as "wet foot/dry foot,"
Cubans intercepted by U.S. authorities at sea are sent home--an American
commitment enshrined in bilateral immigration treaties signed in the mid-1990s.
The Cubans in turn have agreed not to jail or prosecute those sent home.
But, in what Cuban officials have repeatedly asserted is a breach of
those accords, their nationals who reach Florida's shore illegally are "paroled"
into the U.S. and automatically get residency status in a year, although the
smugglers who bring them are subject to federal prosecution.
Privately, several U.S. federal prosecutors say the seemingly
contradictory policy makes smuggling cases difficult to try in South Florida,
where many judges and juries view Cuban migrants as political refugees.
The net effect, Cuban and U.S. authorities agree, is that the numbers
are on the rise.
Cuban Official Blames 'Fast . . . Easy Money'
The Border Guard said that last year it recorded more than 150
human-smuggling missions launched from Florida, each picking up at least a dozen
passengers from Cuba's northern coast. More than a third of those efforts were
successful, according to the Border Guard. The agency, an Interior Ministry
force with a mission similar to the U.S. Coast Guard, recorded fewer than 100
such journeys in 1999 and just 50 in 1998.
Coast Guard statistics show that, in the past year, as many as 1,000
Cubans were intercepted approaching the U.S. and sent back. But U.S. Border
Patrol records indicate that at least double that number made land, and a
spokesman said the Border Patrol arrested only a handful of smugglers in Florida
waters last year.
Cuban Border Guard officials conceded that their own lack of resources,
combined with the enormous profit potential in the smuggling trade, has added to
the industry's growth.
"It's fast money, and it's easy money," said Lt. Col. Ramon
Ramirez, the Border Guard's chief protocol officer.
Added senior State Security prosecutor Lt. Col. Orlando Soroa Clapera: "If
we had the capacity to intercept every smuggling boat that came into our
territory, there would be hundreds of U.S. citizens detained in our jails.
Conservatively, I'd estimate we have been able to catch not even 5% of them."
Although small radar stations ring this nation's coastline, they use
aging Russian and British equipment to monitor the shore and more than 4,000
islands and keys. There also are huge gaps in the radar net that Border Guard
officials conceded are known to smugglers who were born and raised in Cuba.
But those officials added that they concentrate most of their radar
assets on the coastal tourist resorts and industrial towns that are vital to the
economy, rather than the more desolate coastline frequented by smugglers.
To beef up its patrols, the Border Guard recently intensified efforts
to seize smugglers' speedboats, which are much faster than the agency's
decades-old 74-foot vessels. The Cuban authorities have dozens of these
speedboats and use them to catch more smugglers, though officials quickly added
that the boats have only a limited value.
"The problem for us is that, even if we had 100 speedboats or 200,
it won't help us much," said Ramirez, the protocol officer. "They
guzzle very expensive gasoline--98 octane. We can't afford to use these boats
anywhere near as much as we'd like.
"That's why our real effort is aimed at stopping the people on
land, to frustrate their departure before they leave. Sometimes it's as simple
as a boy telling his teacher he won't be in school tomorrow. We follow up on
everything. Because once they're on board, the people think they're already in
the United States. They become more aggressive, more defiant."
What is more, he stressed, the Border Guard has been under strict
orders not to use force to stop smugglers at sea ever since a boat sank during a
forcible interdiction in 1993 and a dozen people died. Instead, the Border Guard
pursues speeding smugglers, appealing to them through megaphones to stop, until
their boats either break down or reach U.S. waters. (see
The Sinking of
the "13 de Marzo" Tugboat - (CN) )
In each case of a successful flight, Cuban authorities fax the U.S.
Coast Guard in Miami details of the smuggler's boat registration, position and
heading--a rare point of direct contact between the two nations' forces. But
Ramirez complained that the faxes are rarely answered.
Replied Coast Guard spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Ron LaBrec in Miami: "We
do get faxes in from the Cuban Border Guard pretty routinely. If we're able to
act on it with vessels or aircraft in the area, we act on it. . . . Sometimes we
do, sometimes we don't."
Just who ultimately is behind the trade and who profits most from it
remain a mystery to the two governments. Investigators on both sides of the
Straits of Florida say the speedboat pilots are mostly pawns in a game in which
the major players, organizers and financiers are never caught.
Joel Dorta Garcia and other smugglers imprisoned here appear to be
living proof.
Dorta fled Cuba in a 19-foot wooden raft in 1994 and spent nearly five
years fishing lobster and living well on Florida's Key West. He insisted in the
interview that he ended up at the helm of the Scorpion only for the sake of his
wife and children.
He denied assertions by Cuban prosecutors and witnesses that
Miami-based organizers had paid him $45,000 for the July 3, 1999, journey,
claiming instead that he did it to repay the boat owner for a successful run
Dorta had made to Cuba the previous month to get his family out.
Dorta also said he was never given a chance to explain that during his
one-day trial here, where he said he met his defense attorney only minutes
before the opening gavel and was given only a few minutes to speak in his
defense.
But the young smuggler, who said he didn't know of Cuba's harsh
penalties before he was caught, insisted that he had no regrets; he is content
knowing that his family is safe in Key West, where his wife works in a coffee
shop.
When asked, though, whether repealing the wet foot/dry foot policy
would eliminate much of the smuggling trade, as Cuba asserts, Dorta shook his
head. As long as Cubans want to leave, he said, the business will thrive.
So what will it take to stop it?
"My answer," a hesitant Dorta replied with a wry smile, "may
have a great cost to me. Maybe I'll get another life sentence."
Copyright 2001 Los Angeles Times
Enlaces insertados por CubaNet | 