CUBANET ... CUBANEWS

August 21, 2002



Cuba News / The Miami Herald

The Miami Herald. Wed, Aug. 21, 2002

Miamian entered Cuba to sign petition

From Herald wire services. Posted on Wed, Aug. 21, 2002

A Cuban anti-Castro activist disclosed on Tuesday that he traveled to Cuba three weeks ago to sign a petition known as the Varela Project, which asks for changes in the Cuban Constitution.

Javier de Céspedes, president of the Hialeah-based Cuban Democratic Directorate, said he used his Mexican passport to enter the island undetected. He was born in Mexico in 1965 to Cuban parents and now is a U.S. citizen.

De Céspedes said he signed the petition at the home of Oswaldo Payá Sardiñas, the project's main sponsor. The Miamian said he also signed a document called Accord for Democracy while visiting the Capitol building in Havana.

He described the accord as a set of guidelines for a transition to democracy in Cuba, "endorsed by the Cuban opposition both inside and outside the island.''

At a press conference in Miami on Tuesday, De Céspedes said he went to the island "to exercise the right of being a child of Cuba.''

''We neither provoked [the authorities] nor asked for their permission,'' he said.

The Varela Project is named after a 19th century Cuban priest active in Cuba's quest for independence from Spain.

On May 10, Payá and other dissident leaders presented a petition with 11,020 signatures to the country's National Assembly. The document calls for an island-wide referendum that, if approved by voters, would grant amnesty to political prisoners and give Cubans freedom of expression and association, free enterprise, electoral reform and elections within one year.

The Assembly has not officially responded to the petition, and Payá is collecting more signatures to press for a prompt response.

Group rehearsing play in Cuba

Herald Staff. Posted on Wed, Aug. 21, 2002.

The Spanish-language theater group La Ma Teodora is in Havana rehearsing Abelardo Estorino's play, She Looks White, for a three-day run in the Cuban capital beginning Sept. 12.

The project is cosponsored by the Council of Theater Arts of Cuba. After its Havana debut, the play will tour the provinces of Villa Clara and Matanzas.

Director Alberto Sarraín said his group plans to stage the play in Miami and later in Tampa.

''This work could be a small and modest contribution to normalize the relations between the two countries,'' he told the Communist Party daily Granma.

The cast includes two Miami-based actors, Pablo Durán and Michel Hernández, and four actors from the island. The visiting ''group of exiled artists will share a brotherhood with other artists on the island through this play about Cubanness and nationality,'' Sarraín said.

La Ma Teodora ran into difficulties in Miami in April when it tried to present a play featuring Cuban actress Verónica Lynn at the University of Miami's Koubek Center. At the last minute, the center canceled its contract with the group. The play finally went on at the Miami Light Project.

What a long, strange trip it's been for Cuban /

By Carol Rosenberg. Crosenberg@herald.com.

Tomás González, one of 20 Cuban refugees sent to Nicaragua from Guantánamo Bay in May, is now living in Miami -- ending an eight-year quest that included two ill-fated raft trips, jail time in Cuba, nine months on the U.S. Navy base and, finally, a swim across the Rio Grande to a month's detention along the Texas border.

The moral of his story? ''A Cuban looking for freedom will do anything,'' he said Tuesday, sitting in the Miami home of a cousin, recounting how he spent $1,500 in a monthlong, five-nation foot-and-bus journey from Managua to Texas.

In this city of refugees with hard-luck stories, his may not be unique.

But González, 37, is also the first of the 20 men to successfully ditch a complicated diplomatic deal that sought on May 1 to resettle in Managua the men who had been given sanctuary at the U.S. Navy base. Rather, he eluded border police in Nicaragua, Honduras, Guatemala and Mexico to secure his goal of a new life in Miami.

Three of the men remain in the capital Managua, trying to reach the United States through legal migration.

The 16 others are now in Immigration and Naturalization Service detention in Texas -- including two men who swam the Rio Grande with González -- likewise awaiting parole.

Fourteen of the men in Texas were for a time captured by Mexican authorities but have since been released and later turned up at the U.S. border in taxis, according to attorney Maria Dominguez of the St. Thomas University Human Rights Institute in Miami.

''They have been trickling in,'' she said, reporting that the last members of the group turned up at a border crossing last week and are applying for parole at an INS detention center at Los Fresnos, Texas.

GAINED PAROLE

González became the first to navigate the path from refugee to prospective green-card holder by receiving parole on Aug. 8 and taking a three-day bus trip to Miami.

He said he does not regret his eight-year odyssey.

''If I had known it would take 16 years, I would've done it,'' he said. "It was much more difficult to be 34 years in a big prison -- in Cuba.''

In part, the refugees' case illustrates the mixed messages of the wet foot/dry foot policy that emerged from the mid-1990s boat crisis that saw 60,000 refugees living in tent camps at Guantánamo across an 18-month period.

The policy was established by the Clinton administration to discourage Cubans from either sailing north to Florida or defecting to the base in a bid to reach the United States. Most balseros, or rafters, are intercepted at sea, and some who reach the base are repatriated directly to Cuban soil.

TROUBLE IN 1994

But González, a former soccer coach, said he first ran afoul of Cuban authorities in 1994, when he joined thousands of others fleeing economic hardship and went on a raft to Florida. Captured just off the Cuban coast, he was jailed for about a month and lost his job.

He then survived on the black market, slaughtering and selling pork in Pinar del Rio province, occasionally being hauled in by state security suspicious of his activities.

Finally, in July 2001, he set out for Florida with a friend on a 10-foot boat and was caught by the Coast Guard within miles of Key West. Because of his prison record, he was taken to Guantánamo, where he learned a new skill as a mechanic and sent money to family in Cuba.

Like the other 19, González said he agreed to leave Guantánamo for Managua on May 1, but always intended to move to Miami. ''I have family and friends here,'' he said.

The 20 were airlifted to Central America under a deal worked out between the U.S. and Nicaraguan governments that was credited to U.S. Reps. Lincoln Díaz-Balart and Ileana Ros-Lehtinen of Florida. But González and the others shunned their $350-a-month stipends and set out, in small groups, for the United States.

HARROWING TRIP

He described a sometimes frightening month-plus journey with Yorkis Aguilera and Eliecier Claro, Cuban army defectors who had swum to Guantánamo four years ago, in which they studied maps and posed as Nicaraguans to reach U.S. soil.

The scariest part, he said, was the Guatemala-Mexico frontier, where one day they saw unknown gunmen engaging in shootouts.

Advocates for the men claim they found Managua frightening, in part, because of Sandinista sympathies for the revolution of Fidel Castro. Among those remaining there is Ernesto Herrero, 26, who married a now-retired U.S. Navy petty officer in June and expects to immigrate legally to the United States soon.

Recognized as a Cuban defector, González said a Nicaraguan taxi driver told him: "If you are against Fidel, then you are against me. I'm a Sandinista.''

But in South Florida, he says, he feels at home. He hopes to someday bring over his wife and three children under a family reunification petition.

The kids, ages 5, 10 and 12, are from two marriages.

In the meantime, he says, he can't sleep past 6 a.m. and rises early to do chores like washing the car and cutting the lawn for his cousin or friends in Hialeah.

So, what does he like best about Miami?

''I like walking around without being disturbed, knowing that there's no one following me,'' he said. "I like that I'm going to do well in this country -- with God's help, some luck and opportunity.''

36 Cubans dropped on island off Tavernier

By Jennifer Babson. Jbabson@herald.com. Posted on Tue, Aug. 20, 2002

TAVERNIER - A group of 36 Cuban migrants landed early Tuesday on an island off Tavernier in the Upper Keys.

The migrants -- 22 men, 11 women and three children -- arrived on Dove Key near mile marker 91 at about 2 a.m., a U.S. Border Patrol spokesman said.

''All are in good health,'' said Cameron Hintzen, the Border Patrol's resident agent-in-charge in the Keys.

Members of the group said they departed Cuba's Villa Clara province early Monday night in a 31-foot, white speedboat with two outboard engines, Hintzen said. The migrants said they paid smugglers $5,000 each for the trip.

After they landed, ''one person swam to shore and went to a residence in Tavernier on the ocean side, and the resident called the Monroe County Sheriff's Office,'' Hintzen said.

Hintzen said Dove island is located roughly one mile from the Keys mainland.

No smuggling boat was spotted Tuesday by the U.S. Coast Guard or Border Patrol near the scene of the landing.

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