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Cuban diplomat visits Miami to plan talks
Dialogue is a hot issue among exiles
By Andrea Elliott. aelliott@herald.com. Posted on Wed, Feb.
05, 2003 in The
Miami Herald.
Cuba's top diplomat in the United States came to Miami this week to organize
a dialogue between Cuban exiles and officials in Cuba -- a signal that the Cuban
government wants to strengthen relations with Miami's Cuban Americans, hundreds
of whom are expected to attend the conference.
Dagoberto Rodríguez, chief of the Cuban Interests Section in
Washington, D.C., met with more than 100 Cuban exiles Monday to gather ideas for
the Castro regime's third ''Nation and Emigration'' conference in April.
The conference will be an ''open and respectful dialogue about the needs''
of Cuban exiles, said Juan Hernandez Acen, a spokesman for the Cuban Interests
Section.
It will address the need for easier travel between Cuba and the United
States and other logistical issues that were broached at the conferences in 1994
and 1995 but, critics say, led to no change.
Some hope, however, that this year's conference will pave the way for a
political dialogue. Rodríguez's talks with Cuban exiles come one week
after Jorge Mas Santos, chairman of the Cuban American National Foundation,
announced he would talk to Cuban officials about a democratic transition.
The comments by Mas Santos sparked a heated debate among Cuban Americans but
also revealed a growing schism in a community that was once dominated by
hard-liners who supported no contact with Castro's regime.
''There's a slow movement of people beginning to think of what's going to
happen in Cuba after Castro. I think there's a search on both sides of the
Florida Straits for a center,'' said Dario Moreno, a political scientist at
Florida International University.
Moreno and others were impressed that Rodríguez traveled to Miami to
plan the conference -- an unprecedented move, by most recollections.
''The fact that they're now coming here, that they want to hear what people
are talking about shows that the Cuban government is adopting a more
sophisticated approach toward talking to the exile community and that they might
be willing to open up further,'' Moreno said.
The two previous conferences were a formal extension of two controversial
meetings held in 1978 between 140 Miami Cubans and the Cuban government.
Those meetings, often referred to as ''the dialogue,'' led to the release of
at least 3,000 political prisoners, the resumption of charter flights between
Cuba and the United States, and the reunification of hundreds of Cuban families.
However, the Miami Cubans who participated in those talks were reviled by
many in Miami as ''collaborators'' with Fidel Castro.
That view hasn't changed for Ninoska Pérez, director of the Cuban
Liberty Council.
''The people that went down on that first conference were the same people
that have been apologists for the Cuban dictatorship,'' she said.
Max Lesnik, an activist who met with Rodríguez and more than 120
Cubans at his Coral Gables home, said the conference is an important step toward
normalization.
"All we are doing is what hundreds of American government officials,
journalists and others have done with Fidel -- have a dialogue to understand his
point of view and so that they understand ours.''
Herald translator Renato Pérez contributed to this report.
Brothers to the Rescue halts migrant search flights
By Tere Figueras And Elaine De Valle. Edevalle@herald.com.
After 12 years and thousands of missions, Brothers to the Rescue is
suspending its search-and-rescue flights, its mission made almost obsolete by
smugglers' speedboats and changes in U.S. immigration policy.
José Basulto, founder and leader of an organization that lost four
volunteers and two planes when they were shot down by Cuban MiG fighter planes
in 1996, announced Tuesday that the organization was grounding its flights over
the Florida Straits.
The once-celebrated group can no longer afford to fly missions that are
rarely needed, he said. ''We are simply not as necessary as we have been in the
past,'' Basulto told The Herald.
"It is redundant work on account of the fact that the U.S. Coast Guard
is providing a very effective surveillance around the shores of Cuba that we
cannot compete with.''
For more than a decade, the group's volunteer pilots patrolled the Florida
Straits, often bringing the first glimmer of hope to floundering migrants when
they caught sight of the planes.
But the evolution of how people escape from the island has lessened the
urgency of the Brothers' airborne mission.
Where Cubans used to flee on often-makeshift rafts that came to symbolize
their desperation, in recent years they have come to rely more on smugglers and
organized boat trips.
Hermanos al Rescate, as they are known in Spanish, began in 1991 with 10
planes and 36 pilots. They spotted 224 migrants in the first year. In its
heyday, the group conducted 32 weekly missions, Basulto said.
The flights were cut to 16 a week, then to four a week, then to strictly
Saturdays before their current emergency-only status. Today Brothers has just
two planes and four pilots.
TURNING POINT
The organization was already at a turning point in 1996 when Cuban fighter
planes shot down two Brothers' aircraft. Changes in U.S. immigration policy a
year earlier had made the group wary of alerting the Coast Guard to rafters
adrift in the Florida Straits because most would be repatriated to Cuba rather
than delivered to U.S. shores.
Instead, Brothers were spending more of their resources printing anti-Castro
leaflets and sometimes dropping them over the island.
Donations were declining.
Then on Feb. 24, 1996, as three Brothers Cessnas flew about 25 miles off the
Cuban coast, Cuban MiGs fired at them. Two planes were shot down; only the
aircraft piloted by Basulto survived.
The shoot-down was followed by revelations that the organization had been
infiltrated by Cuban spies. Basulto became estranged from the families of the
men killed in the shoot-down. Money and volunteers became increasingly scarce.
In the past several years, the Coast Guard and the exile group have worked
hand in hand to find lost vessels -- whether they were rafts or smugglers'
boats, and whether their passengers were Cubans, Haitians or even U.S. citizens
lost at sea. The missions have been only on demand, however -- when families
reported missing relatives. There have been no scheduled flights in two or three
years.
Their last flight was two weeks ago, a response to a call from the worried
child of a Naples man who had not returned from a fishing trip. The search was
fruitless. The men's bodies were recovered days later.
Coast Guard Lt. Tony Russell said the agency would miss the extra eyes. ''In
this time of homeland security when we're asking people to look out more or
report things that are suspicious, any time we lose a source of information it's
certainly going to have some impact,'' Russell said.
"It certainly doesn't hurt when they're out there helping. At the same
time, we don't consider Brothers to the Rescue a Coast Guard resource.''
Nor does Basulto want them to. ''Our mission was always twofold,'' he said. "First
to save lives and then to provide an opportunity for Cubans to be free. We don't
want to be part of the Coast Guard's new agenda, which is to send these Cubans
back. They have become Castro's border patrol.''
The Brothers' change in focus is understandable and welcome, said U.S. Rep.
Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, whose early championing of the group earned her the
nickname ''la madrina'' -- or godmother -- from Brothers' pilots.
''Brothers to the Rescue was a pioneer organization. So often those planes
were the first to spot rafters before they even came under the radar of the
Coast Guard,'' she said.
NEW PRIORITIES
Now, Basulto says, he does not want the Brothers' service to provide a false
sense of security. "Brothers to the Rescue is becoming day by day more like
the Lotto. If we find somebody out there, it's a miracle.''
''This is the moral thing to do. If only to stop the perception that we are
that safety net that may make somebody jump into the sea, I think it was time to
call it off,'' he said.
The costs of running the operation -- hangar rental, maintenance, insurance
-- are also a big factor, he said.
The Brothers will continue to seek funds from the community, but for other
projects, he said. They will continue to support the opposition movement in
Cuba, publish leaflets on nonviolence and civil disobedience and smuggle them to
the island, and press for an indictment of Fidel Castro.
The publicity generated by Brothers to the Rescue over the years has helped
highlight human rights abuses in Cuba, Ros-Lehtinen said.
''Their strategy may have changed, but their mission remains the same,'' she
said.
"They are still searching for a free Cuba.'' | 
