CUBA NEWS
The Miami Herald

Repatriated Cubans apply to leave country legally

Cuban migrants sent back to their homeland after reaching a section of an old bridge in the Keys are now applying to leave Cuba legally.

By Andrea Rodriguez, Associated Press. Posted on Tue, Mar. 07, 2006

HAVANA - Cuban migrants who reached an abandoned bridge in the Florida Keys only to be sent home began a new effort to reach the United States: filling out paperwork Monday at the American mission in Havana.

Under U.S. migration policies, Cubans who reach U.S. soil are generally allowed to stay, while those stopped at sea usually are sent back. The migrants reached an old bridge that the U.S. government said didn't count as dry land because chunks are missing and it no longer connects to U.S. soil.

U.S. District Judge Federico Moreno in Miami last week ordered U.S. federal officials to ''use their best efforts'' to help the Cubans return to the United States. Moreno wrote that "those Cuban refugees who reached American soil in early January 2006 were removed to Cuba illegally.''

But there was no guarantee that the Cuban government would let them go back. Cuba requires its citizens to get special government permission to leave.

''We stepped on American soil, we shouldn't be here,'' Ernesto Hernández told reporters after meeting with consular officials at the U.S. Interests Section in Havana and starting the paperwork that the migrants hope will let them go to the United States for good.

The group includes two children, ages 2 and 13, who were traveling by sea with their parents.

The American government's so-called ''wet-foot, dry-foot'' policy springs from a 1966 law that allows Cubans who reach the United States to apply for legal residency one year after arriving.

The Cuban government calls it a ''murderous law'' that encourages its citizens to undertake dangerous and illegal journeys with the hope of reaching U.S. soil and obtaining legal residency.

During the hearing before Judge Moreno in Miami, Assistant U.S. Attorney Dexter Lee argued that the Coast Guard's decision to send the migrants home was reasonable. The U.S. government could still appeal the judge's ruling.

Cuban doctors bring relief, but controversy mars work

Cuban doctors offer needed help to such poor countries as Guatemala, but their presence is a source of controversy at home and in the Americas.

By Jill Replogle, Special to The Miami Herald. Posted on Sun, Mar. 05, 2006

USPANTAN, Guatemala - At the hospital in this central Guatemala mountain town, Cuban doctors outnumber their local colleagues two to one. And all the five specialists are Cubans, including the surgeon and anesthesiologist.

Eight other Cuban doctors live and work in remote health posts in the region, sometimes trudging up to six hours on foot to vaccinate children and attend to emergencies.

''It's a beautiful, unique experience,'' said María Josefa Herrera, a Cuban general practitioner who works in Uspantán. "Often the patients have never been treated by a medical professional.''

Herrera is one of the thousands of Cuban medical personnel sent abroad by Cuban leader Fidel Castro in a campaign to alleviate health crises, support his political allies and earn badly needed hard currency -- a campaign that also has angered some Cubans on the communist-ruled island.

Recent media reports from Havana have noted that Cubans are increasingly resenting the absence of physicians once provided free of charge by a totally government-run system whose strength was in a massive network of neighborhood doctors, and not in its hospitals or technology.

One recent U.N. mission to Cuba found a clinic in the eastern city of Santiago where 60 of the 140 staff doctors were abroad, according to the Interamerican Dialogue, a think tank in Washington. And it's not just a problem for Cubans.

LAWSUIT, COMPLAINTS

In Venezuela, the doctors' association sued the President Hugo Chávez's government for using doctors unlicensed to practice in that country. The program continued despite a court ruling backing the association. And in Honduras, the Professional Association of Honduran Doctors has complained over the presence of Cuban healthcare workers there at a time when 1,500 recent Honduran medical graduates are out of work.

Cuba touts its medical missions as a show of solidarity with the world's needy that it can well afford, with one of the highest doctor-patient ratios in the world -- one doctor for every 165 residents, according to the World Health Organization.

But there are more palpable benefits for the island. Cuban medical personnel sent abroad earn hard currency for their perennially cash-strapped government, and the estimated 20,000-22,000 deployed in Venezuela are being paid in part with cheap oil.

In Guatemala, the Cuban medical deployment also has its ups and downs.

For its part, the Guatemalan government has gained 285 physicians and 128 other medical personnel at very low costs, with government public health officials saying the Cubans earn about $400 per month -- less than half a typical Guatemalan public sector doctor's salary. Last October, Cuba sent 600 extra medical personnel to Guatemala after Hurricane Stan, but they have since returned home.

Yet that $400 is also about 16 times the average salary of a doctor in Cuba, so the Cubans here have been using their comparatively huge salaries to buy refrigerators, stereos and other items that they couldn't afford in Cuba. They take the goods home when they finish their work here.

SALARY DISTRIBUTION

Guatemalan officials say the full $400 goes to the Cubans here, who have to pay for their own housing, food and local transportation. No part goes to the Havana government, they said, although in many other countries the host government pays the Cuban government, which then passes part of the money to the medical personnel. It's not clear why the Guatemalan arrangement is different.

And for that kind of money, the Cubans are willing to toil under harsh conditions in remote areas where local doctors are not available or don't want to work. Almost three-quarters of Guatemala's 12,000 registered doctors work in the capital and surrounding suburbs, and about one-third of the country's municipalities don't have a single resident doctor, according to the Guatemalan Association of Physicians and Surgeons.

"It's difficult finding Guatemalan doctors to work in the most isolated areas," said Alvar Pérez, director of Guatemala's rural health extension program.

Some experts worry, however, that the public health system has become too dependent on the Cuban medical personnel.

''The Cubans came to fill a medical need,'' said Juan Carlos Verdugo of the National Health Platform, a nongovernment organization that focuses on public health issues. "But this can't be a permanent solution . . . they could leave any day.''

To gradually replace the island's doctors, the Cuban government has been offering free medical school to low-income students from Guatemala and other countries. More than 12,000 students from 83 countries are studying at the Latin American Medical School in Havana and Castro has predicted that it will graduate 100,000 in the next 10 years.

The school's first graduation last August included 187 Guatemalans.

In exchange for free tuition, those students promised to work for the Guatemalan public health service for up to 6 ½ years after graduation. The government also requires foreign-educated doctors to work for one year for free in rural health posts and hospitals.

But many of the new graduates have said they're not willing to work for a Cuban's salary.

''No one's going to work in the mountains for a salary of $400,'' said Carlos Flores, one of the new doctors.

Dissident ready to be 'martyr for freedom of information'

A dissident journalist in Cuba has been on a hunger strike for more than a month, demanding access to the Internet.

By Frances Robles. frobles@MiamiHerald.com. Posted on Sat, Mar. 04, 2006

Psychologist turned dissident Guillermo Fariñas says there are but two weapons he can wield against injustice in Cuba: food and water.

He's had neither since Jan. 31, and the independent journalist is vowing to continue his hunger strike until the Cuban government returns his e-mail -- his portal to the outside world.

''If I have to be a martyr for freedom of information, I will,'' he told The Miami Herald in a telephone interview from Santa Clara last month.

Fariñas, 43, is one of Cuba's independent journalists, most of them government opponents who gather information about human rights abuses and other news that never appear in government-run papers. Lacking such tools as computers or tape recorders, they usually phone in their stories to exile organizations in Miami.

Fariñas, director of a news agency in the central city of Santa Clara called Cubanacán Press, sent his dispatches by e-mail from a local Internet café.

A day after he was prominently quoted in a front-page Miami Herald article Jan. 23 about a wave of attacks against dissidents, Fariñas found all the e-mail addresses he normally sent articles to had been blocked. So he sent an open letter to Cuban leader Fidel Castro, vowing to die unless he got his e-mail back.

FED WITH AN IV

A week later, he refused all liquids and solids. Fariñas -- known as ''el Coco'' to his friends -- collapsed nine days later and was transferred to a hospital. He is being fed with an IV drip in the intensive care unit at Arnoldo Milián Castro Hospital, his mother, Alicia Hernández, said.

''His head hurts, and his legs are bothering him. Sometimes, his blood pressure drops, but other times he's stable,'' Hernández said by phone from Santa Clara. "Everyone, not just me, but the people who call him from outside Cuba, plus the doctors and nurses, have tried to get him to stop, but he will not give in. He is determined.''

She said he's lost more than 60 pounds.

This is not the first time Hernández has seen her son emaciated. He told The Miami Herald that this is his 20th hunger strike in 10 years.

He fasted when Cuban authorities jailed him in late 2002 after he protested what he considered rigged local elections. Photos of his release in November 2003 show him shrunken in a wheelchair. He could no longer walk. Cubanet, an independent news website, wrote that he lasted 400 days being fed by IV.

'VERY FIRM'

''He has a very sweet character, but at the same time he's very firm,'' said Manuel Vázquez Portal, a former independent journalist who now lives in Miami. "He deeply loves justice, and when he thinks something is unjust, he fights against it with all his strength.''

And for Fariñas, Vázquez said, the injustice is the lack of Web access in a nation where the government controls the Internet and cafés charge a month's wages for an hour online.

''I am against hunger strikes and don't recommend them,'' said Vázquez, a veteran of four such protests.

"It's something you do when you are desperate. Coco is desperate.''

Proposal for council irks Cuba, U.S.

The United States and Cuba are fighting over reforming the discredited U.N. Human Rights Commission.

By Pablo Bachelet, pbachelet@MiamiHerald.com. Posted on Fri, Mar. 03, 2006

WASHINGTON - After months of wrangling, a U.N. diplomatic battle that pits Cuba against Washington over an overhaul of a controversial human-rights panel may be approaching an end.

General Assembly President Jan Eliasson of Sweden last week produced a draft proposing a 47-member Human Rights Council to replace the U.N. Human Rights Commission, widely discredited because rights abusers like Cuba, Libya and Zimbabwe have gotten themselves elected to the commission to try to block its condemnations.

Year after year, U.S. and Cuban officials at the commission have clashed at their annual meeting in Geneva as Washington pushed through resolutions condemning Havana's human-rights abuses.

Most major human-rights organizations, the European Union and U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan are backing Eliasson's draft as an acceptable attempt that would make it harder for rights abusers to get voted into the council.

But U.S. Ambassador John Bolton has said the proposed changes are too weak and wants major modifications, even if this means months of delays. Cuban-American lawmakers also criticized the Eliasson draft, and Miami Republican Rep. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen on Thursday called it "a reshuffling of the deck chairs on the Titanic.''

ANNAN'S VIEW

Annan on Thursday urged Washington to reconsider its position. ''The bad must always give in to the good, but the better must not be the enemy of the good,'' he told reporters.

Cuba also opposes the Eliasson draft as a U.S. imperialist ploy to subjugate poor nations. ''We're witnessing another blow to multilateralism,'' it said Tuesday.

Eliasson has said he wants the matter settled quickly, preferably before March 13, when the annual Geneva meeting of the current 53-member Human Rights Commission is scheduled to begin.

''We're not willing to settle for something just to meet that deadline,'' retorted Ben Chang, a spokesman for the U.S. mission at the United Nations.

EXPECTED TO PASS

Most observers expect the resolution to pass easily, although a U.S. ''no'' vote makes many uneasy.

Britain's U.N. Ambassador Emyr Jones cautioned that creating the new council without U.S. backing "isn't good for human rights, and not particularly good for the council.''

But rights groups argue that opening the Eliasson draft to a line-by-line negotiation risks making it worse, not better.

U.S. officials ''believe they can come up with a better compromise position,'' said Eric Olson, the director for government relations at Amnesty International. "Our estimation is that that's not the case.''

STICKING POINT

The key sticking point is how members get elected to the new council.

In the past, commission members were voted from slates presented by regions, which were then voted on as a block by the 54-member ECOSOC, the UN's economic and social committee. Cuba routinely was included in the Latin American region's slate.

MAJOR VOICE

Under the new proposal, the regions would propose individual nations, which would then require majority approval at the General Assembly -- 96 votes. The United States also wants no more than 30 members.

Ros-Lehtinen has emerged as a major voice supporting Bolton's position. On Thursday, she teamed up with fellow Miami Republican Lincoln Diaz-Balart in seeking signatures for a letter criticizing the proposed reforms.

She said the new council has no criteria for membership other than urging nations to take into account the candidates' contribution to the promotion and protection of human rights.

''Essentially, it asks dictators and rogue regimes to review their own human-rights record and determine whether they would be eligible,'' she said.

And the required approval by the General Assembly is meaningless, she added. "This is the same General Assembly that . . . amidst the genocide in Darfur, could not agree that Sudan was guilty of human-rights violations.''

Cuban academics denied visas by U.S.

Posted on Fri, Mar. 03, 2006

HAVANA - (AP) -- Cuban academics hoping to attend a gathering of Latin America experts in Puerto Rico were denied visas by the American government, marking the latest in the current U.S. administration's trend of shutting out Cubans.

Some 55 philosophers, economists, and historians were told last week that they would be unable to travel to this month's Latin American Studies Association congress in San Juan.

Visa requests for four academics were still pending, said Sheryl Lutjens, an American political science professor at Northern Arizona University.

''These people represent strong scholars who think critically and who are often experts in their area where there are no others,'' said Lutjens, who co-chairs the association's Cuba section and is currently visiting the country. "This is alarming.''

Academic exchange between Cuba and the United States has diminished over the last two years since the administration of President Bush started tightening long-standing trade and travel regulations against the island's communist government.

The ''Cubans not welcome'' message has reached new and broader extremes in recent months. The U.S. government provoked outrage after denying Cuba participation in this month's World Baseball Classic -- a decision that was later reversed.

U.S. officials also pressured a major U.S.-owned hotel in Mexico City to kick out 16 Cuban officials attending a meeting with U.S. oil executives in February.

Fewer American scholars are traveling to Cuba, too, wary of complicated U.S. rules that can lead to hefty fines and punishment if broken.

''They have been dissuaded by the new regulations,'' Lutjens said of other professors and researchers. "People are, I think, confused and perhaps even frightened by the thought that they might be doing something that's not permitted.''

Coast Guard waffled over 15 Cubans

A Coast Guard vessel that rescued 15 Cuban migrants from an unused Keys bridge in January started to bring them ashore, but then was ordered to halt.

By Alfonso Chardy, achardy@MiamiHerald.com. Posted on Thu, Mar. 02, 2006

Fifteen Cuban migrants picked up at an abandoned bridge were being brought ashore in the Florida Keys when -- in a span of 20 minutes -- the Coast Guard's legal experts in Miami had second thoughts and ordered the boat to halt, Coast Guard logs reveal.

The logs, released by the Coast Guard in response to a Freedom of Information Act request from The Miami Herald, mark the first time the federal government publicly acknowledges it waffled on what to do soon after the migrants were found in the pre-dawn darkness of Jan. 4, on a piling of the Old Flagler Bridge near Marathon.

The entries from the Coast Guard station in Marathon to sector headquarters in Key West expose the unfolding drama -- and dilemma -- of the most controversial Cuban migrant rescue since the wet-foot, dry-foot policy took effect more than a decade ago when Cuba and the United States struck a migration deal to end a rafter exodus.

The migrants were held offshore for five days while officials in Miami and Washington struggled to decide what to do.

It took 20 minutes, the logs reveal, for the lives of the 15 migrants to take a fateful turn -- one that eventually denied them their wish to reunite with relatives and that sent them back to a life they no longer wanted and a country they thought they had left for good.

One family lost a home in Cuba and another migrant a good job. But family members in South Florida are now hopeful that a Miami federal judge's decision Tuesday will bring their relatives back.

Repatriation of the 15 -- including a toddler and a 13-year-old boy -- angered South Florida's Cuban exile community and set the stage for a possible change of the policy under which Cubans intercepted at sea are generally sent back and those who reach U.S. soil are usually allowed to stay. Miami federal Judge Federico Moreno ruled Tuesday that the bridge, even if not connected to land, is part of Florida and that the migrants ''were removed to Cuba illegally.'' He ordered the Bush administration to take steps to bring them back.

WHAT LOGS SAID

The log entries showing the Coast Guard wavered on bringing the Cubans ashore did not figure into the case, though Moreno's court received the documents.

Although written in the stilted shorthand of official radio talk, the entries convey the drama that unfolded two days after the Cubans -- 11 men, two women and the two boys -- set out for South Florida on a makeshift 20-foot aluminum boat. The Coast Guard determined the boat ''a hazard'' and sank it.

Two relatives in Miami, Mercedes Hernández and Mariela Conesa, told The Miami Herald on Wednesday that the 15 included families as well as neighbors and friends -- all from Matanzas, a city on Cuba's northern coast east of Havana.

Hernández and Conesa said group members organized the trip themselves and were not part of a migrant smuggling operation. The women spoke at the Miami office of their immigration attorney, Wilfredo Allen.

Hernández, 42, said her niece, Elizabeth Hernández, 23, the niece's husband, Junior Blanco, 28, and their son Michael, 2 ½, could not return to their home in Matanzas after they were repatriated because Cuban government officials had seized the house and sealed the door.

Conesa, 35, said her husband, Marino Hernández, and their 13-year-old son, Osniel, are back living in the same house they shared with other relatives -- but Marino Hernández lost his job maintaining restaurant and hotel equipment.

''My son was crying last night when I told him what the judge has ordered,'' said Conesa. 'He was so happy. He said, 'Mami, I will soon be there to join you.' ''

The Cubans were expected to visit the U.S. Interests Section in Havana early next week to review the official steps required to leave Cuba, said Miami lawyer Kendall Coffey, a member of the legal team representing the 15 Cuban migrants.

WHAT HAPPENED

The Coast Guard learned of the migrants when it was notified by the Monroe County's Sheriff's Office at 3:05 a.m. on Jan. 4.

Marathon station dispatched a 41-foot rescue vessel, identified in the logs as CG41329. Initially, the migrants refused rescue, perhaps fearing their ultimate fate.

A second vessel, CG25577, was sent to assist and eventually all the migrants were loaded aboard the first boat.

A log entry for 3:40 a.m. notes that the rescue boat was directed by sector headquarters in Key West ''to bring migrants back to station'' in Marathon. Had the boat been allowed to dock at Marathon, the migrants would have had it made -- automatically qualifying as ''dry foot'' and allowed to stay.

But a log entry 20 minutes later, at 4 a.m., shows a counterorder ''not to bring migrants to station until . . . word'' was received from the Coast Guard's Miami headquarters, known as D-7 for district seven.

MORE INFORMATION

Lt. Cmdr. Chris O'Neil, a Coast Guard spokesman in Miami, said initially ''legal staff'' at Miami district headquarters had been told the migrants had landed on a bridge.

''So they assumed they were feet dry,'' O'Neil said. "But as more information came in and it became clear the bridge was not connected to land, the same legal staff at district seven reversed the original order and sought clarification at higher levels.''

A key document before Judge Moreno's court was a Jan. 4 memo from Lt. Cmdr. Donald L. Brown, of the Coast Guard's legal office in Miami, to Lt. Cmdr. Brad Keiserman, chief of the Coast Guard's operations law group in Washington. By 11:46 a.m., Brown was seeking legal guidance from Washington -- seven hours after the rescue boat was ordered to halt short of the Marathon coast and directed to transfer the migrants to the Coast Guard cutter Kodiak Island.

'NOT U.S. DRY LAND'

A Coast Guard spokesman in Washington, Lt. Gene Maestas, said at the time the decision was made by the Coast Guard's legal office in conjunction with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement and possibly other federal agencies.

A Jan. 7 memo from Keiserman answered Brown's request whether the Cubans were feet wet or dry.

''It is my opinion that, as a matter of law, the man-made structure. . . upon which fifteen undocumented Cuban migrants alighted . . . is not U.S. dry land,'' Keiserman wrote.

That determination sealed the migrants' fate.

They were repatriated two days later, on Jan. 9 -- five days after they landed on the bridge and were almost brought ashore to "dry land.''

Miami Herald staff writer Jay Weaver contributed to this report.

Virgin Rose (Una rosa de Francia) | Teen love story in Cuba tense, then becomes a farce

By Fabiola Santiago. fsantiago@MiamiHerald.com. Posted on Tue, Mar. 07, 2006

The Spanish-Cuban production Virgin Rose (Una rosa de Francia) has an identity problem: It doesn't know whether to be a moving feature film or an awkward political pamphlet, and so it ends up trying to be both.

The movie is set in the 1950s and follows a people-smuggling ruse run by a Havana hustler named Simón, played by Jorge Perugorría in a performance that is a far cry from his career-making role in Strawberry and Chocolate.

But there's a well-developed love story, beautiful photography of Cuba and its heart-stirring sea, and two Spanish actors to watch who play the likable young lovers Marie (Ana de Armas) and Andrés (Alex González).

Marie is an adolescent peasant girl brought to Havana by Simón to be sold to a judge who has promised a high bid for her virginity. Andrés is an ambitious and loyal deck hand who saves Simón's life, takes a bullet, and ends up being treated at the elegant whorehouse where Marie is being groomed. Marie secretly wants to escape, and as Simón watches Andrés fall for her, he realizes that he too loves the girl.

As the tension builds, you really want to like this movie. But the script, co-written by Cuban writer Senel Paz and the movie's Spanish director, Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón, becomes almost a ridiculous farce.

The lines, too often delivered as if they were being read, belong to contemporary Cuban rhetoric, not to the '50s. Viewers unfamiliar with Cuban government jargon may miss it, but the stuffy, militant dialogue comes at you in the most unexpected moments and ruins what minimal magic the love story has managed.

''You can't read a newspaper during elections,'' Simón comments in a barbershop. "It's full of politicians making promises they never keep. I wish we had a government that didn't hold elections.''

Even sillier is the movie's ending.

''¡Cuba no se rinde! (Cuba doesn't surrender),'' Simón screams.

It's a line straight out of a Fidel Castro rant -- and, instead of sad, it becomes bizarrely funny that the ship is sinking. And sadly, so does the movie.

Cast: Jorge Perugorría, Alex González, Broselianda Hernández, Ana de Armas
Screenwriters: Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón, Senel Paz
Director: Manuel Gutiérrez Aragón
Producers: Gerardo Herrero, Camilo Vives
Running time: 100 minutes. Playing at 9:30 tonight at Gusman.

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