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Miami Herald
Poll: Cuba's just one of many issues
A new poll reveals a diversity of issues important to Cuban Americans, challenging the conventional wisdom. Cuba, while still important, is not the top issue for exiles.
By Oscar Corral, ocorral@MiamiHerald.com. Posted on Fri, Mar. 10, 2006.
The war in Iraq and terrorism are more important issues to Cuban Americans in Miami-Dade than Cuba and Fidel Castro, according to a new poll released Thursday that skews to Cuban Americans 60 and older and paints a more nuanced picture of the exile community.
The findings challenge conventional wisdom that the most important issue to older Cuban exiles is bringing democratic change to communist-ruled Cuba.
Asked what the most important political issue is for them personally, 33 percent of respondents said the war in Iraq and terrorism, 26 percent said Cuba and Castro, and 11 percent said the economy. The poll did not give respondents a choice of answers. Rather, they offered their own for that particular question.
The researchers conclude that national security issues will be more important for Cubans and Cuban-American voters in 2008 than U.S.-Cuba policy.
''I think what we are looking at is a much more complicated view of this community than we've seen in the past,'' said Jessica Lavariega Monforti, a political science professor at the University of Texas, Pan American.
"You have to engage this community on issues other than Cuba.''
The poll questioned 600 Cuban exiles and U.S.-born Cuban Americans in Miami-Dade County Feb. 6-19, and has a sampling margin of error of plus or minus 3 percentage points. The telephone survey, conducted during daytime hours, skewed toward older people, with 47 percent of registered voters questioned 60 or older.
Veteran Miami pollster Sergio Bendixen said that a typical sample of Miami's Cuban and Cuban-American community should have no more than 34 percent of respondents 60 and over. That would make it consistent with the U.S. Census, he said.
The survey was conducted by Lavariega Monforti and Lisa García Bedolla of the University of California at Irvine. Both are Cuban Americans but grew up outside Miami. They presented their results Thursday morning at an event organized by Florida International University's Metropolitan Center. García Bedolla and Lavariega Monforti focused their poll results on the registered voters interviewed, which accounted for 87 percent of the sample.
TRAFFIC AND TAXES
On the local front, transportation ranked as the top concern for Cuban Americans interviewed. One in five said traffic congestion and public transit were the most important issue, followed by taxes, crime and political corruption.
The researchers also indicated that Catholic Cubans ''seem politically distinct'' because only 49 percent identified as ideologically conservative. About three in four of the poll's respondents said they are Roman Catholic.
FIU Professor Damian Fernandez, head of the Cuban Research Institute, said ''the social justice doctrine of the Catholic Church in Cuba'' might explain why Cuban Catholics are less conservative than some might expect.
Columbia University Professor Rudy de la Garza warned not to underestimate the Cuba/Castro issue when it comes to Cuban-American voters.
''If you come out wrong on Castro, can you make it as a Cuban-American candidate in Miami? No,'' de la Garza said. "He is a necessary, but not a sufficient, condition for political life in Miami.''
Lavariega Monforti conducted the poll as part of a larger study she is pursuing on Miami's exile community. The poll also asked a series of questions about ethnic relations between Cubans and other groups.
RACE RELATIONS
A large majority of Cubans interviewed described local relations between white Cubans and African-Americans, non-Hispanic whites, other Hispanics and black Cubans as good or excellent.
They are also optimistic about their future. Forty-five percent of respondents felt their family's economic situation will be better three years from now and 36 percent said they expected it would remain "about the same.''
García Bedolla said the poll shows an interesting nuance on Cuban Americans in Miami.
''This is not a one-hit wonder community,'' she said. "I think people need to have concrete facts and not just make assumptions.''
Admiral vows 'transparency'
By Lesley Clark. lclark@MiamiHerald.com. Posted on Fri, Mar. 10, 2006.
WASHINGTON - Incoming Coast Guard chief Thad Allen pledged to deal with the ''gut-wrenching'' issue of Cuban migrants on the sea with ''transparency'' during a Senate confirmation hearing Thursday.
Allen's comments came as Sen. Bill Nelson of Florida told the vice admiral who has been nominated for the top post that the January repatriation of 15 Cubans who had reached a detached bridge in the Florida Keys had touched off "quite a firestorm in Florida.''
Allen, who was tapped by Homeland Security chief Michael Chertoff to head up Gulf Coast recovery efforts after FEMA director Michael Brown's departure, said he was still on Gulf duty when the decision was made to send the Cubans back.
Allen, a former commander in Miami, wouldn't say whether he would have made the same choice -- but he provided some sense of Coast Guard guidelines for dealing with what he said were often ''gut wrenching'' decisions.
''You take each one of these cases on an individual basis,'' he said. "There are a lot of structures down there that are not connected to land. We have migrants that are deposited on all form of structures out there, some of which are very, very unsafe.
"And as a general rule down there anything that is not connected to land is not considered to be dry feet.''
The U.S. ''wet-foot, dry-foot'' policy dictates that Cuban migrants intercepted at sea usually are repatriated; those who reach dry land are allowed to stay. The policy was put into effect by the Clinton administration a decade ago, in the wake of the 1994 Cuban rafter crisis.
A federal judge in Miami last month ruled that the agency had acted illegally in repatriating the Cubans. Allen said the ruling is being reviewed by the Justice Department. He said no decision has been made on whether to appeal the ruling. But he told Nelson that the agency would follow the results of the Justice Department review.
''We try not to make policy on the deck plates,'' he said.
Nelson, who is running for reelection, said he wanted to put his concerns on the record with Allen "to make sure the mistake is not repeated.
''He'll be sensitive to it in the future,'' Nelson said.
U.S. report slams Cuba, Venezuela and Haiti
Cuba, Venezuela and Haiti were among the nations singled out for human rights abuses in the State Department's annual report.
By Joe Mozingo. jmozingo@MiamiHerald.com. Posted on Thu, Mar. 09, 2006
The State Department's annual human rights report Wednesday skewered Cuba and Venezuela for cracking down on dissidents, and it admonished Colombia and Haiti's interim government for allowing abusers to go free.
Documenting in exhaustive detail human rights issues in 196 countries, not including the United States, the report's introduction focused largely on the Middle East, Eastern Europe, East Asia and Africa.
But Cuba, the increasingly autocratic rule of President Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and impunity of military and illegal paramilitary fighters in Colombia made the list of some of the world's worst examples of human rights abuses.
CUBA'S REGIME
''In Cuba, the regime continued to control all aspects of life through the Communist Party and state-controlled mass organizations,'' the report said. "The regime suppressed calls for democratic reform, such as the Varela Project, which proposed a national referendum.
"Authorities arrested, detained, fined and threatened Varela activists and the government held at least 333 political prisoners and detainees.''
Venezuela came under attack for politicizing the judicial branch and cracking down on press freedom, including ''legal harassment and physical intimidation'' of journalists.
"The government use the judicial system selectively against the political opposition, and implementation of a 2004 media law threatened to limit press freedom.''
The State Department also pointed out the difficulties that many countries in the Americas are having sustaining democracy, including Ecuador, where the legislature last year removed democratically elected President Lucio Gutierrez.
Haiti's U.S.-backed interim government, which took over when President Jean-Bertrand Aristide fled the country during an armed revolt, was criticized for its inability to reform the police and judicial systems.
The State Department noted that police raided a soccer match in Port-au-Prince in August looking for gang members and shot and killed six young men. Other groups said more people were killed, hacked to death by gang members working with the officers. Fifteen officers have been arrested for involvement in the massacre.
TWO SET FREE
U.S. officials also criticized the Haitian justice system for releasing two alleged human rights abusers of years past -- former Port-au-Prince police chief Jackson Joanis, held in the killing of The Rev. Jean-Marie Vincent; and Louis-Jodel Chamblain, who was convicted in absentia for a massacre in the northern port city of Gonaives in 1994.
"The release of Chamblain and Joanis . . . called into question the [interim government's] commitment to respect rule of law and to strengthen democratic institutions in the country.''
The State Department report does not look at the United States' own practices, which have come under increasing criticism in the past two years for alleged abuses against terrorism suspects abroad and a legal moves seen as aiming to stifle the press, including the jailing last year of then New York Times reporter Judith Miller.
Calls of bias mar meeting
Cuban-American leaders met with federal officials seeking to change the wet-foot, dry-foot policy, but some called the meeting partisan.
By Oscar Corral And Lesley Clark, ocorral@MiamiHerald.com. Posted on Thu, Mar. 09, 2006.
In a day that underscored tension between some Cuban exiles in Miami and the Bush administration, Cuban-American leaders met with federal officials in Washington to ask for a new U.S.-Cuba migration policy, while others called the meeting partisan.
The Cuban-American group wants the administration to change the controversial wet-foot, dry-foot policy in which Cubans caught at sea are generally returned to the island while those who reach U.S. soil are allowed to stay.
At the White House meeting, Republican U.S. Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Lincoln and Mario Diaz-Balart and several spiritual leaders from Miami's Cuban exile community asked federal officials from the departments of State and Homeland Security to make the policy more humanitarian for Cubans.
NO POLICY CHANGE
The response from Washington: We'll see. ''The meeting was designed to allow for a serious dialogue, and does not signal any change in policy as it relates to Cuba or any other country's migrants,'' said White House spokeswoman Maria Tamburri.
The meeting came almost two months after the Coast Guard repatriated 15 Cubans found on the old Seven Mile bridge in the Florida Keys -- a move that set off controversy and a 12-day hunger strike by the Democracy Movement's Ramon Saul Sanchez.
Upset that the group's lawyers were not invited, Sanchez flew to Washington, anyway, and met behind closed doors with Democratic Sens. Bill Nelson and Bob Menendez.
''We had hoped that this could be bipartisan, and that it kept in mind not politics, but the rights of balseros,'' Sanchez said.
Nelson said he and his Republican counterpart, Sen. Mel Martinez, were asking for a meeting Thursday with Bush administration officials. He said it was ''impossible legislatively'' for him to attend Wednesday's meeting, though he had been invited. Martinez also was unable to attend.
Lincoln Diaz-Balart said the White House meeting was "frank and fruitful.''
MAIN REQUESTS
Diaz-Balart's office said the group asked, among other things, that migrants receive some sort of legal representation when picked up by the Coast Guard; that a portion of the 20,000 visas allowed for Cuban migration every year be set aside for Cubans picked up at sea and in third countries; and that the administration review the process by which the Coast Guard determines if migrants have a credible fear of persecution.
The administration designated Cuban American Emilio Gonzalez, head of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, as a liaison between Cuban American members of Congress representatives and the administration.
Nelson said he already had asked Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice to review the wet-foot, dry-foot policy to prevent a repeat of the bridge fiasco he called the "height of ridiculousness.''
Martinez said in a written statement he has met with the State Department and several other federal agencies on the matter. ''Serious options need to be brought to the table in order to make this unsustainable policy humane and transparent,'' Martinez said.
New Democrat Network consultant Joe Garcia said the difficulty in getting a meeting with the White House shows how the Bush administration brushes off the Cuba issue.
''What's sad is that Ramon Saul Sanchez had to go on a hunger strike to get a meeting with policy makers about immigration in a community . . . [that] votes overwhelmingly Republican,'' Garcia said.
U.N. rights expert: U.S. sanctions trigger repression
A new report by a U.N. human rights expert says that tightening sanctions in Cuba in 2003 and 2004 has led to more antagonism towards the Cuban people.
By Alexander G. Higgins, Associated Press. Posted on Wed, Mar. 08, 2006.
GENEVA - A U.N. human rights expert said Tuesday the number of Cuban dissidents arrested and sentenced to long terms increased in 2005, claiming ''extreme tension'' with the United States had played a role in hampering freedom of expression on the island.
Christine Chanet, a French jurist who is the U.N. Human Rights Commission's expert on Cuba, said in a new report that tightened U.S. sanctions have made life more difficult for Cubans in general -- and political opponents to President Fidel Castro in particular.
''United States laws and the funding provided for building democracy in Cuba make members of the political opposition on the island appear to be sympathetic to foreign influences and provide the Cuban authorities with an opportunity to tighten repression against them,'' she said.
Chanet has not been allowed to visit Cuba since she became the commission's Cuba expert in 2003. Her attempts to reach the government this year went unanswered.
But she said she learned from other sources that "in 2005 more people were arrested and given disproportionate sentences for expressing dissident political opinions.''
U.S. officials were not immediately available to comment, but they have previously defended the embargo as a legitimate tool to "accelerate democratic change in Cuba.''
Cuban officials also were not immediately available for comment.
''The extreme tension between Cuba and the United States of America has created a climate which is far from conducive to the development of freedom of expression and freedom of assembly,'' said Chanet.
She noted nearly 80 people were arrested and given long sentences in ''the unprecedented wave of repression that was unleashed in March-April 2003 in Cuba'' in retaliation for U.S. encouragement of the opposition, and she named the 60 still in prison.
But, she said, "It is impossible to ignore the disastrous and lasting economic and social effects -- compounded in 2004 -- of the embargo imposed on the Cuban population over 40 years ago, as well as its impacts on civil and political rights.''
Tighter restrictions imposed by the U.S. in May 2004 have increased the scope of the embargo, Chanet said.
The U.S. has had economic sanctions against Cuba since President Kennedy imposed them in 1963, four years after Castro came to power. |
