Cuban Americans and the Diaspora

Ever since Evo Morales was elected president in December 2005, all of Bolivia under its new castroite regime is a nightmare, but one individual nightmare in particular really disturbs me.

Dr. Amauris Samartino is a Cuban doctor who fled castro’s communist Cuba for … Bolivia, years ago. Think about that. Who in hell flees TO Bolivia, South America’s poorest and most backward state – unless the place they are fleeing from is infinitely worse? Only if you live in Cuba could you consider Bolivia a promised land and move to it and consider it a step upward. Not even Bolivians do, they have one of the region’s highest illegal emigration rates.

Dr. Samartino lives in Santa Cruz, the one area of Bolivia where Bolivians create wealth and welcome immigrants. That’s the area that’s bearing the hardest lash from Morales and all his castroite communism. That area has seen land confiscations, broken property rights, Cuban security agents and violence. Huge protests have broken out, as happened in Venezuela before them. The local Crucenos hate Morales so bad they actually send each other text-message photos of a dead Morales, acting in the Bolivian spirit of taking out the trash, as they did with che.

Dr. Samartino is a legal resident. He’s spoken out against the cubanization of his new country, and more daring still, has helped other Cuban doctors sent to Bolivia to defect, sending them to reach freedom’s shores in Brazil and the U.S.

The castroites running Bolivia decided he needed to be stopped. So for criticizing Morales and more significantly, for helping castro’s doctors flee to freedom, he’s been arrested. And he is about to be deported.

Back to castro’s Cuba.

I can’t think of anything more terrifying than this. For helping others reach freedom, he is about to lose his own, and be taken back to the very hellhole he fled for his life from.

This is an outrageous human rights violation by any standard and something that ought to get more attention. I am going to do my part. No one should ever be shipped back to castro’s Cuba against his will, to what surely will be an ignominous and terrifying fate. Just for speaking out.

The U.S. gives Bolivia $120 million in annual aid. castro, by contrast, just gives Cuban doctors, and Venezuela’s castroite Hugo Chavez, by contrast, gives only $7 million in aid. The Morales regime is held together by U.S. aid, which amounts to about 10% of the national budget. This U.S. taxpayer aid to this brutal leftist tyrant has got to stop.

One potential course of action is to contact the U.S. Aid office and them that no aid should be given to a regime that would force a Cuban back to tyranny’s prison on our dime. Either bring that Cuban doctor here, or Bolivia must never see another penny of U.S. Aid.

This is going entirely too far now.

As part of an event known as “Miami Cross Blogination” in which twenty-two Miami-based bloggers will stir things up by posting on a randomly selected blog other than their own, my home blog 26th Parallel has posted a piece by Gabriel J. Lopez-Bernal of Transit Miami.

Gabe offers his insights as a American-born Cuban-American that many of his fellow Cuban-Americans share. I invite everyone to read his guest post and make him feel at home. Also, make sure to stop by his home blog for smart discussion on transportation issues affecting South Florida.

As a side note, you can check out my contribution to the event by going over to Stuck On The Palmetto.

Rob Mayer at Publius Pundit has an interesting single question that I think a lot of Babalu readers would be uniquely placed to answer with a lot of insight. Read it here.

…on the right side of the page, following the Boston Red Sox slugger’s remarks about the beast of Havana.

Note what Boston Herald readers really think about Lowell’s opinion on this.

Hat tip: Byron

Miguel Octavio at Devil’s Excrement has the link to this stunning admission here. It goes to show that life in Chavista Venezuela is communist enough to force Cubans to escape.

Tell that to the next pro-Chavista in sandals that wants to extol the glories of Chavistadom.

UPDATE: Boli at Boli-Nica blog reports that now castro’s doctors are fleeing Bolivia, too. His acerbic take on it is here.

Imagine getting a knock on your door this morning. You open the door, and a military official tells you that you have only a few hours to pack all of your clothes and important documents before heading to the airport to catch a flight to a new life.

Pretty daunting, right? That describes the story of many Cubans who left the island prison in a rush, often leaving relatives behind.

The Miami Herald has a nice story today on the passengers of the first freedom flight on December 1st, 1965.

Whatever became of people on the first Freedom Flight?

Over 40 years later, Cuban migrants remember the first Freedom Flights.

BY LUISA YANEZ
lyanez@MiamiHerald.com

The first flight to a new life in America began with only a few hours’ notice. Seventy-five frightened Cubans hurriedly left behind everything — their homes, their careers, their way of life.

Some of them even left some of their children behind in Cuba.

They landed in Miami on Dec. 1, 1965, as pioneers in a U.S. sponsored airlift — dubbed the Freedom Flights — that would eventually bring 260,000 Cubans to the United States over seven years.

Some new refugees resettled in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles and elsewhere, but many eventually returned to Miami.

More than 40 years later, The Miami Herald set out to find out what became of those who traveled on that very first flight to freedom.

The newspaper traced 32 people listed on the first flight’s original manifest, which was recently donated to the Historical Museum of Southern Florida.

Here are some of their stories:

Read more

Maybe it’s the mundane but recognizable details about the cellphone and the two kids; maybe it’s the realization that this happened so recently….but for some reason, I find this story a little haunting.

PUERTO RICO-CUBA
Six Cuban migrants reach Puerto Rico

San Juan, Mar 8 (EFE).- Six undocumented Cuban migrants arrived Wednesday on Mona Island, an uninhabited islet that lies between the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico and is part of the territory of this U.S. commonwealth, authorities here said.

Sgt. Jose Luis Rivera Morales said the travelers reached Mona at around 3:30 a.m. and that the migrants – three men, a woman and two children – were in good health.

The preliminary police report said the Cubans were dropped off on the island by the owners of a boat operating from the Dominican Republic.

Traffickers frequently bring Cuban migrants to Mona, taking advantage of Washington’s “wet foot, dry foot” policy, which mandates that Cubans who reach U.S. soil may remain and apply for permanent residence while those intercepted at sea are generally returned to their homeland. A dozen Cubans reached Mona Island on Tuesday, and a party of 23 arrived there Feb. 24.

It is now common for the Cubans who come to Mona to contact family members already in Puerto Rico – presumably by cellphone – so the latter can alert authorities to retrieve the migrants. EFE ie/dr

***

As day ends on this side of the U.S., I think back to my day. Got on the freeway, got in to work, turned on my computer, read blogs, did some editing, did some writing, did some phoning, chatted with colleagues, got another cup of coffee, pulled out a stock chart, chatted some more on the phone….

and this high human drama of six innocent people risking their lives on a leaky boat, risking everything they had – their lives and homes back home, their uncertain future in an unknown land, and their very existence itself on the high seas in shark-infested waters — was what was happening somewhere else, at the same time, occupying the same time on earth as I was.

And all because they badly wanted to flee to freedom — by any means they could. It stands out to me. While I was pouring another cup of coffee and checking my email …. six people were climbing out of a beat-up rowboat and touching dry land, dead of night and then hot sun above them, praying they would be allowed to stay. All at the same time.

Did I get your attention? It’s not often that there’s anything like … joy … in Cuba. Of course, there is joy in Cuba, but it occurs because of only one thing: the prospect of getting away from castro.

Agencia EFE somehow got hold of the Cuban rafters in Cuba who had been illegally sent back to castro’s hellhole after Coast Guard Scum (read the account below), made up a law of their own, and decided to claim the Cubans’ landing on a U.S. abandoned bridge was somehow no longer U.S. territory. Their behavior, according to the Cuban refugees, who are believable, was much worse than anything the media reported. A court overturned their despicable act, but no one thought there was any hope for the poor balseros who had long been swallowed again by the communist maw and were expected to be punished severely for the “crime” of not wanting to be in the same country as castro.

Why aren’t those lying Coast Guard creeps, who clearly hate their fellow man, in jail where they belong?

The Agencia EFE story is here:

CUBA-US
Cubans sent back after reaching U.S. bridge elated at ruling
By Jose Luis Paniagua.

Matanzas, Cuba, Mar 3 (EFE).- The Cuban would-be emigrants at the center of a watershed U.S. judicial ruling on what constitutes “dry land” are elated at the prospect of finally being allowed to go to what they see as a Promised Land.

But whether their up-and-down odyssey will end with a comfortable airline flight remains to be seen, and some say if the trip is not approved by authorities of both Cuba and Washington, they will risk their lives again on a makeshift boat.

Two months after making their dangerous sea voyage in an attempt to reach U.S. soil, 15 people here again were making preparations to travel to Florida – this time as beneficiaries of a Miami court ruling.

“We’re happy, content and supposedly in less than a month we should be there,” said Ernesto Hernandez, a 47-year-old tire retreader who set out for Florida on the precarious homemade vessel along with his wife and 13-year-old son.

The boat they built themselves at a cost of some $4,000 – approximately their combined net worth – miraculously arrived Jan. 4 at an abandoned bridge in the Florida Keys. The U.S. Coast Guard, however, sent them home several days later after concluding that the spot they had reached did not constitute dry land under the government’s wet-foot, dry-foot Cuban immigration policy.

That decision, however, was reversed Tuesday by a Miami federal judge, who ruled that the Cubans had in fact reached U.S. soil and – under the terms of the Clinton-era policy – should have been allowed to remain in the country and apply for residency.

Eleven of the 15 would-be immigrants gathered at a home in a poor neighborhood of Matanzas, some 100 kilometers (60 miles) east of Havana, reflected on their experiences of the past two months.

The Cubans’ eyes lit up at the possibility of being able to return to the United States, but they turned serious when thinking back on the Coast Guard patrol boat that returned them to their homeland.

“It still hurts,” said Lazaro Martinez, who noted that the Coast Guardsmen picked them up at the base of one of the supports of the broken and disused structure.

“They told us they would take us to have a beer in Florida,” said Martinez, chagrined by what turned out to be a lie. He said they were transferred from one Coast Guard vessel to another, “which sailed away from the coast, and kept going.” Since returning to Cuba on Jan. 9, the would-be immigrants have closely followed the legal proceedings “step by step, day by day, waiting (for news and staying) in constant communication” with their family members in Florida.

Martinez, 31, said he remembered the abandoned bridge where the group landed, insisting that it was connected to the coast and that in arriving there they had passed another bridge traveled over by vehicles.
But his frustration was assuaged by the recent turn of events that could lead to his eventual arrival in the United States.

Martinez hailed the efforts of Ramon Saul Sanchez, head of the Miami-based Cuban exile group Democracy Movement, saying he “was the one who staged the (hunger) strike and from the beginning was the driving force (in bringing about) this reality we’re experiencing now.” “It’s been worth it, at least now others will be able to benefit from it (the judicial ruling),” he said.

“When you return after having left it all behind, after months of hiding (the vessel), getting materials and suffering every night, you want to die,” Ernesto Hernandez said.

Every one in the group expressed confidence they could live out their dreams in the United States. Hermes Hernandez, 22, said he was a black belt in karate and wanted to earn a living from the sport, while Noel Lazaro Reyes said he dreamed of owning his own tractor-trailer truck.

Ernesto, meanwhile, said he could see himself doing a number of things, but was considering the possibility of opening a tire retreading store.

“I haven’t lived up to now how I would like to and now I want to live the way I want the rest of my life and see my family get ahead,” he said.

They said they were convinced U.S. officials will grant them a safe conduct pass for entering the country, and that Cuban authorities will let them leave.

If denied permission, however, they said they were prepared to try their luck at sea yet again. EFE jlp/mc