Cuban Colada

Six Floridians arrested in smuggling sting

A South Florida operation that conspired to smuggle Cubans into the United States was broken up after its leader and five members were arrested in Miami-Dade and Broward counties this month, the U.S. attorney's office said Wednesday.
Miguel Bernal, the accused leader, was charged with conspiracy to smuggle aliens into the U.S.
According to the indictment, the six men conspired to bring 20 Cubans into the U.S. in March of last year.
Following an investigation by Immigration and Customs Enforcement and the FBI, a 26-foot boat and two boat engines were seized from Bernal on March 22, 2008, the indictment said.
If convicted, the men face maximum sentences of 10 years in prison.
To read a detailed account published in The Miami Herald, click here.

Migration talks postponed till February

The talks between Cuba and the United States on the subject of migration, scheduled for December, have been postponed until February, an unidentified State Department official said, according to the German news agency DPA. The official gave no explanation for the delay, but The Associated Press said that the rescheduling was done "at the Cuban government's request.".
The negotiations, which the parties agreed should be conducted twice a year, had been scheduled for this month as a continuation of the first round of discussions, in July.
Suspended by the Bush administration in 2004, the talks review the migration accords of the 1990s, which sought to prevent a flow of migrants to the U.S. like the 1980 Mariel exodus and the 1994 wave of rafters.

15 migrants, 1 suspect nabbed in Mexico

Fifteen undocumented Cubans and one alleged Cuban smuggler were arrested in Cancún, Mexico, during a two-hour raid by Mexican Army troops on Sunday.
The alleged smuggler, identified as Tristán Barragán, had kept the illegal migrants in a safe house since Sept. 1 in preparation for taking them to the United States border, army intelligence officers said. The raid resulted from complaints from Barragán's neighbors.
According to the Mexican website Milenio.com, Barragán was "a member of the Miami mafia, which oversees the traffic of Cubans through Mexico." Some of the migrants admitted they had paid $10,000 each to make the trip, the Mexican newspaper El Universal reported.
The 15 migrants were turned over to the National Migration Institute for eventual repatriation, while the alleged smuggler was placed under the custody of the Federal Prosecutor's Office.
In October 2008, Cuba and Mexico signed a memorandum of understanding whereby Cuba agreed to take back any undocumented Cubans arrested in Mexico.
---Renato Pérez Pizarro.

Son of a revolutionary leader is detained as he publicizes his bid for an exit permit

Juan Almeida García, son of revolutionary comandante Juan Almeida Bosque, was detained by Havana police Thursday as he strolled through Revolution Square with a sign that said he wanted an exit permit to leave the country.
He was released a couple of hours later with a promise that his request will be answered.
Almeida was arrested May 6 after attempting to flee in a boat and given supervised parole. Since 2006, he has asked the authorities repeatedly for an exit permit that would enable him to seek medical treatment abroad for a rheumatoid disease he has had for years. His wife and daughter live in the United States. (Read Herald article "Son of Cuban comandante pleads to leave island," May 28.)
"They promised I would get an answer," Almeida told El Nuevo Herald by phone after his release Thursday. "I am willing to continue my demonstrations on the Square in front of every building, beginning with the Ministry of the Interior." For El Nuevo's account, in Spanish, click here. (PHOTO SHOWS: Raúl Castro and Almeida's father at a Communist Party Politburo meeting July 26. Almeida Bosque, 82, is Vice President of the Council of State.)
---Renato Pérez Pizarro.

NYT: Most unreported immigration deaths were of Cuban nationals

    More than one in 10 deaths in immigration detention in the last six years have been overlooked and were omitted from an official list of detainee fatalities issued to Congress in March, the New York Times reported today – and curiously, nearly all the previously unreported deaths were of Cuban nationals.
    The paper reported that the Obama administration Monday added 10 previously unreported deaths to the official roster and disclosed an 11th, which occurred Friday. The new roster (here: Download 20090818Detainee-Deaths ) includes the names of several Cubans who died in custody from 2004 to 2006. The causes of death range from suicide, to “failure to eat/drink” and natural causes.
    The issue of unreported deaths in immigration custody has been covered extensively by Times reporter Nina Bernstein. She reports:
    “What Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials call “the death roster” stands at 104 since October 2003, up from the 90 that were on the list the agency gave to Congress this spring.
    The latest search for records began late last month, officials said, when Freedom of Information litigation by the American Civil Liberties Union uncovered one of the 10 deaths that had gone unreported — that of Felix Franklin Rodriguez-Torres, 36, an Ecuadorean who settled in New York and died of testicular cancer on Jan. 18, 2007, after being detained two months at an immigration jail run for profit by the Corrections Corporation of America in Eloy, Ariz.
    On Saturday, after inquiries about that case by The New York Times, the new chief of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, John Morton, issued a directive for field offices to make sure that other deaths had not been overlooked, a spokesman said.”
    The ACLU says the announcement is a “tragic confirmation of our worst fears” and that the immigration detention system has been plagued by a “lack of transparency.”
    - Frances Robles

Preferential treatment to illegal migrants may thwart accords, Cuba warns in talks

Excerpts from statement issued by the Cuban delegation after the immigration talks in New York City on Tuesday. Translation is by The Miami Herald.
• At the meeting, "Cuba ratified its unequivocal commitment to the existing migratory accords between the two countries and submitted to the North American party a proposal for a new accord, with the objective of guaranteeing a legal, safe and orderly emigration between the two countries and cooperating in a more effective manner in the confrontation with the illicit traffic of persons."
• "Cuba complies rigorously with its commitment to the letter and the spirit of the migratory accords. We moved forward in the identification of areas where both parties must work and cooperate to guarantee compliance with these accords and we proposed to reach a new accord on migratory matters."
• "The Cuban delegation also reaffirmed its concern that the agreed-upon objective upon signing the migratory accords of guaranteeing that emigration from Cuba may be legal, safe and orderly may not be reached as long as the Cuban Adjustment Act and the policy of dry-feet-wet-feet exist in the United States, as they stimulate the illegal exits and the smuggling of people by offering a differentiated treatment to the Cubans who arrive illegally on United States territory."
• "The Cuban delegation proposed to hold the next round of migratory talks in December in Havana and reiterated its willingness to continue the exchanges to find solutions for the pending issues and to strengthen cooperation in the migratory area."

For The Herald's account of the meeting, click here. 

Immigration talks resume in Manhattan

The United States and Cuba on Tuesday resumed immigration talks in New York City after a six-year hiatus, but, according to a longtime Cuba expert, the talks are not likely to prosper.
"I don't see this leading anywhere else," Wayne Smith, former head of the U.S. Interests Section in Cuba (1979-82), told The Christian Science Monitor. "That's it. It's immigration, and that's disappointing, because there is a whole list of issues the two countries should be discussing."
Smith told The Monitor that he does not expect Washington's resumption of contacts to move the Cubans. "For this piddly step, the Cubans aren't going to change their system," he said.
Others are not so pessimistic.
''This is a welcome development because the two governments are talking, because migration affects both of our interests, and because this can be a starting point for discussions on drugs, the environment, and ultimately, diplomacy and politics,'' Sarah Stephens, executive director of the Center for Democracy in the Americas, which favors normalizing relations with Cuba, told The Miami Herald.
The U.S. delegation was headed by Craig Kelly, in photo at left, Deputy Assistant Secretary of State. Dagoberto Rodríguez Barrera, Deputy Foreign Minister and a former chief of the Cuban Interests Section in Washington, led the Cuban delegation. [UPDATE: In a statement after the meeting, Rodríguez said that preferential treatment by the U.S. to illegal Cuban migrants could foil further negotiations. See text of statement elsewhere on this page.] 
---Renato Pérez Pizarro.

Fidel: Pedro Pan was a 'diabolical' trick

Operation Pedro Pan was "one of the most repugnant acts of moral aggression ever carried out" against Cuba, "a low and repugnant blow," writes Fidel Castro in his latest article in the Cuban media.
The extraction of 14,000 children from the island in the early 1960s, after the triumph of the revolution, was a "diabolical, clandestine operation" concocted by the Central Intelligence Agency in cahoots with Msgr. Bryan Walsh, "an American Catholic priest who answered to the Bishop of Miami," Castro writes.
The CIA claimed that the children's parents were about to lose their parental rights to the revolutionary government, thus triggering the exodus, yet "none of the children needed to be saved."
Castro quotes the son of one of the creators of the plan as saying that Operation Pedro Pan "was a sinister, immoral trick designed and dreamed up by the CIA." Even today, the agency refuses to declassify documents related to the children's exodus, Castro says.
"The affair smells so bad that they don't want to lift the lid," he comments. "[It] was a maneuver of cynical publicity that [Joseph] Goebbels himself, the Nazi propaganda minister, would have envied." To read the entire denunciation, in English, click here.
---Renato Pérez Pizarro.

Fidel breaks news about migration talks

Fidel Castro on Tuesday informed the Cuban people that the United States and Cuba will resume talks about migration, a bit of information that the rest of the world has known since Saturday, when Cuban diplomats in Washington voiced their willingness to negotiate.
Until Tuesday, Cuba's official media -- even the Foreign Ministry website -- had been silent on the subject.
In typical fashion, Castro quoted a foreign news report (in this case, three paragraphs from Agence France-Presse) to put his message across. "Yesterday, May 31, an AFP dispatch reported that 'Cuba agreed to reopen negotiations with the United States over migration and the direct delivery of mail, a new sign of the thaw taking place'" between the two countries, Castro wrote at the start of his latest article in Granma and other publications. To read it in full, click here.
Cubans on the street reacted optimistically. For an AFP report, click here. For a report from the Spanish newspaper La Voz de Galicia, click here.
[UPDATE: White House spokesman Robert Gibbs on Tuesday said that the resumption of talks on migration and direct mail "obviously is in the interest of both countries and obviously I believe that direct mail service will increase [President Obama's] ability to reach the Cuban people directly. We are pleased that the [Cuban] government accepted the invitation."]

---Renato Pérez Pizarro.

Cuba hails resumption of migration talks

Washington's offer to Cuba to resume talks on migration "will be examined with the greatest interest," said National Assembly president Ricardo Alarcón on Monday. "We have always said that we are willing to sit down to talk with them under conditions of equality, and on migratory matters we had an experience that was abruptly interrupted" by the Bush administration, Alarcón said, according to the Spanish news agency EFE.
"Now, all of a sudden, comes this proposal, which, I am sure, will be examined with the greatest interest," he said, adding that, between 1994 and 2003, "such meetings were held regularly, twice a year, until the United States unilaterally suspended them." Alarcón, who often was the Cuban interlocutor at those meetings, said that now that the Americans "retook the initiative of resuming them, it has to be considered, has to be studied."
Speaking at a poetry conference in Havana, Alarcón said Barack Obama "has done what he promised" about Cuba during his presidential campaign -- he relaxed the restrictions on travel and remittances to Cuba by Cuban-Americans. "There is a change" in Washington, and Cubans have "to appreciate it and handle it in an adequate manner," he said.
Last Friday, the State Department said it had proposed restarting the talks to "reaffirm both sides' commitment to safe, legal and orderly migration, to review trends in illegal Cuban migration to the United States and to improve operational relations with Cuba on migration issues."
President Obama "wants to ensure that we are doing all we can to support the Cuban people in fulfilling their desire to live in freedom," Darla Jordan, a department spokeswoman, said at the time. "He will continue to make policy decisions accordingly."
---Renato Pérez Pizarro.