Cubans stopped as they try to reach Haulover Beach (Miami)

[Scurrilous]

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/12723814.htm

<snip>

"A South Florida television audience got a rare peek at migrant interdiction on the open seas Friday, as 10 desperate Cuban men fought defiantly with U.S. authorities for 90 minutes as they tried to reach the U.S. mainland.

In the end, less than two miles from Haulover Beach, the U.S. Coast Guard and Homeland Security succeeded in stopping the men, but not before a Homeland Security Go-Fast boat rammed the wooden homemade craft, partially knocking it over and sending four of the men spilling into the sea.

A government spokesman called the ramming "inadvertant."

The men eventually made it back on board, one man swimming hard against a current, three others hanging onto the side. No one was injured, according to U.S. Coast Guard Spokesman Luis Diaz."


<snip>

"During the melee, the Coast Guard used a rope to try to stall the engine of the wooden craft, tossed lifejackets at the men -- which were thrown back -- gently nudged the wooden craft with a Coast Guard vessel, then briefly sprayed water from a hose at the Cubans."

[Turbineguy]

1. In 1994, I was on a containership

passing Miami and we stopped and pulled some Cubans off a raft. We got them into our Lifeboat and hoisted them on board. They were in terrible shape. Barely alive. They'd been drinking seawater. There were two rafts in the group and one did not make it. One man watched his Father drown.

The USGC came out and we handed them over. The CG guys were very nice and assured me they would be well taken care of and probably had relatives in the area who would take them in.

But here's the thing:

They were drifting past Miami. In the Gulfstream, on their way to Europe. There are an unknown number of people who simply never make it and are swept along by the current until they die.

[Mika]

2. 1994 was before the repatriation agreement.

In 1997 a repatriation agreement was created between the US and Cuba that included the 'wet foot/dry foot' policy.

The USA currently offers over 20,000 LEGAL immigration visas per year to Cubans (and Bush has announced that the number would increase despite the fact that not all 20,000 were applied for in the last few years). This number is more than any other single country in the world. The US interests section in Cuba does the required criminal background check on the applicants.

The US's 'wet foot/ dry foot' policy (that applies to Cubans only) permits all Cubans, including Cuban criminals and felons, who arrive on US shores by illegal means to remain in the US despite having failed to qualify (or even apply) for a legal US immigration application.

Cubans who leave for the US without a US visa are returned to Cuba if caught at sea (mainly in smuggler's go-fast boats @ $5,000 per head) by a US/Cuban repatriation agreement. But IF they make it to US soil, no matter who they are or what their criminal backround might be, they get to stay in the US and enjoy perks offered ONLY TO CUBAN IMMIGRANTS (via the US's Cuban Adjustment Act and a variety of other 'Cubans only' perks). Perks like instant work visa, instant green card, instant access to sec 8 taxpayer assisted housing, instant social security, instant welfare, free health care, and more.

These perks are not offered to any other immigrant group, but yet, without the perks offered to Cubans, immigrants still pour into the US from all over the Caribbean and the Latin Americas - many taking greater risks than Cubans to get here.


Get it? There is no such thing as a Cuban illegal immigrant in the USA. Plus, they get perks that no other group is offered.

[ret5hd]

3. thank you mika...how many times does it have to be said?

[Judi Lynn]

4. Hundreds of Latin Americans die annually trying to get across the border

from Mexico to California, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. They die in various ways from drowning, exposure, dehydration, etc. The desert has been littered with their remains.

If they were offered a free chance to stay here once they crossed, there would be THOUSANDS dying in the effort annually.

Haitians, Dominicans, etc. also participate in Caribbean migration, and they DO get taken to jail and returned A.S.A.P. when they are detected in America. They also would come here in torrents if they were offered the array of perks available to Cubans.

Even with the attractive inducements, some Cubans have returned, or spent time coming and going:

In Cuba, one used to be either a revolucionario or a contrarevolutionario, while those who decided to leave were gusanos (worms) or escoria (scum). In Miami, the rhetoric has also been harsh. Exiles who do not endorse a confrontational policy with Cuba, seeking instead a negotiated settlement, have often been excoriated as traidores (traitors) and sometimes espías (spies). Cubans, notably cultural stars, who visit Miami but choose to return to their homeland have been routinely denounced. One either defects or is repudiated.

But there has been a slow but steady shift in the last decade-a not to the clear majority of Cubans en exilio and on the island who crave family reunification. Since 1978, more than one million airline tickets have been sold for flights from Miami to Havana. Faced with the brisk and continuous traffic between Miami and Havana, hard-liners on both sides have opted to deny the new reality. Anomalies such as the phenomenon of reverse balseros, Cubans who, unable to adapt to the pressures and bustle of entrepreneurial Miami, return to the island, or gusañeros, expatriates who send a portion of their earnings home in exchange for unfettered travel back and forth to Cuba (the term is a curious Cuban hybrid of gusano and compañero, or comrade), are unacknowledged by both sides, as are those who live in semi-exilio, returning home to Cuba for long holidays.
(snip/...)

Page xviii, preface
Cuba Confidential
Ann Louise Bardach
Former New York Times, Vanity Fair writer
Currently Newsweek International

On edit:

Thanks, Mika, for reference to the benefits which are offered to Cuban immigrants upon arrival in the U.S. Most Americans haven't been aware of this from the first. It takes a while, doesn't it, for word to get around?

This privilege which is withheld from other nationalities facing equal or greater dangers getting to the States is surely resented.

[RebelOne]

5. Maybe no one here will agree with me, but I think that

all Cubans that are picked up on the ocean should be sent back to Cuba. I was in Miami during the Mariel boat lifts. The crime rate in Miami soared to over double of what it was before dear old Jimmie Carter opened his arms to all the refugees. This is one of the reasons that I moved out of Miami up to North Georgia. I had lived in the Miami area since I was 5 years old, but it is not the same city now as when I was growing up. A person cannot get a job if they are not bilingual.

[Mika]

7. Thanks for posting that Bardach exerpt, Judi Lynn

Ms Bardach rightly points out that not all Cuban immigrants are here for the same reason, and not all are Batistanos.

Americans should understand that most of the Cuban immigrants that have come to the US have come here for the same reasons that immigrants from all over the Caribbean and Latin Americas come to the US.. jobs. Jobs that help them earn enough money to send some back to their family in their homeland. Many Cuban immigrants don't have an all consuming hatred of Fidel Castro, and the USA offers Cubans many avenues and a wealth of exclusive perks for immigrating here.. plus they can travel back to their homeland and take or send money.. just like almost all other immigrants do (albeit with restrictions).

[Judi Lynn]

8. Good points, Mika. So many people have never known Cubans travel

to Cuba with no fear of Cuba whatsoever. They've come and gone for ages, going there to see friends, relatives, vacation. The crack-down on their travel to Cuba comes from the man who has claimed to be their best pal: _{George W. Bush.}

Ordinary Americans, who've been wildly unaware of the contradictory information have always assumed Cubans "flee" from Cuba and do it due to their great fear of the island's government. It confuses them when they learn that Cubans have always been in and out of Cuba after leaving. That's the great feature of the right-wing's propaganda campaign: the terrifying, oppressive "totalitarian nature" of the Cuban government. Once they start thinking it through, and checking up, they realize they've been had all these years. Fooled. Duped. Played. Deceived. Conned. Tricked. Manipulated.

Speaking for myself, I have to say I felt disgusted when I learned how ignorant I'd been. It was a life-altering experience.

[peacetalksforall]

6. There is very good information in this thread from Mika and Judi Lynn.

I won't go into a rant tonight about the money that creates the favors for Cubans. I will add to what has been said in that the exodus started full force in 1959. The benefits they received were more than any other immigrant group in the history of this country.

In decades past it was premised on the fact that we had to 'show the USSR' and the world that good people had to flee communism. When the USSR folded and the Berlin Wall came down... we continued our embargos. Today, travel is still restricted and substantial penalties have been added if Immigration finds out that you visited Cuba. Cuban-Americans in the U.S. are sending billions of dollars to family members in Cuba, but the U.S. won't allow a normal business person the opportunity to do business there. Cubans are prohibited from participating in sport and art competitions and celebrations. Every other country does business with Cuba freely, including China, but not the U.S.

It was once said that Albania was the last serious bastion of Communism in the world. We're big friends with them today. But not with Cuba.

It is political nonsense that both Republican and Democrat leaders allow and benefit from this ploy.

[Judi Lynn]

9. More about Cuban-American terrorist, Luis Posada Carriles

who may still be in Texas, in jail, awaiting _Bush's next brilliant brain spasm focused on protecting his @$$ from the effects of the law as it should be administered:

Weekend Edition
September 24 / 25, 2005

Is Osama Smiling?
The Terrorist Resumé of Luis Posada
By SAUL LANDAU

(snip)

.........Al Qaeda knew about Posada. After all, he had confided to journalists and others that for four decades he had worked on and off with the CIA to assassinate Cuban President Fidel Castro. In 1971, his intimacy with the Agency led them to develop a gun inside a 16 mm newsreel film camera. Working with Antonio Veciana, another wanna-be Castro assassin, Posada hired two Venezuelan hit men to pose as reporters and travel to Santiago, Chile several months before the Cuban leader's planned visit to that country. In this way, the assassins could blend in casually with the foreign press corps. The ersatz news crew, carrying two cameras, an ordinary film machine and the CIA-made lethal weapon, nervously awaited Castro's arrival.

In 1995, Veciana told me how the assassins aimed the special camera primed to fire a lethal bullet at Castro. But they also noticed Castro's security forces covering the exits. This gave them compelling second thoughts.

Posada, disgusted over this failure, sent the killer camera to Caracas and hired different assassins. When Castro stopped in the Venezuelan capital on his return route to Cuba, the hired killers didn't even show up.
(snip)

Again, Posada, now working with Orlando Bosch, another obsessed Castro-hater, hired two Venezuelan killers to detonate a bomb on board a Cubana flight over Barbados. 73 passengers and crew members died. The police arrested the hired weasels who ratted on Posada and off he went to a Venezuelan prison where he sat while courts and elected officials played politics with his case. After a decade of inconclusive judicial proceedings, Posada's Miami buddies bribed the prison officials and Posada "escaped" to Central America, where he worked for Lt. Col. Oliver North in supplying the Contras in their CIA-backed attempt to overthrow the Nicaraguan government.
(snip/...)

http://www.counterpunch.org/landau09242005.html



The woman in the photos is Mireya Moscoso, recently retired President of Panama who pardoned Posada Carriles one week before leaving office, and who called Cuban "exile" acquaintances in Miami to inform them of what she had done. Note she is attending a personal evening with the _Bushes, a concert of black American music, which is not a customary tradition for government heads of other countries.

[Mika]

10. Kinda similar to the US op against Ahmad Shah Masood..

.. when a fake news video camera had a bomb within blew up during a news conference/interview killing Masood.


Shah Masood, leader of the Northern Alliance assassinated two days before 9/11
http://www.globalresearch.ca/articles/CHO309B.html

Had Masood not been assassinated, the Bush administration would not have been able to install their political puppet Hamid Karzai in Kaboul.

Masood rather rather than Hamid Karzai (a former employee of UNOCAL oil company), would have become the head of the post-Taliban government formed in the wake of the U.S. bombings of Afghanistan.

In other words, the assassination of the leader of the Northern Alliance, was consistent with U.S. foreign policy objectives.

[Judi Lynn]

11. No wonder Posada Carriles has been so cocky, untroubled about being caught

He knows certain people in government don't want him going to Venezuela any more than he wants to go there himself. They can't afford for him to fall into the hands of anyone who's not going to feel obligated protect their secrets.

Haven't seen this material before you posted it here. Shah Masood's convenient assassination, would seem "heaven-sent" to _Bush interests, following the Trifecta pattern. Thanks, Mika.