Ballplayers, coach denied asylum

From Herald Staff and Wire Reports

Four baseball players and a coach who defected from Cuba do not qualify for political asylum in the Bahamas, a senior immigration official said Wednesday in Nassau.

One of them, Jorge Luis Toca, was offered a visa by Japan because his wife is Japanese, a Japanese Embassy official in Kingston, Jamaica, said Wednesday. The other players are trying to get visas from Costa Rica.

The Bahamas' decision to deny political refugee status was based on interviews by inspectors from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees last week, Deputy Immigration Director Vernon Burrows said.

``They could not determine that these people were politically persecuted, and we follow that finding,'' Burrows said. ``If no offer comes from another country, they will be repatriated.''

Burrows said there was no word from Costa Rica on visas for any of the players. On March 24, Costa Rican Foreign Minister Fernando Naranjo had said his country would welcome the Cubans.

Toca, Angel Lopez, Jorge Diaz, coach Enrique Chinea and Michael Jova, a 17-year-old shortstop from Cuba's junior Olympic team, were found in a boat by Bahamian fishermen March 20.

They are being held with more than 330 other migrants at the Carmichael Road Detention Center in Nassau.

The number of Cubans in the Bahamas grew from 138 to 154 on Tuesday, when 16 rafters landed on Andros Island, according to a Foreign Ministry announcement. The rafters were to be taken to the Nassau detention center.

Thirty-one other Cubans were reported to have landed Wednesday on Cayman Brac, a small island south of Cuba, according to Cayman Islands authorities.

At the center in Nassau, Cuban detainees complained Wednesday that supplies flown into Nassau on Saturday by Miami-based volunteers of Brothers to the Rescue had not been distributed to them. Worse still, they contended, Bahamian guards were stealing the supplies from a nearby warehouse.

A Foreign Ministry official, Luther Smith, said that was impossible.

``There is no storage depot in the detention center,'' Smith said. The supplies were delivered to the Bahamian Red Cross building three miles from the center, he said.

``We feel insulted'' by the Cubans' allegations, Smith added.

But Red Cross director Marina Glinton told The Herald that the supplies were indeed taken to the Carmichael Road Detention Center on Saturday, ``at the insistence of Brothers to the Rescue.'' The supplies consisted of baby food and toiletries, she said, ``no [adult] food, nothing that needs to be cooked.''

Glinton defended the Bahamian guards at the center, saying they are professionals who would not steal donated goods. Perhaps the Cubans saw Bahamian guards removing their own supplies from an army warehouse and assumed the worst, she said.

``Those Cubans are lying a bit much,'' she said on the phone. ``If we're going to have all this publicity and all this disturbance, we're not going to accept anymore food for these people.

``I've had enough,'' Glinton said. ``What the Bahamian government should do is repatriate [the Cubans], like it does with the Haitians.''

Jose Basulto, president of Brothers to the Rescue, said Wednesday that his group will halt its airlift until the Bahamian government allows Brothers crew members to watch the distribution of supplies to the Cubans.

According to Basulto, the supplies flown in Saturday included ready-to-eat food, and medicine, toiletries and other goods.

Herald staff writers Pablo Alfonso and Cynthia Corzo contributed to this report.