Welcome mat removed for Cubans

Published Wednesday, September 30, 1998, in the Miami Herald

Welcome mat removed for Cubans

By GLENN GARVIN
Herald Staff Writer

MANAGUA -- As the Cold War fades to a distant memory, the warm smiles that once greeted Cubans fleeing the Castro regime are turning chilly throughout Central America and the Caribbean.

Taking their lead from the United States, which signed a repatriation agreement with Cuba in 1995, governments throughout the region are making it clear that they no longer offer automatic safe haven to anyone who gets off the island.

``The whole ideological question is gone, and the Cubans are just seen as a pain -- as poor people looking for a better situation,'' one U.S. diplomat said.

Four Caribbean countries among the closest to Cuba -- the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands, the Dominican Republic and Jamaica -- all reached repatriation agreements with Havana after the Clinton administration did so in May 1995. The accords call for Cuban rafters intercepted at sea to be returned to the island.

But now even Central American countries, much farther away and unlikely to be inundated by waves of refugees, are taking a harsher look at Cuban arrivals:

Costa Rica just did away with a provision in its law that allowed any permanent resident of the country to bring in close relatives. Officials admitted the change was aimed at slowing the flow of Cuban immigrants.

In July, Guatemalan authorities arrested seven Cubans as they arrived on a charter flight from Costa Rica. The seven, carrying forged U.S. passports, were headed for Mexico, where they apparently intended to cross the border into the United States. They were sent back to Havana.

Thirteen Cubans, including a pregnant woman and three children, were detained in Panama last month after they arrived with phony passports from other countries. They were all returned to the island.

Following the U.S. lead

Ricardo Alberto Arias, who retired as Panama's foreign minister recently, noted that several of the 13 Cubans that his country deported had criminal records. Nonetheless, he admitted, a few years ago they almost certainly would not have been sent home.

``There is a new tendency in the region with respect to Cubans, and the leader of that tendency has been the United States, which has put limits on the Cubans it's willing to accept,'' Arias said. ``That policy has penetrated the entire region.''

A Caribbean official who didn't want his name used was even more blunt: ``The U.S. isn't allowing them to stay, so why should we?''

Central American and Caribbean governments, however, are not merely playing follow-the-leader with the United States. Cuban President Fidel Castro's recent diplomatic initiatives in the region have led to budding trade and commercial ties that the governments are loath to jeopardize.

The Central American airlines Lacsa, Aviateca and Copa all have regularly scheduled and extremely popular flights to Havana. So does Air Jamaica. The two big all-inclusive Caribbean resort chains, Sandals and SuperClubs, have operations in Cuba. Cuba is a major customer of Panama's free trade zone.

A decade ago, governments might have been embarrassed to be putting economic matters ahead of humanitarian concerns, but the end of the Cold War has focused everything through a different lens. Eduardo Vilchez, head of Costa Rica's immigration department, says hardly any of the Cubans who arrive in his country can be considered refugees anymore.

``They don't say they are being persecuted,'' Vilchez said. ``They just say they want to get out of Cuba.''

Nicaragua an exception

Virtually the only leader in the region to express full-fledged support for Cuban refugees is Nicaraguan President Arnoldo Aleman. In May, when Aleman offered visas to about 200 Cuban rafters scheduled for deportation from the Bahamas, it caused a diplomatic uproar, but he told The Herald he doesn't care.

``These other countries haven't lived through what we have with the Sandinista regime,'' Aleman said, recalling Nicaragua's 11 years of Marxist rule and the hard times that Nicaraguan refugees encountered in other nations

But even Aleman has had trouble enforcing his refugee-friendly policy. In August, while he was on a state visit to South America, eight Cuban refugees -- including several well-known baseball players -- turned up on Nicaragua's Atlantic coast.

Although the eight were on the list of the 200 refugees detained in the Bahamas that Aleman had ordered admitted to Nicaragua, immigration officials debated for six hours whether offering them political asylum would damage Nicaraguan relations with Cuba. They finally gave the refugees tourist visas, and told them not to talk to a crowd of reporters waiting outside the immigration office.

Herald staff writer Don Bohning and special correspondent Catalina Calderon contributed to this report.