Chronicle on Cuba - November 2008

Exile Community

November 3: Cuban doctor Ivette Domínguez, who walked away from an international mission in Zimbabwe in 2002, is determined to get what she considers to be her most basic right as a mother: contact with her youngest son, who still lives in Cuba. But her prospects aren't good, given a pending lawsuit in a Cuban court to strip her of her parental rights. ''I think I have the right to demand a normal relationship with my son,'' said Domínguez, 37. ``It is inhuman what is happening. I'm destroyed.'' Domínguez, who specialized in internal medicine, has lived in Málaga, Spain, since leaving Zimbabwe in 2004. Her oldest son from her first marriage, Alexander, 16, lives with her after having obtained paternal permission to emigrate to Spain in August of 2007. Her 10 year-old son, Alfredo Chapur Domínguez, is at the center of the legal dispute and currently lives with his father, Alfredo Chapur Hernández, 37, in the city of Santa Clara, Cuba (The Miami Herald, 3/11/08).

November 4: Miami's trio of Cuban-American Republican congress members survived their toughest challenge yet. Voters returned hard-line anti-Castro Representatives Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Lincoln Diaz-Balart and Mario Diaz-Balart to Washington. It was a major coup for the trio. With Barack Obama heading the Democratic ticket and a newer, more moderate generation of non-Cuban Hispanic voters emerging throughout Miami-Dade, the Democrats had targeted the Diaz-Balart brothers for defeat. Mario Diaz-Balart survived the closest race, narrowly outpolling Joe Garcia, the former chief of the Miami-Dade Democratic Party, to win his fourth term. Lincoln Diaz-Balart scored a remarkably large double-digit win over former Hialeah Mayor Raul Martinez to win his ninth term on Capitol Hill. Ros-Lehtinen cruised to her 11th term with 58 percent of the vote to vanquish her challenger, Colombian-American businesswoman Annette Taddeo. Ros-Lehtinen said she fretted that an unpopular president, an unpopular war, a plummeting economy and an ''Obama wave'' might have added up to a perfect storm for the Democratic challengers. “It had all the makings of me going down,'' Ros-Lehtinen said. ``If I can make it in this election, I can make it in any election'' (The Miami Herald, 5/11/08).

November 6: According to Bendixen's exit polls, US President elect Barack Obama won 35 percent of the Cuban-American vote in Miami-Dade County, nearly 10 points higher than John Kerry's showing in 2004. Within that community, the generational difference was stark. For example, 84 percent of Miami-Dade Cuban-American voters 65 or older backed McCain, while 55 percent of those 29 or younger backed Obama. For evidence of the potential divide among Cuban Americans, consider Miami's Pujol family. Alexandra Palomo-Pujol, 24, helped persuade her mother Rose, a lifelong Republican, to back Obama -- but those arguments failed with her grandparents, who emigrated from Cuba in 1959. The family's debates over the election at times ended in slammed doors and days spent without speaking, Palomo-Pujol said. Meanwhile, Rose Pujol, 53, became an enthusiastic Obama supporter, attending the Democratic Convention, volunteering for the Florida campaign and putting up a life-size cutout of Obama in her Coconut Grove offices. When she went to tell her parents that she and her daughters were backing the Democratic candidate, they were appalled. ''I could see the hair rising up on their arms, even though I kept telling them that it's OK to realize 50 years later that the party you're part of needs to be revamped,'' Pujol said. Despite the political divide in families like the Pujols, Cuban-American political observers say this year's presidential election did not signal a departure from the past (The Miami Herald, 6/11/08).

November 9: With Democrats in control of the White House and Congress, the Cuban American National Foundation is sitting pretty after wandering the political wilderness for eight years. Jorge Mas Santos -- scion of the architect of US policy toward Cuba before ultra-conservatives walked out of CANF in a huff in 2001 -- now has the ear of President-elect Barack Obama. Mas Santos' father, Jorge Mas Canosa, was brilliant at positioning CANF as a human rights group backed by Republicans and many Democrats in Congress during the Reagan years. When George H.W. Bush was running for re-election in 1992 against Bill Clinton, Mas Canosa tried to straddle both sides. Even though he personally embraced the GOP, he did not want CANF or Cuban Americans to ever be taken for granted, as blacks had been by the Democratic Party. Human rights, he noted, have no party affiliation. The Bushes never forgot the slight. When George W. Bush ran in 2000, he expected allegiance from CANF. By then, Mas Canosa had died, and Mas Santos vowed to keep his father's bipartisan approach. CANF was locked out. Instead, the Cuban Liberty Council, formed by CANF's break-away old guard, had an open door at the White House and pushed to tighten travel and remittances to Cuba. The result? With Fidel Castro all but dead and his brother Raúl in charge, the US government has had no sway on the regime and the opposition is floundering. With Obama's win CANF is positioned to have immense influence on Cuba policy (The Miami Herald, 10/9/08).

November 18: Inside her bedroom on Cuba's Isle of Youth, 7-year-old Daviana González prays to be reunited with her mother after more than five years, relatives say. In Camagüey, Marta Daniela Batista, another little girl separated from her parents, is said to suffer from mental health problems. The girls are children of Cuban medical professionals living in Miami who deserted their posts in various nations where the Cuban government sent them. But the price for desertion was higher than the families believed possible: The Cuban government is denying the little ones permission to leave, even though they have US visas that would allow them to travel. ''Marta isn't to blame for what her parents did, and yet they punish her,'' said her mother, Melvis Mesa, 42. ``She's just a child, and children have a right to be with their parents. What the Cuban government is doing is a terrible abuse.'' Mesa and Daviana's mother -- Yaisis González -- are among more than a dozen Cuban health workers working with the Cuban American National Foundation, or CANF, on a campaign to get their children back. CANF representatives plan to file complaints against the Cuban government with international organizations, such as the Organization of American States' Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and the United Nations. A press conference is planned to call for other Cuban medical professionals in the same situation to come forward and join their cause. The Cuban government is ''holding the children hostage'' to punish those who leave official missions, López said (The Miami Herald, 18/11/08).

November 19: A Cuban man who lost both of his arms -- after he tried to escape from prison following a failed attempt to reach Florida -- denounced the Cuban government for keeping his family on the island even though they have been issued visas to join him in the United States. In March 2007 Jorge Albart Rodriguez detailed how he injected petroleum into his own arms during the 1980s in an attempt to escape from a Cuban prison. ''All of the frustration and pain I felt while locked up does not compare to the suffering of not having my family reunited,'' he said ``They should already be in Miami, but the Cuban government has delayed the authorization for their exit without offering an explanation.'' He said he suspected that the publicity given to his ordeal never sat well with Cuban authorities who have blocked the departure of his wife, Judith, and their sons Jury, 9, and Jorge, 19. His family had been due to arrive to the United States in September. ''The nightmare is not over and I don't know what else I can do,'' Albart said (The Miami Herald, 20/11/08).

November 20: Two veterans of the Elián González saga are expected to be named to top posts in Democrat Barack Obama's administration, infuriating some Cuban-American Republicans who haven't forgotten the 6-year-old boy seized in Miami and sent back to the communist regime. The Associated Press is reporting that Obama's top choice for US attorney general is Eric Holder, who served as deputy attorney general during the 2000 raid in Miami. Greg Craig, who represented González's father in the custody battle, is expected to be named White House counsel. ''This is a clear sign that the Obama administration is diametrically opposed to the concerns and views of the Cuban-American community,'' said state Representative David Rivera of Miami, who helped organize the June protest. ``It is a blatant and disrespectful slap in the face'' (The Miami Herald, 20/11/08).