In a curious juxtaposition of refugee events in Cuba, a United Nations official this week surveyed a camp harboring 316 Haitian refugees. This official, the representative in Cuba of the U.N. High Commission on Refugees, toured the safe haven in Punta de Maisi, in the easternmost region of Cuba.
This camp, operated by the Red Cross and the Cuban government, is a place for Haitians who flee the oppression of their homeland, who risk death and persecution at the hands of the military simply for trying to leave. And in Cuba they are safe.
That's what this official found, according to a story I read this week on the Spanish news service EFE. He praised the attention the Haitian refugees received from the Cubans, which has granted such temporary safe haven to an estimated 60,000 Haitians whose boats have drifted off course in the past 10 years.
The report offers this by way of background: "The political instability and acute economic crisis (Haiti) suffers has provoked a massive exodus of those who risk precarious conditions to reach the United States."
So it's a good thing when they get to Cuba. They get shelter, food, medical treatment. Nobody shoots them for trying to leave. More than 100 Haitians have been at Punta de Maisi since April. They were joined by 200 who arrived aboard a flimsy vessel early this month.
Days later, on July 13, a tugboat carrying about 71 Cubans slipped away
from the port of Havana in the darkness. Like the Haitians, the passengers of
the 13 de Marzo were fleeing oppression and an acute economic crisis. There
were entire
families aboard the tug.
Seven miles into the escape voyage, two Cuban government fireboats crept up on the tugboat. The refugees watched helplessly as crewmen opened up with high-pressure hoses. Later, two more fireboats came up and began ramming the tug.
The refugees scrambled, called out to the crews of the attacking boats, showed them the children. But the government boats didn't stop until the tugboat sank, and until more than half the passengers disappeared into the sea.
One survivor, a woman who lost her husband, her 10-year-old son, her brother, three uncles and two cousins in the attack, told reporters: "We begged them not to harm us. We showed them the children, but they continued to pour water on us."
In the classic official murkiness that follows events involving refugees trying to flee Cuba, the Cuban government has attempted to depict the passengers as hijackers who were rescued when their leaky boat began to sink after it accidentally collided with border guard boats. It was a rescue.
Thirty-one people survived. The women and children were released. The men were imprisoned.
And if it weren't for the survivors who risked their skin by talking to the foreign press, this is where the story might have remained, in the version delivered by Havana's Prensa Latina. In it, the Cuban government called the hijacking "an irresponsible act of piracy, stimulated and promoted by counterrevolutionary radio broadcasts and reactionary elements of Cuban origin in Miami."
Still, the outrage seems to resound in a sealed capsule and
stir in familiar patterns, in limits that are exact and predictable. Sometimes
it feels as if The Island, the capsule of weeping and hurt and protests, is
here. And sometimes it seems as if nobody outside it, in the lands on the
other side of our water, can hear or understand.
And, meanwhile, what can we do but stand at the edge of Biscayne Bay, at the shrine of the Virgin of Charity, and cast off our prayers? What can we do but count the ironies from afar?
© 1996 The Miami Herald.