As far as the Wall Street Journal is concerned, David Gonzalez Mejias and Marialys Darias Mesa are not lawbreakers.
They say that the dentists’ efforts to emigrate from Cuba with their families began legally when they entered the visa “lottery” that the U.S. holds for Cubans every year since President Clinton made the “wet foot-dry foot” deal with Castro.
This so-called wet foot-dry foot deal is today coming in for intense scrutiny. In this regard, we note some of yesterday’s new information, as reported by Oscar Corrall.
The new information says that “CubanAmerican members of Congress plan to meet with White House officials this afternoon to discuss the controversial wet foot/dry foot policy for Cubans arriving by sea.
“Also meeting in Washington today: an umbrella group of Cuban exile organizations called Cuban Consensus. Made up of 18 groups, Consensus members set aside their political differences last year to craft an 18-point blueprint on how best the island should be governed in a demo, cratic transition post Fidel Castro.
“Cuban Consensus will be meeting at Georgetown University.”
The power and influence wielded by this Cuban-American lobby is such that “the White House agreed to meet with Cuban-American leaders to discuss U.S.Cuba migration policy after a well-known Cuban exile activist went on a hunger strike to protest the repatriation of 15 Cuban migrants who had been found by the Coast Guard standing on the pilings of the old Seven Mile Bridge in the Florida Keys.
“The Coast Guard, concluded that because that section of the bridge – which has missing pieces -was not connected to land, the migrants were “feet-wet” and sent them back to Cuba. A federal judge has since ruled that the bridge is part of Florida and has asked U.S. officials to expedite travel papers for the 15 Cubans now back on the island.”
And as the Wall Street Journal ﾠexplains, that policy says that the U.S. will send back Cuban migrants captured at sea (wet foot) but will also allow 20,000 ﾠvisas a year to Cubans through a lottery ﾠsystem.
It also notes that “not surprisingly, Fidel has not always kept his side of the bargain. Though the dentists had won U.S. visas in the lottery, he denied them exit visas in 2002 on grounds that their medical training made them too important to spare. The dentists sent their families on to the U.S. and obediently waited the three prescribed years.
“When they re-applied in 2005, the Cuban government again refused to let them go. This time they were termed “indispensable” and given no certain date for when they might join their loved ones. (Meanwhile, Castro has sent thousands of Cuban medical professionals to Venezuela both to promote revolution and earn the hard currency that is so precious in Cuba’s Third World economy.) In desperation, the dentists joined a “fast boat” escape from Cuba at the end of last April.
“When the U.S. Coast Guard picked up the pair, along with 16 others, their mechanically disabled boat was in Bahamian waters. Tired and terrified, they say they showed their legal – but expired – visas to the Coast Guard officer, who decided not to allow them an immigration hearing, nor to repatriate them to Cuba.
Instead, as we now know, he deposited them with the Bahamian government, which rejected their pleas as political refugees and sent them to the detention center in Nassau.
We also know that in a diplomatic note to The Bahamas on June 30, 2005, the U.S. said it wants the dentists freed and is ready to make current their visas. To date, it seems as if the Bahamian government is refusing their release on the grounds that a memorandum of understanding with the Fidel Castro regime says that Cuban rafters get sent back to Cuba.
However, there is a most important complication. It involves Prime Minister, the Rt. Hon. Perry Gladstone Christie.
We are learning from a source close to the matter who is of the view that Prime Minister Perry Christie has assured U.S. Ambassador John Rood that they will not be returned to Cuba.
Like others who would like to see this issue resolved, our counsel is that now that it has been allowed to drag on for so long, every effort should be made to see to it that this matter is resolved once and for all; and sooner rather than later.
Editorial from The Bahama Journal
