Why the Cuban Adjustment Act needs to be fully restored
A closer look at the wet foot, dry foot policy
By Notes from the Cuban Exile Quarter
August 17, 2015
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Cuban Patrol Boat near Guantanamo Naval Base
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On December 16, 2014, the eve of the announcement of a new relationship between the United States and the Castro regime, Cuban Patrol Boat sank a boatload of 32 Cuban refugees and one of them Diosbel Díaz Bioto went missing and is assumed drowned the others were detained.
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Diosbel Díaz Bioto: Died December 16, 2014
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Four months later Yuriniesky Martínez Reina was shot in the back and killed by state security chief Miguel Angel Río Seco Rodríguez in the Martí municipality of Matanzas, Cuba on April 9, 2015 for peacefully trying to leave Cuba. A group of young men were building a boat near Menéndez beach to flee the island, when they were spotted trying to leave and were shot at by state security. If they had made it to dry land they would be free, but if caught at sea the U.S. coastguard then would have returned them to the Castro dictatorship. This is a violation of the spirit of the Cuban Adjustment Act, a 1966 law that granted refugee status to those fleeing Cuba from 1966 until 1994.
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Yuriniesky Martínez Reina killed April 9, 2015
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At the same time many Cuban athletes continue to defect to the United States. This is something Mexican, Jamaican, or Dominican athletes do not have to do because they are free to enter and exit their own countries. Additionally their governments do not limit their right to live and work abroad. In the case of Mexico some Americans are upset because the Mexican government provides aid and assistance to Mexican migrants in the United States. Cuba is the only country in this hemisphere, although Venezuela is trending in the same direction, in which the regime does not recognize the rights of Cuban nationals to enter and exit their own country. Cuba is different from the rest of the countries in the hemisphere.
Meanwhile there is also an additional security concern. Author and journalist Fabiola Santiago brought up the concerns of exiled opposition activist Yoan David Gonzalez in her August 12, 2015 column "Pro-Castro there, but now here?" on Cuban repressor Jenny Freire Rosabal who engaged in acts of repudiation in Cuba and rallied for Chavez in Venezuela who is now living here in Miami with her husband who is slandering democratic opposition activists from the island.
Unfortunately, these are not new problems but the result of the Clinton administration's immigration accord with the Castro regime in 1995 that violated the spirit of the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act deporting Cuban refugees back to the Castro regime. Carl McGill, Professor of Criminal Justice at University of Phoenix in 2000 compared "Clinton's policy to return 'rafters' to Cuba" was "like returning a slave in pre-Civil War America back to his enslaver. This would have condoned civil rights violations and slavery, as returning a 'rafter' to Cuba condones human rights violations and communism." The Dred Scott Decision is a historical abomination as is President Clinton's wet foot, dry foot policy that circumvented the intent of the Cuban Adjustment Act.
The General Accounting Office (GAO) reported that "for over 30 years, fleeing Cubans had been welcomed to the United States; however, the U.S. government reversed this policy on August 19, 1994, when President Clinton announced that Cuban rafters interdicted at sea would no longer be brought to the United States." Wet foot, dry foot" was a massive set back for Cuban refugees.
In November 2012 The Miami Herald reported on former Cuban provincial prisons chief Crescencio Marino Rivero who abused prisoners and ordered guards to abuse others before he moved to Miami.
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| Cresencio Marino Rivero, Cuban prison chief found in Miami |
This is in spite of the August 4, 2011 Obama Administration ban on visas for people who the State Department finds have been involved in human rights violations. Cuban human rights violators continue to get a free pass to enter the United States and when identified by their victims, nothing happens.
The 1995 Clinton - Castro Immigration Accord needs to be repealed and the lottery controlled by the dictatorship ended and the Cuban Adjustment Act restored to its original intent. Otherwise the legacy of the Obama years will not be tearing down the Cuban version of the Berlin Wall which are the Florida Straits but by ending the Cuban Adjustment act closing off the path to freedom for those fleeing the dictatorship and assisting the brutal agents of the Castro regime in the murder of refugees and enslavement of Cubans.
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