'The wrong place at the wrong time'
Jane Bussey. Published Sunday, March 4, 2001, in the
Miami Herald
Czech jailed in Cuba endured questioning, then an injection
Jan Bubenik first burst onto center stage of Czech politics in 1989, when,
as a 20-year-old medical student, he became the spokesman for the Velvet
Revolution that toppled the Communist regime. In between serving in the first
elected parliament and his current job as a corporate recruiter, Bubenik
perfected his English studying economics at the University of Colorado. Bubenik
returned to the international spotlight on Jan. 12 when he and member of
parliament Ivan Pilip were thrown in jail in Cuba after visiting several
dissidents in Ciego de Avila. Accused of violating their tourist visas by
holding "subversive contacts,'' the two men were held for 24 days, most of
the time in the Villa Marista prison, before being released. Bubenik spoke with
The Herald last week about how a chance discussion with Pilip turned into far
more than Bubenik expected.
Q: Why did you decide to go to Cuba?
A: [Pilip] said that he was looking for a partner who has been in similar
programs [to Freedom House, a pro-democracy organization based in Washington,
D.C.] and whether I would be interested? It sounded very, very interesting. I
had some Cuban American friends in the [United] States, and I agreed. He told me
that in the worst case what happened to people who went there and visited the
dissidents . . . was they were thrown into immigration jail, usually two days
prior to their departure and then [deported].
The motive was really, that we as a former communist country . . . now when
we do have freedom and democracy -- to share that with people who are not as
fortunate and who are brave enough to stand up to a regime like the [President
Fidel] Castro system.
Q: How did you get apprehended?
A: We had two meetings with the people who were mentioned in the articles,
and then at 8 p.m. we went to the house of the independent journalist Antonia
[Bubenik declined to give a last name].
At about midnight, we got to the hotel and spent the night. In the morning
when we were about to check out, they told us there was a problem with our
passports -- that we had registered as Polish citizens, which wasn't true, and
an immigration policeman who started to take the numbers of our passports and
questioned us on whom did we meet. What was the purpose of our trip?
The secret police showed up. Then we were taken to the station, our luggage
was searched and then we were questioned some more. We maintained that we were
tourists there. We did not deny that we had met with these people because they
had admitted to that and then they asked if we would be willing to drive our car
to Havana.
In those moments we started to think. . . We were really in the wrong place
at the wrong time. . .
Q: Was there any physical harm?
A: They never threatened any physical harm. There were moments when they
told us we would be there 20 years: "The Cold War is not over for us. We've
been at war with the rest of the world for 42 years and we are still here
calling the shots.'' They said, "We will do whatever necessary to keep our
revolution alive. We shoot down airplanes.''
You realize that they can basically do whatever they want. That's real
scary. How gladly we forget the old regime under which we grew up.
One morning they woke me up very early, before 6, and without a word, they
took me in a transport car with two guides. We went through some gates and then
there were some white coats outside -- it looked like a hospital. There was a
nurse unwrapping something from an old newspaper. It was a 20-year-old
Soviet-made syringe with reusable needle, and all of a sudden, it was in my
vein. I thought I was going to die. I started medical school in 1986 in Prague
and we already saw this [type of syringe] as a museum piece.
All kinds of things went through my mind -- AIDS, hepatitis, any kind of
infectious disease.
When they took me to shave after about three weeks of not shaving, the guy
had a little plastic bag with about 20 different disposable razors. He used
about six or 10 of them and none of them worked much.
Q: What do you think changed their minds? Why were you released?
A: I really don't know. I think they realized that they probably maximized
the value they could get out of us and then we would only be a bother for them.
Castro, in his conversation with Mr. [Petr] Pithart [president of the Czech
Senate], said that we should be looking for an elegant solution -- hinting that
if anybody makes some kind of appeal to his generosity or something like that,
they would be willing to consider our release. The question was who should make
some kind of concession. I thought that a way to get out of the situation, maybe
gracefully, would be for us to write a letter with some kind of declaration.
Bubenik, who does not speak Spanish, was separated from Spanish-speaker
Pilip the entire time in custody. He was interrogated once or twice a day.
One question was, "Why were you against the regime?'' I said: Since
1968 we've been an occupied country by tens of thousands of Soviet troops until
1991. My father refused to sign a letter that was given to him in order to
remain at the university that said he welcomed the Red Army. He wasn't any big
dissident. He was not allowed to teach, he worked as a laborer until the changes
in 1989.
Q: Did you have déj vu?
A: All these miracles of communism, like everyone is stealing, but nothing
is missing. You see beautiful old Havana that belongs to everybody, but nobody
takes care of it.
We almost always had some hitchhikers in our car. There was a young,
20-year-old mother of two. We stopped and gave her a ride. She's a mother of two
with her own mother there, who was basically offering herself to us. The
grandmother would watch the kids while she would go and make some money for her
family. I think that is incredibly sad.
The way they took the freedom and dignity from people is just incredible.
That was the déj vu.
Q: Do you have any regrets?
A: Now that I'm back in Prague with my family, I don't regret it. I hope
that our case has convinced the world or anybody who has been in doubt about the
state of human rights in Cuba, that there is a big problem with them. But not
mainly in our case, since we went home in the end, but with the people who are
basically locked up in the prison called Cuba.
It really convinced me that these people need our help. Ivan and I have been
asked by the Czech diplomacy to testify to the Human Rights Commission in Geneva
this year. Ivan and I will come to the States in about 10 days to meet with U.S.
officials and Cuban exiles in Washington or Miami.
I intend to raise some money to at least send some supplies of disposable
syringes and disposable razors.
Mystery surrounds migrants' deaths
U.S. looking for foul play in deadly trips by Cubans
Jennifer Babson . jbabson@herald.com.
Published Monday, March 5, 2001, in the Miami Herald
KEY LARGO -- Four Cubans who embarked for the Florida Keys over the past two
months had two things in common.
They were fleeing their island home clandestinely, trying to reach South
Florida by boat. And they all died mysteriously from head injuries.
The unusual deaths -- and the fact that they coincide with a sharp increase
in the number of Cuban migrants who are being smuggled into the United States
aboard sophisticated high-speed boats -- have drawn the attention of several
federal agencies, including the FBI, which is trying to determine whether some
could have been the result of "crimes on the high seas.'' As a result, even
routine information such as autopsy reports is being kept under wraps.
Investigators say they still don't know the circumstances of the deaths.
They could have been accidents. They could have been the result of recklessness
on the part of smugglers who routinely overload their boats to multiply their
profits. The deaths could be something worse.
For most of the past four decades, the story of Cubans trying to reach South
Florida by sea has usually been a tale of rickety boats and homemade rafts.
But now, souped-up speedboats -- whose trips originate not from Cuba but
from Florida -- have largely replaced the low-tech vessels. Fares for the trips,
often underwritten by Miami relatives, generally run between $2,000 and $6,000
per person.
Investigators say the boats are captained by for-profit smugglers who are
more brazen, more violent and more willing to do what it takes to deliver the
maximum load without being captured.
"What people need to realize is that there are organizations out there
that are plundering the market and don't care about the people, and that is
borne out by the deaths that we are seeing,'' said Assistant U.S. Attorney
Patricia Diaz. "It is a profit motive here and people are dying -- people
who don't have to die.''
For Cuban exiles such as Arturo Cobo, a veteran of the U.S. side of the
Mariel boatlift who used to run a refugee center near Key West, the four deaths
are particularly troubling. There have always been horror stories of Cubans
perishing in the Florida Straits because of bad weather or perilous seas. But
nothing like this.
UNFAMILIAR EVENT
"In my case, I don't remember any refugees who died after they got on
the boat,'' Cobo said.
The four whose deaths remain unexplained are:
Juana María Sánchez, 73, who died on board a boat that
arrived just before midnight on Feb. 22 in the Florida Keys.
Mileydis Cuéllar, 27, a passenger on the same boat who was
pronounced dead several hours later at Mariners Hospital in Tavernier.
Nelson Zayas, 35, whose bruised body was plucked from the waters off
Marathon on Jan. 19, a gash on his head.
Cira Rodríguez de Gómez, who authorities believe disappeared
on her way from Cuba to the United States aboard a smuggling boat in January,
though her body was never found. Rodríguez's husband told investigators
he received an anonymous phone call from a man who said his wife had struck her
head while on the boat, died, and was buried on a cay in the Bahamas.
Cuéllar and Sánchez died from "trauma to the head,''
according to the Monroe County medical examiner's office, an assessment disputed
by Cuéllar's relatives in Miami, who say she was not injured on the trip.
Zayas died from "drowning secondary to extensive trauma to the head,''
according to the FBI.
TRIPS INCREASING
The deaths occurred over the winter months, a time when rougher seas usually
mean fewer passages. But the Coast Guard says the number of smuggling runs in
the off-season has increased dramatically this year, and officials fear the
figures may rise as the seas calm down in spring and summer.
In January and February, there were twice as many smuggling runs as in the
same period last year, bringing more than twice as many migrants to shore. The
Coast Guard says 210 Cuban migrants landed in the Keys in January and February,
compared to 96 in that period last year.
"It's a racetrack out there at night. On any given night you you can
have two to three go-fast boats out there,'' said Cmdr. Marcus Woodring,
operations officer for the Coast Guard's Group Key West. "It's not like a
search-and-rescue mission. They don't want to be found. They are not going to
call us on the radio.''
The Coast Guard contends that smugglers are beginning to substitute the
machetes routinely stashed aboard migrant boats with firearms.
Patrol officers intercepting a go-fast boat near Cay Sal Bank in the Bahamas
in December discovered a 9 mm Luger loaded with hollow-point bullets -- the kind
that expand on hitting a target.
And as more passengers reach shore -- the number of migrants landing in the
first two months of this year outpaced the number of interdictions by 10 to 1 --
the scramble in the final stretch is becoming more intense.
CLASH AT SEA
Last July, passengers aboard a 32-foot Condor speed boat took the wheel
after their smugglers, whose boat had been spotted by federal authorities,
jumped overboard several miles from shore. When a Border Patrol boat tried to
head them off, the Cubans rammed the vessel. When Coast Guard officers
brandished pepper spray, passengers "used children as human shield'' and
kept going, according to a written Coast Guard account.
Despite the fracas, the boat's 41 passengers still made it to shore.
The alleged smugglers were nabbed and face an upcoming federal trial.
Authorities say they are particularly alarmed because as smuggling has
increased, it has remained extremely difficult to crack ventures that now
resemble organized rings. Investigators say they don't get much cooperation from
either the passengers on these boats or from the relatives who often pay for
their passage.
"That's the chance they have to bring their family, so they aren't
going to talk to anybody,'' Cobo said. Authorities rarely catch smugglers, who
typically swoop into remote, pitch-black stretches of beach along the Florida
Keys and dump their passengers with instructions to remain still for a few hours
to buy the smugglers get-away time. Investigators say passengers are often
coached to stick to a cover story, one usually built on denying they were
smuggled onto U.S. soil in the first place. Boats are rarely recovered.
In the Zayas case, migrants on several boats that arrived from Cuba the same
day his body was discovered said they didn't know him.
BEFORE THE DEATHS
Also unclear, federal investigators say, are the events leading to the
deaths of Cuéllar and Juana María Sánchez. Investigators
believe Cuéllar survived the actual voyage, though she was barely alive
when hastily dropped at a bridge near Craig Key with 19 others.
She is believed to have died in the back seat of a car flagged down by her
desperate husband along U.S. 1. Passengers told investigators that Sánchez
struck her head getting into the boat in Cuba and died before reaching the
United States, but they reportedly didn't offer solid explanations as to how Cuéllar
died.
It's very possible to be injured after being tossed about in a boat during a
smuggling trip, but seas in the Florida Straits weren't rough the night Cuéllar
crossed.
Cuéllar's brother told reporters his sister wasn't even contemplating
a voyage the day she departed from a beach in Jibacoa, between Havana and
Matanzas, with her husband and 3-year-old daughter. He said the trio happened
upon a departing boat while spending the day relaxing and decided to climb
aboard as it shoved off.
And Cuéllar's husband, Alain Aulet Hernández, who accompanied
her on the trip, flatly denies investigators' claims that she died from head
trauma.
He said she complained of a headache during the voyage and arrived
semiconscious.
"My wife had a weak heart and had migraines since she was a child,''
Hernández said. "She didn't bang her head on anything.''
Herald staff writer Elaine de Valle contributed to this
report.
FAA gave Cuba reply on Brothers
By Gail Epstein Nieves . gepstein@herald.com. Published
Friday, March 2, 2001, in the Miami Herald
The Federal Aviation Administration took just eight days to respond to
Havana's first complaint about Brothers to the Rescue founder José
Basulto after he flew over Cuban airspace on July 13, 1995, according to a
chronology outlined in the Cuban spy trial Thursday.
Cuba, when seeking to justify the Brothers shoot-down, has said that it shot
down two airplanes only after the United States ignored Havana's repeated
complaints about violations of its sovereign airspace.
Cuba formally lodged its protest about Basulto in an Aug. 21, 1995,
diplomatic note to the State Department, testified aviation consultant Charles
Leonard. The FAA responded on Aug. 29, informing Cuba that it took the
allegations seriously and would take enforcement action if federal air
regulations had been violated.
Shortly, the agency decided to clip Basulto's wings.
Basulto's attorney has said he received an FAA letter outlining three
options: surrender his pilot's license, seek a meeting with an FAA attorney or
appeal to the National Transportation Safety Board. He sought the meeting.
Leonard testified that the FAA had sent Basulto a letter of investigation on
Aug. 3, 1995 -- weeks before Cuba first complained. Leonard read the chronology
dates from a U.N. report on the shoot-down.
On Oct. 5, 1995 -- six weeks after Cuba's original complaint -- the FAA
notified Havana that it was charging Basulto for violating Cuban airspace and
operating his plane recklessly, Leonard testified.
Basulto did not deny flying over Havana. He has said he did it to distract
Cuban gunboats that were ramming against an exile flotilla memorial service.
The government is scheduled to rest its prosecution of five accused spies
today. Accused spy ringleader Gerardo Hernández faces a possible life
sentence if convicted of murder conspiracy in a Cuban MiG missile attack on the
two planes on Feb. 24, 1996. Four fliers were killed.
On Jan. 15, 1996, Cuba protested again, charging Brothers with overflying
Havana with leaflets on Jan. 9 and 13. The group denied the charge.
The FAA asked Havana for evidence to prove its charge, Leonard testified. On
Feb. 20, 1996 -- four days before the shoot-down -- the State Department told
Cuba that the FAA inquiry of Basulto was ongoing and that investigators were
seeking more evidence, he testified.
'Epidemic' of fake Cuban art plagues market, dupes buyers
By Elisa Turner . elisaturn@aol.com. Posted at 6:43 a.m.
EST Monday, March 5, 2001
When Dewey Lane Moore pleaded guilty to mail fraud last month for using a
Pompano Beach auction house to try to sell almost 300 paintings he had knowingly
misattributed to Degas, Manet, Matisse, Picasso and a host of other renowned
artists, the case shed new light on the means forgers use to prey on
unsuspecting art collectors.
But European masters aren't the only artists whose work is faked by
unscrupulous painters. Rapidly escalating prices for paintings by Cuban masters
have led to a notorious parallel market for fakes. Damaging the artists'
legacies, the fakes have turned up in the United States, Spain and Latin
America. Many forgers are aided by Cuba's political isolation and the scarcity
of resources and experts on Cuban art who can certify a work's authenticity.
Those issues haven't kept auction houses from doing a brisk business in
works by Cuban masters. Last year, Cuban works accounted for 9.3 percent of $23
million in sales of Latin American art at Sotheby's. Still, fakery in this field
duped even Christie's, which had to to withdraw a number of Cuban paintings
offered for sale a week before its 1997 fall Latin American art auction.
And fakes plague the Miami market, where forged works of modern Cuban
masters such as René Portocarrero, Mario Carreño and Amelia Peláez
circulate in "epidemic'' numbers, according to Ramon Cernuda, a prominent
art collector, scholar and dealer. Record prices for these artists fuel the
flow. According to the "Latin American Art Price Guide,'' a 1943 painting
by Carreño sold for $442,500 at Christie's four years ago; a 1950
painting by Peláez, for $310,000 at Christie's in 1998; and a 1943
painting by Portocarrero, for $195,000 at Sotheby's in 1996.
In all, about a dozen Cuban artists have sold works at auction for $100,000
or more, making them forgery targets.
Cernuda said that in free consultations with collectors and dealers, he
often sees 50 fakes a month. Living artists aren't exempt; he notes that Cundo
Bermúdez maintains a file on some 300 forged examples of his work.
"You have a situation that's ideal for cheating people,'' Cernuda said.
Next year, he'll mount a show with fake and real paintings by Cuban artists in
an effort to inform misled collectors. "The experts on Cuban art live
mostly inside Cuba, and there's very little communication between reputable
experts and collectors. Collectors have very few resources to check.''
WARNING CLIENTS
While auction houses and others do consult Peláez experts at Havana's
National Museum, New York dealer Mary-Anne Martin said she has to warn clients
about fakes when they come to her with a Peláez from a Miami collector. "You
have to understand,'' she said, "that Miami is a central point for a lot of
these things.''
Lowe Art Museum director Brian Dursum said his museum, at the University of
Miami, is investigating the authenticity of a painting by Carreño, which
was given to UM two or three years ago.
"We either have a great Carreño or a really great study piece,''
Dursum said.
Examining the provenance of work -- which documents previous owners -- is
essential to determining whether a work really did exist when the person
offering it says it did. With paintings by Cuban masters, this can be a special
challenge.
"Because people are selling things in Cuba and doing it behind the back
of the Cuban government,'' Cernuda said, "dealers of forgeries can claim
they can't provide provenance because of the political situation.''
The case of the late Cuban artist Wifredo Lam offers a good example,
however, of how published resources, legal backing and vigilance can
dramatically cut the tide of fakes. Lou Laurin Lam, the artist's widow,
published a scholarly listing of her husband's works through 1964. If a work
isn't in that book, it's probably a fake.
LAW AS WEAPON
As a result, experts say, the number of fake Lams circulating has dropped
dramatically in the past decade -- even though Lam has fetched the highest price
at auction of any Cuban master: $1.3 million for a 1943 painting sold in 1997 by
Sotheby's.
Moreover, no reputable dealer, auction house, or knowledgeable collector
will touch a work by Lam without a certificate of authenticity from Lam's widow,
who lives in Paris. She has invoked a French law countless times to get fakes
out of circulation: The law allows artworks to be destroyed if specific experts
consider them forged and owners can't prove otherwise.
Axel Stein, director of the Sotheby's office in Coral Gables, remembers
being offered a fake of a painting by Cuban modernist Peláez, guaranteed
with a photocopy of a forged certificate with flawed spelling. Phony documents
are easy to spot, he said, when "you know how an expert signs a certificate
[or if] they are signed by people not respected in the field.''
Even after a painting has been identified as fake, it's not uncommon for it
to reenter the market as duped collectors try to recoup their investment. Fakes
"get passed around like dust on a dust cloth. I see things I saw when I was
working at Sotheby's in the 1970s,'' said Martin, who founded the auction
house's Latin American department.
But proving fraud is often quite difficult, according to Lawrence Katz,
counsel for the inspection division of the U.S. Postal Service, which, along
with the FBI, investigates art fraud committed across state lines. "In the
very subjective world of the arts,'' Katz said, "people can simply make an
honest mistake.''
"An honest mistake is a relative term,'' said Yvette G. Murphy, a Miami
lawyer who notes that tests can determine whether paintings were made before the
first nuclear explosion in 1945. "You can make an honest mistake, but once
it's proven that the work is not by the artist then the dealer should pay up.
That's basically what the [law] says.''
In the early 1990s, Murphy represented Cernuda, who successfully sued Coral
Gables gallery Javier Lumbreras Fine Arts for selling him a forged painting
presented as a work by Tomas Sanchez, a contemporary Cuban artist who confirmed
that he did not paint the work. The gallery was ordered to return the cost of
the painting and pay legal expenses, but the corporation dissolved and Cernuda
says he never received a cent. Cernuda still has the painting and plans to
exhibit it as a fake.
To stop the cycle, both the FBI and the U.S. Postal Service will deface the
forgeries, permanently marking works by branding a sculpture or applying an ink
stamp to a painting or work on paper.
They also can ask a judge for permission to destroy a work or pressure the
suspect to forfeit or abandon the work to the government in a plea agreement.
One way to keep fakes from being sold again is to give them to universities,
as long as they are acknowledged for what they are. A number of schools
regularly accept counterfeit art, which is used pedagogically in course work.
Cernuda said museums can expect to be increasingly targeted with offers of
fake art because of the difficulty of cracking the juicy market of auction
buyers.
In Miami, the crush of faked Cuban masters makes it likely some paintings
will wind up as unwanted "gifts'' presented to charitable institutions,
said Vivian Pfeiffer, who heads Christie's Coral Gables office.
"I think the auction houses, galleries and collectors are more aware.
It's not so easy for people to dispose of fake paintings,'' she said. "However,
people that get rejected in one market go to another, like Mexico, or make
donations.''
Freelance writer Daniel Grant contributed to this
report.
Copyright 2001 Miami Herald | 