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CUBA NEWS

December 29, 2004

Colombian cocaine suspect in Cuba, out of U.S. reach

Charged in Cuba with using a false passport, a reputed Colombian drug trafficker is beyond the clutches of Colombian and U.S. authorities.

By Steven Dudley, sdudley@herald.com. Posted on Mon, Dec. 27, 2004.

BOGOTA - Even as Colombia extradites a record number of drug traffickers to the United States, one reputed capo is eluding capture and extradition in an unusual way: He is being held in Cuba on a charge of using a false passport.

Havana has been slow to move on the charge against Hernando Gómez, and Colombian authorities say they have no news on their request for his extradition to Bogotá to face charges here.

Now, some of Gómez's associates have told The Herald that they suspect that Gómez may have bribed his way into an extended stay in Cuba so he could avoid a Colombian prison and later possible extradition to the United States.

''There's a long history of the Cuban government taking money . . . to give criminals refuge,'' said a State Department official, speaking on the condition of anonymity. "We hope the Cubans do the right thing in this case.''

Gómez is said to be part of Colombia's Norte del Valle drug cartel, which allegedly accounts for 60 percent of the cocaine reaching U.S. streets. The U.S. Justice Department has indicted Gómez and eight other alleged cartel members, and many of its leaders were extradited to the United States in recent years.

Some of those extradited have cooperated with U.S. prosecutors, sowing fear and chaos among those remaining and triggering an intra-cartel squabble that has left close to 1,000 dead in the last year and forced many capos to flee Colombia.

EXTRADITION SOUGHT

Colombian and U.S. authorities would not discuss the Gómez case on the record. But Colombia, which has an extradition treaty with Cuba, has officially requested his immediate return to Bogotá.

Gómez would most likely be sent on to the United States. Colombian President Alvaro Uribe has extradited nearly 200 drug trafficking suspects to the United States in two years, far surpassing his predecessors.

Cuba's top anti-drug official, Gen. Jesús Becerra, told reporters in October that Gómez was ''in transit'' when he was captured there in early July and did not intend to use Cuba to ship drugs. Gómez is charged with carrying false documents, a relatively minor crime. There has been no official word on what jail he is being held in, or even whether he has been brought to trial and sentenced.

Associates of Gómez say that his wife and top lieutenants have been allowed to visit him in Cuba, and that he is believed to be managing his drug trafficking operations from the island.

Cuba has a mixed record on its handling of foreigners wanted for crimes abroad, at times deporting them immediately, at times keeping them for extended periods.

In 1999, Cuba signed an agreement with Bogotá to extradite 50 Colombians suspected of drug trafficking who were jailed in Cuba. It has extradited others to Mexico, most notably Mario Villanueva, a former governor of Quintana Roo wanted for drug trafficking in Mexico, and Carlos Ahumada, who was sought on corruption charges.

But Cuba has also sheltered suspected criminals. At last look, more than 70 fugitives wanted in the United States for charges ranging from murder to hijacking to grand theft were thought to be living in Cuba.

Washington and Havana do not have an extradition agreement.

HELD IN CUBA

The U.S. fugitives in Cuba include financier Robert Vesco -- now in a Cuban jail after being convicted of defrauding the Cuban government -- and suspected cop-killer Joanne Chesimard.

Now, U.S. officials say, it is beginning to look as if another one has slipped under Cuba's protection.

Fewer traveling to Cuba

A new U.S. policy has reduced the number of trips being taken to Cuba. Some who have relatives on the island resent the change. Others say it will help bring about democracy.

By Lisa Orkin Emmanuel, Associated Press. Posted on Sat, Dec. 25, 2004.

Luisa Rimblas is worried about her mother. The elderly woman lives on a meager teacher's pension in Cuba. When Rimblas visits she buys rice, meat and other food to help her mother survive.

But because of new, more stringent U.S. government restrictions on visiting Cuba, Rimblas and many other Cuban Americans do not know when they will see their relatives again.

According to the U.S. State Department, airplane seat reservations for Cuba have significantly decreased this year compared to last. From July -- when the policy was put into effect -- to December there were 50,558 reservations, less than half of last year's 118,938 bookings for the same period.

FAMILY LICENSE

The new policy requires that Americans apply for a family license to visit only immediate relatives, such as mother, father, siblings and children. They can visit once every three years. Other licenses are available for religions or commercial reasons.

At Miami International Airport, three to five flights leave daily for several destinations in Cuba.

Just days before Christmas, dozens of people lined up to check in for their morning flight to Cuba. Most passengers have their luggage wrapped in blue plastic to guard against rain damage. One woman, who refused to give her name, would described how it took her two months to get a license to visit her sister in Havana, who is ill with cancer and diabetes.

''They don't want anybody to go. Maybe some people go for pleasure, but it's not always the case,'' the 66-year-old Miami resident said.

U.S.-Cuba relations, which have never been good during more than four decades of communist rule on the island, have deteriorated during President Bush's administration, which has toughened economic sanctions and publicized its plan for a democratic Cuba after Fidel Castro.

''It hurts both of us because here we have family and we want to see them and they are in Cuba and they want to see us,'' said Rimblas, who has applied for a license. She has not received any reply from the Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control, which processes the requests.

OFAC said that from Aug. 10 to Nov. 10 there have been about 6,300 applications for family licenses. Of those, 2,600 were accepted and 3,600 were rejected.

A State Department official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said the travel restrictions were put in place to limit revenue to Cuba. Officials estimated that during 2003 money generated from relatives coming in on charter flights amounted to about $96.3 million for the government.

But the restrictions have also affected U.S. businesses. Travel agents and charter companies, which specialized in flights to Cuba, have been devastated.

BUSINESS WOES

Armando Garcia, vice president the Marazul travel company, said he has fired about 25 employees, two-thirds of his work force. ''It is very hard,'' Garcia said. "We have been surviving.''

Dania-based Gulfstream Air Charter, a company that operates flights to Cuba, had profits drop 30 percent since the summer, said Thomas Cooper, the company's president

''How do you complain against the president of the United States?'' Cooper said. "We are just punishing the Cuban people.''

Mavis Anderson, a senior associate with the Washington-based Latin America Working Group, a coalition of nongovernmental agencies, said people will find other ways to get to Cuba, by traveling via a third country that does not have restrictions on the island.

''What they are being forced into is breaking the law to be with their families,'' Anderson said. "The government has redefined for Cubans who their family is. You can no longer visit aunts, uncles, cousins, nieces, nephews.''

Critics said the measures are pointless.

''It is affecting more the Cuban Americans than the Cuban government. It's just a way to show the world how mean we are. It gives propaganda triumph. I just don't see exactly what is the aim. I don't think it's having a weakening effect on the Cuban government,'' said Delvis Fernandez, president of the national Cuban American Alliance which, according to its website, is opposed to U.S. policy toward Cuba.

Supporters claim the sanctions will help bring about democracy in Cuba.

''It's not about a few people who are allowed to travel to Cuba -- it's about 12 million people. It's about putting an end to a 46 year-old dictatorship,'' said Ninoska Perez, spokeswoman for the Miami-based Cuban Liberty Council. "Basically cutting down the funds that a dictatorship needs to survive.''

Photographs recall Cuba's sugar industry

By Fabiola Santiago. fsantiago@herald.com. Posted on Mon, Dec. 27, 2004.

Browsing through a Paris flea market, Cuban architect and artist Juan Luis Morales found an old book that led him to the work of French painter and lithographer Eduardo Laplante, who moved to Cuba in 1849.

Laplante made 38 lithographs of the island's sugar mills. His colorful landscapes of smoke stacks towering higher than royal palms and his romanticized view of life on the plantations inspired Morales and his partner Teresa Ayuso to return to Cuba and photograph the sugar mills as they are today.

The work of Atelier Morales, as the husband-and-wife call their artistic alliance, is a tale of loss and an ode to poetic memory.

CAPTURING THE PAST

In their series Los Ingenios: Patrimonio a la deriva (Adrift Patrimony: Sugar Refineries, 2004), the couple captures with a bitterly beautiful technique of digital photography and gouache the ruinous remnants of what was once a thriving industry.

Steel carcasses of defunct sugar mills rise amid vividly green but sadly empty landscapes. An overturned wooden boat sits at what was once the royal-palm lined entrance of a grand plantation. A rusted locomotive peers from the overgrown brush overtaking a no-longer bustling sugar cane train route.

''An entire industry destroyed, a way of life lost and no one thought to at least preserve some of these historical relics and turn them into museums for the generations,'' says Morales, who has been living in Paris since 1996 and was in Miami to exhibit his work at Art Basel Miami Beach.

He'll also be at the palmbeach3 contemporary art and photography show Jan. 13-17 at the Palm Beach County Convention Center.

SWEET DEALS

Taking up a wall at the Nina Menocal Gallery booth at Basel, Los Ingenios attracted scores of South Florida's Cuban-American collectors, including Florida sugar mogul Alfonso Fanjul, whose family also owned sugar refineries in Cuba. He bought one of the limited edition 25-piece sets.

Of the 10 sets, presented in a wooden box that looks like a cigar case with the Laplante story illustrated by two of his drawings, only five remain post-Basel, now priced at $25,000. Smaller prints sell for $2,000; a special poster-sized print goes for $10,000.

The prints are painted with traces of gouache, which highlight and romanticize the natural beauty surrounding the ruins. In some, Morales kept as titles the poetic names of the sugar mills -- Flor de Cuba, Buena vista, Narciso, Tinguaro, Constancia. He titled one piece Cimarrones because the pieces of steel are ''like slaves running away'' through the thick landscape. Acana shows the regal entrance of a plantation and Vereda the exit route for the train.

TO THE RESCUE

''We wanted to rescue the romantic charge that Laplante brought to his lithographs in the 19th century with illumination, composition and color,'' Morales says. "You don't see the cruel world of slavery in the plantations, and we wanted to recuperate that beautiful part. It's not a negation of the bad part of history. We wanted to show that history, good and bad, being erased, disappearing.''

Morales hopes people will want to collect his sugar mill prints, as Cubans did a century ago with Laplante's lithographs, which became popular collector's items.

Commissioned by magnate Justo Cantero, Laplante's lithographs are considered a relic as is Cantero's book, where the drawings were first published in 1857, Vistas de los principales ingenios de Cuba (Views From The Most Important Sugar Refineries in Cuba).

LAPLANTE'S TRAIL

In his trips to the island, Morales followed Laplante's trail through southern Havana, Matanzas and Las Villas, sometimes riding on the same train routes that used to take the sugar to the ports of Havana and Cárdenas, to be shipped to the United States and Europe.

In his research, Morales discovered that the original Laplante drawings, and two of the original editions of Cantero's book ''mysteriously disappeared'' from Palacio de Junco in the Museum of Matanzas in 1993.

LOST WORLDS

''That is part of the lost patrimony, all the valuable treasures that are disappearing from Cuba, stolen and sold,'' Morales says. "Works of art, books, and archival documents have disappeared from all of the national Cuban museums, that's why I call my work Patrimony Adrift.''

Loss has been the running theme of Atelier Morales' work since Morales, 44, and Ayuso, 43, formed Atelier Morales in 1993.

The former graduates of the University of Havana's School of Architecture have exhibited in Paris, Spain and New York and are represented by Mexico City-based Menocal, one of the leading dealers of top emerging Cuban artists inside the island and in exile.

Last year's series, Bohíos, a mix of photography, painting and collage, also shown at Art Basel Miami Beach, portrayed eerie images of bohíos, the typical homes in the Cuban countryside, some run-down and stacked up over each other, others at the seashore, as if they too, were leaving the island.

Also touching is their three-part series No es más que la vida (It's Only Life, 2004), in which Atelier Morales tackles water, smoke and wind as metaphoric elements of loss.

WATER COLORS

The water series, Agua, shows a china cabinet as if it were slowly drowning. On the top shelf, one can clearly see a set of dainty, antique demitasse cups. But with each shelf, items get murkier, more difficult to recognize, until water completely clouds over the cabinet.

''Water represents the loss of memory, which doesn't just happen in one sweep, but becomes muddled, little by little,'' Morales says. "You know the kind of thing where you remember the great party, but you don't remember whether it was at your grandmother's house or your aunt's house.''

The smoke series, Humo features three public sculptures in Spain and Paris, clouds of smoke bellowing near them, as in the images of the terrorist attack on New York's Twin Towers.

'The smoke represents the European attitude toward terrorism of 'It doesn't touch us,' but the smoke does reach everyone,'' Morales says.

The wind series, Viento features household objects flying disjointedly as if uprooted by ''the tornado of social elements,'' Morales says. "Like a revolution, which changes things forever.''

Cuban flair lights up Hialeah

By Elizabeth Bonet, ebonet@elizabethbonet.com. Posted on Sat, Dec. 25, 2004.

When my friends in northern states shudder at the idea of spending Christmas in Florida, all I can tell them is that they have never seen Hialeah during the holiday season. The predominantly Cuban city puts on such an extravagant show that any thoughts of snow melt right out of your mind.

Hialeah is home to my Cuban mother-in-law. Celebrating Christmas in Cuba was officially banned in 1969. No trees, no lights, no nativity scenes, no parties. Although the holiday was again made legal after Pope John Paul II's visit to the island in 1998, most Cubans who came to the United States during the blackout period still enjoy expressing their Christmas spirit with a phenomenal brightness.

As our car enters Hialeah, you can hear the wonderment in my 3-year-old's voice. "Look Mommy, lights!''

"Uh-huh.''

"More lights!''

"Yep.''

"Look, more lights . . . And a reindeer!''

The decor gets more fascinating as we get closer to Abuela's house -- reindeer on roofs, Santa's sleigh, house-size snowmen, the Madonna and Child. House after house has entire life-size replicas of the nativity scene -- cows, horses, camels and goats included.

Palm trees look like landing pads for alien spacecraft. Entire roofs are covered with lights that extend to surround everything in their path -- TV antennas, fences, flowers and lawn decorations.

Red, white and blue displays of the American flag flash from windows while Christmas music blares from loud speakers. The neighbors would never complain. Like Cuban conversations that just get louder and louder, the neighbors just crank their own music higher so that no one will miss the candy cane forest on their rooftop.

Nothing from my childhood in Texas compares to the sights in Hialeah. All we had was one street in our town where all the neighbors got together and decorated their houses. The line of cars driving past would extend for miles, all creeping along with the headlights turned off. My sisters and I would roll down the windows, huddle together in our winter coats, and stare out in awe.

We would spend the next week begging my father to drive more than an hour to see one fantastic cottage. Once he gave in, we would don our coats, scarves and hats and sing Christmas carols in the car until we arrived.

Lights covered every surface. Fake snow and icicles dripped from windowsills. Fawns, squirrels and elves all moved, looking side to side with a jerk of their heads. Santa waved from his rooftop sleigh while huge red and white packages spilled out of his sack. Strings of real candy canes and gingerbread men surrounded the perimeter, protecting the house from fascinated children. Every year, it was the highlight of our Christmas.

After returning home, we would attempt to decorate two of the trees in our front yard. My father would trudge outside with us as assistants, our arms laden with lights. But even our best efforts could not hold a candle to the cottage.

Someday my daughter may want to see a snowy Christmas that matches most of the picture books, cartoons and songs. But she will never have to beg to see a wonderland cottage. Thanks to the Cubans expressing their feeling of freedom, all of her Christmases have been filled with wonderland cottages that she sees on the way to Abuela's Hialeah home.

Elizabeth Bonet is a freelance writer who lives in Sunrise. She can be contacted through www.elizabethbonet.com.

Browsing through a Paris flea market, Cuban architect and artist Juan...