By GLENN GARVIN
Herald Staff Writer
MANAGUA -- As the Cold War fades to a distant memory, the warm smiles that
once greeted Cubans fleeing the Castro regime are turning chilly throughout
Central America and the Caribbean.
Taking their lead from the United States, which signed a repatriation agreement
with Cuba in 1995, governments throughout the region are making it clear
that they
no longer offer automatic safe haven to anyone who gets off the island.
``The whole ideological question is gone, and the Cubans are just seen
as a pain --
as poor people looking for a better situation,'' one U.S. diplomat said.
Four Caribbean countries among the closest to Cuba -- the Bahamas, the
Cayman
Islands, the Dominican Republic and Jamaica -- all reached repatriation
agreements with Havana after the Clinton administration did so in May 1995.
The
accords call for Cuban rafters intercepted at sea to be returned to the
island.
But now even Central American countries, much farther away and unlikely
to be
inundated by waves of refugees, are taking a harsher look at Cuban arrivals:
Costa Rica just did away with a provision in its law that allowed any permanent
resident of the country to bring in close relatives. Officials admitted
the change was
aimed at slowing the flow of Cuban immigrants.
In July, Guatemalan authorities arrested seven Cubans as they arrived on
a
charter flight from Costa Rica. The seven, carrying forged U.S. passports,
were
headed for Mexico, where they apparently intended to cross the border into
the
United States. They were sent back to Havana.
Thirteen Cubans, including a pregnant woman and three children, were detained
in Panama last month after they arrived with phony passports from other
countries.
They were all returned to the island.
Following the U.S. lead
Ricardo Alberto Arias, who retired as Panama's foreign minister recently,
noted
that several of the 13 Cubans that his country deported had criminal records.
Nonetheless, he admitted, a few years ago they almost certainly would not
have
been sent home.
``There is a new tendency in the region with respect to Cubans, and the
leader of
that tendency has been the United States, which has put limits on the Cubans
it's
willing to accept,'' Arias said. ``That policy has penetrated the entire
region.''
A Caribbean official who didn't want his name used was even more blunt:
``The
U.S. isn't allowing them to stay, so why should we?''
Central American and Caribbean governments, however, are not merely playing
follow-the-leader with the United States. Cuban President Fidel Castro's
recent
diplomatic initiatives in the region have led to budding trade and commercial
ties
that the governments are loath to jeopardize.
The Central American airlines Lacsa, Aviateca and Copa all have regularly
scheduled and extremely popular flights to Havana. So does Air Jamaica.
The two
big all-inclusive Caribbean resort chains, Sandals and SuperClubs, have
operations in Cuba. Cuba is a major customer of Panama's free trade zone.
A decade ago, governments might have been embarrassed to be putting economic
matters ahead of humanitarian concerns, but the end of the Cold War has
focused
everything through a different lens. Eduardo Vilchez, head of Costa Rica's
immigration department, says hardly any of the Cubans who arrive in his
country
can be considered refugees anymore.
``They don't say they are being persecuted,'' Vilchez said. ``They just
say they
want to get out of Cuba.''
Nicaragua an exception
Virtually the only leader in the region to express full-fledged support
for Cuban
refugees is Nicaraguan President Arnoldo Aleman. In May, when Aleman offered
visas to about 200 Cuban rafters scheduled for deportation from the Bahamas,
it
caused a diplomatic uproar, but he told The Herald he doesn't care.
``These other countries haven't lived through what we have with the Sandinista
regime,'' Aleman said, recalling Nicaragua's 11 years of Marxist rule and
the hard
times that Nicaraguan refugees encountered in other nations
But even Aleman has had trouble enforcing his refugee-friendly policy.
In August,
while he was on a state visit to South America, eight Cuban refugees --
including
several well-known baseball players -- turned up on Nicaragua's Atlantic
coast.
Although the eight were on the list of the 200 refugees detained in the
Bahamas
that Aleman had ordered admitted to Nicaragua, immigration officials debated
for
six hours whether offering them political asylum would damage Nicaraguan
relations with Cuba. They finally gave the refugees tourist visas, and
told them not
to talk to a crowd of reporters waiting outside the immigration office.
Herald staff writer Don Bohning and special correspondent Catalina Calderon
contributed to this report.
Copyright © 1998 The Miami Herald