Cuban Refugee Influx Into U.S. Begins

Press, Volume CIV, Issue 30901, 6 November 1965, Page 18

Cuban Refugee Influx Into U.S. Begins

[From

FRANK OLIVER,

N.Z.P.A. Special Correspondent.]

BOCA GRANDE (Florida), Nov. 4.

A group of Washington officials has now arrived in Florida to superintend the influx of Cuban refugees, who within a week are expected to start arriving at the rate of about 200 a day.

It was while he was signing the new immigration bill at the foot of the Statue of Liberty in New York that President Johnson publicly informed Dr. Castro that America would accept the Cubans of whom he seemed so anxious to be rid.

Now Key West, the city of Miami and the State of Florida generally are braced for the great exodus from the Cuban communist paradise and, it must be admitted, wondering just what to do about them and with them.

The relatives of refugees already in the United States have priority with the American Government and so far refugees in America have “claimed” 127,638 relatives they want brought out of Cuba. The size of this humanitarian problem America has shouldered is best understood when it is said that at 200 a day it will take American aircraft nearly two years to bring over just the “claimed” refugees.

But if reports are well founded —and they seem to be —that there are at least 300,000 Cubans who want to cross the Florida straits, then it becomes a four-year task. Clearly the rate of exodus will have to be stepped up and thus the prospects are for a Berlin airlift in reverse, an airlift of humanity, instead of food and fuel.

The question which no one seems able to answer is why Dr. Castro has suddenly decided to open the gates. Of course, he refuses to let young men of military age leave. This is not because he expects much military aid for

himself from these disgruntled young men but because he wishes to deny their services to the refugee organisations in the United States which still drill and otherwise try to make themselves good soldiers for the time when they hope to swarm ashore on Cuban beaches and take the island from its Communist Government.

But, apart from that, Dr. Castro is allowing out Cubans with skills required on his island. Since he first said he would allow out all, or almost all, who wishes to go some 1300 refugees have braved the rough straits in small boats, some of them scarcely bigger than dinghies. Skilled Workers Of this number 22 per cent were shop clerks and sales personnel of one kind or another, 19 per cent were semiskilled workers, 15.3 per cent were fully-skilled workers, almost 9 per cent were professional people, 4 per cent skilled in fishing and agriculture, and about 25 per cent were students, children and housewives.

If these percentages hold good throughout the whole body of Cubans anxious to leave Cuba, then Dr. Castro will lose a lot of professional people and skilled workers which, reports from inside

Cuba insist, he needs badly to bring the island’s economy up from the depths to which it sank after the severance of diplomatic and commercial ties with the United States. The Washington team now on the spot to organise the influx of refugees is headed by the Secretary for Health, Education and Welfare and it includes officials concerned with immigration, labour, commerce, and some from the Justice Department. Screening The problems involved include the screening of these thousands of people for their skills but also to weed out undesirables and even agents for Dr. Castro, for it would be unthinkable that he would fail to use this exodus to get agents into the United States if that is one of the things he wants. Then comes finding jobs for them and relocation generally. Since refugees began escaping from Cuba a total of 270,000 have crossed the Florida straits and the tendency has been for them to stay in the Miami area, the nearest big city to their homeland.

The city of Miami is bracing itself for the influx. A local newspaper said a day or two ago that the city would soon “confront what can only be described candidly as a crisis in its reception of Cuban refugees.” The paper went on to say that Miami had in some ways benefited economically and socially from the thousands of refugees who had already arrived.