‘Come to us’ Carter told Cubans; now 1700 are in prison

Press, 31 March 1981, Page 17

‘Come to us’ Carter told Cubans; now 1700 are in prison

By

DAVID BLUNDY

“Sunday Times, M London

A forlorn figure in surplus United States army fatigues stood in the corridor of a maximum security prison in Atlanta, Georgia. “Are you a journalist?” he asked. “Can you help? What is going to happen to us?” Enrique Betancourt, aged 29, is one of the 125,000 Cubans who flooded into the United States last year at President Carter’s invitation. “We will receive them with open hearts and open minds,” Carter said. Now, Betancourt and 1700 others face a life sentence in the Atlanta penitentiary. They have committed no crime in the United States. They have not appeared before an American court. But they did have criminal records in Cuba, and that disqualifies them automatically from entry into the United States. Betancourt readily confesses to stealing 2400 pesos (about $3300) from a shop in the Cuban town of Olquin in 1970 when he was 18. He was jailed for 10 years. In the United States, his sentence is considerably stiffer. Because of this crime, the United States immigration department deems him guilty of. •‘moral turpitude” and has ordered-his deportation.. That is legal nonsense, as the Immigration Department fully realises.No-one has been deported from the United States to Cuba since

1959 and nobody will be in the foreseeable future. The Cubans do not want him, or the 1700 others, and will not accept them. Both the immigration department and the F. 8.1. consider him a security risk and will not release him on to the streets. So Betancourt shares a cell with five other Cubans in a maximum security prison where • conditions were considered so bad that the authorities ordered its closure two years ago. It is not what he expected iff the land of the free. ;if ' '■ : What can he do? We took Betancourt’s question to offi-

cials of the former Carter administration who allowed him in, to the Reagan Administration, the State Department, Immigration officials and to international lawyers. The answer was always the same: “We don’t know.” We had only one definite answer — from a Cuban Government official: “They cannot come back to Cuba.” Meanwhile, the frustration and anxiety of thel7oo Cubans in the Atlanta penitentiary builds up as the prospect of a life behind bars becomes a reality. There’have been two recent stabbings. Earlier, one prisoner stabbed another to death in* a fight over a comb, “They are on a short fuse,” said a prison official. None of the Cubans I spoke to complained of illtreatment. “The guards are’ kind, the food is good, we are treated well,” said Betancourt. “But it is prison.” When. Jimmy, Carter announced his opeii-door policy last May, Betancourt was still in prison in Cuba. Conditions were grim: “I was hit, kicked, and called a dog,” he said. Four fingers on his left, hand had been lopped off by another prisoner with a machette on the.orders, he says,

Of a Cuban warder. Then a Cuban official made the prisoners an offer •— they could stay in prison or they could go to the United States. As Jody Powell, Carter’s press secretary, pointed out, it was- an offer any Cuban prisoner would find hard to refuse. The prisoners were put in boats and sent to Key West, Florida. Suddenly, the open heart of the American Government began to contract “We will not permit our country to be used as a dumping ground for criminals who represent a danger to our society,” Carter said on May 17. Fine words, but meaningless. The criminals had already been dumped. As immigration officials and the F.BJ. sifted through the 125,000 entrants to uncover the criminal element there were inevitable injustices. Some Cubans in the Atlanta penitentiary complain that they are there because they were honest and admitted their prison records. Others, who did not, were allowed in.

One man, in his seventies, admitted a conviction for murder 30 years ago. He served a 10-year sentence in Cuba but had been free for the past 20 years. As a former murderer; he is an obvious “security risk” and now finds himself back in prison in Atlanta. Others in the penitentiary had been convicted of minor offences which might not carry a prison sentence in America. Among them is Gilberto Torres, aged 24, who as a teen-ager served nine months in a Cuban jail for stealing a small quantity of coffee. Some of the Cubans were informed on by colleagues bearing a grudge. Francisco Rosales said that another Cuban he knows only as “Eddie” accused him of working with the Cuban police and being a director of the Cuban State Circus, which would carry a high rank in the Communist

Party. He denies it, and the evidence against him is indeed slim. Nevertheless, the F. 8.1. suspect him of possibly being a Cuban spy. The case of 45-year-old Candido Jerez reveals the scale of the United States dilemma. On arrival he admitted having been put on probation for molesting a child — although, he said, he was totally innocent. “Who knows?” said an immigration official. “How do we release a possible child molester in Atlanta, where 20 children have been murdered in the past two years?” And so he stays in jail. The Cubans considered security risks are now being gathered in Atlanta after being scattered through jails in America’s South for the past year. It is. a'-strange community, A social worker who has spent months in the prison says half have committed only minor, crimes or none at all. But, according to

some estimates, the combined moral turpitude is impressive: they have confessed to, or been accused of, 544 robberies, 20 armed robberies, 473 thefts, 333 burglaries, 222 assaults, 121 homicides, 61 drug and 11 prostitution offences, and 39 cases of arson. Relations inside the prison are strained because the Cubans speak no English and few of the staff speak any Spanish, Communication is largely through grunts and gestures. There is little work for them. The lucky ones earn. 35c an hour stamping “US Government property” on pieces of cloth, making paper parachutes for the weather bureau, and brooms. Security is tight, The prison is ringed by gun towers, the guards armed with rifles, shotguns, gas guns and pistols. “No point in a gun tower if there ain’t no guns,” said a warder. Their one hope of release lies on an upper floor where every weekday the Cubans apply to a team of immigration department judges for

permission to stay. “I’ve heard hundreds of cases and I ain’t let one in,” said a judge. “I feel sorry for them but this morning I had a child molester, a pimp, and a burglar. What can I do?” Everyone except the Cubans seems to think the only answer is to send them back. “That is what we would like to do if there is a humane and credible way,” said VicePresident George Bush. But there is less prospect of that under the Reagan administration. Suggestions that they should be loaded on a ship and dumped by night on a Cuban beach are rejected out of hand. For one thing, it is said, the ship would probably be sunk by the Cuban navy. And to send them home, to almost certain imprisonment, would contravene the United Nations convention on refugees. For Enrique Betancourt, the prospects are indeed grim: jail in Atlanta or jail in Cuba. “When I thought of America, I used to think of big steaks, Cadillacs, and houses,” he said. \ That particular American dream has been shattered abruptly with the clang of a steel door at the Atlanta penitentiary.