Cubans find backdoor route to US soil

Sunday, July 2, 2006 · Last updated 8:17 a.m. PT

Cubans find backdoor route to U.S. soil
By ANDREW SELSKY
ASSOCIATED PRESS WRITER

MONA ISLAND, Puerto Rico -- Taking the back door into the United States,
droves of Cubans are crossing some of the world's stormiest seas and
clambering onto this rugged speck of an island belonging to Puerto Rico.

Forsaking the heavily patrolled Florida Straits, Cubans are increasingly
reaching the U.S. by flying to the Dominican Republic and traveling
about 40 miles by boat to Mona Island.

In fiscal year 2001, no more than five Cubans landed on Mona. But in the
past nine months 579 have arrived, Jorge Diaz, a senior U.S. Customs and
Border Protection agent, said Tuesday.

Under the general U.S. "wet-foot, dry-foot" policy, Cubans who reach
U.S. soil get to stay, while those caught at sea are sent back. A Puerto
Rican nature reserve inhabited by a few park rangers and lots of
iguanas, Mona Island, like the rest of Puerto Rico, is as much a part of
the U.S. as Miami is.

On a recent morning, U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents,
accompanied by an Associated Press reporter and photographer, sailed 45
miles from mainland Puerto Rico to Mona to pick up two groups of Cubans.
Approached from the east, among leaping dolphins, the 6.7 square-mile
island looks forbidding, rising in sulfur-colored cliffs. But on the
western side, facing the Dominican Republic, a white-sand beach beckons.

Eight Cubans sat at a picnic table under a palm tree, having spent 12
hours in a smuggler's open-air boat. Arriving just past midnight, they
spent the rest of the night on mattresses provided by the island's rangers.

They said they were scared they would either drown or be caught by
authorities during the journey.

"We prayed for 12 hours, aloud or silent, but we prayed," said Richard
Echevarria, his green T-shirt shirt stiff with sweat and salt spray.
Another boat carrying nine Cubans had arrived two days earlier.

The Cubans said they flew to the Dominican Republic on commercial
airliners. Even accomplishing that step required patience and luck. To
leave Cuba legally, Cubans must generally get a visa from the country
they're going to visit, plus a letter of invitation from a citizen of
that country. They then must seek an exit visa from the Cuban
government, which is sometimes denied. The process can take months.

The Cubans - who couldn't simply fly from the Dominican Republic to the
United States without a U.S. visa - then paid between $1,500 and $2,000
to be taken by boat to Mona. That's at least $12,000 total for one boatload.

Dominican people-smugglers are turning huge profits in this growing
industry, and few are prosecuted.

"If they hear you speaking with a Cuban accent in Santo Domingo, someone
is going to come up to you and offer to arrange the trip," said Jorge
Bueno, one of the new arrivals. Another Cuban said he hadn't left the
Dominican capital's airport before someone sidled up with an offer.

"It's very lucrative. It's better than trafficking drugs," Bueno
remarked as he donned an orange life vest and settled into the back of
the Customs boat.

Few migrants of other nationalities plying these seas show up at Mona,
which sits about halfway between the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico,
because they know they'll be sent back. Instead, they try to make it all
the way to Puerto Rico's western shores. About 600 have been arrested
since October, most of them Dominicans, Diaz said.

The trip aboard low-slung boats called yolas is hazardous and many have
died in the 80-mile-wide Mona Passage between the Dominican Republic and
Puerto Rico, where the Atlantic collides with the Caribbean and is often
stormy.

In November a federal judge in Puerto Rico sentenced five Dominicans to
prison terms of 10 to 17 years. They were captured after their yola
capsized with 93 Dominican migrants aboard. At least seven of them drowned.

It was a rare victory over the smugglers. About 80 suspects were
arrested in the Dominican Republic in the first three months of this
year but nearly all were released for lack of evidence, said Adm. Delfin
Bautista, the commander of a Dominican naval unit that searches for the
yolas. Migrants hoping to make the voyage again refuse to testify for
fear of being blacklisted by smugglers. Bautista said smugglers are
treated locally as heroes.

When a Coast Guard cutter intercepts a yola, the pilot pretends to be
one of the migrants, said Petty Officer First Class Howard Sanchez, of
the Coast Guard cutter Matinicus.

"You can't tell who the smuggler is, and none of the migrants will point
him out to us," the Brooklyn native said.

After taking the migrants aboard, the Coast Guard sets the yola on fire
or sinks it with machine gun fire.

As the Customs boat headed back to Puerto Rico, it leaped over 10-foot
swells and smashed into cavernous troughs, drenching the 17 Cubans
aboard in spray. One threw up.

"Imagine if you were out there in one of those yolas," Agent Art Morrell
shouted over the roar of the engine.

Three hours later, the boat docked in Boqueron, southwest Puerto Rico.
Carlos Alvarez, a butcher from Higuey, Cuba, combed his hair. Wearing a
red tank top, he was the first to step off the boat.

There was no ceremony or celebration. The exhausted migrants said they
just wanted to get to the U.S. mainland, mostly to Florida, where
relatives awaited them.

For those without money, help comes from a group of women in San Juan
who left Cuba decades ago and devote themselves to aiding their newly
arrived compatriots. They give them clothes, put them up in a San Juan
hotel and help pay their passage to the mainland.

The migrants were locked in Customs vans and driven to a processing
center on a former U.S. Air Force base. The agents checked the migrants'
Cuban IDs and fingerprinted and photographed them. The agents can detect
the distinctive Cuban accent but generally don't contact Cuban
authorities to verify the migrants really are Cuban or have a criminal
record.

These newly arrived migrants were among the lucky ones.

Capt. James Tunstall, commander of Coast Guard operations in the eastern
Caribbean, says the traffic should be stopped before it leads to "a
catastrophic event ... when you have an overladen yola coming across
with men, women and children in a sea that can become very rough very
quickly."

Alvarez, the butcher, said he had planned to bring out his wife and
daughter by the Mona route. But after seeing how dangerous it is, he
expressed second thoughts.

"I wouldn't want to put them through that," he said.

---

Associated Press writer Jonathan M. Katz in Santo Domingo, Dominican
Republic, contributed to this report.

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1102AP_Backdoor_to_US.html