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Cuban doctors: children kept from leaving island

By Staff | Nov 18, 2008

MIAMI (AP) _ The children of more than a dozen Cuban doctors and medical professionals who defected from the communist island nation are not being allowed to travel to the United States even though they have visas, their parents said Tuesday.

The parents are all Cubans who worked in countries such as Venezuela and Belize as part of a Cuban government program. Most fled to the United States, but their children remained in Cuba.

A 2006 Homeland Security policy would allow them to bring spouses and children to the U.S., but critics charge Cuba has made that difficult.

The parents spoke Tuesday at the Miami headquarters of The Cuban American National Foundation, a U.S. group known as CANF that represents Cubans in exile.

Foundation lawyers said they know of 18 cases involving more than 20 children who have been barred from leaving the island, but said there could be many more.

Norbe Lois Basulto and his wife, Odette M. Lopez, were working in Venezuela when they decided to head to the United States. They have been away from their 8-year-old son, Bryan, for a year and three months, Basulto said Tuesday in Spanish.

His son and other children need their parents and shouldn’t be punished simply because their parents wanted “freedom,” Basulto said.

Officials with CANF called preventing the families from reunifying a “human rights violation,” and their lawyers said they planed to lodge complaints before the United Nations and the Organization of American States. Cuba has been suspended from the OAS since the 1960s.

“They are being held hostage,” said Manny Vazquez, an attorney for CANF.

It is not clear what success the complaints could have.

The communist government often withholds visas for the family members of citizens it considers traitors for not returning to Cuba after it sends them to work in government-sponsored events or missions overseas.

According to the Department of Homeland Security, in 2007 more than 44,000 Cubans became legal permanent residents or citizens.

CANF president Francisco “Pepe” Hernandez said that now is a good time to pressure the Cuban government. The government is likely to “try to get on the good side” of President-elect Barack Obama and therefore may be more willing to release the children, he said.

Marisol Bennett hopes that is true. She hasn’t seen her 16-year-old daughter Daliette since 2001, when she left Cuba to work as a doctor in Belize. Bennett, who was wearing green scrubs Tuesday and is studying to take a nursing exam in the United States, said she knew when she left for Belize she would never return to Cuba.

On Tuesday she showed reporters a photograph of her daughter in a silky white dress and elbow-length white gloves. Pressing her lips together and her eyes getting wet, she said her daughter asks, “Ma, when I come with you?”

“I miss so much my daughter. I need my daughter with me,” she said.

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On the Net:

The Cuban American National Foundation: http://www.canf.org/

Copyright 2008 The Associated Press.