POPULATION-CUBA: Families Suffer in Aftermath of Air Attack

By Dalia Acosta Reprint | | Print |

Dalia Acosta

HAVANA, Feb 29 1996 (IPS) - Cuban families are once more being held to ransom as tension mounts between national government and the United States, after two civil aircraft were downed by the national air force.

“It is always the weakest who bear the brunt,” Alicia Gutierrez told IPS. She had her visa and ticket ready for a visit to her sister when US President Bill Clinton suspended all flights to the island.

Cuban emigrees frenziedly called their relatives on the island in a rush of calls Sunday, fearing that telephone communication would be next in line.

The Cuban air force shot down two civilian planes belonging to the opposition organisation “Brothers to the Rescue” Saturday, when they made an unauthorised entry into Cuban airspace.

The people instinctively knew the reaction from Washington would include blocking flights from Miami to Havana, suspending family contact.

“The same thing happened in the boat-people crisis,” said one 63 year-old woman who said she lived on her pension and a few dollars her daughter sends her from Miami.

In the streets of Havana the public are divided between unconditional support of the government action and those who think the aeroplanes could have been dealt with less aggressively.

“They should have done it before,” said a law student from Havana University. “Cuba said it was going to do it and if they hadn’t done it when it was least expected there would be an entire fleet facing Havana bay,” he added.

A history student in the same university said “they didn’t need to be so extreme. Without taking into account the human losses, I don’t think Cuba will gain anything from all this.”

As the days have passed, the Clinton administration and the Cuban government have continued to differ over where exactly the accident took place – whether over international or national waters – and the civilian nature of the aircraft shot down.

Clinton called for international condemnation, toughening of the blockade, the limitation of Cuban diplomatic action in the United States and the suspension of flights between the two nations.

It is this last decision which falls hardest on the Cuban people.

“Here anyone who has no father, has a brother or uncle in Miami. In 30 years we have got used to living with the blockade, but no one has got used to the family estrangement and lack of communication,” an expert from the Centre of Political Alternatives told IPS.

At least two million Cubans live outside the island, mostly in Miami in southern Florida.

For decades the politicisation of Cuban migration meant the United States looked on any immigrant from the island as a “political refugee” while the Fidel Castro government classed them all as “enemies of the State.”

Policital affiliations divided families leaving deep scars, though many have overcome the worst of the problem.

A survey of 4,676 Cuban emigres in 12 countries of the world in 1991 showed that the family unit is the most valued aspect of their lives, and links with relatives back home are normally very strong.

The United States suspended the regular lines of communication with Cuba in 1962, and though people were allowed out from the island between 1965 and 1973, it was only in 1978 that emigres were allowed back into the country to visit their relatives.

These “family reunions” were suspended once more after the mass exodus from port Mariel in 1980, to be reinstated for a year in 1984.

Bilateral relations seemed to approach normality in the nineties, and until the raft people crisis of 1994 islanders travelled back and forth from the US, and in humanitarian cases emigres were allowed back in.

Local specialists said the issue of migration has always been one of the main points of negotiation between the two nations.

“Neither “Brothers to the Rescue” nor Cuba think of the families when they do these things,” said one doctor whose two children went to the US 18 years ago, “(we) are always dependent on the political toing and froing.”