18827: Esser: Cuba trying to head off mass exodus from Haiti (fwd)

[Bob Corbett <corbetre@webster.edu>]

From: D. Esser torx@joimail.com

The Miami Herald
http://www.miami.com

Posted on Thu, Feb. 19, 2004

THE CARIBBEAN
Cuba trying to head off mass exodus from Haiti

BY NANCY SAN MARTIN
nsanmartin@herald.com

With a potential migration crisis brewing amid continued political
turmoil in Haiti, Cuba has issued an appeal for international
assistance for the troubled country just 50 miles off its eastern tip.

''Cuba believes that the international community cannot abandon
Haiti. The social situation is getting worse,'' Foreign Minister
Felipe Pérez Roque said at a recent meeting of Caribbean officials.
"Collaborating with Haiti has become a duty for all of us, its
neighbors.''

In the early 1990s, about 600 Haitians wound up in Cuba as thousands
trying to escape the violence of a military coup in their homeland
fled in rickety boats in an attempt to reach the United States.

Cuba set up an emergency refugee camp near the sparsely populated
eastern tip of the island to accommodate the Haitians who had come
ashore in the eastern provinces of Camagüey, Holguín, Guantánamo and
Santiago.

The exodus forced the Cuban government to care for the would-be
refugees at a time when the communist nation was experiencing its
worst economic crisis as a result of the collapse of the former
Soviet Union, which abruptly ended subsidies.

The Haitians were repatriated after the U.S. invasion of Haiti in
1994 forced out a military dictatorship and returned President
Jean-Bertrand Aristide to power.

Marie Andrine Constant, Haiti's ambassador to Cuba, said Tuesday that
her government would prefer a police force from the Organization of
American States to an ''international peace force'' proposed by
France.

''I think it would be better to follow a proposal put forward by . .
. Aristide, which is to get in touch with the OAS,'' Constant said in
Havana.

Constant also said the Aristide administration favors dialogue with
the opposition to resolve the growing political and social conflict
that many fear could lead to another mass exodus.

© 2004 The Miami Herald and wire service sources. All Rights Reserved.
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