Have Cubans Fled One Authoritarian State for Another?
The following week, I went west of Miami to the Gulf of Mexico – Trump’s “Gulf of America”. After the last row of shopping centers and subdivisions, the Everglades took over, in a large hot expanse of subtropical wetland. In the miccosukee Indian reserve, I spent huts where tourists take walks by plane in the swamp to see alligators.
I was accompanied by Thomas Kennedy, political analyst at Florida Immigrant Coalition. Kennedy is thirty-four years old, the son of Argentinian who came to the United States on tourist visas and remained. After spending a large part of his childhood as an unparalleled immigrant, he became a citizen and made migration problems his work of life. A few days earlier, he had joined a group of legislators from the Democratic States who went to inspect the Alligator Alcatraz and were refused by civil servants there. “What they told them is that they were not allowed to enter, and that it was for their own protection,” recalls Kennedy. One of the legislators stressed that he had been sure enough for the President of the United States. Officials have always refused to let them in.
While the road extended into the deeper desert of the great national CYPRESS reserve, the panels marked the entrance to the prison. By deactivating, we stopped on a roadblock kept by two armed officers in Flak jackets. One of the guards told us that unauthorized visitors were prohibited, but she was ready to speak for a few minutes. Her face was red in the heat, and she admitted that the marsh was not the most comfortable place to get care. But she couldn’t complain, she said-she had a lot of drinking water, sunscreen and insect repellents.
The detainees were less well maintained. Kennedy was in contact with a Cuban woman whose son, a severe asthmatic, had been detained in Alligator Alcatraz for a week and was only transferred after his health has decreased considerably. Another Cuban man had been brought with acute hemorrhoids; He was finally taken to surgery, then immediately returned to detention, despite constant pain. Kennedy said it was difficult to keep a trace of the detainees, because many were transferred to prisons in Louisiana and Texas, but the cases of abuse accumulated. A fifteen -year -old boy had been detained for a week before anyone realized that he was a minor; Another detainee who made a hunger strike had been chained on the landing track for several hours in the sun. (DHS denies the allegations of inhuman conditions.)
Through the entrance, vans with tinted windows have come to deliver more prisoners. Kennedy made a gesture towards a place in the marshes where he had seen alligators lounge when he visited the legislators. The prison was intended to have migrants who had committed crimes, but, according to the Miami HeraldOnly one third of detainees had judicial lockers in the United States Kennedy stressed that the Alligator Alcatraz existed in a legal limbo: the Ministry of Internal Security, ICEAnd the state of Florida had all avoided the responsibility of the establishment. “Lawyers still do not know where to turn to deposit their belongings,” he said. “It is a concentration camp. He operates outside of any judicial framework, where people are placed in a legal escape of which there is no appeal. ”
Later, Kennedy introduced me Betty Osceola, a miccosukee activist who was an important voice from the opposition to Alligator Alcatraz. She told me that the abuses of the prison were obvious, but that no one in power seemed to worry about it. “I tried to bring people to listen to, including local legislators,” she said. “Unfortunately, in Florida and through the United States, toxicity is such that if you are talking about human problems, they solve you.” Instead, she and her allies had raised concerns about the ecosystem. The prison, she said, had been installed in the midst of a national reserve without study on environmental impacts. “What they are doing to people is not fair, but it also affects panthers, wooden stories and fireflies, due to light pollution,” she said. Given the number of violations, Osceola seemed surprised that the government was even authorized to start construction: “If they had been another group or another individual, they would have been arrested.”
In August, a federal judge ordered that the prison was canceled for environmental reasons. While Desantis complained of an “militant judge who tried to make the policy of the bench”, the State posted an appeal and obtained a suspension in the decision. However, the detainees were inherently transferred to other facilities. Some went to Fort Bliss, Texas, or in a prison in northern Florida called Depot Deporation. Others were sent to the Miami Krome detention center – another installation which was the worrying incident site. At the end of June, a Cuban-American man of seventy-five years died there, apparently of heart failure. He has been in the United States since the age of sixteen.
From Miami, I spoke by phone with one of the women arrested in Las Cañas after the incident with Morejón. Alina, as she asked to be called, is fifty-five, the mother of an adult daughter and son. She had served three years of forced work, working on a banana plantation and cleaning an office.
Alina described Morejón as a “shameful human being”, but said he did not seem to have suffered for his offenses or for trying to flee to the United States since his return to Cuba, he had returned to Las Cañas. “We hear that he will be charged with a store next to the slaughterhouse,” she said. In the years following the demonstrations, Las Cañas had acquired a new police station, whose police officers frequently circulated through the squad cars community. “They want to send a message that if someone thinks of redoing something like that, they will go to prison for a long time,” she said. This summer, the state -owned public telecommunications agency suddenly increased the price of data plans across the country, in what was considered an attempt to draw the flow of information.
