Some 200 Cubans Seek Asylum in Spain

yahoo.com ^ | March 12, 2002, 11:59 AM ET | AP

[Cincinatus' Wife]

MADRID, Spain - A group of Cubans seeking political asylum in Spain have been put up at Madrid's international airport while authorities decide their cases, officials said Tuesday.

Two hundred Cubans, reportedly the most to seek asylum in recent years, arrived on separate flights over the weekend, Cadena SER radio said. It said 123 men, women and their children sought asylum on a stopover from Havana to Moscow. There was no immediate information on who the Cubans were.

An Interior Ministry spokeswoman confirmed there was a large group was seeking asylum at the airport but would give no other details. She said asylum cases are confidential.

The number of Cubans seeking asylum in Spain has soared in recent years. Nearly all arrive through the Spanish capital's Barajas international airport. Ninety percent of the 3,273 asylum petitions processed at the airport last year were Cuban, the government said.

Unidentified police officials told the leading daily El Pais that the Cubans would probably be allowed enter Spain on humanitarian grounds.

The daily El Mundo quoted one of the Cubans as saying they had come for economic reasons. The paper said that unlike asylum seekers from other countries, those from Cuba are normally allowed to enter Spain on humanitarian grounds even if their political asylum applications are rejected.

Spain, with a population of 41 million, has an estimated 1 million legal immigrants and several hundred thousand illegal immigrants. It receives nearly a quarter of all new immigrants to the European Union.

[livius]

I don't know if anybody remembers the incident a few years ago where an elderly Cuban poetess named Dulce Maria Loynaz somehow managed to get permission to go to Spain for cataract surgery. She had been under house arrest (seditious love poetry, I believe) for many years in Cuba, and at this point, she was about 90 and nearly blind. But the Castro government was so convinced that she was going to crawl out of her hospital bed and find a way to defect that they posted a military guard outside her door to make sure she didn't get away. That's the Socialist Paradise for you - makes the lame walk and the blind see - well, long enough to get away, at any rate!

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Great story! It says so much.

[Free the USA]

Check the Bump List folders for articles related to and descriptions of the above topic(s) or for other topics of interest.

[mgist]

You notice how on one hand they say asylum cases are condidential. Then somehow a newspaper manages to quote the asylum seeker saying they are seeking asylum for economic reasons?

The media always fails to mention the tyranny people face in Cuba. They reason the mass exodus to a simple greed. The media in Spain, like many places, is extrememly sympathic to Castro.

[ExpandNATO]

And who was the Spanish prime minister who let the armed guard be there and which political party was he from?

[Cardenas]

Several years ago, a group of thugs, among them several functionaries of the Cuban embassy in Madrid, tried to kidnap a Cuban exiled in the middle of the day in the Gran Via, the most crowded and famous street in Madrid. If my memory doesn’t fail me, the Cuban exile was able to escape. Castro's bullies are accustomed to violate the sovereignty of any country as we saw recently in the Mexican embassy in Havana.

During Elian's fiasco also a group of functionaries of the Cuban Section of Interest in Washington came out and attacked a group of people who were demonstrating in front of the embassy and in plain view of Washington policemen who did nothing to protect the Americans. Among the attacked were several women.

[CUBANACAN]

After all, Cuban immigration is a blessing for Spain, which is a country like France and Germany condemned to be taken over by the Muslim’s massive immigration. Christian Western Europeans are an endangered species in peril of extinction. Abortion and contraception are taking its toll. In 2030 most of Europe would be Muslim and not by conversion but by birthrate.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Maybe they can make their way to Italy.

[Cincinatus' Wife]

Castro likes to farm out Cuban doctors to thugs like Mugabe and Chavez. He knows they'll keep them in tow.

Zimbabwe denies holding dissident Cuban doctors--U.S. CALLS GUN-TOTING RAID "a favor for Castro"--[Excerpt] A U.S. State Department official who monitors Zimbabwe said the abduction of the Cuban doctors -- yanked from their beds during a pre-dawn raid Friday by two machine gun-toting soldiers --was a brazen snub of the refugee agency's mandate to assess their asylum claim.

``This was more forceful of an intervention than you would expect,'' said the official, noting the long-standing bond between Fidel Castro and Zimbabwe's President Robert Mugabe. ``The government of Zimbabwe has chosen in this case to do Cuba a favor.'' [End Excerpt]