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Keyword: cubanrefugees

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  • Biden admin. speaks with Cuban officials about slowing tide of illegal immigration

    04/24/2022 6:38:06 AM PDT · by antidemoncrat · 21 replies
    OAN ^ | 4/22/2022 | OAN Newsroom
    The Biden White House and Cuban officials kicked off talks to curb illegal migration coming from the Caribbean country. On Thursday, State Department spokesperson Ned Price said the US is hoping to continue almost 30-years of dialogue with Cuba.
  • Obama WH: 'Certainly an Uptick' in Number of Cubans Fleeing to USA Since Obama Normalized Relations

    02/19/2016 5:55:00 PM PST · by Olog-hai · 20 replies
    Cybercast News Service ^ | February 19, 2016 | 10:06 AM EST | Susan Jones
    In the months after President Obama re-established diplomatic relations with Cuba, there's "certainly" been an "uptick" in the number of Cubans trying to make their way to the United States, Deputy National Security Adviser Ben Rhodes said on Thursday. [...] ... "I think that's tied to perhaps expectations around our policy changes but also greater freedom of movement for Cubans to travel from Cuba." Rhodes said the Obama administration has no plans to change the longstanding "wet foot/dry foot" immigration policy, which says Cubans who reach U.S. soil qualify for legal permanent resident status and U.S. citizenship, while those who...
  • GLORIA ESTEFAN: ‘Our Gloria’ Betrays Cuban Fans, Jumps On Obama Bandwagon

    04/20/2010 10:23:21 AM PDT · by EveningStar · 25 replies · 949+ views
    Big Hollywood ^ | April 19, 2010 | Humberto Fontova
    “Multi-Millionaire Hispanic pop star holds fundraiser for Democratic Party!” “OK? And dog bites man? So where’s the story here?”... OK, a little background might help. Exit polls show that Cuban-Americans voted against Obama by the highest margins—and by far—of any U.S. ethnic group, including “anglos.”...
  • Flow of Cubans leaving by sea rising: U.S

    04/10/2008 6:37:07 PM PDT · by Huntress · 7 replies · 58+ views
    Reuters ^ | 4/10/08 | Rosa Tania Valdes
    HAVANA (Reuters) - The number of Cubans risking their lives to leave their communist-run country illegally by sea to reach the United States is rising, U.S. officials in Havana said on Thursday. Since October 1, 2007, 2,891 Cubans have tried to cross the Florida Straits; 1,697 made it to the United States and were allowed to stay while the U.S. Coast Guard intercepted 1,194 and sent them back. The U.S. officials said the figures showed that average Cubans had little faith that life would improve in the one-party socialist state under President Raul Castro, who succeeded his ailing brother Fidel...
  • Fox News Just Reported 25 Cubans Safely Ashore In FL Keys This AM (8/13/2007)

    08/13/2007 7:46:55 AM PDT · by tgslTakoma · 66 replies · 1,577+ views
    Fox News - not on website yet | 8/13/2007
    Not much on the report as of now. Overhead video of crowd of newly free Cubans. Fox says they washed ashore on the Florida Keys.I know it's not much of a report right now...sorry about that.
  • More Cubans Leaving by Sea Again, Many to Mexico

    07/30/2007 3:35:09 AM PDT · by JACKRUSSELL · 16 replies · 598+ views
    Reuters ^ | July 29, 2007 | By Anthony Boadle
    (HAVANA) - After a lull following Fidel Castro's illness last year, Cubans once again are taking to homemade boats or powerful speedboats manned by smugglers on a trip to the United States that often includes a detour through Mexico. Since May, the U.S. Coast Guard has been intercepting more boat people in precarious craft crossing the Straits of Florida in the calm summer waters. The U.S. Border Patrol also has been processing rising numbers turning up at the U.S. frontier with Mexico. Cubans coming across the 90-mile gap with Florida try to make it in anything that floats and has...
  • Cubans top Dominicans in boatpeople trying to reach Puerto Rico [U.S.]

    05/04/2006 3:00:37 PM PDT · by cll · 9 replies · 290+ views
    Dominican Today ^ | 5/04/2006 | Staff and wire reports
    SAN JUAN, PUERTO RICO - Crossings of Cuban boatpeople towards Puerto Rico have surpassed those by Dominicans, according to [U.S.] Border Patrol spokesman Victor Griffin, who stated that these will increase if the law granting political asylum to all Cubans who reach U.S. territory is [not modified]. Griffin said that while crossings of Cuban boatpeople from Dominican Republic towards Puerto Rico increase, "the ones by the Dominicans has been diminishing." He said that Cubans are increasingly using Mona Island as a bridge to get to Puerto Rico. "We are receiving less Dominicans and more Cubans and that tendency is going...
  • Judge Rules for Cuban Migrants

    03/01/2006 9:12:25 AM PST · by NonValueAdded · 23 replies · 655+ views
    FOXNews ^ | March 1, 2006 | AP
    MIAMI — A judge has ordered federal officials to "use their best efforts" to help 15 Cubans return to the United States, weeks after they reached an abandoned bridge in the Florida Keys but were sent back to their homeland. While U.S. District Judge Federico Moreno sympathized with the difficulty the U.S. Coast Guard faces in making split-second decisions at sea, he wrote, "those Cuban refugees who reached American soil in early January 2006 were removed to Cuba illegally." Under the government's policy, Cubans who reach U.S. soil are generally allowed to stay, while those stopped at sea are sent...
  • U.S. finds Cubans fleeing in amphibious 49 Mercury

    06/08/2005 6:15:58 PM PDT · by Former Fetus · 45 replies · 1,905+ views
    yahoo ^ | 6/8/05 | Anthony Boadle
    HAVANA (Reuters) - A group of Cubans making the third bid in two years to reach the United States in a vintage American car converted into a boat were intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard, relatives said on Wednesday. In their impoverished Havana neighborhood, tearful mothers implored U.S. authorities to allow the emigres to stay in the United States, saying they would be jailed if returned to Communist-run Cuba. Thirteen Cubans, including six children, sailed across the Florida Straits in a 1949 Mercury with an built-on prow and a taxi sign on the roof. They were intercepted about 20 miles...
  • Let’s grab a cab to the United States

    06/08/2005 10:29:49 AM PDT · by RS · 45 replies · 1,075+ views
    MSNBC ^ | 06/08/06 | The Associated Press
    A vintage blue taxicab converted into a seagoing vessel and carrying several Cuban immigrants was intercepted Tuesday off Key West by the Coast Guard, a television station reported.
  • Taxi! Cubans Set Sail For Florida In Vintage Cab

    06/08/2005 9:05:53 AM PDT · by Cecily · 32 replies · 1,168+ views
    Reuters ^ | June 8, 2005
    MIAMI - Taxi! Take us to the United States, don't spare the gas and mind the, er, waves. A group of 13 Cubans set sail for the United States in a vintage blue taxicab converted into an unwieldy vessel, Miami television station NBC 6 reported. But the makeshift boat, with a prow jutting out of the front and a taxi sign on the roof, was intercepted on Tuesday evening by the U.S. Coast Guard about 20 miles off Key West on the southern tip of Florida.
  • Caption this! (Cubans escaping on floating taxi)

    06/08/2005 8:55:35 AM PDT · by Uncledave · 47 replies · 2,150+ views
    June 8: A group of 13 Cubans set sail for the United States in a vintage blue taxicab converted into a boat. NBC's Kerry Sanders reports. Today show
  • U.S. resident stuck in Cuba after identity swap with brother exposed

    06/08/2005 10:42:02 AM PDT · by Graybeard58 · 11 replies · 609+ views
    Waterbury Republican-American ^ | June 8, 2005 | Vanessa Arrington (A.P.)
    HAVANA -- Bernardo Heredia fled communist Cuba a decade ago, and this year loaned his lookalike younger brother his U.S. residency documents to help him do the same. But what started in March as an act of familial love became a full-blown sacrifice when Cuban authorities got wise to the ploy and refused to let the elder Heredia leave the island, effectively switching the lives of two brothers. Now, Heredia is living with his younger sibling's wife and child, plotting an ocean escape similar to the one he went through in 1994. "This is a nightmare," Heredia, a U.S. resident...
  • 25 years ago, the Marielitos landed

    04/10/2005 3:15:36 PM PDT · by Graybeard58 · 4 replies · 1,481+ views
    Waterbury Republican-American ^ | April 10, 2005 | Adrian Sainz
    MIAMI -- She was a short and skinny 15-year-old, sitting down on a sunny afternoon for lunch of brown sugar sandwiches at her grandmother's house, when Lourdes Hernandez was forced to face her future. Her grandmother called out, "You have to go home. Officials just came over to your house. You're leaving the country." About a week later, Hernandez walked through the mosquito-filled night in Mariel, Cuba, toward a shrimp boat, the Lorraine, and its American captain. Clutching her father's hand, she stepped onto the vessel with about 200 other refugees joining the "freedom flotilla" toward Key West. "My dad...
  • Mariel family finds success in America against the odds

    04/10/2005 11:46:14 AM PDT · by wagglebee · 5 replies · 423+ views
    Gainsville Sun ^ | 4/10/05 | JOHN PAIN/AP
    When Isidoro Vilarino fled Cuba with his wife and two young children in the 1980 Mariel boatlift, he was like most of the other 125,000 refugees - destitute, with few job skills and only the clothes on his back. Vilarino had worked on his father's livestock farm in the rural mountain town of Buey Arriba, near where Fidel Castro based his revolution to take over the country in the 1950s. Life was comfortable until Castro nationalized Cuban land and his father's farm in the early 1960s. Vilarino had to quit school and get a job working in a bar as...
  • They tried sailing a Chevy, then they gave the Buick a go

    03/24/2005 5:29:56 PM PST · by MadIvan · 37 replies · 1,309+ views
    The Times ^ | March 25, 2005 | Tim Reid
    SOME Cubans are so desperate to cross the Florida Straits for a new life in America that they have attempted the journey on surfboards, in bathtubs and even in converted refrigerators.But none has been as determined, or as ingenious, as Luis Grass. Señor Grass, 30, whose two previous attempts to make the voyage in propeller-driven vintage cars ended in glorious, headline-grabbing failure, has finally arrived in the United States with his family after his third try. This time he came overland — an epic, 24-day, 1,140-mile journey. “Trying to cross the Florida Straits on my floating cars was easier, I...
  • Cuban family reaches U.S. -- by taxi -- after attempts at floating truck, car fail

    03/23/2005 5:42:26 PM PST · by LibFreeUSA · 19 replies · 950+ views
    Newsday.com ^ | Tue, Mar. 22, 2005 | Madeline Baró Diaz
    MIAMI -- After trying to first float to the United States in a 1951 Chevy truck and then in a 1959 Buick, a Cuban family has finally made it, this time by taxi. Luis Grass Rodríguez, 36, his wife, Isora Hernández Hernández, 27, and their son, Angel Luis, 5, arrived in Miami on Sunday, more than a year after their second unsuccessful attempt. "I had a desire to leave Cuba, to live in a place where I wouldn't be bothered, where my children could have a better future and, above all else, freedom," said Grass, who made it to Texas...
  • Cuban Family Who Tried Floating Truck To U.S. Now In Miami

    03/22/2005 6:01:39 AM PST · by kellynla · 30 replies · 979+ views
    Sun-Sentinel.com ^ | 3/21/2005 | staff
    MIAMI -- A Cuban family that twice tried to reach Florida with vehicles converted into boats has made it to Miami, this time coming overland via Mexico from Costa Rica, the family's lawyer said. Luis Grass, his wife Isora Hernandez and their five-year-old son Angel Luis Grass Hernandez, entered the U.S. though the Texas-Mexico border on March 12. They were held in custody in Brownsville, Texas until Sunday. They traveled to Miami on Monday after being released on parole for humanitarian reasons. They will be allowed to apply for permanent residence in 2006. The Grass family's voyage to America began...
  • MARIEL BOATLIFT: FREED DETAINEE SEEKS A HOME

    02/28/2005 7:46:18 AM PST · by JesseHousman · 3 replies · 362+ views
    Miami Herald ^ | Feb. 28, 2005 | Alfonso Chardy
    The first case of a newly released Mariel detainee in South Florida surfaced in Miami. Carlos Bueno Rodríguez, recently released Mariel detainee, arrived home in Miami over the weekend after a 24-hour bus trip from New Orleans -- but he didn't really have a place to call home. Under a persistent drizzle, Bueno Rodríguez made his way to east Little Havana near downtown Miami's gleaming skyscrapers Saturday evening, looking for a friend he remembered who lived in the area. But he wasn't sure he would be able to find him. His backup plan: go to a homeless shelter if he...
  • Dozens of migrants land in the Florida Keys on Thursday

    02/11/2005 1:46:57 AM PST · by Elle Bee · 25 replies · 744+ views
    Key West Citizen and Bait Wrapper ^ | February 11, 2005 | staff
    Dozens of migrants land in Keys on Thursday CITIZEN STAFF A total of 51 Cuban migrants arrived in the Florida Keys on Thursday. The first to arrive were 13 adult men, who landed on Gopher Key just off Spanish Main Drive on Cudjoe Key, said U.S. Border Patrol Agent Kerry Heck. The migrants arrived in an aluminum boat and waded ashore on Cudjoe Key, said Heck. All were reported in good health. Also on Thursday, a group of 38 Cubans made landfall in the Dry Tortugas. The 21 adult men, 12 adult women, one young girl and four young boys,...