Double Exile

What could be worse than having to leave your homeland?

Having to leave your adopted homeland.

The following Miami Herald article describes this very process that Cuban-Venezuelans are going through as they flee hugolandia.

(Side note: take along a huge chunk of salt and read the comments to the article. There's nothing quite like unbridled ignorance on display).

Venezuelans of Cuban descent use heritage to enter U.S.

The sons and daughters of Cubans living in Venezuela are fleeing the country, fearing a repeat of Fidel Castro's 1950s revolution.

Haunted by their exiled parents' harrowing experience in the 1950s revolutionary Cuba, thousands of Venezuelans of Cuban descent are fleeing the country as President Hugo Chávez intensifies his drive to transform Venezuela into a socialist state.

The two Cuban consulates in Venezuela -- in Caracas and Valencia -- have seen a sharp rise in recent months in the number of petitions from young applicants looking for ways to prove their Cuban origin.

The sons and daughters of Cuban nationals have a unique advantage over the rest of Venezuelans: A direct shot at becoming U.S. residents if they can prove their parents were born on the island.

''We are witnessing in Venezuela the same situation that our parents experienced [in Cuba,] and that is why we are looking for new horizons,'' said Víctor López, a 35-year-old son of Cubans who went to the Cuban embassy in Caracas last week to request a birth certificate.

Víctor plans to move to Miami next year, along with his wife and their 4-year-old daughter, hoping to benefit from the Cuban Adjustment Act, a law that allows any person who can prove he was born in Cuba or to Cuban parents to become a legal resident in the U.S.

''The birth certificate proving that the person is the son or the daughter of a Cuban citizen allows him to be considered under the Cuban Adjustment Act,'' said Salvador Romaní, president of the advocacy group Junta Patriótica Cubana in Venezuela, who moved to Miami last year after 47 years in Venezuela.

The number of Cuban-Venezuelans who have applied for residency under the Cuban Adjustment Act has grown since August, after the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services agency ruled that a birth certificate issued by a Cuban consulate could be used as proof of Cuban origin.

The decision ''has opened the doors not only to the sons and daughters of Cubans in Venezuela, but also to those living anywhere else in the world,'' said Avelino González, a former law professor at the University of Havana and an immigration lawyer in Miami who has also lived in Venezuela.

María Victoria López, a 27-year-old Venezuelan lawyer who came to Miami in 2005 to pursue graduate studies, is also hoping to benefit from the ruling.

''One of the main reasons not to return to Venezuela is that Chávez is building a Cuba-inspired autocracy, something that has always concerned us as a family because of what [my parents] lived through in Cuba,'' said López Ferrer.

She presented her Cuban birth certificate in January, after having lived legally in the United States for twelve months and one day, as the Cuban Adjustment Act requires. She is currently awaiting her green card.

González estimates that 30,000 Cubans currently live in Venezuela -- including some former Bay of Pigs fighters.

''Every day we hear of more cases of people of Cuban descent who want to come to Miami, and we are trying to help them in any way we can,'' said Julio César Alfonso, president of Solidarity Without Borders, an organization that helps defecting Cuban doctors in Venezuela reach Miami.

Posted by Robert M at October 29, 2007 01:41 PM

Trackback Pings

TrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.babalublog.com/cgi-bin/mt/hut.cgi/6367

Comments

Posted by: rrrod at October 29, 2007 03:42 PM

Posted by: BarrioChino at October 29, 2007 11:44 PM

Post a comment