• Submitted by: admin
• Politics and Government
• 04 / 26 / 2010

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Almost 2,000 refugees from the exodus were returned under a confidential agreement with Havana.

Deported last October from the United States to Cuba, René Alamo spends most days sitting alone in a bedroom of his family's house outside Havana waiting to hear whether he will get to rejoin his wife and children in South Florida.

``I am seeing a psychiatrist because I can't deal with this by myself,'' the 63-year-old René told El Nuevo Herald in a telephone interview from Cuba.

Said his wife Lázara Alamo: ``I am destroyed. Suddenly I'm left without a husband of almost 30 years and our children without their father.''

Alamo was forced to return to Cuba under a little-known immigration accord between the U.S. and Cuban governments dating back to the 1980s Reagan administration that singles out Cubans who arrived during the 1980 Mariel boatlift.

Their names are contained on a confidential list kept by federal authorities and not open to the public.

The agreement allows U.S. immigration authorities to deport certain Mariel Cubans convicted of crimes both in Cuba and within the United States.

Other Cubans typically do not get deported to the island nation.

As Cuban exiles mark 30 years since the first Mariel refugees landed on the U.S. mainland, the deportations of the so-called ``Mariel excludables'' underscore how to this day -- three decades later -- the memory of Mariel haunts a select group of Cuban families.

The family of René Alamo and his attorneys say U.S. immigration authorities have made a terrible mistake in deporting him from the United States because they insist that he arrived the year before the Mariel boatlift.

``It is a terrible injustice,'' said Lázara Alamo in an interview with El Nuevo Herald in the Coral Gables office of Eduardo Soto, her immigration lawyer.

Soto recently sued the federal government demanding that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement bring back Alamo, who was deported on Oct. 29.

Lázara said René was sentenced to two years probation after a 1981 incident in Key West that led to criminal charges over an alleged boat hijacking.

No records, however, could be found in court files and René refused to talk about the case in the telephone interview from Cuba.

While U.S. officials would not comment on individual cases, a U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement official in Miami asserted that the United States is only returning to Cuba those on the 1984 deportation list.

``The process for removing Cubans has not changed,'' said Nicole Navas, the ICE spokeswoman in Miami.

``ICE is only removing Cuban nationals contained in the repatriation agreement.''

Verifying ICE's contention is difficult because the repatriation list is not open to the public.

As a result, it's unknown which Mariel migrants are actually on the list, whether the names have been the same since 1984 or whether they have changed over time.

It's also unclear whether names of individuals who did not arrive during Mariel have been included.

What is known is that the list has the names of nearly 3,000 criminal convicts -- 1,840 have been repatriated since the accord took effect in 1984.

About 900 Mariel Cubans reportedly remain to be deported, but they have not been apprehended by U.S. authorities.

Over the years, a few non-Mariel Cubans have been deported -- but those have been isolated and are special cases.

BY ALFONSO CHARDY

Source: www.miamiherald.com/