Published Tuesday, February 29, 2000, in the Miami Herald
Canada orders Cuban envoy back home
By Juan O. Tamayo. [email protected]
An angry Canadian government ordered a Cuban diplomat, forcibly deported from Washington on spying charges, to leave Canada by Monday evening and end his ``publicity seeking attempt to remain in Ottawa.
Jose Imperatori, 46, a former vice consul in Washington linked to the spy case of U.S. immigration official Mariano Faget in Miami, was expected to take a Cubana de Aviacion flight to Havana, where the government was preparing a hero's welcome.
Early this morning, however, Imperatori remained at the Cuban Embassy in Ottawa.
``The gentleman only has a transit visa which expires this evening and we expect he and the Cuban government to live up to the responsibilities of that visa, Canadian Foreign Minister Lloyd Axworthy said Monday.
Axworthy added that Canada had simply ``facilitated Imperatori's expulsion from the United States on Saturday, and that he would not accept Cuba's request for a one-week extension of his Canadian visa.
Imperatori's attempt to stay in Canada added yet another chapter to a saga that has seen him defy a U.S. expulsion order, surrender his immunity, dare the FBI to arrest him and spark a U.S.-Cuba diplomatic clash.
The State Department ordered Imperatori to leave the United States by 1:30 p.m. Saturday after the FBI identified him as one of two alleged Cuban intelligence agents who met with accused spy Faget in Miami last year.
But Imperatori surrendered his diplomatic immunity and stayed in his suburban Washington apartment until FBI agents took him into custody Saturday evening, put him aboard an FBI plane and deported him to Montreal.
Canada was chosen because the Cuban Interests Section in Washington, in effect Havana's embassy, opposed flying him to Miami, which has direct flights to Havana, out of security concerns, U.S. officials said.
EXPULSION COORDINATED
``This expulsion from the United States via Canada . . . was closely coordinated by U.S., Canadian and Cuban officials in Washington in advance, State Department spokesman James Rubin said.
Canadian and U.S. officials said Monday that Canada agreed to issue Imperatori a 48-hour transit visa only after Cuba promised that he would take the next commercial flight to Havana.
He had been booked aboard a Cubana flight from Montreal to Havana Sunday, but instead turned up at the Cuban Embassy in Ottawa, a two-hour drive from Montreal, as Cuban officials announced he would seek a visa extension so he could defend himself from the U.S. allegations of spying.
Canadian diplomats Monday ed the ranks of those stunned by Cuba's actions, with one saying that the extension request was ``a very improper attempt by the Cubans to abuse our side for publicity-seeking purposes.
``Cheeky of them, said the diplomat, ``to try to put us in the middle of this mess.
The Canadian ambassador in Havana, Keith Christie, also told Cuban authorities Monday that Imperatori should ``comply with Canadian laws and leave for Cuba, Foreign Ministry spokesman Michael O'Shaugnessy said.
Calls to the Cuban Embassy in Ottawa went unanswered Monday, but a Cuban government statement Sunday charged that Washington ``had turned Canada into a victim of its errors, and vowed Imperatori would remain in Canada ``as an accusing finger against the evil done to him.
U.S. ANNOYED
State Department spokesman Rubin meanwhile made it clear that U.S. officials remained annoyed by Imperatori's refusal to leave U.S. territory after he was declared persona non grata Feb. 19.
``Under international practice, when a diplomat is declared persona non grata, his government must remove him, Rubin said. ``PNG does not mean `Please Now Go.' . . . It means `Go.' ''
As for Imperatori's offer to return later to the United States so that he can defend himself and Faget from the spying charges, Rubin said that remained to be decided.
The Cuban-born Faget, 54, a senior official at the Immigration and Naturalization Service in Miami, was arrested Feb. 17 and charged with ing secret information to Cuban-American businessman Pedro Font.
The FBI did not file spying charges against Imperatori after he surrendered his immunity Saturday, Rubin added, ``because preparing a prosecutorial case is not something that can be done in seven days.
As for the future, he added, ``when and if a time comes where law enforcement officials believe it appropriate for him to be here . . . I am not going to rule out that possibility. But in the meantime, PNG means PNG.
This report was supplemented by Herald wire services.
Sister Jeanne: Grandma wanted to defect
By Meg Laughlin. [email protected]
After three weeks of silence, Sister Jeanne O'Laughlin has decided to tell exactly why she abandoned her position of neutrality and became an advocate for those who believe that 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez should stay in the United States rather than return to Cuba.
O'Laughlin now says that the night Elian met with his grandmothers in her home in Miami Beach, she learned that one of the grandmothers wanted to defect.
She says she learned that the father and his family knew about Elian's mother's plan to bring him to Miami on a boat 10 days before they left.
And finally, she says she learned that Elian's father had been physically abusive to the boy's mother.
``I've decided to talk,'' O'Laughlin told The Herald late Friday. She said Miami lawyer Roger Bernstein, who is fighting to keep the boy here, had visited her and persuaded her to tell what she knew to help his case. She said she had not done so previously because she did not want ``to endanger
the family in Cuba.''
``But this is more about that little boy than anyone else, and I have to do whatever I can to help him,'' she says.
Senior U.S. District Judge William Hoeveler has scheduled a hearing for Tuesday in a lawsuit brought by Elian's Miami relatives, seeking to force the Immigration and Naturalization Service to grant Elian the right to request political asylum.
The hearing is on the narrow issue of whether Hoeveler has jurisdiction in the case -- the INS argues he does not -- and it is unlikely that O'Laughlin's revelations will influence those discussions on points of law. But it is certain to reignite debate on her role in the Elian case.
Since taking a stand three weeks ago, O'Laughlin has been at the center of international controversy. Her house had been chosen as a neutral site for the reunion between the grandmothers and Elian. But the day after the meeting, O'Laughlin told reporters that the meeting had changed her mind
about where Elian should live.
``The laws of this nation always the bond of a parent and child unless there is a dramatic circumstance,'' she said then. ``This is a dramatic time. Because, as I found myself imagining the child growing into manhood, the fear that seemed to be emanating made me question the environment
this child has come from.''
The reasons she gave, both in her public comments and in a later article written for The New York Times opinion pages, were vague: She believed Elian had bonded with his 21-year-old cousin Marisleysis Gonzalez, and she sensed fear emanating from the grandmothers, which she believed was caused by
the Cuban government.
QUESTIONS RAISED
But her explanations only raised more questions: How could she have formed a credible conclusion about the child and his cousin after being with them for less than hour? And how could she say that the grandmothers' nervousness during the meeting was caused by Cuba rather than demonstrators
outside her house? Had her role as president of Barry University influenced her pronouncement?
``Sister Jeanne has to live in the neighborhood,'' was the reaction of Bob Edgar, the director of the National Conference of Churches, which sponsored the grandmothers' trip.
Even as recently as Tuesday, in a three-hour interview with The Herald, O'Laughlin refused to detail her reasons. ``I had to be vague, and I know I sounded flaky,'' she said during that interview.
But she continued to decline to be more specific until Friday, after she talked with Bernstein.
She now says that at the end of the meeting at her house, after Elian and his Miami family had left, she had about five minutes alone with both grandmothers and then a few minutes with the mother of Elian's mother. In that time, she says, she got convincing information.
``I am not fluent in Spanish,'' she says. ``But I understand most of what is said to me in Spanish. And I clearly understood what was said to me that night.''
CHANGE OF DEMEANOR
Maj. Steve Robbins of the Miami Beach Police Department, who was in the house when O'Laughlin talked with the grandmothers, says he was standing at the bottom of the stairs when she went upstairs to see them.
``She was happy and relaxed when she went up, but when she came down after talking to them, she looked terribly distressed,'' he says.
He says he thought something had happened that shocked her, and he asked her about it.
``But she would not answer,'' he says. ``She just looked terribly preoccupied.''
O'Laughlin then walked out to the gate of her house and spoke about the meeting to the press and hundreds of people gathered there. Her comments were neutral: ``I believe in hope. It has been an informative day. I am so thankful for this opportunity to host this meeting and to touch lives.''
But O'Laughlin says now that she was in fact devastated. When she went back into her house, she wept and prayed for most of the night.
Early the next morning, she called Sister Janet Capone, the prioress of the Adrian Sisters in Adrian, Mich. Capone is O'Laughlin's superior.
'SOMETHING IS WRONG'
``I know something is very wrong, and I can't be specific,'' Capone says O'Laughlin told her. ``So, I'm going to make a vague public statement that will be very controversial.''
Janet Capone: ``I told her to follow her conscience.''
But before she did, O'Laughlin called Maj. Robbins and asked him to come to her house to discuss the meeting with the grandmothers. Robbins says she asked him whether he had heard anything and he said no. He asked her what she had heard, and she said she could not tell him. He told her he had
noticed how upset she was after talking with the grandmothers.
``She nodded, but she said nothing specific,'' he says. ``But I thought something big must have happened.''
``I did not tell anyone what I really knew until today,'' O'Laughlin said Friday.
According to the version of events O'Laughlin now recounts, one of the grandmothers was present when her husband called Lazaro Gonzalez, Elian's great-uncle in Miami, and told him that Elian and his mother would be making the journey to Miami. The conversation occurred 10 days before Elian and
his mother left Cuba.
After hearing that, ``I thought that the boy must have come with his father's blessing,'' she said.
NEW VIEW OF FATHER
She also said Friday that information from one of the grandmothers that the father had been abusive to Elian's mother made her question how good a father he would be to Elian. And finally, she says, one of the grandmothers speaking to her about defecting made her question whether the child
should go back.
``This talk of defecting got me to thinking; if one of the adults wanted out, perhaps it was not a good place for the child,'' she says.
She says that the grandmother who wanted to defect spoke of a secret video in which she said she wanted to leave Cuba and that it would someday become available.
The credibility of O'Laughlin's may hinge on the level of her understanding of Spanish. Sister Leonor Esnard, who served as an interpreter at the meeting with the grandmothers, said she was not present for O'Laughlin's private moments with the grandmothers. ``I translated nothing they
said to her,'' she said.
O'Laughlin, 70, says she studied Spanish in college for four years and ed her language competency exam for her doctoral degree. She says she has read novels in Spanish. Sister Peg Albert, Barry's executive vice president, says O'Laughlin often interprets what people say in Spanish. ``She
doesn't understand everything, but she gets the gist,'' Albert said Saturday.
NOT A SPEAKER
O'Laughlin is not known for speaking Spanish in public. She says she doesn't because she is embarrassed. ``I just don't have the tongue for it,'' she said.
Ever since she met Elian, O'Laughlin says, she has lain awake at night thinking about him: because he is such a small child and she has always been a sap for small children, and because he lost his mother at the same age at which she lost her mother and she identifies with him.
``My father raised me and was wonderful,'' she says. ``I'm not opposed at all to any child being raised by a loving father.''
And because she found the child's eyes so haunting: ``He is too young to have such old, tormented eyes,'' she says.
``It may be too late for him,'' she says. ``If he had gone back immediately before so many people on both sides wanted control of him, he would have been better off. But as it is now, I pray every day that whether he stays or goes back, he can survive this.''
And, she says, she prays for something else: ``That I do what I believe is right and survive this, too.''
Judge leaves Elian case, citing ties to consultant
By Jay Weaver. [email protected]
Miami-Dade Circuit Judge Michael Chavies has removed himself from the family court custody dispute over Elian Gonzalez, saying he, too, once hired the political consultant behind the legal effort to stop the 6-year-old boy's return to Cuba.
Chavies, 50, said he stepped aside ``to avoid the appearance of impropriety'' because the consultant, Armando Gutierrez, handled his 1994 campaign promotions in the Hispanic community.
On Monday, the divisive case was reassigned randomly by computer to Circuit Judge Jennifer Bailey -- the third judge to preside over the custody suit filed by Elian's Miami relatives in early January. Bailey, 41, could not be reached for comment.
But Gutierrez said: ``I don't recall working for her campaigns.''
The case started with Circuit Judge Rosa Rodriguez, who made the controversial Jan. 10 decision to grant emergency custody of Elian to his great-uncle in Miami -- until a temporary custody hearing scheduled for Monday. The boy lost his mother during a journey from Cuba to Florida in November,
leading to the battle between family over his future.
Her decision was praised by Miami's Cuban exile community. But it unleashed a wave of criticism because immigration officials had already ruled the boy belonged with his father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, in Cuba, and the judge had not disclosed her past ties to Gutierrez.
Rodriguez, 39, had paid the political consultant and his wife Maritza's advertising business more than $60,000 to handle promotions during her bid to be elected to the Circuit Court in 1998.
She did not ask to be removed from the Elian case, but it was handed over to Chavies after Rodriguez was reassigned to another division of the family court.
It's unclear whether Elian's custody case will ever be heard in family court.
Great-uncle Lazaro Gonzalez has sued the Immigration and Naturalization Service in federal court, challenging the agency's decision to send the boy back to Cuba. Federal court hearings in that case are scheduled for Monday, the same day as the hearing on temporary custody in family court.
Lawyers for Lazaro Gonzalez said it is likely the family court hearing will be delayed until the federal court case is resolved.
Rafters win freedom
INS releases three; wake set for two who died
By Ana Acle. [email protected]
After nine days at sea and three in the hospital, three Cuban rafters finally stepped within reach of their goal Monday: freedom and reunions with their relatives in Miami.
Immigration officials said the men would be released to their families Monday night.
Their liberty did not come easily. Badly blistered and sunburned, still weak from the voyage, the trio could barely walk through the Krome Detention Center for processing.
But they were the fortunate ones. Two companions died during the long ordeal at sea, and another remains in the hospital.
For the families of the survivors, their liberation signals the beginning of life in a new country. Jorge Nicolas Gonzalez, 33, Oscar Lazaro Garcia, 27, and Jeinier Alvarez, 21, can apply for permanent residency under the Cuban Adjustment Act after a year and a day.
``We're very happy,'' said Sara Abreu, Garcia's stepmother. ``They were worried they would be repatriated. Oscar said he'd rather throw himself overboard and be eaten by the sharks than return.
``When we first heard that they left Cuba, we waited with bated breath as each day ed, wondering if they had drowned.''
But it was a difficult day for the families of the dead and for another rafter -- Ernesto Molina Ramos, 29 -- who remains in critical condition at South Shore Hospital.
``The family is devastated,'' said his sister-in-law Zuly Foret. ``We waited for him with other plans in mind.''
She said Molina left a small daughter and wife behind in Cuba.
The medical examiner's office said it still was trying to determine the cause of death for Jorge Travieso Lopez and Victor Manuel Bermudez Pabon.
A wake for the two men is scheduled for 6 p.m. today at Graceland Funeral Home, 3434 W. Flagler St. They will be buried Wednesday morning at the Cuban Mausoleum at Graceland Memorial Park, 4580 SW Eighth St.
Funded by Radio Mambi and Cuban Unity, the mausoleum was created in honor of rafters who perish in attempts to reach the United States in search of freedom and opportunity.
Lopez's mother, Carmen Lopez, will bid farewell to her 36-year-old son there. She identified him from a photo that the medical examiner's office showed her.
``His face was burned and peeling,'' Lopez said, crying. ``I feel so bad I can't walk.''
The six men left Guanabo, Cuba, on a six-square-foot raft with an outboard motor. But two miles from Cuba, the motor quit and they lost food and water as they drained air from the raft to make it less bouncy.
They ended up drinking their own urine.
The harrowing voyage ended at 3:46 p.m. Friday after a pleasure craft spotted them about five miles from Key Biscayne and alerted the Coast Guard.
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