Friday, March 10, 2006

Mexico bends over for fidel

The Diario de Yucatán (in Spanish) writes about another 6 Cubans rafters arriving on the coast of Mexico, this time in the state of Quintana Roo. They have been detained! In Mexican lingo, this means arrested. Their failed goal was to reach the United States. There are 500 such arrivals of Cubans in Mexico each year. The Mexicans authority simply puts them under arrest, until the Cuban master, owner of the biggest slave plantation in the world, decides that they are to be returned. Here is an opinion piece published in the The Californian, poiting out the incredible disparity between how the US treats illegals and the treatment of illegals in Mexico.

Taking a lesson from Mexico

With all the weeping and gnashing of teeth over the treatment of illegal immigrants in this country, no one has yet argued that the conditions under which they are jailed are less than humane.

Perhaps we're just too kind. Maybe we should revisit the quality of the temporary housing illegal immigrants receive at the expense of taxpayers. Just because we educate their children for free, care for their ill for free and employ them off the books to the extent that they can afford to send an estimated $10 billion a year back to their families in Mexico, doesn't mean we have to be particularly accommodating when we incarcerate the ones we actually arrest and are preparing to send back across the border.

Surely, there must be some substandard lockups somewhere in this country where we could house them.We could crowd them in to the degree that inmates in the nation's "overcrowded" prisons would by comparison be spending their sentences on the wide-open spaces of the Ponderosa. And beds. They don't need no stinkin' beds. Concrete floors would work.The delicious part of this plan is that Mexican officials would understand.


Read the rest of the story here.

Meanwhile the Cubans that caused a disturbance in a Mexican "dentention" center protesting their situation will not be granted asylum, and may be facing criminal charges. Read here (in Spanish).

A final observation are the ages of the 6 Cubans that arrived at Q. Roo. The youngest is 19 and the oldest is 31 years old. That is to say, they were born after 1959, after the triumph of "glorious" revulsion (no misspelling here), which is to say they have very little experience about of any other type system, but the human soul yearns to breathe the air of a free destiny. That is why there is only one direction for the rafters, away from 47 years of darkness and hopelessness.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Orlando, what's new about this treatment? Mexico never really cared for Cubans fleeing the island. And we are talking way back in the early 60's when they basically shut the door to Cubans wanting to go to Mexico. However, Chileans fleeing Pinochet were welcomed with open arms. I remember reading how some Mexicans were resentful of the fact that Chileans were given good jobs in contrast to the nationals.