Cubans lament safe exile of ex-tormenters

— Havana activist Elizardo Sanchez says he bears no ill will for the Caamanos, neighbors who collaborated with State Security agents to harass him for years. After all, he heads the Cuban Commission for Human Rights and National Reconciliation.

But his sister Marcela, who lives with him, has no problem denouncing the two Caamanos and a son-in-law, who now live in Miami.

“The first thing I would do is bring them back,” she said. “It is not a grudge. But it is a lot of pity for the many people suffering here, while they live without any kind of problem over there.”

Former Cuban provincial prisons chief Crescencio Marino Rivero made headlines over the past month amid allegations that he abused some prisoners and ordered guards to abuse others before he moved to Miami two years ago.

But uncounted hundreds of other Cubans with nasty pasts are also living in Miami, including State Security officers, snitches and collaborators, judges, policemen and members of the Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, the neighborhood watch groups.

Most were small cogs in the Communist system’s machinery for political repression. They did not beat or torture. But they were not harmless. Their work could land dissidents in prison or block their children from getting into the right universities.

Yet like hundreds of thousands of other Cubans, they eventually moved to Miami, legally or illegally, for valid or suspect reasons. And their victims fumed when they spotted their former tormentors living in the capital of Cuban exile.

“The fact is that he screwed up my life,” Jose Varona, 73, said about the State Security officer whose court testimony in 1973 helped send him to prison for 61/2 years. Varona was freed and moved to Miami in 1979. The officer arrived two years ago.

Frank Parodi, a retired official of the human rights violators’ unit of Immigration and Customs Enforcement, said that after the arrest of one Cuban abuser was announced in 1992, his office received 250 tips and leads about other abusers in Miami. He was transferred to Washington afterward and does not know what happened to those tips.

Elizardo Sanchez said “hundreds upon hundreds” of fulltime officers of State Security, the Interior Ministry branch in charge of political repression, moved to the United States in recent years. Ironically, he claimed, some went searching for a safe haven.

“The smartest ones perceive that the regime is in its final stage” and fear revenge attacks, he said by telephone from Havana. “They are looking to put themselves in a safe place.”

U.S. government officials acknowledge it is difficult if not impossible to weed out the bad apples when Cubans apply for U.S. visas, residency or citizenship.

State Security officers use pseudonyms to hide their identities when cracking down on dissidents, and Washington does not appear to have extensive databases that could alert to Cubans with dirty pasts.

Marcela Sanchez said she warned U.S. diplomats in Havana that three of her Caamano neighbors had obtained U.S. visas and were preparing to leave. They settled in Miami in 2000 or 2001.

In the absence of full U.S.-Cuba diplomatic relations, Havana does not cooperate in confirming the personal details of Cubans seeking visas or citizenship and almost never accepts U.S. deportations.

Rivero -- the former prisons chief -- and his wife apparently did not reveal in their visa or residency documents that they had held the rank of colonel and captain in the Interior Ministry and belonged to the Communist Party — facts that might have triggered deeper U.S. looks at their cases.

“The checks and balances we have for migrants of other nationalities were not that effective with the Cubans,” Parodi said. “These are people who should not be here, but whatever they put on paper is all we have. And once they’re in Miami, they’re in.”

The former agents and collaborators also could pose a security risk because they could cooperate with Cuban intelligence agents, willingly or under pressure, said Elizardo Sanchez.

Miami human-rights activist Oscar Pena said it’s time for Cubans to stop nursing old wounds, “not to forget, but to draw a mental line and say ‘this stops now.’” The same goes for islanders still holding grudges against exiles, he added.

But that’s a tough idea for victims, their relatives and friends to accept.

After El Nuevo Herald newspaper published the first story about Rivero, it received a dozen complaints alleging other abusers lived in South Florida.

One Miami man e-mailed the newspaper to denounce the Havana judge he said had refused to give a break to a mutual friend convicted of a nonpolitical crime in the 1980s.

Another alleged that a former prison guard in Camaguey province named Eugenio Salgado had worked at the Palacio De los Jugos restaurant on Flagler Street. Owner Apolonia Bermudez said Salgado quit 10 to 12 years ago and El Nuevo Herald efforts to find him were unsuccessful.

Miami author Rodrigo de la Luz said he was stunned some years back when he ran into the policeman who watched but did nothing as another cop beat him 20 years ago in Havana for being disrespectful during his arrest.

“I was handcuffed, and you laughed,” de la Luz, now 43, recalled saying to the man, who admitted that he had been a policeman but denied ever abusing anyone and insisted that was old history.

“After all, we’re all here” in Miami, the man added.

Front Section, Pages 6 on 11/25/2012

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