Cuba trying to head off mass exodus from Haiti

[Judi Lynn]

Posted on Thu, Feb. 19, 2004

Cuba trying to head off mass exodus from Haiti

BY NANCY SAN MARTIN

[email protected]


With a potential migration crisis brewing amid continued political turmoil in Haiti, Cuba has issued an appeal for international assistance for the troubled country just 50 miles off its eastern tip.

''Cuba believes that the international community cannot abandon Haiti. The social situation is getting worse,'' Foreign Minister Felipe Pérez Roque said at a recent meeting of Caribbean officials. ``Collaborating with Haiti has become a duty for all of us, its neighbors.''

In the early 1990s, about 600 Haitians wound up in Cuba as thousands trying to escape the violence of a military coup in their homeland fled in rickety boats in an attempt to reach the United States.

Cuba set up an emergency refugee camp near the sparsely populated eastern tip of the island to accommodate the Haitians who had come ashore in the eastern provinces of Camagüey, Holguín, Guantánamo and Santiago.
(snip/...)

http://www.miami.com/mld/miamiherald/7987451.htm