Posted on 06/08/2005 10:42:02 AM PDT by Graybeard58
HAVANA -- Bernardo Heredia fled communist Cuba a decade ago, and this year loaned his lookalike younger brother his U.S. residency documents to help him do the same.
But what started in March as an act of familial love became a full-blown sacrifice when Cuban authorities got wise to the ploy and refused to let the elder Heredia leave the island, effectively switching the lives of two brothers.
Now, Heredia is living with his younger sibling's wife and child, plotting an ocean escape similar to the one he went through in 1994.
"This is a nightmare," Heredia, a U.S. resident who was born just 13 months earlier than his brother, said Tuesday outside his mother's small apartment in western Havana.
The U.S. government can't do much because the elder Heredia never obtained American citizenship.
"The government of Cuba has the sole legal authority to grant exit permission from Cuba for its citizens," a statement from the U.S. Interests Section said, urging Cuba to grant all its citizens the right to leave the island.
It began when Heredia, 42, found out his younger brother, Fidel, planned to leave Cuba by sea. Heredia vividly remembered his own hellish, seven-day journey across the Florida Straits and devised what he thought was a foolproof way to avoid it.
In Havana on a family visit, Bernardo Heredia persuaded his brother to use his U.S. residency card and Cuban passport to leave on a plane for Mexico. Fidel Heredia, who turns 41 in July, then used his own documents to cross the Mexico border into the United States as a regular Cuban migrant.
With his own documents mailed back to him and no record of an arrival in Las Vegas, Bernardo Heredia imagined there'd be no problem flying back to the United States. But Cuban immigration officials stopped him at the Havana airport after realizing his passport had been used a few days prior.
Heredia spent 30 days in a detention center. When he was released, he said, he was told he wouldn't be leaving Cuba anytime soon.
"This is revenge," he said. "They know that to live in this country is so bad and depressing that that is the punishment. The immigration officials ... said to me: 'Your brother left, so you stay here."'
Neither wife knew about the plan beforehand and both were -- predictably -- upset.
Bernardo Heredia drove a taxi in Las Vegas, but in Cuba he has no work. He spends his watching home videos he sent his mother of his daughter. He stays at his brother's house with his sister-in-law and 8-year-old nephew.
In Las Vegas, Fidel Heredia's days are bittersweet, the excitement of a new life shadowed by his brother's predicament. The younger Heredia lives with his brother's wife and their 2-year-old daughter, who sometimes mistakes her uncle for her dad. He works a night shift cleaning a casino.
But Hollywood says Fidel is great. This can't be true...
Isn't the communist worker's paradise wunderful? James Earl Carter surely thinks so.........That's why every body who is anybody is going there this summer...........
Does anybody have a link to figures on estimates of Cuban emmigration? I'm pretty curious about that...
Once I got out, I would never go back while Castro was still there.
I don't, but I was in Orlando last week for the first time in 30 years and the south side looks a lot like south Miami use to look. I met some nice people as well.
Did the younger bro have a plan to free his wife and son, or did he intend to abandon them in Cuba?
Let's do Bernardo a favor, round up his illegal-alien brother and ship his @ss back to the island.
I was wondering the same thing! It looks like the older brother has some 'slainin' to do, and plenty of time in which to do it! Ai yi yi!
The younger brother is in the U.S. legally.
"Did the younger bro have a plan to free his wife and son, or did he intend to abandon them in Cuba?"
I guess all anyone needs to leave Cuba is a US residency card. Perhaps once the brother got a card he could get one for his wife and son and then mail it to them.
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