Cuban Brothers' Identity Switch Backfires (link)But...wait... Cuba is an island utopia... isn't it? I mean, at least that's what all of Hollywood told me...
By VANESSA ARRINGTON
Jun 7, 10:46 PM (ET)
HAVANA (AP) - 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. "I feel as if I were in prison."
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 before working his way to his brother's home in Las Vegas.
[...]
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.'"
Read the sickening "truth."
- Filmmaker Steven Spielberg visited Cuba and met with Castro in November and dined with the dictator until the early morning hours. Spielberg announced that his dinner with Castro "was the eight most important hours of my life." ("Not the hours when he met his wife, not the birth of his children, it was the eight hours he spent with Fidel," [Michael] Medved said.)
- Jack Nicholson - "He [Castro] is a genius. We spoke about everything."
- Model Naomi Campbell declared that Castro was "a source of inspiration to the world."
"I'm so nervous and flustered because I can't believe I have met him. He said that seeing us in person was very spiritual," Naomi Campbell recounted of her 1999 visit to Cuba with fellow model Kate Moss, according to the Toronto Star.
- Chevy Chase, at Earth Day 2000 in Washington D.C., "...socialism works" and "...Cuba might prove that. [...] I think it's conclusive that there have been areas where socialism has helped to keep people at least stabilized at a certain level."
Go ahead. ¡Te atrevo a hacerlo!
Posted by Kyer at June 8, 2005 11:11 AM