Home to 79 Mentally Handicapped Cubans : Halfway Houses’ Closing Demanded

City officials, a congressman and a state senator are calling for the closure of two Pomona-area halfway houses occupied by mentally handicapped Cuban refugees who came to the United States during the 1980 Mariel boat lift.

According to the officials, the patients housed at the facilities are committing crimes in Pomona and pose a danger to neighbors. However, those involved with the Cuban refugee mental health program say these charges are uninformed and unfounded.

Rep. David Dreier (R-Covina) wrote a letter to U. S. Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese requesting an investigation by the Department of Justice into Pomona Manor and Country Manor in Chino, two privately owned board-and-care facilities, which together house 79 Cuban psychiatric patients.

In letters to the director of the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services’ refugee mental health program, Dreier described the refugees living at Pomona Manor as “criminals, sex offenders and people of low moral character.”

State Sen. Ruben Ayala (D-San Bernardino), whose district includes the halfway houses, has asked Clifford Allenby, director of California’s health and welfare agency, to shut down the facilities and house the refugees elsewhere.

‘Put Them’ Elsewhere

“Put them somewhere else in the state,” Ayala said. “There’s no doubt that these people need help, but why is the responsibility here in the Pomona area?”

City officials in Pomona asked Dreier and Ayala to look into the facilities in October after Police Chief Richard Tefank announced that 26 Cuban refugees had been arrested in Pomona over a nine-month period for offenses ranging from public drunkenness to assault with a deadly weapon.

“The bottom line is we want these people out, and we don’t want any more,” Mayor Donna Smith said.

But social workers and a psychiatrist at the facilities said that the refugees pose no danger to the community and that police have not been able to verify that those arrested were patients from the halfway houses.

“It’s been completely overblown,” said Dr. Gonzalo Puig, staff psychiatrist at Pomona Manor. “Our people have not been dangerous in any way in comparison to the general population.”

That view is shared by Shallie Marshall, who administers the refugee mental health program from her office at the U. S. Department of Health and Human Services in Rockville, Md. Marshall said she is baffled by the furor over the halfway houses and sees no reason to close them.

“I can’t understand why everyone there is so upset about the Cubans,” Marshall said. “It seems like someone has declared war on us out there, and I don’t know why.”

Avi Leibovici, program director for Pomona Manor, said the residents, most of whom were formerly patients at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Washington, D. C., have been carefully screened by psychiatrists.

“We don’t have sex offenders; we don’t have pedophiles,” Leibovici said.

Leibovici said the patients are victims of bias against the mentally ill and a stereotype of Cuban refugees created by media coverage of events such as last year’s prison riots in Atlanta and Oakwood, La.

“We feel there has been a cascade of misinformation,” Leibovici said. “My hypothesis is that we’re politically expedient. . . . We’re an easy target. We’re racially different. This population has had a lot of sensational press. And you also have the prejudice against the mentally ill.”

Enrique Jurado, project director for Country Manor, agreed. “It’s a political issue,” he said. “They’re not the most popular of populations--the mentally ill Mariel Cubans.”

The patients are among 125,000 Cuban refugees, known as Marielitos, who arrived in the United States in 1980 after they were expelled from their homeland by President Fidel Castro.

Although many of the Marielitos were permitted to become permanent residents, thousands who were found to be criminals or mentally handicapped have remained in prison or in psychiatric hospitals. More than 200 of those with mental health problems have been placed in halfway houses in Kansas City, Mo.; Norristown, Pa., Tucson and in the Pomona area, Marshall said.

Cuban refugees have received psychiatric care at Country Manor--in an unincorporated area of Chino along Pomona’s eastern boundary--since 1982. However, Pomona officials said they were unaware of their presence until federal authorities contacted them about opening a second facility in Pomona.

In June, 1986, Marshall and the owners of Western Care Centers Inc., the firm that contracts with federal health officials to provide care for Marielitos in Southern California, met with Tefank and then-City Administrator Ora Lampman to discuss plans to house refugees at a facility that formerly housed Northgate Hospital.

“We indicated that we were in opposition to the facility being placed there,” Tefank said. “We felt we already had our share of outreach facilities.”

Marshall said she did not infer from the meeting that Pomona officials are dead-set against any type of home for the refugees.

“My impression at that time was that they didn’t want us to get Northgate, but I didn’t feel they didn’t want us in there at all because of community opposition,” Marshall said.

However, Smith said, city officials made their position quite clear at that meeting.

“We said absolutely not. We don’t want Marielitos in our community,” the mayor said.

Western Care Centers opened Pomona Manor in March at a board-and-care facility on Hamilton Avenue that had formerly housed mentally retarded adults.

Between October, 1986, and August, Pomona police arrested 24 people who reported their address as Country Manor in Chino and two who said they lived at Pomona Manor, Tefank said.

The 48 patients housed at Pomona Manor have more severe mental health problems than those at Country Manor or the other halfway houses around the nation, Leibovici said. All are mentally retarded, and many also suffer from disorders such as depression or schizophrenia.

“They’re chronic mentally ill,” Leibovici said. “The prognosis for them living independently in the community is low.”

To Smith, these are not the type of people who should be living in Pomona.

“We have been told by the government that we are getting some of the harder-core cases who may never be able to rejoin society,” Smith said. “And, yet, here they are, walking our streets.”

‘They Look Vulnerable’

But Leibovici said the residents at Pomona Manor, who are allowed to venture off the grounds during the day, have more to fear from the neighborhood than vice versa.

“We’re more concerned with our residents being victims than being aggressors,” Leibovici said. “We deter them from carrying tape recorders because they look vulnerable. Two or three guys can jump them and take away their tape recorders and beat them up.”

Leibovici added that he knows of only one patient who was arrested since the facility opened in March--a retarded man charged with petty theft after taking a pack of cigarettes out of a store without paying for them.

Country Manor houses 31 patients, 15 of whom hold jobs in the community. The rest attend vocational classes at the facility, said Jurado.

Jurado said he knew that some patients at Country Manor had been arrested on minor charges such as public drunkenness. However, he said, he was not aware of any arrests on more serious charges, such as assault.

Although he does not dispute the Police Department’s report that 24 people were arrested who gave their address as Country Manor, Jurado said police have not provided him with the names of those arrested so that he could confirm their identity.

“How do we know that these are actually people in our program?” Jurado said.

Marshall said her office has not received specific information on the arrests from Tefank. Until this information is provided, she said, the refugee mental health program will not take action against the facilities.

“Certainly, the federal government does not want to cause problems in communities, and we would cooperate with the police if we found the patients were causing these problems,” Marshall said. “We need more information.”

Police could not immediately provide specific details of the arrests, Tefank said, adding that it would take several days to compile the information.

Unsanitary Conditions

Ayala has also called on state authorities to close the facilities because of unsanitary conditions. In a local newspaper story, Ayala said he toured Pomona Manor with Dreier and found the halfway house flooded with raw sewage and found the director of the facility outside playing ball.

Leibovici acknowledged that, on Dec. 23, the two officials and their staffs toured the facility and discovered that some toilets had overflowed. The program director also said he was playing volleyball with patients when he was told of the plumbing problem.

Leibovici called a plumber and sent documentation of the repair to officials with the state community-care licensing program. Sallee Kraics, licensing program supervisor for the community-care program’s San Gabriel office, confirmed that the plumbing problem was resolved satisfactorily.

Susan Kuzanek, district manager for the community-care licensing office in Riverside, which oversees Country Manor, said she could not recall any licensing violations at the facility.

Kuzanek said her staff has canvassed the neighborhood around Country Manor and found that residents “didn’t have any complaints about the operation.” She added that opposition from public officials is not sufficient cause for the state to close the halfway houses.

“We can’t deal with those kind of generalities,” she said. “A licensee, like any business owner, has due-process rights. We have to have concrete allegations of specific violations of licensing regulations to take action.”

Ayala said he will keep the pressure on state and federal officials until they close the facilities.

“I guess the state and federal government has found us soft and figured we’ll complain about it for about 10 days and then stop,” Ayala said. “But we’re going to keep raising Cain.”

As for the directors of the halfway houses, Leibovici said they plan to try to stay out of the fray.

“We’re not going to become political animals all of a sudden--that’s not our job,” Leibovici said. “Our job is to provide services to this population. We plan to continue along with the same level of services we have since 1982, and we’re not going to let our clients become pawns in some political ‘We’re more concerned with our residents being victims than being aggressors.’ ”