27 Haitians Arrive in Miami as Camp at Cuba Closes

A group of 27 Haitians, most of them adults who have tested positive for the virus that causes AIDS, arrived here early Monday, the first of some 150 refugees ordered freed last week from a barbed-wire detention camp at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo, Cuba.

The 21 adults and six children will be resettled in various cities in the United States because of a judge’s order to the Clinton Administration to close the camp where they have been held for 20 months. In settling a lawsuit filed on the refugees’ behalf, U.S. District Judge Sterling Johnson Jr. called the camp “squalid,” adding that the confinement of HIV-positive migrants “serves no purpose other than to punish them for being sick.”

About half the Haitians who were flown here Monday on a military cargo plane will remain with relatives in Miami. “The scene was a typical family reunion,” said Raul Hernandez of the U.S. Catholic Conference in Miami, one of the designated resettlement agencies.

Roseann Micallef, director of refugee programs for Church World Service, another resettlement agency, said that the three adults and two children she helped reunite with their families in Miami appeared to be in good health. “It was very emotional,” she said. “The families were thrilled.”

Some 120 Haitians who remain at Guantanamo likely will be brought to the United States within the next week to 10 days, Hernandez said.

Closing the camp at Guantanamo ends a distasteful chapter in U.S. immigration history, one that began as thousands of Haitians fled their homeland in crude wooden boats following the September, 1991, military coup that ousted President Jean-Bertrand Aristide.

To stem the tide of illegal, U.S.-bound boat people, then-President George Bush ordered the U.S. Coast Guard to intercept the Haitians at sea and take them to Guantanamo where their claims for political asylum could be judged. Almost 40,000 Haitians were picked up. Some 29,000 were repatriated, while about 11,000 were allowed into the United States.

Of the 10 arrivals assigned for resettlement to the U.S. Catholic Conference, four will stay in Miami, two will join relatives in West Palm Beach, one will go to St. Petersburg, Fla., one to New York, one to Boston, and another to Camden, N.J.