Defections of Top Athletes Embarrass Castro Regime

As many as a dozen more top athletes and other members of a large Cuban delegation to a two-week sports festival in Puerto Rico were expected to announce their defections this week, joining 40 others who have said they will not return home.

The Cuban defections at the 17th Central American and Caribbean Games being held in the U.S. territory have overshadowed the competition itself. They are seen here as a major embarrassment for the government of Cuban President Fidel Castro.

“This is absolutely the cream of the crop,” said Joe Garcia, a spokesman for the Cuban-American National Foundation. “They are not starving; they have three square meals a day, subsidized by government. But they see the reality of a totalitarian regime.”

The Cuban government has called the defectors traitors “unable to face the difficulties Cuba is going through.” It has praised the “serene and firm attitude” of the majority of the 900-member delegation.

When the games opened last week, one exile group flew over the stadium in a small plane, trailing a banner that urged the Cubans to defect and provided a local phone number for help.

In Miami, news of the defections, considered a record from an official Cuban delegation, was greeted as evidence that support for Castro is waning as Cuba’s economic conditions worsen. “And they continue to come!” the banner headline screamed Tuesday in the Miami Herald’s Spanish-language daily, El Nuevo Herald.

At a press conference Monday in Miami, Cuban archery coach Alfonso Donate told how he spent years training his son, a 19-year-old also named Alfonso, so he could become a member of the national team and the pair could leave Cuba together. Left behind in Cuba, Donate said, were his wife and a 17-year-old daughter.

Others who have declared their intentions to seek U.S. political asylum include star basketball and softball players, medal-winning gymnasts, champion weightlifters and a photographer.

A spokesman for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service in Washington said Tuesday that an asylum officer from Miami had been sent to Puerto Rico to hear the Cubans’ claims. Except for convicted criminals who came to the United States in the Mariel exodus of 1980, no Cubans are ever repatriated. Under the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act, Cubans who live in the United States for one year can apply for residence.

Cubans also continue to arrive via routes that are less publicized but more perilous. A total of 36 refugees in three separate groups sailed crude rafts into U.S. waters and were picked up by the Coast Guard last weekend. That brought to 3,276 the number of Cuban rafters who have crossed the Florida Straits this year.

Another 31 Cubans flew into Miami on Sunday from Puerto Rico, a day after leaving the Dominican Republic. The group apparently traveled from Cuba to the Dominican Republic by boat. Earlier, a second group of 39 Cubans stranded on a tiny Bahamian island was brought to Key West after rheumatic fever was diagnosed in one of them. In addition, the INS says about 600 other Cubans have been paroled into the United States this year after jumping the fence at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo, or after defecting through third countries.