Price of Immigration Bias

Eugenio de Sosa Chabau couldn’t believe it when he crossed paths in Miami with the man who, said De Sosa, had repeatedly tortured him with electrodes while he was imprisoned for opposing Cuba’s communist regime. He wondered how his torturer could walk the streets of a U.S. city just like any other Cuban refugee.

At a news conference a few weeks ago, Immigration and Naturalization Service officials seemed as baffled as De Sosa in trying to explain how Eriberto Mederos, who had long been publicly accused of torturing political prisoners in Cuba, could become a U.S. citizen.

Actually, it’s easy. U.S. policy tailored to anti-Castro refugees gives all Cubans special and permissive immigration treatment. For instance, unlike members of other national groups, any Cuban who reaches U.S. shores gets to stay and may apply for legal residency in one year and citizenship in five more years. Even if criminality is unmasked, it is all but impossible to deport such immigrants back to Cuba, where they are considered undesirables.

Mederos, known in Cuba as El Enfermero, the nurse, came to the U.S. in 1984 and became a citizen in 1993. The allegations about his past had already come to light--charges that he worked at the government psychiatric hospital where jailed dissidents were taken for “special treatment” modeled on similar practices by the Soviet Union.

In his defense, Mederos said he “only did what the doctors ordered.” De Sosa says that those orders included administering excruciating jolts of electricity to his head and genitals.

On Nov. 26 a U.S. district judge will hold a hearing to set a date for the trial of Mederos on charges of lying about his past in obtaining citizenship. If the federal allegations are proved, he should be fined and jailed to the limit of the law. After he is released, the INS should deport him if conditions in Cuba permit. It should at least try.

Grappling with individual cases like Mederos’ only underlines the faults of Washington’s Cuba policies. Until Cubans of all political stripes have to play by rules like those to which other economic immigrants and political refugees adhere, Fidel Castro’s brutes and violent opponents of Castro alike will find a welcome in the United States.