Popular Cuban Musician Given Asylum

Popular Cuban musician Carlos Manuel Pruneda has defected to the United States after giving a concert in Mexico City, U.S. officials said Wednesday.

He and a group that included his mother and sister were given asylum after crossing the international bridge from Matamoros, Mexico, into Brownsville early Monday, said Art Moreno, a spokesman for the U.S. Bureau of Customs and Border Protection.

Members of the group were detained while their cases were processed by immigration officials, then released Tuesday on their own recognizance, Moreno said.

Under U.S. law, Cubans who reach U.S. soil are allowed into the country and permitted to apply for permanent residence a year later, said a spokesman for the U.S. Bureau of Citizenship and Immigration Services in Washington.

Moreno said Pruneda flew to Miami on Wednesday evening and was scheduled to report to immigration officials there today.

Pruneda was the star of the salsa band Carlos Manuel y su Clan and one of Cuba’s most popular singers and musicians.

News reports said that after giving a concert in Mexico City, he and his group flew to the northern Mexico city of Monterrey, took a cab for the 180-mile ride to Matamoros, then walked across the bridge over the Rio Grande, which forms the U.S.-Mexico border, to turn himself in to U.S. officials.

He told Harlingen, Texas, television station KGBT he defected because he wanted more freedom to play music around the world.

“I felt very uncomfortable with the situation,” Pruneda told Associated Press. “I was fed up with the government in Cuba.... There was no more room to grow.”

Joe Garcia, executive director of the Cuban American National Foundation, headquartered in Miami, said a Pruneda representative told the foundation a month ago the musician was considering defecting.

“We had told him we were going to help, if it was possible, to make a legal [border] crossing,” he said.