Smugglers have discovered a new way to get Cubans into the United States: Leave them on a tiny American Caribbean island and make the U.S. Border Patrol complete the journey.
The back-door route, via the Dominican Republic and sparsely inhabited Mona Island, relies on payoffs to Cuban and Dominican officials and a Cold War-era act of Congress that guarantees U.S. residency to virtually any Cuban who makes it to American shores.Only in recent weeks have immigration agents determined that Cubans are intentionally landing on Mona Island, about halfway across the 80-mile channel that separates the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico.
Previous migrants from other countries only landed there by mistake, through a shipwreck or through bad faith on the part of a Dominican smuggler. Once there, they lost hope of sneaking into America and were bound to be found by U.S. border agents.
But the Cubans, because of the U.S. law, want to be discovered.
Mona Island is home to 3-foot-long iguanas, wild goats, boars, and a few scientists and natural resource officers, who radio the Border Patrol each time the Cubans land.
Since Oct. 1, 286 Cubans have used the back-door route, including 35 on Friday. American immigration agents must ferry them from Mona Island to Puerto Rico, a U.S. commonwealth.
The informal ferrying of immigrants into American territory is but one example of the special treatment given Cubans over the millions of other people around the world seeking a spot in the United States.
Cuban exiles say the preference is made for a reason: Their countrymen are fleeing Fidel Castro's communist state.
Critics of the U.S. policy say the departing Cubans are mainly economic migrants - most with permanent emigrant visas granted by the Castro government - who have already taken refuge in the Dominican Republic but are taking advantage of the U.S. law to do better in America.
"Many of them do not even fulfill normal U.S. immigration standards," said Raul Alzaga, a leader of the Marti Circle, a pro-Castro group in Puerto Rico. The Cuban-born Alzaga said the Cold War law sets "a double standard" for immigrants that is bound to increase U.S. antipathy toward Cuban-Americans.
The immigrant-smuggling route from the Dominican Republic to Puerto Rico has been used mainly by thousands of Dominicans, who face a flight home if captured.
On the northern route across the Florida Straits more commonly used by Cubans, the U.S. Coast Guard has picked up more Cuban migrants this year than in any year since the 1980 Mariel boatlift.
The last annual U.S. figures released, for October 1991 through September 1992, show that Washington granted residency to more asylum-seekers from Cuba than from anywhere except the former Soviet Union and Vietnam.
"Once they set foot in United States territory, we are impotent to do anything about it. That's a fact under current law," said Duke Austin, U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service spokesman in Washington.
Aside from some specific criminal offenders from the Mariel boatlift, no Cubans have been deported since Castro took power nearly 35 years ago.