US denies visas to more Cubans 

U.S. denies visas to Cubans planning visit to Bloomington
By Steve Hinnefeld,
Herald-Times Staff Writer
December 26, 2002

For the second time, representatives of Bloomington's sister city in Cuba have been denied permission to visit the United States.

Four Cubans learned this month that the U.S. government had turned down their applications for travel visas for a three-day trip to Bloomington.

The news disappointed members of CubAmistad, the Bloomington sister-city group, who had looked forward to repaying the hospitality they were shown in visits to Cuba.

"This really goes against the whole point of the sister-cities idea, which is people-to-people contact," said Mike Gasser, an organizer of the group.

The Cubans are local officials in Santa Clara, which three years ago became Bloomington's sister city. Bloomington has two other sister cities: Posoltega, Nicaragua, and Lu Chou, Taiwan.

Santa Clara residents also were part of a group that planned to come to Bloomington in June 2001 for a conference of U.S.-Cuba sister-cities organizations. They also were denied entry visas.

The latest group had applied in October and got word two months later that their visas were denied.

Kelly Shannon, a spokeswoman for the U.S. Bureau of Consular Affairs, said information about visa requests is confidential, and she couldn't say whether or why the Cubans' visas were denied.

She said U.S. law mandates that people seeking to travel to the United States are assumed to be illegal immigrants until they prove otherwise. And she said Cubans are subject to additional restrictions because Cuba is on a U.S. list of countries that support terrorism.

"We can't exempt people from the law," she said. "That's what people need to understand. This is a national security issue and we can't do that."

She said the applicants would have been told why they were denied visas. But Gasser said two of the Cubans indicated, via e-mail, that they were not.

In 2001, a bureau spokesman said Cubans were banned from attending the sister-cities conference under a 1985 presidential order denying entry to agents of the Cuban government or Communist Party.

Regardless of the reason, the denial was bitter for Bloomington sister-city participants, several of whom have traveled to Cuba.

"When our delegation visited Santa Clara, we met with local leaders, asked lots of questions and had good discussions," said Chris Gaal, a Bloomington City Council member who traveled to Santa Clara in 2000.

"To repay that hospitality, I was ready to organize a tour of City Hall, show their delegation how our local government works and explain the types of services the city provides and how our election process works. I'm sure they would have been interested in seeing our system first-hand."
Gaal sent the letter that formally invited the Cubans to Bloomington. Mayor John Fernandez endorsed the effort and then-state Rep. Mark Kruzan wrote a letter of support.

Planned for the visitors were tours of Indiana University and Bloomington Hospital, meetings with local officials and a public pitch-in dinner.

The Cubans are Alberto López, vice mayor of Santa Clara; Iris Menéndez, head of the Cuban Institute for Friendship of Peoples office in Santa Clara; Enrique Suárez, a Villa Clara province assembly member; José Ramón Ruíz, a physician and public health director.

The Bloomington group paid $75-per-person visa application fees, provided cash for airport spending and arranged flights to Indiana via Cancun, Mexico.

Lisa Valanti, president of the U.S.-Cuba Sister Cities Association, said it's common for Cubans to be denied entry to the United States for no apparent reason. She said visa requests are increasingly tangled up with paperwork under anti-terrorism policies.

"It was always arbitrary and politically sensitive, whether people got into the U.S.," she said. "But now the procedures themselves are so cumbersome."

Valanti said it's confusing that Cubans are kept at home not by their own allegedly repressive government but by the United States.

Suárez, the Villa Clara assemblyman, made the same bitter point in an e-mail message to Gasser. "They don't want Cubans to visit the 'most democratic country in the world,'" he wrote.

Politics aside, Gasser said it's a personal blow to be prevented from playing host to Cubans who have treated visiting Bloomington residents with remarkable kindness and generosity.

"The ordinary person there would feel our government is their enemy," he said. "But they love us. Kids are taught in school that there are people and governments, and you have to keep them separate."

Reporter Steve Hinnefeld can be reached at 331-4374 or by