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141 Cuban émigrés in Spain ask for U.S. visas
28.09.2010
Twenty-one of the 36 political prisoners now in Spain have asked the U.S. Embassy in Madrid to give them visas to come to this country, the news agency EFE reported Sunday. One hundred and twenty relatives of those prisoners, who are with them in Spain, have done the same. The Cubans give "family reunification" as their reason to come to the U.S., saying they have relatives here, mostly in Miami. Besides, being in Miami is "being closer to Cuba on the day when freedom comes," ex-inmate Blas Giraldo told EFE.Spain's opposition party, the conservative Popular Party, this week told the Cubans it would assist them in their efforts. The prisoners' release and subsequent travel to Madrid was negotiated with the assistance of the ruling Socialist Workers Party of Spain.
Arturo Pérez de Alejo Rodríguez, 59, plans to leave Madrid on Monday in a plane to Miami, with his wife and daughter. Pérez, who arrived in Spain on July 21, will be the first freed prisoner to come to the United States from Spain. A resident of Manicaragua, Villa Clara province, he was in his seventh year of a 20-year prison term when released by the Cuban government.
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