Ineficácia Militar Árabe

Ineficácia militar árabe

Os árabes são o povo que talvez mais consistentemente envolveu-se em conflitos armados e mais consistentemente sofreu derrotas. Nos conflitos modernos isso é uma constante. As vitórias, até o século X, devem-se muito mais ao fato de enfrentarem inimigos enfraquecidos e pelo seu conhecimento do deserto do que a qualquer outra coisa.

Um dos livros mais interessantes sobre história e estratégia militar que li nos últimos tempos busca responder esta questão. O livro é o "Arabs at War, Millitary Effectiveness, 1948-1991", Kenneth M. Pollack.

Desde a segunda guerra mundial, o Oriente Médio foi provavelmente a região mais conturbada, quase todos os conflitos com envolvimento dos árabes em alguma escala, e em todos eles a ineficácia surpreende. Alguém pode observar o histórico militar de Egito, Iraque, Arábia Saudita, Jordânia, Líbia e Síria, em combate com israelenses, europeus, americanos, persas, curdos, africanos, e até entre eles mesmos, e é sempre impressionante como atuam com ineficácia de maneira bem consistente, independente do adversário e das condições.

Dois exemplos extremos tanto em caso de vitória quanto derrota são a Síria na Guerra do Yom Kipur, e o Iraque no conflito com o Irã, e o final decisivo do conflito entre Líbia e Chade no norte do país em 1987-1988.

A ofensiva da Síria contra as forças israelenses no Golan em 1973 é comparável em disparidade à Operação Bagration pela URSS contra as tropas da Alemanha na Bielorússia durante a segunda guerra mundial. Um exército de veteranos defendendo linhas bem estabelecidas e fortificadas contra uma ofensiva massiva de surpresa com grande superioridade numérica. Os soviéticos tiveram sua maior vitória, enquanto os sírios tiveram sua pior derrota em condições de superioridade similares.

O Iraque passou praticamente uma década enfrentando o Irã com grande superioridade numérica e tecnológica, mas só conseguiu uma vitória em 1988 usando armas químicas em larga escala, matando cerca de 20,000 soldados iranianos, quase 1/5 das forças, e criando forças locais com disparidade de até 30 para 1 em relação aos iranianos.

No Chade, depois que os líbios perderam seu apoio entre os dissidentes chadianos, ainda contavam com decisiva vantagem numérica e tecnológica. Os chadianos não tinham tanques, blindados, aviões e artilharia, e não sabiam usar bem o pouco equipamento de infantaria que tinham. O único armamento pesado e transporte de que dispunham eram pick-ups Toyota com mísseis antitanque Milan fornecidos pela França na última hora, e confiavam na força aérea francesa e stingers fornecidos pelos EUA para defender-se dos líbios. Mesmo com a vantagem em todos os aspectos, os líbios sofreram uma derrota completa no norte do país. A principal base foi abandonada com muito equipamento ainda funcionando, soldados líbios morriam ao fugir pelos próprios campos minados, e a força aérea líbia tinha de destruir o próprio equipamento para evitar que fosse utilizado pelo inimigo.

Ou seja, independente do oponente e de vitória ou derrota, as forças árabes sempre atuam com muito menos eficácia do que esperado para seu número, equipamento e posição. Qual o real motivo disso?

Eu nunca havia pensado muito a fundo no assunto, e por conhecer melhor o conflito árabe-israelense, aceitava a explicação de cada guerra em particular, sem me preocupar muito nisso como característica dominante. Agora li um livro que trata especificamente do assunto, falando dos diversos conflitos e achei que valia a pena enumerar algumas das explicações que achei mais relevantes para discussão. Algumas das explicações auxiliam até a entender melhor outros conflitos.


1. O argumento mais óbvio é o treinamento das tropas. Alguns dos pontos dele são relevantes para outros argumentos. Como a maioria dos países árabes são monarquias e/ou ditaduras, a maior parte das forças armadas recebe um treinamento voltado para lidar mais com problemas internos, manifestações, tentativas de golpe e revoluções, do que uma operação militar convencional. Alguns analistas argumentam que o treinamento não é só inapropriado, mas inadequado mesmo. Na Guerra do Yom Kipur os egípcios treinaram por anos para fazer a mesma coisa, e fizeram bem feito quando era exatamente como esperava, mas não conseguiram fazer mais nada direito quando saiu dos planos.

2. Outro problema relacionado é que pelo fato da maioria desses países serem monarquias e/ou ditaduras muitos oficiais são apenas indicados, não chegando à posição por competência. Adicionalmente, por medo de um golpe de estado vindo dos militares, muitas indicações são feitas para deliberadamente gerar algum atrito e evitar uma união que levaria a isso. Esse atrito acaba indo para o campo de batalha também e elimina qualquer iniciativa. Soldados e oficiais preferem falhar do que tomar decisões por conta própria. Qualquer assunto militar é considerado segredo e oficiais são transferidos de forma imprevisível antes de poder formar alianças. Essa característica também presente na URSS acabou reforçada pelo envolvimento com os soviéticos pela maioria dos países árabes.


3. Isso gera um outro problema pois leva o conflito de classes que existe na sociedade para o campo de batalha, gerando hostilidades entreos homens . Para os homens de nível social baixo que ingressam nas forças armadas buscando oportunidades de ascenção social, um oficial indicado ao cargo representa uma ofensa. Pelo outro lado, a mesma discriminação social que haveria na sociedade civil acaba havendo entre o oficial indicado e seus homens. Isso é comum no Egito, onde há muitos relatos de oficiais que, sem nenhum laço com seus homens, simplesmente os abandonam no campo de batalha. Liderança não é considerada uma disciplina a ser aprendida, mas apenas assume-se que um oficial vindo de uma classe social superior seja um líder nato. O conflito entre oficiais também é constante por razões semelhantes, existindo uma disputa, e não há o mesmo grau de confiança que existe entre militares ocidentais.


4. A consequência mais óbvia desses três argumentos é a pouca coesão dos árabes em pequenas formações, a incapacidade de permanecer juntos e continuar a combater como grupo no calor da batalha, algo essencial na guerra moderna. Esse é o principal argumento que eu conhecia, porque é geralmente usado pelos militares israelenses. Desde a Campanha do Sinai em 1956, ficou claro para os israelenses como as unidades árabes perdiam sua coesão e deixavam cada homem por si ao sofrer ataques precisos e inesperados, algo que até ajudou a moldar a doutrina militar israelense a combater dessa forma.

5. Como muitos oficiais acabam chegando ao cargo por indicação, sem competência para tal, mesmo que permaneçam com as tropas, uma liderança tática rápida e eficiente é crucial para a eficácia nas guerras modernas, exigindo uma descentralização do comando e sub-oficiais competentes que consigam se adaptar com iniciativa e rapidamente às situações e conduzir tudo com fluidez. Isso é evidente em particular na Guerra do Yom Kippur, em que devido à surpresa adicional vê-se que tanto os Egípcios quanto Sírios lutaram com eficácia enquanto seguiam os planos originais, mas o nível despencou depois do ponto em que a reação israelense começou a ganhar momento e as decisões tinham que ser mais rápidas.


6. Outro ponto é a ineficácia dos árabes em adquirir informações sobre o inimigo e repassá-las eficientemente através da cadeia de comando. Não raro, em várias guerras, informações são deliberadamente distorcidas ou fabricadas para exagerar sucessos e ocultar falhas, principalmente por medo de represálias. Isso foi muito comum na guerra Irã-Iraque e na Guerra dos Seis Dias, chegando até mesmo ao topo da hierarquia. Difícil saber até onde foi fanfarronice e até onde foi falha de inteligência, mas por exemplo, a Jordânia chegou a lançar ataques fadados ao fracasso porque Egito anunciava que seus aviões já estavam bombardeando Tel Aviv quando na verdade foram destruídos no chão.


7. Muitos dos países árabes tem um nível educacional muito abaixo daquele dos países que lhes fornecem equipamento militar, e hoje as guerras dependem muito mais do conhecimento e manuseio eficaz dos equipamentos. Operar um tanque ou avião da segunda guerra mundial parece brincadeira de criança perto de todos os equipamentos computadorizados dos tanques e aviões modernos. Um argumento usado para explicar a ineficácia dos árabes em conflitos que dispõe de grande superioridade tecnológica, é não conhecer e explorar toda a capacidade dos equipamentos que dispõe devido às deficiências educacionais e ao treinamento inadequado. O nível de segredo e a paranóia constante que impera sobre todos os assuntos militares também impede a descentralização de manutenção e reparos de equipamentos, algo essencial nas guerras modernas.

Todos esses fatores, e outros que não foram comentados, culminam em uma esfera de ineficácia em todos os aspectos, desde o alto comando até o último soldado. Governantes impedem interação e treinamentos conjuntos entre as forças por medo de golpes, comandantes tentam microgerenciar qualquer aspecto das suas forças com medo de delegar autoridade, oficiais vêem soldados com desprezo e não se importam com eles e vice-versa.

Essas técnicas podem funcionar para manter uma ditadura, mas não para enfrentar um inimigo externo ou para sustentar uma democracia, daí a dificuldade em implantá-la nesses lugares.

April 14, 2010

Embracing a Life of Solitude

By SARAH MASLIN NIR

Stuart Isett for The New York Times

Nick Fahey’s cabin on Cypress Island, Wash., is an hour by boat from the nearest town. He uses solar panels to charge a cellphone to stay as connected as he wants to be. More Photos »

By SARAH MASLIN NIR

Published: April 14, 2010

FOR the last 16 years, Nick Fahey has been living on an island in the San Juan archipelago north of Puget Sound, in Washington state, where his only full-time companion is a 26-year-old quarter horse called Ig. Mr. Fahey, 67, lives in a cabin on 100 wooded acres that has been in his family since 1930; it has no refrigerator, but there is electricity generated by solar panels, so he has light and can charge his cellphone.

There are few amenities of the material kind, but his days are his own. Time, he said, is “one of the real luxuries of living out here.” With the exception of cutting wood for fuel and to support himself — occasionally he makes a trek to neighboring islands or the mainland, to sell the wood or buy groceries — he is free to do as he pleases. Most days are spent rambling around the rocky island and drinking coffee, his favorite French Market brand with chicory.

“I don’t worry about whether I am clothed or not,” Mr. Fahey said. “But the weather is such that it’s a good idea to wear some clothes.”

Getting away from it all: it’s a common fantasy. But for some people, fantasizing isn’t enough. For whatever reason — the desire for peace and quiet in an increasingly frenetic world, an attempt to escape the intrusiveness of technology or the need for an isolated place to recover from heartbreak — they feel compelled to act out the fantasy, seeking the kind of solitude found only in the remotest locations.

The compulsion to live in isolation can be attributed to any number of factors, said Elaine N. Aron, a psychologist and the author of “The Undervalued Self” and “The Highly Sensitive Person: How to Thrive When the World Overwhelms You.”

Some people might “really need their downtime,” Dr. Aron said, and seek out “isolation that avoids all social intercourse.” Others may have developed an “avoidant attachment style” in childhood, resulting in “a need to prove to themselves that they don’t need anybody,” she said.

For many people, though, the desire for extreme solitude may have simpler roots, she noted: “It could be because they want a mystical experience. You can’t pathologize that.”

When it comes to striking out alone in the wilderness, however, men may be more inclined to do that than women, said John T. Cacioppo, director of the Center for Cognitive and Social Neuroscience at the University of Chicago. “In our culture, there is this mythic individualism that we cherish,” said Dr. Cacioppo, who studies the biological and cognitive effects of isolation. “That’s particularly true for men — they are supposed to be an island unto themselves. They take that myth more seriously and try to pursue it.”

For some, he added, a divorce later in life or another equally jarring event may trigger that impulse. “Losing connections during that period of your life becomes very traumatizing,” he said. “One way to deal with that is to prove that you don’t need anyone.”

In Mr. Fahey’s case, he moved to the island full time in 1994, several years after he divorced, not because he was traumatized, he said, but because he liked the “feeling of freedom when you’re by yourself. You don’t have to answer to anybody.”

His daughter, Anna, 36, now visits about once a month, and his son, Joe, 39, who lives in France, comes once a year. There are a handful of other residents on the other side of the island, but Mr. Fahey prefers not to socialize with them.

“I’m not a misanthropic recluse sort of guy,” he said. “I just know that I’d rather be here by myself.”

Once a week, though, he does venture to Anacortes, a town on the mainland, 10 miles away by boat, to visit his 99-year-old father in an assisted-living home and to see his girlfriend, Deborah Martin, whom he has been dating for 15 years.

Ms. Martin, 56, explained: “We are both pretty independent, and I imagine that’s partly why it works. We don’t have the same expectations that other couples might, like, ‘I need you to be here every night.’ ”

When they met, she said, she was raising two children on her own and not looking for a father figure for them. But now that the children are grown, she said, she is considering moving to the island to be with Mr. Fahey.

“I think he probably does get lonely,” she said. “But he loves that place and he gets a lot of sustenance from it. He doesn’t want to forsake it.”

FOR Roger Lextrait, 63, living in seclusion seemed like an appealing change, after a harried life as a restaurateur in Portland, Ore.

Mr. Lextrait was the sole inhabitant of the remote tropical atoll of Palmyra, in an island chain administered by the United States in the Northern Pacific Ocean, more than 1,000 miles south of Hawaii, from 1992 to 2000. He wound up there in his mid-40s, after nearly a dozen years of sailing around the world on his yacht, the Cous Cous, following his divorce and the sale of two restaurants in the early 1980s. Exhausted by his years on the boat, he agreed to take a job as the island’s caretaker, warning ships off the reefs and discouraging vandals. The post was supposed to last a few months, but Mr. Lextrait stayed for eight years.

Part of the draw of living on the island, which is now owned by the Nature Conservancy, was that “time did not matter — sometimes I would lose track of the year,” he said. “It was so magical, millions of birds, turtles. When I’d go out with the dinghy, manta ray would escort me, dolphins.”

When he arrived, he said, he brought a boat stocked with canned goods, 300 pounds of flour, 30 gallons of olive oil and several cases of wine. After two years, he had achieved a near-subsistence lifestyle, eating fish from the lagoons and lobster hidden in the reefs.

Still, island life took its toll. “I got attacked by loneliness,” said Mr. Lextrait, who came to depend on the company of his German shepherd mix, TouTou. He would often forgo shaving and dressing, he said, and “I started talking to myself. Sometimes I felt like an animal.”

His infrequent visitors would ask things like “What are you going to do if a coconut falls on your head?” — given that the nearest doctor was hundreds of miles away. “I said, ‘Oh my, if I think like that, I’ll never do anything.’ ”

Mr. Lextrait, who now lives in Thailand with his wife, Jayne, an American he met in Hawaii after leaving Palmyra, said he returned from seclusion to find the world a changed place.

“I had no idea that the cellular phone existed, I was so lost,” he said. “I came back with different eyes — I was a different person.”

OTHERS choose a reclusive lifestyle as a political statement. Edward Griffith-Jones, a 27-year-old British man, spent the last year living in a hut he built in a national park in Sweden. It was his way of being environmentally responsible, he said.

“It’s a very interesting time to find another way of life,” he said. “People use the word ‘sustainable’ a lot, especially if they are in business, and it means nothing.”

In England, he had been working in nightclubs and bars, he said, when he met a group of people who squatted in abandoned buildings. He found he shared their green, anti-establishment values, and eventually became a squatter himself. And after attending a gathering of like-minded people held in a Polish forest, he decided to take that lifestyle to its logical extreme.

For him, that meant living deep in a Swedish forest, an hour and a half walk from the nearest train station — a trip that could take four hours during the winter, when the snow was deep — with a couple of other similarly inclined individuals who would come and go. He had a cellphone, which he charged with a small solar generator and used to call his family and his girlfriend, a college student who visited him every few weeks.

His diet was not for the fainthearted. Along with perch and pike from nearby lakes, he ate wild plants like nettles, berries and tubers, as well as mice and rats. He couldn’t hunt larger game because he didn’t have a gun — to purchase one, he would have had to provide an address — but he began studying how to make a bow and fletch arrows. On infrequent trips to town, he would scavenge for unspoiled food in the trash.

“We live in a world where everything is so specialized, now people don’t know how to make anything, they don’t know how to survive,” he said, speaking by cellphone from the forest. “I’m not completely self-sufficient, but I’m learning.”

Every aspect of his daily routine was essential to his survival. “I have to collect firewood, rather than do some job that I have no idea what is the point, which I hate, and from which I am completely alienated,” he said. “Everything in my life feels full of meaning.”

Recently, though, Mr. Griffith-Jones left the forest, having decided that the lifestyle was not as sustainable as he had hoped, mostly because “women weren’t willing to live there,” he said, “or raise up children in the forest.” He is now trying to start an ecologically minded commune on a farm nearby.

DAVID GLASHEEN, 66, likened his experience of living alone to “going to the moon.”

“Everything you’ve ever learned means nothing till you come to a place like this,” said Mr. Glasheen, who lives on Restoration Island, off the northern coast of Australia, with his mixed-breed dog, Quasi, and has been there since 1996. “It’s the pinnacle of privacy.”

An entrepreneur who said he has worked in a number of fields — including mineral exploration, food services and toys — he had suffered a series of financial losses and divorce when a girlfriend suggested escaping to an island in the early 1990s.

“I just wanted the idea of a less stressful life,” he said. “I figured there had to be something better than this out there.”

Mr. Glasheen was living in Sydney at the time and found the island, an uninhabited national park, through a real estate agent. His company, Longboat Investments, leased the land for $20,000 a year, in Australian dollars. He and his girlfriend set up permanent residence there, but she left after six months; their son, now 11, spends some school holidays on the island with Mr. Glasheen.

“We had a baby, we had no hot water, we had no washing machine,” he said. “Things are not easy here for a woman.”

In the city, he said, when you need something, “you pick up the phone and everyone comes running. This is an environment where you have to be independent. Most men can’t handle it either.”

Mr. Glasheen intended to build a resort on the island with a partner, he said, but eventually he scaled back his plans, and is now leasing just 30 acres, which he has turned into a farm.

Along with native foods like lemon grass and capers, he raises bok choy, tomatoes and corn, sometimes with the help of volunteers who come to work for a month or so in return for food and lodging. (His farm is listed with an online network called World Wide Opportunities on Organic Farms.) He also makes home-brewed beer that he trades for prawns from trawlers that sometimes anchor off shore.

A few times a year he makes a trip to Cairns, a city nearly 500 miles away, for “condiments and other special things,” he said, but mostly he lives a subsistence lifestyle that requires immense amounts of labor and planning. The wind turbine he used to generate electricity was damaged during a storm three years ago and still hasn’t been repaired, so he uses a solar panel to power his computer and lights. He does not have a refrigerator, but has a gas-powered freezer.

Several years ago, Mr. Glasheen became something of a media sensation after a dating profile he had posted on the Australian site RSVP.com was picked up by newspapers around the world. “The beautiful coral island I live on is a castaway’s dream,” he wrote in the profile.

When the National Enquirer published an article about him in February 2009, he said, he received messages from hundreds of women, but only a few piqued his interest: “There’s a lot of crazies out there.”

He made contact with six women in Australia, but after explaining the reality of his situation, he never heard from any of them again. “A lot of people liked the idea of having visits,” he said, “but not being able to go to the shops every month, that would be very hard for a lot of women.”

Though he would like to find a life partner, he knows he may have to lower his expectations. “There’s nothing wrong with having half a dozen very good female friends who see me as the most important man in their life when they come to this part of the world,” he said.

There is an inherent conflict between the peace of total solitude and the pleasures of companionship, he admitted. “It’s literally like living in heaven on Earth,” he said of the island, but “I guess I could say I’m desperately lonely sometimes.”

In an Indian Village, Signs of the Loosening Grip of Caste

In an Indian Village, Signs of the Loosening Grip of Caste
Despite Impediments, Life Visibly Improving For Dalit Communities

By Emily Wax
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, August 31, 2008; A14

GADDOPUR, India -- Rubbing his salt-and-pepper stubble, Lasla Ram, 60, stretched out on his wide porch overlooking a fertile knoll in this village of Dalits, the lowest caste in India's social pecking order. His children and grandchildren were gathered at his side as he told his story.

He had been born an indentured serf, he told them. Like his father and grandfather before him, he spent his youth toiling in the fields of upper-caste landlords, cleaning up cow dung and dead animals. He was paid only in millet, the same low-quality grains used to feed pigs and cows.

But 30 years ago, he recalled, he and some friends decided to throw off the shackles of the caste system. They were Dalits, formerly known as untouchables. They didn't stage a revolt. They simply sneaked onto a train headed to New Delhi, 500 miles to the west.

Since then, generations of Dalits have sought to escape the confines of caste by taking trains to India's vast, roiling cities. Today, in this village in eastern Uttar Pradesh state, a survey has found that 68 percent of families, including Ram's, have at least one member who left a landlord's farm for the factories of New Delhi or Mumbai. Although lower castes still suffer discrimination in cities, caste is more easily escaped there. Many Dalits change their last names. They also have greater access to new and better-paying jobs.

"I arrived in New Delhi an illiterate boy, but I was free," Ram said, outside the brick house he built from his earnings. In the capital, he worked as a brick maker. Later, he went to Iraq to manage construction sites. When he came home, he had enough money saved to open a textile business.

India's rapid economic expansion and urbanization since 1991 -- and the new job opportunities generated by those changes -- have loosened the grip of caste, some economists believe. Under the centuries-old system, occupation and social status are inherited at birth. Preliminary research from the first and largest nongovernment study of economic gains made by Dalits in India's strengthening economy, including a survey of 20,000 Dalit households, shows that migration to urban centers is helping one of India's most impoverished and ostracized communities break free from such constraints. The survey is being funded by the University of Pennsylvania.

"The untouchable has been touched by India's growth. Dalits are coming out from hunger and humiliation," said Chandra Bhan Prasad, a popular Dalit newspaper columnist and childhood friend of Ram's.

"Capitalism is beginning to break the caste system," said Prasad, who is conducting the survey.

At the same time, some analysts say, Dalits' economic advancement has been much slower than that of higher castes. For the most part, their rise has been modest -- from landless serfs to low-paid laborers -- with many still living in tin-shack urban slums. They have yet to really share in India's new prosperity, these analysts say, and India's soaring inflation rate, bringing steep rises in the cost of food and fuel, appears to be erasing some of their meager gains.

Dalits still slog away in jobs that no one else wants. An estimated 1.3 million Dalit women, for example, work as manual scavengers, carrying away human waste from dry-pit latrines. In this status-obsessed society, some upper-caste Indians still refuse to eat food prepared by a Dalit.

But to Prasad and Ram, the migration of Dalits to the cities has led to a power shift in the countryside. Upper-caste landlords no longer have anyone to care for their plow-pulling oxen, a burden on the Dalits for centuries. Now they have to hire tractors.

"To me, this is the greatest social change India has ever witnessed in its known history," Prasad said. "The Dalit has been unchained. The answer was found in the machine."

Small Emblems of Progress

The driver of Prasad's rented sport-utility vehicle swerved through rain-filled potholes and maneuvered around goat herders and past computer training centers. Prasad was taking two American journalists on a tour of several of the villages in the study.

Chain-smoking and enthusiastically pointing out the bustling markets, he said he believes that the Dalit's increasing empowerment can be seen in one of capitalism's greatest pastimes: shopping.

Sachets of name-brand shampoos and detergents have started to appear in the markets of Dalit villages. A native son of the region, Prasad measures Dalits' economic progress in terms of their ability to acquire these brightly packaged amenities, however tiny the portions. According to his survey, less than 0.85 percent of Dalit families used shampoo in 1990. In 2007, 81 percent said they use it regularly.

Prasad said he first noticed the increasing prosperity six years ago when he returned home for a family wedding. In the past, he would be asked for cash, saris or radios. He was expected to treat for various feasts, the slaughtering of a piglet and "VIP sweets made from milk," laughed Prasad, patting his expanding waistline to attest to his weakness for desserts.

But this time, he said, the relatives didn't ask him for anything. Many had family members living in cities, and their remittances flowed back into the village. "I was in touch with the countryside, but I was surprised this change was happening so fast," said Prasad, who is considered a maverick for departing from the Dalits' habit of looking to the government to drive change.

India has the world's largest and oldest affirmative action program. Dalit intellectuals have long hoped that quotas for jobs and university places would help lift the community out of poverty. But those programs have been both controversial and corrupt. They are credited with helping create a small Dalit middle class but also criticized for perpetuating the entrenched societal structure.

Prasad's parents were illiterate, land-owning Dalits. His grandfather had worked for the British colonial government and saved enough money to put Prasad and his siblings through school, rare for Dalit families at the time. Later, as a college student, Prasad became angered by the injustices of the caste system and joined the Naxalite movement, a Marxist insurgency against India's government.

But after four years, his life took a major turn. He watched a family happily eating ice cream one afternoon, and that changed his life. "It got me thinking, and I made a quantum jump," he said. "I never developed a hatred for those who live well. Everyone wants a good life. I came to believe that it was not going to happen through the gun. If there was going to be serious conflict in this country, it would be Dalits who would suffer."

'From Horrible to Bad'

Dalit empowerment is so incremental as to be almost invisible to outsiders. Dalits still have the country's highest malnutrition rates, which are also among the highest in the world. Violence and discrimination against lower castes are common, although reports usually end up on the inside pages of India's newspapers. In a recent incident, a Dalit working in Mumbai drove a new car back to his village, where some higher-caste people pulled him out and beat him to death, telling police later that they assumed the car had been stolen. They thought a Dalit could not afford a new car.

But Prasad's survey results showed that discrimination is decreasing, at least in this village. In 1990, 88.1 percent of families questioned in Gaddopur were seated separately during public dinners organized by upper castes. Now, only 30 percent said they were asked to sit apart.

Dalit villages are less likely than others to have paved roads, reliable electricity, running water or health clinics. But where some see squalor, others see progress. In many Dalit villages, brick hovels are replacing mud huts.

"It's gone from horrible to bad. But it's like saying that you have to climb a 10,000-foot mountain and you've have climbed 1,000 feet," said Devesh Kapur, director of the University of Pennsylvania's Center for the Advanced Study of India. "Still, the fact that we have seen a change of this magnitude after hundreds and hundreds of years of this community being crushed is really amazing."

Accompanied by Prasad, Kapur recently visited one of the villages in the study and met a Dalit village elder. He asked him if things had changed since he was a boy. "He said, 'It's like the difference between the land and the sky.' "

Unfazed by Setbacks

After working for many years in construction, Ram started his own textile business, which prospered. He was able to afford a grand wedding for his son and build a spacious house.

Like many Dalit households, the family painted a mural at the entrance depicting a studious-looking man in a three-piece suit and glasses: Dalit leader B.R. Ambedkar, author of much of India's constitution. Ambedkar often urged Dalits to leave their villages.

With Ram's earnings, his wife, Sola Hanna, no longer had to labor in the fields for the landlord. She recently ran into her former boss. "I saw her once in the market. We didn't speak. But we shared a quiet moment," Hanna said softly. "I had a memory of her shouting at me, calling down to me in front of other neighbors to fetch things. When I realized she could no longer do that, I felt proud."

Beaming as he listened to the story, Prasad said he wanted to check out Ram's nearby pharmacy.

Chandra Bhan Prasad, a Dalit, said goods sold in a village market reflect the caste's progress. (By Emily Wax -- The Washington Post)

As Prasad perused the shelves, stocked with mouthwash, headache pills and thermometers -- items that he said Dalits could not afford in the past -- the power went out.

Undependable power, like the rutted dirt roads and lack of running water, is one of the remaining impediments to economic growth in Dalit villages. Unfazed, Prasad cheerfully continued examining bags of pricey beans, cellphone chargers and dented boxes of cornflakes. All were proof of Dalit progress, and Prasad smiled in the darkness.

DoTheRightThing wrote:

It's unbelievable that this article did not mention the Hindu riots going on these past few days in India in which 13 Catholic workers, nuns and priests were killed by the rioters angry over the murder of one of their own religious leaders reportedly by a Maoist terrorist. Some Hindus resent the Catholics because when an Untouchable converts to Catholicism he is no longer an Untouchable and (apparently) is free to do better-paying work. So the Hindus lose their large supply of cheap labor to do the most menial jobs, and have to pay more for the same services, which impacts their pocket books and their cultural lives. Shame on the WaPo for not mentioning the murders of these 13 Catholics who were nonviolently serving their fellow human beings in India. It's no wonder the main stream media (MSM) is losing readership/viewers -their former market base has discovered the sad truth that the MSM does not now (and probably never did) report all the important news of which it was aware.

AGAINST SCHOOL - John Taylor Gatto

AGAINST SCHOOL

How public education cripples

our kids, and why

By John Taylor Gatto

John Taylor Gatto is a former New York State and New York City Teacher of the

Year and the author, most recently, of The Underground History of American

Education. He was a participant in the Harper's Magazine forum "School on a Hill,"

which appeared in the September 2003 issue.

I taught for thirty years in some of the worst schools in Manhattan, and in some of the best, and during that time I became an expert in boredom. Boredom was everywhere in my world, and if you asked the kids, as I often did, why they felt so bored, they always gave the same answers: They said the work was stupid, that it made no sense, that they already knew it. They said they wanted to be doing something real, not just sitting around. They said teachers didn't seem to know much about their subjects and clearly weren't interested in learning more. And the kids were right: their teachers were every bit as bored as they were.

Boredom is the common condition of schoolteachers, and anyone who has spent time in a teachers' lounge can vouch for the low energy, the whining, the dispirited attitudes, to be found there. When asked why they feel bored, the teachers tend to blame the kids, as you might expect. Who wouldn't get bored teaching students who are rude and interested only in grades? If even that. Of course, teachers are themselves products of the same twelve-year compulsory school programs that so thoroughly bore their students, and as school personnel they are trapped inside structures even more rigid than those imposed upon the children. Who, then, is to blame?

We all are. My grandfather taught me that. One afternoon when I was seven I complained to him of boredom, and he batted me hard on the head. He told me that I was never to use that term in his presence again, that if I was bored it was my fault and no one else's. The obligation to amuse and instruct myself was entirely my own, and people who didn't know that were childish people, to be avoided if possible. Certainty not to be trusted. That episode cured me of boredom forever, and here and there over the years I was able to pass on the lesson to some remarkable student. For the most part, however, I found it futile to challenge the official notion that boredom and childishness were the natural state of affairs in the classroom. Often I had to defy custom, and even bend the law, to help kids break out of this trap.

The empire struck back, of course; childish adults regularly conflate opposition with disloyalty. I once returned from a medical leave to discover t~at all evidence of my having been granted the leave had been purposely destroyed, that my job had been terminated, and that I no longer possessed even a teaching license. After nine months of tormented effort I was able to retrieve the license when a school secretary testified to witnessing the plot unfold. In the meantime my family suffered more than I care to remember. By the time I finally retired in 1991, 1 had more than enough reason to think of our schools-with their long-term, cell-block-style, forced confinement of both students and teachers-as virtual factories of childishness. Yet I honestly could not see why they had to be that way. My own experience had revealed to me what many other teachers must learn along the way, too, yet keep to themselves for fear of reprisal: if we wanted to we could easily and inexpensively jettison the old, stupid structures and help kids take an education rather than merely receive a schooling. We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness-curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insightsimply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids to truly competent adults, and by giving each student what autonomy he or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then.

But we don't do that. And the more I asked why not, and persisted in thinking about the "problem" of schooling as an engineer might, the more I missed the point: What if there is no "problem" with our schools? What if they are the way they are, so expensively flying in the face of common sense and long experience in how children learn things, not because they are doing something wrong but because they are doing something right? Is it possible that George W. Bush accidentally spoke the truth when he said we would "leave no child behind"? Could it be that our schools are designed to make sure not one of them ever really grows up?

Do we really need school? I don't mean education, just forced schooling: six classes a day, five days a week, nine months a year, for twelve years. Is this deadly routine really necessary? And if so, for what? Don't hide behind reading, writing, and arithmetic as a rationale, because 2 million happy homeschoolers have surely put that banal justification to rest. Even if they hadn't, a considerable number of well-known Americans never went through the twelve-year wringer our kids currently go through, and they turned out all right. George Washington, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln? Someone taught them, to be sure, but they were not products of a school system, and not one of them was ever "graduated" from a secondary school. Throughout most of American history, kids generally didn't go to high school, yet the unschooled rose to be admirals, like Farragut; inventors, like Edison; captains of industry like Carnegie and Rockefeller; writers, like Melville and Twain and Conrad; and even scholars, like Margaret Mead. In fact, until pretty recently people who reached the age of thirteen weren't looked upon as children at all. Ariel Durant, who co-wrote an enormous, and very good, multivolume history of the world with her husband, Will, was happily married at fifteen, and who could reasonably claim that Ariel Durant was an uneducated person? Unschooled, perhaps, but not uneducated.

We have been taught (that is, schooled) in this country to think of "success" as synonymous with, or at least dependent upon, "schooling," but historically that isn't true in either an intellectual or a financial sense. And plenty of people throughout the world today find a way to educate themselves without resorting to a system of compulsory secondary schools that all too often resemble prisons. Why, then, do Americans confuse education with just such a system? What exactly is the purpose of our public schools?

Mass schooling of a compulsory nature really got its teeth into the United States between 1905 and 1915, though it was conceived of much earlier and pushed for throughout most of the nineteenth century. The reason given for this enormous upheaval of family life and cultural traditions was, roughly speaking, threefold:

1) To make good people. 2) To make good citizens. 3) To make each person his or her personal best. These goals are still trotted out today on a regular basis, and most of us accept them in one form or another as a decent definition of public education's mission, however short schools actually fall in achieving them. But we are dead wrong. Compounding our error is the fact that the national literature holds numerous and surprisingly consistent statements of compulsory schooling's true purpose. We have, for example, the great H. L. Mencken, who wrote in The American Mercury for April 1924 that the aim of public education is not

to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. ... Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim ... is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality. That is its aim in the United States... and that is its aim everywhere else.

Because of Mencken's reputation as a satirist, we might be tempted to dismiss this passage as a bit of hyperbolic sarcasm. His article, however, goes on to trace the template for our own educational system back to the now vanished, though never to be forgotten, military state of Prussia. And although he was certainly aware of the irony that we had recently been at war with Germany, the heir to Prussian thought and culture, Mencken was being perfectly serious here. Our educational system really is Prussian in origin, and that really is cause for concern.

The odd fact of a Prussian provenance for our schools pops up again and again once you know to look for it. William James alluded to it many times at the turn of the century. Orestes Brownson, the hero of Christopher Lasch's 1991 book, The True and Only Heaven, was publicly denouncing the Prussianization of American schools back in the 1840s. Horace Mann's "Seventh Annual Report" to the Massachusetts State Board of Education in 1843 is essentially a paean to the land of Frederick the Great and a call for its schooling to be brought here. That Prussian culture loomed large in America is hardly surprising, given our early association with that utopian state. A Prussian served as Washington's aide during the Revolutionary War, and so many German-speaking people had settled here by 1795 that Congress considered publishing a German-language edition of the federal laws. But what shocks is that we should so eagerly have adopted one of the very worst aspects of Prussian culture: an educational system deliberately designed to produce mediocre intellects, to hamstring the inner life, to deny students appreciable leadership skills, and to ensure docile and incomplete citizens 11 in order to render the populace "manageable."

It was from James Bryant Conant-president of Harvard for twenty years, WWI poison-gas specialist, WWII executive on the atomic-bomb project, high commissioner of the American zone in Germany after WWII, and truly one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century-that I first got wind of the real purposes of American schooling. Without Conant, we would probably not have the same style and degree of standardized testing that we enjoy today, nor would we be blessed with gargantuan high schools that warehouse 2,000 to 4,000 students at a time, like the famous Columbine High in Littleton, Colorado. Shortly after I retired from teaching I picked up Conant's 1959 book-length essay, The Child the Parent and the State, and was more than a little intrigued to see him mention in passing that the modem schools we attend were the result of a "revolution" engineered between 1905 and 1930. A revolution? He declines to elaborate, but he does direct the curious and the uninformed to Alexander Inglis's 1918 book, Principles of Secondary Education, in which "one saw this revolution through the eyes of a revolutionary."

Inglis, for whom a lecture in education at Harvard is named, makes it perfectly clear that compulsory schooling on this continent was intended to be just what it had been for Prussia in the 1820s: a fifth column into the burgeoning democratic movement that threatened to give the peasants and the proletarians a voice at the bargaining table. Modern, industrialized, compulsory schooling was to make a sort of surgical incision into the prospective unity of these underclasses. Divide children by subject, by age-grading, by constant rankings on tests, and by many other more subtle means, and it was unlikely that the ignorant mass of mankind, separated in childhood, would ever re-integrate into a dangerous whole.

Inglis breaks down the purpose - the actual purpose - of modem schooling into six basic functions, any one of which is enough to curl the hair of those innocent enough to believe the three traditional goals listed earlier:

1) The adjustive or adaptive function. Schools are to establish fixed habits of reaction to authority. This, of course, precludes critical judgment completely. It also pretty much destroys the idea that useful or interesting material should be taught, because you can't test for reflexive obedience until you know whether you can make kids learn, and do, foolish and boring things.

2) The integrating function. This might well be called "the conformity function," because its intention is to make children as alike as possible. People who conform are predictable, and this is of great use to those who wish to harness and manipulate a large labor force.

3) The diagnostic and directive function. School is meant to determine each student's proper social role. This is done by logging evidence mathematically and anecdotally on cumulative records. As in "your permanent record." Yes, you do have one.

4) The differentiating function. Once their social role has been "diagnosed," children are to be sorted by role and trained only so far as their destination in the social machine merits - and not one step further. So much for making kids their personal best.

5) The selective function. This refers not to human choice at all but to Darwin's theory of natural selection as applied to what he called "the favored races." In short, the idea is to help things along by consciously attempting to improve the breeding stock. Schools are meant to tag the unfit - with poor grades, remedial placement, and other punishments - clearly enough that their peers will accept them as inferior and effectively bar them from the reproductive sweepstakes. That's what all those little humiliations from first grade onward were intended to do: wash the dirt down the drain.

6) The propaedeutic function. The societal system implied by these rules will require an elite group of caretakers. To that end, a small fraction of the kids will quietly be taught how to manage this continuing project, how to watch over and control a population deliberately dumbed down and declawed in order that government might proceed unchallenged and corporations might never want for obedient labor.

That, unfortunately, is the purpose of mandatory public education in this country. And lest you take Inglis for an isolated crank with a rather too cynical take on the educational enterprise, you should know that he was hardly alone in championing these ideas. Conant himself, building on the ideas of Horace Mann and others, campaigned tirelessly for an American school system designed along the same lines. Men like George Peabody, who funded the cause of mandatory schooling throughout the South, surely understood that the Prussian system was useful in creating not only a harmless electorate and a servile labor force but also a virtual herd of mindless consumers. In time a great number of industrial titans came to recognize the enormous profits to be had by cultivating and tending just such a herd via public education, among them Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller.

Tre you have it. Now you know. We don't need Karl Marx's conception of a grand warfare between the classes to see that it is in the interest of complex management, economic or political, to dumb people down, to demoralize them, to divide them from one another, and to discard them if they don't conform. Class may frame the proposition, as when Woodrow Wilson, then president of Princeton University, said the following to the New York City School Teachers Association in 1909: "We want one class of persons to have a liberal education, and we want another class of persons, a very much larger class, of necessity, in every society, to forgo the privileges of a liberal education and fit themselves to perform specific difficult manual tasks." But the motives behind the disgusting decisions that bring about these ends need not be class-based at all. They can stem purely from fear, or from the by now familiar belief that "efficiency" is the paramount virtue, rather than love, lib, erty, laughter, or hope. Above all, they can stem from simple greed.

There were vast fortunes to be made, after all, in an economy based on mass production and organized to favor the large corporation rather than the small business or the family farm. But mass production required mass consumption, and at the turn of the twentieth century most Americans considered it both unnatural and unwise to buy things they didn't actually need. Mandatory schooling was a godsend on that count. School didn't have to train kids in any direct sense to think they should consume nonstop, because it did something even better: it encouraged them not to think at all. And that left them sitting ducks for another great invention of the modem era - marketing.

Now, you needn't have studied marketing to know that there are two groups of people who can always be convinced to consume more than they need to: addicts and children. School has done a pretty good job of turning our children into addicts, but it has done a spectacular job of turning our children into children. Again, this is no accident. Theorists from Plato to Rousseau to our own Dr. Inglis knew that if children could be cloistered with other children, stripped of responsibility and independence, encouraged to develop only the trivializing emotions of greed, envy, jealousy, and fear, they would grow older but never truly grow up. In the 1934 edition of his once well-known book Public Education in the United States, Ellwood P. Cubberley detailed and praised the way the strategy of successive school enlargements had extended childhood by two to six years, and forced schooling was at that point still quite new. This same Cubberley - who was dean of Stanford's School of Education, a textbook editor at Houghton Mifflin, and Conant's friend and correspondent at Harvard - had written the following in the 1922 edition of his book Public School Administration: "Our schools are ... factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned .... And it is the business of the school to build its pupils according to the specifications laid down."

It's perfectly obvious from our society today what those specifications were. Maturity has by now been banished from nearly every aspect of our lives. Easy divorce laws have removed the need to work at relationships; easy credit has removed the need for fiscal self-control; easy entertainment has removed the need to learn to entertain oneself; easy answers have removed the need to ask questions. We have become a nation of children, happy to surrender our judgments and our wills to political exhortations and commercial blandishments that would insult actual adults. We buy televisions, and then we buy the things we see on the television. We buy computers, and then we buy the things we see on the computer. We buy $150 sneakers whether we need them or not, and when they fall apart too soon we buy another pair. We drive SUVs and believe the lie that they constitute a kind of life insurance, even when we're upside-down in them. And, worst of all, we don't bat an eye when Ari Fleischer tells us to "be careful what you say," even if we remember having been told somewhere back in school that America is the land of the free. We simply buy that one too. Our schooling, as intended, has seen to it.

Now for the good news. Once you understand the logic behind modern schooling, its tricks and traps are fairly easy to avoid. School trains children to be employees and consumers; teach your own to be leaders and adventurers. School trains children to obey reflexively; teach your own to think critically and independently. Well-schooled kids have a low threshold for boredom; help your own to develop an inner life so that they'll never be bored. Urge them to take on the serious material, the grown-up material, in history, literature, philosophy, music, art, economics, theology - all the stuff schoolteachers know well enough to avoid. Challenge your kids with plenty of solitude so that they can learn to enjoy their own company, to conduct inner dialogues. Well-schooled people are conditioned to dread being alone, and they seek constant companionship through the TV, the computer, the cell phone, and through shallow friendships quickly acquired and quickly abandoned. Your children should have a more meaningful life, and they can.

First, though, we must wake up to what our schools really are: laboratories of experimentation on young minds, drill centers for the habits and attitudes that corporate society demands. Mandatory education serves children only incidentally; its real purpose is to turn them into servants. Don't let your own have their childhoods extended, not even for a day. If David Farragut could take command of a captured British warship as a pre-teen, if Thomas Edison could publish a broadsheet at the age of twelve, if Ben Franklin could apprentice himself to a printer at the same age (then put himself through a course of study that would choke a Yale senior today), there's no telling what your own kids could do. After a long life, and thirty years in the public school trenches, I've concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress our genius only because we haven't yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.

Back to Gatto page

OR, click here to read a variant on John's views which might just offer a positive proposal for an educational alternative to high schools as currently organized.

SLAVERY TODAY AND THE BATTLE OVER HISTORY

SLAVERY TODAY AND THE BATTLE OVER HISTORY

When I was invited to lecture on: “Slavery – The Rest of the Story” at three university campuses in Minnesota, I expected that it would engender some opposition. What I could not have foreseen was the intensity of hostility and emotion that would be whipped up by some radical students against myself and those who had invited me.

Karl Marx declared: “The first battlefield is the rewriting of history.” Evidently, many of Marx’s disciples have been very busy on the university campuses rewriting history, rearranging reality and brainwashing students.

The University of Minnesota has 37,000 students, including over 2,900 international students from more than 130 countries, including China, India, Korea, Japan, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Somalia, Sudan and many others.

I have been invited to lecture at the university campus before, on the persecution of Christians in Sudan. Those presentations received some opposition, but nothing like what we received on this occasion.

Muslim students from Somalia, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia expressed great hostility, anger and emotion in opposition to my presentations on Slavery – The Rest of the Story . At one of the lunch time presentations in a university auditorium, the questions and answers and discussion went on for over 3-and-a-half hours after the end of the presentation. One Somalian stood up and made a long and vitriolic speech against “President Bush’s war of aggression against the people of Iraq,” and attacked me for not dealing with this. In response I pointed out that I was not an American citizen, that I had never worked in Iraq, that I am an African, and the subject that I had been invited to speak on was: “Slavery – The Rest of the Story.” I had spoken on what I had personally witnessed and researched in Sudan, but I could not speak with any authority on Iraq, as I had never even visited that country.

However, I did point out that I was not aware that America was waging “a war of aggression against the Iraqi people.” It was my impression that the Allied forces had freed the people of Iraq from one of the most brutal dictatorships in the Middle East. In fact, I asked, didn’t Iraq now have the first elected government in its history? So, perhaps it would be more accurate to refer to the conflict in Iraq as a civil war where the US forces are assisting the first elected government in Iraq’s history against local insurgents?

A woman, who identified herself as coming from Saudi Arabia, was most agitated. She declared that it was false to give the impression that women were oppressed in Islam. Women were “completely free and equal.” It was wrong to suggest that Muhammad had owned slaves, she claimed, he never mistreated anybody, and Islam is a peaceful and tolerant religion of brotherhood.

I had to remind this lady that both the Quran and the Hadith confirm that Muhammad was a slave owner and a slave trader. Muhammad gave detailed instructions concerning the treatment of slaves, including that Muslim slave masters could lawfully “enjoy” their female slaves sexually or even hire them out as prostitutes. “How many women can a Muslim man marry?” I asked. “Four” she replied. “And how many men can a Muslim woman marry?” “What’s that got to do with it?” She responded angrily. I pointed out that this indicates that there is no equality for women in Islam.

“Are you, as a Muslim woman, allowed to vote in Saudi Arabia?” “Of course not!” she responded angrily. “Can you, as a Muslim woman, drive a car in Saudi Arabia?”“No, but Saudi Arabia is the land of Muhammad!”“But you can drive a car here in America? Why is it that you have so many more rights and freedoms in America than you would have in your home country of Saudi Arabia?” In response, this woman expressed very hostile views of America and its government, prompting me to ask why she had come to study in such a horrible country, under such terrible conditions, when she could be enjoying such perfect freedom back in Saudi Arabia?

One student, apparently from Pakistan, declared that I did not deserve to live, and I should not be allowed to remain on this planet! When I asked where he would suggest I go, he exploded: “To hell!” In response to this I said: “I’m sorry, but the Lord Jesus has already dealt with that, so I will not be able to join you.”

One of the most surprising aspects of my visit to the university campuses in Minnesota was the hostility of many university lecturers against Christianity and America. As a missionary who has spent almost 25 years ministering to restricted access areas in Africa, I expect opposition from Muslims and Marxists. However, as experienced during these campus outreaches in Minnesota, some of the most fervent opposition we received came from nominal Christians who seem either infatuated with, or in fear of, Islam. They seemed most antagonistic towards Biblical Christianity and even hostile to the Christian civilisation, which they benefit from.

One university professor stood up during the question and answer time and declared that he was most disappointed with my presentation. It was “the most bigoted, narrow-minded lecture” he had ever heard in his life. He had brought his students from his history class to hear me, expecting that I would speak about the American involvement in the slave trade. He didn’t understand why I would have dealt with such “hurtful” and “offensive” material as the Muslim involvement in the slave trade. Why hadn’t I given more time and attention to America’s involvement?

To this I had to respond that surely the advertised title of my presentations: Slavery – The Rest of the Story should have made it abundantly clear that it was not my purpose to come to America to repeat again what most Americans are so familiar with, and what ended over 150 yeas ago. As an African missionary, who had witnessed the ongoing slave trade in Sudan today, I had undertaken a research project into the history of slavery in Africa and the result was the book: Slavery, Terrorism and Islam – The Historical Roots and Contemporary Threat – on which these lectures had been based.

The American involvement in the slave trade lasted for less than 3 centuries; however, the Muslim involvement in the slave trade has continued for 14 centuries and is still continuing to this day. Considering that 95% of the African slaves who were transported across the Atlantic went to South and Central America, mainly to Portuguese, Spanish and French possessions, and that less than 5% of the slaves who crossed the Atlantic went to the United States, it was remarkable that the vast majority of academic research, films, books and articles concerning the slave trade concentrated only on the American involvement, as though slavery was a uniquely American aberration. The vastly great involvement of Portugal, Spain and France seems to be largely ignored. Even more so the far greater and longer running Islamic slave trade into the Middle East has been so ignored as to make it one of history’s best-kept secrets.

Now, I pointed out, if I had concentrated on the American slave trade, that would have been ignorant, bigoted and prejudiced.

Numerous Sudanese university students stood up to confirm the truth of my presentations, that there was indeed slavery continuing in Sudan today. “It is a fact! No one can deny it! The facts and the documentation are there, for anyone to see. We ourselves have seen and experienced it. The Americans are very honest and admit their involvement in slavery over 150 years ago. Why can’t you Muslims be honest and admit what is going on in your own countries, and deal with it?” challenged one student from Sudan.

Another man from Mexico spoke up: “My ancestors were the Aztecs. We were the biggest slave traders, and the slaves were used for human sacrifice - to make the sun rise each day! Our Aztec priests ripped out the beating hearts from living slaves who were sacrificed in our temples. Men were enslaved and sacrificed like that. I don’t like it. I am not proud of it, but it is a fact. It is part of our history. We have to face up to it. And the slavery and human sacrifice in Mexico only stopped when Christianity came and brought it to an end. That is the fact of history. When are the Arabs going to face up to the facts of their own history, and to what is going on in many Muslim countries today? When are they going to rise up like the Christians to bring this slavery in their own countries to an end?”

The atmosphere in the university auditorium was electric, as various students and some lecturers took part in the very vigorous question and answer time, and debating, arguing and discussing these volatile topics.

At one of the university campus meetings, I was still surrounded by about 10 students, including some from Somalia, Pakistan and Saudi Arabia, 4 and a half hours after the beginning of the presentation. Suddenly I realised that all the discussion had stopped and everyone was silent. They were all listening to me. After hours of shouting and argument, it was an eerie experience as I related the parables of Christ, particularly of the two men who went up to the Temple to pray: the one was a religious leader, a Pharisee; and the other was a tax collector – a sinner. I related the contrast between these two men. The one self-righteous, convinced of his own goodness and moral superiority, and the other man humbled and repentant only crying out: “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner!” Then I asked them which of these two men were justified in God’s sight? Whose prayer did the Lord find acceptable? The Muslim students remained silent as one of the Christians responded: “The tax collector, because he was repentant.” This seemed to shock the Muslims as they would have thought that the religious leader, with his fasting, was the righteous one.

I also had the opportunity to share the Gospel in the story of Abraham being willing to sacrifice his son and how God Himself provided the lamb. I pointed them to Jesus, who is the Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world (John 1:29). He died in our place, the Just for the unjust.

After all the heated emotions, anger and shouting, it was an extraordinary experience to be able to communicate calmly and clearly the Gospel presentation to these Muslims who had been so emotive and hostile for so many hours.

My respect was greatly increased for the campus ministries that have to work in such volatile and hostile environments on a daily basis. Campus ministries, such as Maranatha, are laying a foundation for righteousness for future generations. On a daily basis they are seeking to evangelise in dorm rooms, class rooms and offices throughout the university community. With guest speakers like myself, and through men’s and women’s Bible studies, prayer meetings, contact tables and outreaches, they are challenging the present politically correct propaganda of Humanism and the New Age Movement with the life changing power of the Gospel of Salvation and Jesus Christ alone.

My host, Rev. Bruce Harpel, who founded Maranatha Christian Fellowship over 25 years ago, explains: “In the classroom, students are indoctrinated to think that truth is relative, that there are no absolutes, and what is right and wrong are determined by the individual and society.”

“Drinking, drugs, sexual immorality, and lack of accountability lead some students to self destruction. The student usually exits college much more wounded and addicted to sin than when he/she entered. Many times students who were raised in Christian homes abandon their beliefs as they are challenged by opposing worldviews. When these students return to their respective towns, cities, and countries, this bondage to sin is transfused into the bloodstream of society. We see more white-collar crime, violence, sexually transmitted diseases, abortions, suicide, divorce, depression and despair in society than ever before. The University is truly a mission field and that is why we are here. To ignore campus ministry is to surrender the culture to the enemy .”

“Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.” 2 Corinthians 3:17

Dr. Peter Hammond

Cuban Detour to Texas - Cubans reroute to Mexico before heading north to the U.S.

Cuban Detour to Texas
Cubans reroute to Mexico before heading north to the U.S.

By Russell Cobb and Paul Knight Published: January 10, 2008

Daniel Kramer
Damian Jimenez left Cuba on a homemade raft in 1994, He now works at Catholic Charities in Houston, helping newly arrived Cubans settle in the city.
Daniel Kramer
Rey Rodriguez (right) moved to Houston from the Texas border at the urging of his friend Silvino (left). The men live with another Cuban in a one-bedroom apartment in southwest Houston.
Russell Cobb
Maria Sanchez (left), with her Cuban friend Ernesto, has developed a feud with the nuns at La Posada.
Russell Cobb
La Posada is one of the few shelters along the Texas border where Cubans are staying.
Daniel Kramer
Fingerprinting is one of the last steps before a Cuban is released into the United States.

Subject(s): Mexico, Cuban immigrants, border
Enveloped by darkness, a tractor rumbles down the hills that surround Cuba's western coast. The tractor pulls a cart loaded with a makeshift boat constructed from aluminum tubing and an old car motor.
Fourteen Cubans cram into the craft, destined for a twisting river that leads to the Yucatán Channel. To Harry Reinier, who had waited with the others in a safe house for weeks, the boat feels like a kitchen sink. Tonight, they make their escape from Cuba.
A motorcycle races ahead of the tractor, its driver armed with a two-way radio to sound alarm if the river launch is guarded. The shoreline is clear, and two men shove the boat away from the river­bank. The engine—a leftover from a 1950s-era American car—howls to a start and the boat shudders from the shallows to deeper water.
Reinier doesn't know what to expect on the open sea. He has never set foot on a boat before this moment. Food and water are scarce, with a backpack full of canned food and two jugs of water for each person. He only knows that their goal is the east coast of Mexico—a trip he is told will take four days. Reinier has little money, few resources and no guarantee the boat will ever reach Mexico.
But the risk is well worth a chance at the reward—legal residency in the United States. In Havana, Reinier heard that any Cuban who makes it to the Texas border is processed into the country without much hassle.
The boat sputters toward Mexico for two days before the motor dies. For more than a week, the boat drifts on the open sea. Food and water soon run out. The group survives on raw fish and ­rainwater.
After suffering dehydration, sunburn and exhaustion, after battling sleep-deprived, crazed Cubans on his boat, after five months in a Mexican prison and after marathon bus rides to Mexico City and Matamoros, Reinier crosses the Texas border. Today, he lives about 30 miles north of Brownsville. He is a legal resident of the United States, drawing a little less than $500 a month of government money.
Reinier is part of a growing number of Cubans abandoning the traditional Cuban escape route—the Florida Straits—and entering the United States through Texas. When the U.S. Coast Guard started turning back Cubans caught in the waters off the southern tip of Florida in the mid-1990s, Cubans simply changed directions. Now they're leaving from Cuba's poorly guarded southern and western coasts and crossing to the Yucatán Peninsula, often landing on Isla Mujeres, an island near Cancún.
Before 2005, Cubans who crossed the Texas border were held in a detention facility until their backgrounds were checked and their paperwork processed. But a policy change now allows Cubans to enter the United States the same day they arrive. They're registered as "political asylees."
The number of Cubans entering Texas has skyrocketed. About 11,500 crossed the border legally last year—almost all through Brownsville—which is three times the number that entered through Florida.
As a result, Houston's Cuban community is on the verge of a boom. The city is becoming a popular destination for ­border-crossing Cubans without friends or relatives waiting in Miami.
Some Cubans find the Texas border an unfriendly place. Some are placed at the Port Isabel Detention Center in Los Fresnos and face an immigration judge who has denied political asylum to every Cuban immigrant who has appeared before him in the last two years.
Cubans entering Texas are often flush with cash, but not all. Some, like Reinier, find themselves broke and alone, unprepared for life in the Valley. Still, despite his few prospects, Reinier knows that unlike other illegal immigrants, he won't be deported.
For at least one nationality, the Texas-Mexico border is an open door.
Cubans were first given a path to residency in the United States in 1966, when the government passed the Cuban Adjustment Act, a product of Cold War politics intended to allow Cubans a refuge in this country until the Castro regime was ­overthrown.
The majority of Cubans moved to Miami or New Jersey during the early years, but about 12,000 settled in Houston. They were mainly from affluent families that had been vacationing in South Texas for years. Because of Houston's location and warm weather, along with its universities and medical centers, the city became a magnet for middle- and upper-class Cubans.
"Back then, everybody knew each other," says Orlando Sanchez, a Houston businessman and politician who was born in Cuba. "We thought we'd all eventually go back home."
These days, Sanchez considers himself a Texan, not a Cuban. He says that his two daughters have few connections to the island and little desire to go there.
The demographic portrait of Cubans in Texas has changed dramatically since Sanchez arrived. In the spring of 1980, Castro opened the port of Mariel, located west of Havana, and allowed foreign boats to take Cubans from the island. Castro emptied the country's jails and mental hospitals to rid the island of "undesirables" and "counterrevolutionaries"—gays, the insane, drug addicts and criminals.
The exodus ended in September 1980, after a U.S. Coast Guard and Naval blockade stopped the inflow of boats. But during the six months that the Mariel port was open, about 125,000 Cubans arrived in Miami.
Tensions between the United States and Cuba heightened during the 1980s, and the tide of refugees slowed to a trickle until the fall of the Soviet Union.
The Soviets had provided generous subsidies for Cuban exports from the early 1960s until the late 1980s. Within a couple years of the Soviet Union's collapse, almost all of its aid to Cuba disappeared. In 1991 alone, the Cuban economy shrank by 24 percent.
As economic pressure built within the country, so did discontent among the people. When desperate Cubans began rioting in the streets, Castro blamed their dissent on a U.S. policy that encouraged Cubans to leave.
Castro announced in a televised speech that "either the U.S. take serious measures to guard their coasts, or we will stop putting obstacles in the way of people who want to leave the country, and we will stop putting obstacles in the way of people in the U.S. who want to come and look for their relatives here."
Damian Jimenez, born and raised in Cuba, was sitting at his mother's house in Havana when the phone rang. His friend was on the other end. He was ecstatic.
"He told me that everyone was leaving, that Castro was letting everyone leave," Jimenez says. "He told me to turn on the television."
Sure enough, Castro had pulled his guards away from the coast, reversing a long-standing Cuban law that punished attempted escape with arrest. During the month following Castro's announcement, an estimated 35,000 Cubans, now known as "balseros," left the island and floated to Florida.
Jimenez and seven friends were among them. They paid about $375 for a raft. After rowing for three days, the group was picked up by the U.S. Coast Guard and, like many of the balseros, taken to the detention center at Guantanamo Bay.
Jimenez was eventually released and shuttled to Miami where a caseworker with Catholic Charities, a resettlement agency, found him a job on a Michigan farm. Ten years later, Jimenez moved to Houston to work for Catholic Charities and help newly arrived Cubans.
In response to the balsero crisis, the U.S. government created a special immigration program for Cuba. Twenty thousand Cubans a year would get visas, which are distributed through a process that Cubans call "the lottery," to live and work in the United States. As a tradeoff, Castro promised to take steps to stop the wave of rafters disembarking from Cuba's shores.
The agreement also led to the creation of a "wet foot/dry foot" policy. Cubans caught in the water are now taxied back to the island on Coast Guard ships. But, if Cubans can make it to U.S. soil, they can stay and seek legal residency.
"Dry foot" Cubans technically enter the country on a one-year parole. At the end of that time, they are required to appear before an immigration judge to have their status upgraded to permanent residency. The new phenomenon of Cubans crossing Mexico by land has given rise to a new term: "dusty foot."
The policy has been widely criticized as hypocritical since its inception. Bizarre and dangerous incidents along the Florida coast—including Cubans threatening to kill themselves or their children to hold the Coast Guard at bay—have drawn attention to the problem.
"We've had cases where...they've poured gasoline on themselves and threatened to light themselves on fire," says Chief Dana Warr, an officer in the U.S. Coast Guard in Miami. "People will stab themselves or cut their wrists to be evacuated by helicopter to a U.S. hospital, and as soon as they touch down, they're 'dry foot.' It's almost like the wild, wild west out there, except on the water."
In June 1999, Coast Guard officers attempted to stop six Cubans from reaching the Miami beach by blasting their boat with a high-power water cannon. When the men bailed into the sea to swim for shore, the officers trolled alongside, spraying pepper spray into their faces.
A crowd gathered on the beach to cheer on the swimmers, and two made it ashore, dashing through police and diving onto the sand. The entire incident was filmed by a news helicopter, and all six men were eventually allowed to enter the United States and awarded a seafood dinner with then-Miami Mayor Joe Carollo.
In 2005, again with news cameras rolling, the Coast Guard tried to seize a homemade Cuban vessel by throwing rope into its propeller, and then using the water cannon to turn back the boat. The Coast Guard tossed life jackets to the Cubans. The Cubans quickly tossed them back.
And in January 2006, 15 Cubans were found on a section of Old Seven Mile Bridge, an abandoned structure in the Florida Keys. The group was deported to Cuba after Coast Guard officials determined the bridge, which had partially collapsed, did not qualify as dry land.
The case was considered a watershed moment, with some Florida politicians calling for complete reform of the government's Cuban policy. One Florida protestor led a hunger strike. Eventually a federal judge ordered immigration officials to attempt to bring the Cubans back. By December 2006, 14 of the 15 were living in the United States.
"Our agents...they're just trying to enforce current U.S. policy," Warr says. "But we understand, the migrants at sea, they're just trying to leave a country they don't want to be in. For what it is, it's illegal migration. We're just trying to control the border."
Since 2005, about 8,500 Cubans have been caught off the coast of Florida and sent back to Cuba. With the Coast Guard clamping down on routes in the Florida Straits and Miami filling up with out-of-work Cubans, it was only a matter of time before balseros and smugglers shifted directions.
"I am not happy with the policy," says Jorge Ferragut, a Cuban who settled in Houston in 1980 and later started Casa Cuba, an organization aimed at helping Cubans who arrive in Texas. "The people that try to leave, they are putting their lives in danger. Yes, it's violating the law, but also the U.S. has known from the beginning the political situation in Cuba."
As a young man, Ferragut wanted to stay in Cuba. But he says that when he realized what little freedom he had, he decided to leave. Ferragut thinks that most Cubans have a similar realization, and says that the latest surge in Cubans leaving could be attributed to an ailing Fidel handing over power to his younger brother Raul last year.
"It's the same tyranny," Ferragut says. "Raul has all the same power; he has been part of the same crime. If something changes, it is only cosmetic."
Ferragut adds that many of the Cubans arriving in the United States today do not leave because of Castro or communism. Their decision is based on economic, rather than political, motives.
Before Harry Reinier left Cuba this spring, he worked in a bakery kneading dough for 10 hours a day and $12 a week. His mother had fled Cuba years earlier for Peru. She sent him money when she could so that he might be able to leave as well.
When a friend told Reinier about a planned escape to Mexico, Reinier emptied his savings and paid $500 to secure a seat on the boat. It was blind faith; he never met the men in charge of the trip.
"Everyone wants to leave Cuba," Reinier says. "When there is money, and there is a chance, that's when they leave."
Rey Rodriguez left Cuba on a calling from God. But when Mexican authorities busted him with false documents nearly four years later, Rodriguez headed for the Texas border.
In Cuba, Rodriguez had been a professional photographer, living in a provincial town in eastern Cuba. He suddenly felt the urge to enter the priesthood, but couldn't find much support for seminarians in Castro's Cuba. He was able to secure a visa to Mexico to further his studies. Then Rodriguez fell in love with a Mexican girl during a religious retreat and impregnated her. Rodriguez abandoned the seminary, and the couple decided to marry and start a family in Morelia, a colonial city in central Mexico.
When Rodriguez applied for Mexican residency at an immigration office, authorities told him he had 72 hours to leave the country or risk deportation. Instead of leaving, Rodriguez purchased false documents that identified him as a Mexican citizen. He destroyed all of his personal belongings that identified or even mentioned his Cuban nationality.
Rodriguez also worked to change his accent, his mannerisms and his word choice. It wasn't easy, because switching between Cuban and Mexican Spanish is like changing a Texas twang to an Irish brogue.
His scheme worked for a while. Rodriguez married his girlfriend, their child was born, and he found part-time work at a Ford dealership. With his brown skin and straight black hair, Rodriguez passed as a Mexican for three years.
Finally, Mexican immigration officials caught and detained him. They let him go after issuing a document stating his name and nationality.
"It was just a plain piece of paper with a stamp, but it was the only identification I had left," Rodriguez says. "The paper said that I had 30 days of parole in Mexico before I would be ordered out of the country."
Rodriguez decided to bolt for the Texas border, where he heard that he could pass into the United States legally. After a full day on a bus from Morelia to Matamoros, Rodriguez reached the border crossing. Fearing he would be caught and sent back to Cuba, his hands trembled as he approached the gate to the international bridge.
Rodriguez fumbled in his pockets for change at the turnstile. He only had a 10-peso piece, the wrong coin. He tried to stuff the peso into the slot but it wouldn't fit. A Mexican guard approached, armed with an automatic rifle.
"Mexico is so corrupt," Rodriguez says. "You're constantly having to pay bribes to get anything done. I thought I would have to pay another bribe to get across."
To Rodriguez's surprise, the guard offered up the correct change. Rodriguez strolled across the bridge and came to a line of people curling out of the U.S. customs office. He started talking to others, telling his story.
The Mexicans were surprised that a Cuban would wait in such a long line. They told him that he could simply walk up to a window inside the office, declare his nationality and claim political asylum. Rodriguez did, and hours later, he walked into Texas.
In December, after months of floundering at the border, including a botched trip to New Orleans to find work, Rodriguez moved to Houston. He lives with Silvino, a Cuban he met while living near the border. The men, along with another Cuban Silvino met in a Mexican prison, live in a one-bedroom apartment in southwest Houston.
Rodriguez is optimistic about his job prospects now that he's out of the Valley and into the big city, but he misses his wife and two children, who are Mexican citizens and still living in Mexico. He's thought about trying to persuade his family to sneak across the border but says he's going to wait until he has the money to bring them here legally.
Stories like Rodriguez's have some immigration reform groups fuming. The Federation for American Immigration Reform supports ending all preferential treatment of Cubans. Ira Mehlman, a representative of the group, says the U.S.'s Cuban policy encourages all kinds of illegal immigrants—including potential terrorists—to seek asylum.
"It's a vestige of a Cold War-era policy that didn't make sense even during the Cold War. Castro has always been happy to export his political dissidents here to yell and scream," Mehlman says. "Cubans should be treated exactly like everyone else. No better and no worse."
Even some Cuban-Americans are questioning the legitimacy of asylum claims by "dusty foot" Cubans. Grisel Ybarra, an immigration attorney in Miami who fled Cuba in 1962, thinks the Cuban Adjustment Act shouldn't apply in Texas. She thinks that the vast majority of Cubans are seeking better-paying jobs, not political freedom.
"These Cubans come here, tell some bullshit story at the border and they get their green card," Ybarra says. "I came here seeking freedom, not hot dogs. My generation, we are refugees; they are immigrants. If you came to Miami and asked Cubans who came here before Mariel, 99 percent of them would agree with me."
Evidence of human smuggling from Cuba to Mexico is starting to pop up on the Yucatán Peninsula. In fact, Ybarra believes that the majority of Cubans are smuggled from the island in expensive speedboats rather than the type of ramshackle vessel that Reinier crossed in.
"Cubans are the richest Hispanic group in the U.S.," Ybarra says. "We live in $1 million homes in Coral Gables. We have the money to pay for boats to get people out of Cuba."
According to Warr, smugglers charge $8,000 to $10,000 per person. The boats are often stolen from marinas along the Florida coast, Warr says, then used to transport 30 to 40 Cubans in a single trip.
In the Florida Straits, the Coast Guard has become more aggressive toward suspected smugglers. Officers are now instructed to shoot at boats that do not respond to warning shots. Gunfire has a 100 percent success rate, Warr says, and it's no surprise that smugglers have changed directions.
"We know it's happening, that there is a lot of maritime smuggling between Cuba and Mexico," Warr says. "We have a vested interest because, indirectly, that is illegal smuggling into the U.S."
The Coast Guard tries to patrol all international waters surrounding the Cuban, Mexican and U.S. coasts. If Cuban smuggling continues to affect the number of Cubans crossing the Texas border, Warr says that Coast Guard ships could patrol as far south as the Yucatán Channel.
"The Caribbean Sea is 2 million square miles, and we try to patrol every bit of it," he says. "We realize we can't catch them all."
Officials from the Mexican state of Quintana Roo say that Cuban-Americans now have human smuggling rings based on the Yucatán Peninsula. Articles in Granma, the official newspaper in Cuba, which is widely perceived as a mouthpiece for the Cuban regime, have reported that Cubans are dressed up as tourists after arriving on the Mexican coast and then hustled off to an airport in Cancún or Mérida.
Articles in the Mexican press have also speculated that competition for the lucrative trade of Cuban immigrants is responsible for a rash of gruesome homicides on the Yucatán. Quintana Roo Attorney General Bello Melchor Rodriguez contends that the violence is part of an ongoing battle over Cuban smuggling between Mexican drug cartels and a Cuban-American mafia.
The bloodshed started in July, when a Cuban-American man was killed in a shootout outside the National Immigration Institute in Mérida, the largest city in the Yucatán. Then, another Cuban, Luis Lázaro Lara Morejón, was found executed near Cancún, his body dumped on a remote and narrow strip of road.
Days after the Morejón murder, Mexican police followed red arrows painted on a Cancún highway and discovered three dead Mexicans, bound, gagged and blindfolded, partially buried in a sinkhole.
"We believe these people were executed by those who are part of a Cuban-­American mafia," Rodriguez told The Associated Press in August. "They probably hired people to execute them."
The Cuban government has blamed both Mexico and the United States for allowing the trafficking to occur and calls the killings part of a "bloody war" between Cuban-Americans and the Mexican drug cartel, the Zetas.
Critics claim the Mexican government is taking few measures to prevent Cubans from entering the country. Reinier found little more than indifference and neglect in Mexico after his group's initial rescue. At first, he was happy to land in Mexico. After 10 days at sea, Reinier's boat was found by a Mexican fisherman hundreds of miles from the intended destination. The fisherman alerted the Mexican navy, which provided the group with food, water and medical attention, then took them to shore.
Reinier was detained at an immigration office in Mérida. Mexican officials told his group that if they could pay a "fine" of $1,000, or arrange for a friend or relative to wire the money, they would be set free.
Reinier and several others in the group were unable to pay and were taken to a prison in Tapachula, nearly 850 miles south of Cancún. Reinier was told he would have to serve three months before being allowed to leave.
Hundreds of Cubans and thousands of Central Americans were detained at the prison. They slept on concrete floors, surviving on a steady diet of watered-down milk, rice and beans.
Reinier says that from time to time, a small group of Cubans would be rounded up for deportation. According to the National Institute of Immigration in Mexico, authorities have detained 876 Cubans this year and deported 271.
The Mexican government has adopted a policy similar to the U.S. wet foot/dry foot rule. Still, all Cubans—even those found at sea—are detained for processing in Mexico. Furthermore, some Cubans seized on land are transported to an airport in Cancún and deported back to Cuba. Others, such as Reinier, are found at sea but eventually released.
Reinier says there seemed to be no logic to who was selected for return to Cuba, and he constantly felt that he might be next for deportation. But five months passed and Reinier remained in Tapachula. When workers from Grupo Beta, a Mexican humanitarian organization, visited the prison, Reinier decided to file a complaint with the group because he was languishing in the jail months after his anticipated release.
Reinier was then taken before an immigration judge at the prison. The judge said that if Reinier withdrew his complaint, he would be allowed to leave. Days later, after a hearty dinner and a night in a $10 hotel, Reinier was on a bus rumbling north through Mexico.
Marisela Campuzano devoted her life to ballet in Cuba. But when the Cuban government sent her to Venezuela on a "mission" to teach budding young ballerinas, Campuzano used the opportunity to escape for the United States.
Campuzano and her husband bought fake passports and attempted to fly out of the country. But Venezuelan immigration officials busted them and confiscated the passports. Then Campuzano tried paying a man who said he had a contact in the U.S. Embassy and could provide a visa for the right price. That plan failed as well.
After losing money a second time, the couple remained in Venezuela until they managed to obtain a legal visa to visit Mexico. After eight years, the couple, along with their young son, took a flight to Reynosa, a border town across from McAllen, and entered the United States.
That was in 2000, when the trend of Cubans crossing the Texas border was about as unique as Mexicans floating to Miami. Customs officials were not versed in Cuban policy, Campuzano says, and her family was told to return to Mexico.
"We would rather go to jail than go back," Campuzano says, "so we made up a story."
Campuzano and her husband told customs officers that they had taken a boat from Cuba to Mexico, and that they had paid smugglers to transport them to the U.S. border. Campuzano pleaded that she could not return to Mexico because she feared for her life.
Customs officials took Campuzano and her husband to a detention facility where they waited for an immigration hearing. After 10 days, they were released, and Campuzano's aunt and uncle brought the family to Houston.
Before 2005, all Cubans were held at detention facilities for weeks at a time until they could be processed, according to Felix Garza, an agent with U.S. Customs and Border Protection. But as spots at the detention facilities started to fill up, and the trickle of Cubans along the border turned into a tide, the Department of Homeland Security changed the policy to allow for almost immediate parole.
Still, some Cubans are detained.
"Once we begin the processing, we do have the authority to make an arrest," says Garza, who oversees border crossings from Del Rio to Brownsville. Garza says that a Cuban could be detained if he is determined to be sick or mentally ill or to have a criminal record.
"The policy on that kind of shifts from day to day," says Jodie Goodwin, an attorney in Harlingen. Goodwin has practiced immigration law along the Texas border for more than a decade and has seen the Cuban boom firsthand. She has represented a number of Cubans detained at the Port Isabel Detention Center in Los Fresnos.
"They're not stupid," she says. "They know they're probably not going to die crossing the bridge in Texas, where who knows floating the 90 miles to Miami."
One of the Cubans that Goodwin represents was detained because he entered the country by swimming the river. When the man made it across, he flagged down a Border Patrol truck and turned himself in.
"I can't figure out why a Cuban would swim the river...but I've actually seen a number of these cases," Goodwin says. "He knew about the policy. He just didn't know about the bridge."
While in detention, Cubans must wait to go before an immigration judge and defend their claims of political asylum. At the Port Isabel center, where Brownsville detainees are taken, that means facing Judge Howard E. Achtsam.
"If you're unfortunate enough to get Judge Achtsam, that means you're probably going to get denied," Goodwin says. "I think he has got to be the only immigration judge in the country that routinely denies asylum for Cubans."
Achtsam, who has served as an immigration judge since 1986, could not be reached for comment. A representative with the U.S. Department of Justice says federal immigration judges do not answer questions from the press. But statistics reveal that in the last two years, every Cuban that has passed through Port Isabel has been denied asylum.
Goodwin's client who swam the river has been detained for four months. The man is still waiting for his asylum hearing. But Achtsam already turned down the man's request for bond. In recent months, the docket at Port Isabel has been so packed that an immigration judge in Washington, D.C., has started hearing cases via video conference. Goodwin is optimistic that her client will not have to face Achtsam again.
"He's going to get another judge and probably going to get his asylum," she says.
But even if a Cuban is denied political asylum, it means little more than an extended stay at the detention facility. Goodwin says that if the asylum is denied again during appeal, policy requires a final review within 90 days. That review usually results in release from detention, only without asylee status.
At that point, however, the Cuban will usually have been in the country for one year, the period of time necessary to qualify for a green card.
"They can't send them back to Cuba. It basically means a lot of wasting of government resources and a lot of wasting of private resources," Goodwin says. "It's all a game. The ultimate end for all Cubans is just to get here and stay."
On a sunny morning in November, a group of Cuban women huddled in the corner of a waiting room at the customs office in Brownsville. Two of the women had dyed their hair a bronzy-blond. Another wore a pair of bright pink Nike Shocks.
Outside, a line of immigrants from other countries waiting to cross the border stretched out of the building and onto the international bridge.
The women, along with two Cuban men, had arrived at the border at midnight and were waiting for a turn to be interviewed by an officer with U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
Cubans are asked a series of questions to determine whether they should be allowed to enter. The interviews take several hours, and unless they are detained, Cubans are given their one-year parole papers the same day they arrive.
While the women wait, customs officers interrogate two Cuban men who arrived with the women. Unlike Rodriguez and Reinier, it's clear that their trip has been immaculately planned and well-financed.
Garza, the customs agent, looks at one of the group suspiciously. He asks the skinny, mustachioed young man named Rolando to empty his pockets. Rolando takes out a leather wallet bulging with $20 bills and a small address book.
While another agent continues the questioning, Garza flips through the notebook, which is filled with phone numbers and details for his trip through Mexico. Garza's eyes widen when he comes to a familiar name.
"Fidelito!" he exclaims. "Do you know Fidelito?" Garza is referring to Fidelito Castro, Fidel's oldest son and ex-head of Cuba's nuclear energy program.
Rolando looks horrified. No, he says, it's not Fidelito Castro; he's only a friend from school.
Garza asks him if Fidel Castro is dead. Rolando shakes his head to answer no.
"When was the last time you saw him alive?"
"About a month ago," Rolando says.
Reinier crossed the Texas border with relative ease, but he was broke.
To pay for his bus fares and traveling expenses, he had taken loans from the relative of a Cuban he met in the Mexican prison. Reinier had promised to pay back the money once he arrived in the United States. At the moment, though, that was the least of his concerns.
After getting parole, Reinier walked to a small park across the street from the customs office in Brownsville. Shade trees provide cover for concrete benches, and recently arrived immigrants often rest in the park or wait for companions. Reinier began asking strangers for advice.
He eventually found his way to a Catholic church in the heart of Brownsville. The church contacted Sister Margaret Mertens, a former Catholic-school teacher from Missouri who now runs a small shelter for refugees about 30 miles north of the border.
After a few weeks at the shelter, Reinier feels stuck. When he stepped aboard the homemade boat and set out for Mexico, he knew it would be the last time that he would ever see Cuba. His sister is still there, along with his wife and child. He misses the place.
Reinier rarely leaves the shelter grounds, which are surrounded by acres of dirt and sugarcane fields, miles from any of the businesses in San Benito or Harlingen that might provide work. He sometimes gets a ride into town from Sister Margaret to go to the bank and cash his government assistance checks (see "The Boss Nun").
Most days, Reinier's either studying English or completing a chore or cooking dinner for other refugees. He's applied for several jobs in surrounding towns but thinks that whites and Mexican-­Americans are suspicious of a black man with a funny Spanish accent.
He's waiting on his immigration hearing to get his official green card. He says he's confused about what's going on most of the time.
"You could put a paper in front of me that says, 'This black guy will be your slave,' and I would sign it," Reinier says, "because I have no idea what I'm ­signing."
On a warm fall evening, Reinier paces across the concrete floors of a building at the shelter. The wire meshing tacked in the window frames does little to keep out the insects. Mosquitoes buzz around the fluorescent lights overhead. A lawn mower and rusty bicycle stand against a wall, and a stack of discarded suitcases leans in one corner.
Another Cuban at the shelter pulls pieces of ham from a refrigerator and talks as he pours a glass of juice.
"While we're here, we can't do anything," the man says. "We're looking for a job to pay bills, to pay rent. It's just like being in Cuba."
But Reinier has some hope. He figures that he can venture out on his own as soon as he learns enough English. He doesn't know much about the Texas away from the border and wants to leave the state so he can find work. He's heard of a place called Kentucky, where he dreams of settling down.
"I have no idea what it's like there," he says, "but it sounds calm and peaceful, with plenty of jobs for Cubans. I think that it's a place where I could raise a family."
For now, Reinier remains in the Valley. The living conditions at the shelter aren't great, Reinier admits, but at least he has a bed to sleep in and food to eat. He's too tired and weary to start a new journey.
The important thing is that he's here, dry foot, in Texas.
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So much pain and suffering, so much hearthbreak has been caused by the Castro regime in Cuba. Now our government is expending so many resources on keeping these refugees--yes, refugees out when the reality is the U.S could easily absorb the islands entire population. We should have an open door for fleeing Cubans, end of story.
Comment by Ziva — January 11, 2008 @ 09:35PM