Cubans in Dramatic Bid For Asylum

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The New York Sun

LAS VEGAS – Forty-three members of a Cuban dance troupe performing at a Las Vegas casino asked for asylum in America yesterday in the one of the biggest mass defections of entertainers from the communist country.


Members of the cast said they took the step because they feared they would be forced to quit performing if they returned to Havana. They said Cuban authorities did not want them to perform in America in the first place.


“They were forced into this,” Nicole Durr, the German creator of the Havana Night Club show, said of the dancers, singers, musicians, and stagehands. “We will continue our work.”


The performers arrived by bus at the federal courthouse in Las Vegas, where they submitted the paperwork for asylum.


There was no immediate reaction from Fidel Castro’s communist government.


For more than 40 years, Cuban refugees have routinely been given asylum in America. Applicants usually receive a response in less than two months.


Seven other cast members now in Germany had applied earlier and were granted American asylum yesterday, said Pamela Falk, a City University of New York professor advising the troupe. They were expected to arrive in Las Vegas today, she said. At least two cast members have decided to return to Cuba, and one was wavering, Ms. Falk said.


Group members slowly entered the country months ago and performed in Las Vegas from August 21 to September 6, with a short encore engagement last month.The troupe’s show was due to reopen yesterday at the Stardust Resort and Casino and run until January 11.


In July, promoters complained that Cuban officials were not backing the group’s first planned trip to America, although the troupe had made 16 other trips to countries such as Japan and Germany.


Cuban authorities said they did not support the effort because they did not believe the United States would grant visas – especially since it rejected a similar request in February. However, America did grant the visas.


But Ms. Durr said that when the show’s members decided to come to Las Vegas, the Cuban government threatened to make life unpleasant upon their return.


Ms. Durr also said she was thrown out of Cuba and told she could never return, and said that was part of the reason the cast members decided to leave Cuba.


“We’ve been together for more than six years,” she said. “We are like a family.”


Joe Garcia, an official with the Cuban American National Foundation, an anti-Castro group in Miami, said: “Cuba had sort of warned these guys. They basically broke up the group.”


In 1993, about 34 Cuban athletes defected to Puerto Rico during a tournament, 16 members of a traveling dance troupe remained in Spain, and 10 members of a Havana university choir performing in Venezuela stayed behind. That same year, Cuban singer Albita Rodriguez and her band defected to America.


Perhaps the best-known Cuban defector in the late 1990s was baseball pitcher Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez, who defected in 1997. He established residency in Costa Rica and signed with the New York Yankees in 1998.


In 2003, five dancers with the National Ballet of Cuba slipped away during an American tour and asked for asylum.


The New York Sun

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