They fight to revisit home
Cubans in Vt. sue US over 3-year travel restriction
WESTFORD, Vt. - Through tears at a sun-bleached airport in Cuba, she promised her ailing grandparents she would not be gone for long. Soon she would return with her new American husband for their blessing.
But after Yurisleidis Leyva Mora landed in America in 2006, she was stunned to discover that the Bush administration's tightened travel restrictions barred her from returning to Cuba for three years.
She worried that her grandparents might not live that long, so Leyva Mora and her law student husband sought their own solution: They spearheaded a lawsuit against the federal government, saying the restrictions violate their constitutional rights and discriminate against people of Cuban descent.
Testimony in their love-story-turned-lawsuit begins today with a hearing in federal court in Burlington, and it is drawing attention from Cuban exiles in Miami and nationwide as the first legal challenge to the restrictions adopted in 2004.
The four plaintiffs, who also include a music teacher and a school superintendent who fled Cuba in the 1960s, say the lawsuit is about family, not politics.
"It shouldn't be this way in this country," Leyva Mora's husband, Jared K. Carter, a third-year student at Vermont Law School, said in an interview. "When the government's in the business of interfering with families, there better be constitutional ramifications, if the Constitution stands for anything."
The US Justice Department has urged the court to dismiss the lawsuit, saying it is baseless and interferes with foreign policy. Department officials did not respond to requests for comment, but in court documents they said the plaintiffs have no constitutional right to travel abroad.
The lawsuit has thrust this rural state with a socialist streak and miles of loamy farmlands into the center of the contentious debate over US-Cuban relations, which more typically simmers in the courtrooms and coffeehouses of exile epicenters like Miami. The economic embargo against Cuba is nearly 50 years old, but from 1999 to 2004 the US government allowed Cuban-Americans to visit an extended web of relatives at least once a year.
In 2004, under pressure from hard-line Cuban exiles who wanted to stem the flow of dollars to Cuba, President Bush limited visits to every three years and to immediate family only, excluding aunts, uncles, and cousins.
Supporters of the lawsuit reflect the complexities of today's debate over Cuba: The American Civil Liberties Union in Massachusetts, Florida, and Vermont and the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York have signed on to support the lawsuit. But the Cuban American National Foundation, a foe of the Cuban government, also praises the effort.
Francisco Hernandez, the Miami foundation's 71-year-old president and a dissident who said he would be thrown in jail if he returned to Cuba, called the restrictions absurd because family visits could promote democracy in Cuba. But he said with a sigh that Vermont might be a safer place for the debate than southern Florida.
"It probably is better that it happened this way," he said. "It has a much better chance in someplace like Vermont."
In the lawsuit, Leyva Mora, 23; Carter, 27; and two others, 51-year-old school superintendent Armando Vilaseca and 49-year-old Maricel Lucero Keniston, a music teacher, say the restrictions are ripping apart families.
In an interview at Vilaseca's farmhouse in Westford, a tiny town of dandelion-dotted fields near the Canadian border, Leyva Mora said she was unaware of the travel restrictions when she left Contramaestre, Cuba, in April 2006 to marry Carter in the United States. The two had met on a beach in Cuba; she was working at the carnival, and he was researching national parks for a nonprofit. After a whirlwind courtship, they fell in love and planned to marry.
It took more than a year for Carter to bring her to the United States, where they married and planned to return to Cuba to renew their vows. But when they sat down late last year at their computer to apply online for US government permission to visit Cuba, a warning flashed that recent visitors were banned for three years.
Instead, they will throw a wedding at the end of July in Maine, his home state, and perhaps send a video to Cuba. His mother and sister helped her pick out a wedding dress.
In Cuba, her mother and sister are heartbroken. She can afford to call them only once a month. She mailed them pictures of her in the dress, but mail takes a month to arrive. "I feel very alone here," she said.
The couple have decided against exchanging wedding rings until they can marry before her family in Cuba.
For Cubans who arrived in the United States long ago, the 2004 travel restrictions are straining family relationships that they had only just begun to rekindle.
Maricel Lucero Keniston - who lives in Springfield, Vt., and sings in a band called Black Beans - went home in 1997 for the first time since she was 10 to visit relatives she left behind in Santiago de Cuba.
"All these memories just came flooding back at me," she said. "I cried all the way home."
Vilaseca, superintendent of Franklin West School District, was born in Cuba and raised in a vehemently anti-Castro household in New Jersey. He moved to Vermont for college, married, and decided to make it his home.
But after decades of negative stories about Cuba, Vilaseca decided in 1999 that he wanted to see it for himself. His father warned his son that the government would try to brainwash him.
Instead, Vilaseca said, he found the family he had left behind in 1964, when he was 8 and boarded a flight with his parents to Miami. An aunt and cousins welcomed him into their homes, told him stories about his parents' wedding. "They took me in, like families do," he said.
Both Vilaseca and Lucero Keniston were struck by their families' urgent need for supplies and felt compelled to help after they left. Vilaseca sends about $1,000 to relatives a year, to help build a roof on his aunt's home, to aid his godson and his cousins. Lucero Keniston brings relatives bottles of vitamins, aspirin, and packages of Alka-Seltzer when she can visit.
The last time Vilaseca went to Cuba was last year. By then, his aunt Gladys Casdelo was dying of cancer. He hoped to visit again, but just in case, they said goodbye.
A month after they filed the lawsuit, she died. 