Cuban migrants receive unique benefits in the US

Updated 08 February 2013
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Cuban migrants receive unique benefits in the US

ALL ANA SOTO had to do to gain entry to the United States at the Texas-Mexico border in 2008 was show her Cuban identity card and birth certificate.
Soto has since brought her husband from Cuba, reunited with her parents in Miami and got an accounting job — building a dream life thanks to one of the most generous US immigration laws: the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act.
“I had no future in Cuba. My life, and my entire family’s life has changed for the better thanks to the Adjustment Act,” said Soto, 24.
Those who follow in Soto’s footsteps may not be so fortunate. As the US Congress takes up immigration reform, the special status of Cuban emigres is being called into question by critics, who say the CAA is a costly and anachronistic Cold War relic that should be abolished.
The issue has gained urgency after a relaxing of travel restrictions by both Cuba and the United States that has led to a dramatic increase in the number of Cubans traveling between the two countries. Soto herself has returned to Cuba a dozen times, on the last occasion to visit her dying grandmother.
Last month Cuba ended its practice of requiring an exit permit to leave the island, and said all Cubans could obtain a passport, potentially increasing the exodus.
Even traditional defenders of the CAA in the nation’s large Cuban American community, concentrated mostly in South Florida, say the law is out-dated and may need adjusting.
“I’m not sure we’re going to be able to avoid, as part of any comprehensive approach to immigration, a conversation about the Cuban Adjustment Act,” Florida’s Republican Senator Marco Rubio, a son of Cuban immigrants, told reporters last month.
Rubio, one of eight senators pushing for bipartisan immigration reform, said the CAA was intended to protect refugees fleeing an oppressive regime but an increasing number of Cuban exiles were traveling to and from Cuba on family vacations and business trips, undermining the justification for the act.
“It’s becoming increasingly difficult to justify it to my colleagues,” said Rubio.
Cuban immigrants are just a sliver of the roughly one million foreign-born nationals who become legal permanent US residents each year and their fate might seem small compared to the 11 million estimated to be in the United States illegally. But as a touchstone of American freedom, they play an outsized role in the nation’s politics.
As such, the CAA is unlikely to be thrown out entirely, analysts say, but it could well be tightened to limit eligibility to genuine victims of political persecution in Cuba.
“There is going to be a discussion and there are going to be changes, but how far they will go nobody knows,” said Jaime Suchlicki, director of the Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies at the University of Miami. “There is no reason now for Cubans to have preference in the immigration line,” he added.
The reform could also mark the end of the controversial ‘wet foot, dry foot’ policy, coined after the 1994 Cuban rafter crisis, that allows entry to undocumented Cubans who reach US soil (‘dry foot’) either by home-made rafts or smuggler ‘go-fast’ boats, as well as thousands who show up each year at the Mexico border. Others intercepted at sea (‘wet foot’) are repatriated.
Cuban immigration has become a deeply divisive issue in Miami’s exile community in recent years. Unlike older exiles who left Cuba in the 1960s with their entire families and vow never to return until the ruling Communist Party is ousted, newer arrivals in Miami retain close family ties on the island.
“It’s not an exile community anymore,” said Philip Peters, a Cuba expert at the Lexington Institute, a Virginia thinktank.
Around 327,000 Cubans have emigrated to the United States in the last 10 years, more than in any previous decade since Cuba’s 1959 revolution, Peters said.
A survey of visa applicants in 2009 by the State Department, which was published by Wikileaks, noted: “Overwhelmingly, applicants appear motivated to leave Cuba due to economic and family reasons.”
Travel restrictions are now so loose that a top Cuban baseball pitcher, Jose Contreras, recently visited the island without incident. A decade earlier he was excoriated as a mercenary by Communist officials for defecting from Cuba’s national team and signing with the New York Yankees for $ 32 million.
An estimated 476,000 Cuban Americans visited the island last year according to a Miami consumer research firm, The Havana Consulting Group. That was more than double the number in 2007.
Under the CAA, Cubans receive unique and highly favorable treatment, including granting of permanent residency a year after arrival, as well as being eligible for government benefits, such as Medicaid, supplemental social security income, child care, and disability.
No other foreign nationals enjoy these benefits except for the few who are granted political asylum.
The CAA was passed in 1966 to adjust the status of some 300,000 Cubans who found themselves in legal limbo after fleeing Cuba’s socialist revolution of 1959. Cuba has railed against it.
These days an average of about 36,000-40,000 Cubans arrive each year. Many are selected by a visa lottery, others come under a family reunification program and there are a handful of political asylum cases. Roughly 10,000 arrive without visas each year, smuggled by boat or via the border with Mexico.

Being Cuban is so advantageous it has spawned its own form of identity fraud. Last year federal agents busted a ring that sold almost 50 fake Cuban birth certificates for up to $ 15,000 apiece to undocumented immigrants from Latin America so they could obtain green cards.
According to an estimate by the University of Miami’s Institute for Cuban and Cuban-American Studies, the cost of public benefits provided to Cuban immigrants was $ 322 million in 2008.
“Everybody knows they are economic refugees and have been for a long time,” said Vivian Mannerud, president of Airline Brokers, a Miami travel agency that books flights to Cuba.
“We cannot keep giving all the benefits to people coming from Cuba who have not paid a penny into the system, especially at a time when Congress is talking about taking benefits from people who have been paying into the system for years,” added Mannerud, who is of Cuban descent.
Support for the CAA is still strong among many exiles who say the conditions that led to the CAA in the first place, including repression in Cuba, still exist.
Even though many newer exiles may be economic migrants “the economy is part of politics in Cuba,” said Humberto Rodriguez, 67, who came to Miami from Cuba in 1983 and operates a one-man home repair business. “The Cuban economy is a product of the communist political system, so everyone is persecuted in that sense,” he said.
Immigration experts note that if that were the definition of political asylum, rather than specific persecution for political or religious beliefs, residents of any poor, misgoverned country would be eligible.
Soto is rooting for the CAA to survive. “I have to think of all the other people in Cuba who deserve the same opportunity that I had,” she said.
Like many young Cubans, she left Cuba because she saw no professional future for herself in the communist system after she graduated. Her father, 49, a skilled English-speaking mechanical engineer, was working in Cuba’s black market doing odd jobs as a carpenter to make ends meet. In Miami, he quickly found a job as a supervisor in an auto parts factory.
“He’s so happy now,” she said.


Russell Brand pleads not guilty to charges of rape and sexual assault in London court

Updated 30 May 2025
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Russell Brand pleads not guilty to charges of rape and sexual assault in London court

  • Brand denied two counts of rape, two counts of sexual assault and one count of indecent assault
  • He said “not guilty” after each charge was read in Southwark Crown Court

LONDON: Actor and comedian Russell Brand pleaded not guilty in a London court Friday to rape and sexual assault charges involving four women dating back more than 25 years.

Brand, who turns 50 next week, denied two counts of rape, two counts of sexual assault and one count of indecent assault. He said “not guilty” after each charge was read in Southwark Crown Court.

His trial was scheduled for June 3, 2026 and is expected to last four to five weeks.

Prosecutors said that the offenses took place between 1999 and 2005 — one in the English seaside town of Bournemouth and the other three in London.

Brand didn’t speak to reporters as he arrived at court wearing dark sunglasses, a suit jacket, a black collared shirt open below his chest and black jeans. In his right hand, he clutched a copy of the “The Valley of Vision,” a collection of Puritan prayers.

The “Get Him To The Greek” actor known for risqué stand-up routines, battles with drugs and alcohol, has dropped out of the mainstream media in recent years and built a large following online with videos mixing wellness and conspiracy theories, as well as discussing religion.

On a five-minute prayer video he posted Monday on social media, Brand wrote: “Jesus, thank you for saving my life.”

When the charges were announced last month, he said that he welcomed the opportunity to prove his innocence.

“I was a fool before I lived in the light of the Lord,” he said in a social media video. “I was a drug addict, a sex addict and an imbecile. But what I never was a rapist. I’ve never engaged in nonconsensual activity. I pray that you can see that by looking in my eyes.”

Brand is accused of raping a woman at a hotel room in Bournemouth when she attended a 1999 Labour Party conference and met him at an event where he was performing. The woman alleged that Brand stripped while she was in the bathroom and when she returned to the room he pushed her on the bed, removed her clothes and raped her.

A second woman said that Brand grabbed her forearm and attempted to drag her into a men’s toilet at a television station in London in 2001.

The third accuser was a television employee who met Brand at a birthday party in a bar in 2004, where he allegedly grabbed her breasts before pulling her into a toilet and forcing himself on her.

The final accuser worked at a radio station and met Brand while he was working on a spin-off of the “Big Brother” reality television program between 2004 and 2005. She said Brand grabbed her by the face with both hands, pushed her against a wall and kissed her before groping her breasts and buttocks.

The Associated Press doesn’t name victims of alleged sexual violence, and British law protects their identity from the media for life.


Tate brothers will return to UK to face charges after Romanian legal proceedings, lawyers say

Updated 30 May 2025
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Tate brothers will return to UK to face charges after Romanian legal proceedings, lawyers say

LONDON: Internet personality Andrew Tate and his brother Tristan will return to Britain to face criminal charges once separate legal proceedings in Romania have been concluded, a lawyer for the siblings said.
Britain’s Crown Prosecution Service confirmed earlier this week that it had previously authorized charges against the brothers including rape, actual bodily harm and human trafficking.
The Tates are facing a separate criminal investigation in Romania over trafficking allegations, and the courts there have already approved their extradition to the UK.
The brothers have denied all the allegations.
“Once those proceedings are concluded in their entirety then The Tates will return to face UK allegations,” Holborn Adams, the law firm representing the brothers, said in a statement on Thursday.
Andrew Tate, a self-described misogynist who has gained millions of fans by promoting an ultra-masculine lifestyle, separately faces a civil lawsuit in Britain, which has been brought by four women and is due to go to trial in 2027.


Ex-assistant testifies Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs sexually assaulted her and used violence to get his way

Updated 30 May 2025
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Ex-assistant testifies Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs sexually assaulted her and used violence to get his way

  • “I was going to die with this. I didn’t want anyone to know ever.”

NEW YORK: Sean “Diddy” Combs ‘ former personal assistant testified Thursday that the hip-hop mogul sexually assaulted her, threw her into a swimming pool, dumped a bucket of ice on her and slammed a door against her arm during a torturous eight-year tenure.
The woman, testifying at Combs’ sex trafficking trial under the pseudonym “Mia,” said Combs put his hand up her dress and forcibly kissed her at his 40th birthday party in 2009, forced her to perform oral sex while she helped him pack for a trip and raped her in guest quarters at his Los Angeles home in 2010 after climbing into her bed.
“I couldn’t tell him ‘no’ about anything,” Mia said, telling jurors she felt “terrified and confused and ashamed and scared” when Combs raped her. The assaults, she said, were unpredictable: “always random, sporadic, so oddly spaced out where I would think they would never happen again.”
If she hadn’t been called to testify, Mia said, “I was going to die with this. I didn’t want anyone to know ever.”
Speaking slowly and haltingly, Mia portrayed Combs as a controlling taskmaster who put his desires above the wellbeing of staff and loved ones. She said Combs berated her for mistakes, even ones other employees made, and piled on so many tasks she didn’t sleep for days.
“It was chaotic. It was toxic,” said Mia, who worked for Combs from 2009 to 2017, including a stint as an executive at his film studio. “It could be exciting. The highs were really high and the lows were really low.”
Asked what determined how her days would unfold, Mia said: “Puff’s mood,” using one of his many nicknames.
Mia said employees were always on edge because Combs’ mood could change “in a split second” causing everything to go from “happy to chaotic.” She said Combs once threw a computer at her when he couldn’t get a Wi-Fi connection.
Her testimony echoed that of Combs’ other personal assistants and his longtime girlfriend Cassie, who said he was demanding, mercurial and prone to violence. She is the second of three women testifying that Combs sexually abused them.
Cassie, an R&B singer whose legal name is Casandra Ventura, testified for four days during the trial’s first week, telling jurors Combs subjected her to hundreds of “freak-offs” — drug-fueled marathons in which she said she engaged in sex acts with male sex workers while Combs watched, filmed and coached them.
A third woman, “Jane,” is expected to testify about participating in freak-offs. Judge Arun Subramanian has permitted some of Combs’ sexual abuse accusers to testify under pseudonyms for their privacy and safety.
The Associated Press does not identify people who say they’re victims of sexual abuse unless they choose to make their names public, as Cassie has done.
Combs, 55, has pleaded not guilty to sex trafficking and racketeering charges. His lawyers concede he could be violent, but he denies using threats or his clout to commit abuse.
Mia testified that she saw Combs beat Cassie numerous times, detailing a brutal assault at Cassie’s Los Angeles home in 2013 that the singer and her longtime stylist Deonte Nash also recounted in their testimony. Mia said she was terrified Combs was going to kill them all, describing the melee as “a little tornado.”
The witness recalled jumping on Combs’ back in an attempt to stop him from hurting Nash and Cassie. Mia said Combs threw her into a wall and slammed Cassie’s head into a bed corner, causing a deep, bloody gash on the singer’s forehead. Other times, she said, Combs’ abuse caused Cassie black eyes and fat lips.
Mia said Combs sometimes had her working for up to five days at a time without rest as he hopped from city to city for club appearances and other engagements, and she started relying on her ADHD medication, the stimulant Adderall, as a sleep substitute.
Combs, with residences in Miami, Los Angeles and the New York area, let Mia and other employees stay in his guest houses — but she wasn’t allowed to leave without his permission and couldn’t lock the doors, she testified.
“This is my house. No one locks my doors,” Combs said, according to Mia.
Mia didn’t appear to make eye contact with Combs, who sat back in his chair and looked forward, sometimes with his hands folded in front him, as she testified. Occasionally, he leaned over to speak with one of his lawyers or donned glasses to read exhibits. Mia kept her head down as she left the courtroom for breaks.
She testified that she remains friends with Cassie.


Rescued giant moths emerge from cocoons in Mexico’s sprawling capital

Updated 30 May 2025
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Rescued giant moths emerge from cocoons in Mexico’s sprawling capital

MEXICO CITY: Two moths the size of a hand, their wings patterned with brown and pink around four translucent sections, mate for hours hanging from a line alongside cocoons like the ones they emerged from just hours earlier.
“When I get here and find this, I jump with delight,” said María Eugenia Díaz Batres, who has been caring for insects at the Museum of Natural History and Environmental Culture in Mexico City for nearly six decades.
The mating pair of “four mirrors” moths as they’re popularly known in Mexico, or scientifically as Rothschildia orizaba, are evidence that the museum’s efforts to save some 2,600 cocoons rescued from an empty lot were worth the trouble.


The moths, whose numbers have fallen in Mexico City due to urbanization, have cultural relevance in Mexico.
“The Aztecs called them the ‘butterfly of obsidian knives,’ Itzpapalotl,” Díaz Batres said. “And in northern Mexico they’d fill many of these cocoons with little stones and put them on their ankles for dances.”
These cocoons arrived at the museum in late December.
“They gave them to us in a bag and in a box, all squeezed together with branches and leaves, so my first mission was to take them out, clean them,” Díaz Batres said.
Mercedes Jiménez, director of the museum in the capital’s Chapultepec park, said that’s when the real adventure began since they had never received anything like this before.
Díaz Batres had the cocoons hung in any place she thought they might do well, including her office where they hang from lines crisscrossing above her table. It has allowed her to watch each stage of their development closely.


The moths only survive for a week or two as adults, but they give Díaz Batres tremendous satisfaction, especially when she arrives at her office and new moths “are at the door, on the computer.”
So she tries to help them “complete their mission” and little by little their species recovers.


US supercomputer named after Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna to power AI and scientific research

Updated 30 May 2025
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US supercomputer named after Nobel laureate Jennifer Doudna to power AI and scientific research

  • Dell Technologies contracted with the energy department to build the computer
  • Not clear yet how the computer will rank on the listing of the world’s fastest supercomputers

BERKELEY, California: A new supercomputer named after a winner of the Nobel Prize in chemistry will help power artificial intelligence technology and scientific discoveries from a perch in the hills above the University of California, Berkeley, federal officials said Thursday.
US Energy Secretary Chris Wright announced the project Thursday alongside executives from computer maker Dell Technologies and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.
The new computing system at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory will be called Doudna after Berkeley professor and biochemist Jennifer Doudna, who won a Nobel in 2020 for her work on the gene-editing technology CRISPR. It’s due to switch on next year.
“One of the key use cases will be genomics research,” said Dion Harris, a product executive in Nvidia’s AI and high-performance computing division, in an interview. “It was basically just a nod to her contributions to the field.”
Dell is contracted with the energy department to build the computer, the latest to be housed at Berkeley Lab’s National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center. Previous computers there have been named after other Nobel winners: Saul Perlmutter, an astrophysicist, and Gerty Cori, a biochemist.
It’s not clear yet how the computer will rank on the TOP500 listing of the world’s fastest supercomputers. The current top-ranked computer is El Capitan, located about an hour’s drive away at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. That’s followed by other supercomputers at US national labs in Tennessee and Illinois.