Pérez had arrived from Cuba that day with a visa granted by the U.S. Interests Section in Havana to visit her husband, Gerardo Hernández, who is imprisoned at the federal penitentiary in Lompoc, California.

After holding Pérez for 11 hours and interrogating her, the INS revoked her visa and forced her to return to Cuba. In the process, federal agents separated Pérez from the Cuban consular official who accompanied her, holding her incommunicado. Despite having all travel documents in order, the young Cuban woman, who has not seen her husband in four years, was summarily deported.

Gerardo Hernández is serving a double life sentence after being convicted by a federal court in Miami in June 2001 on frame-up conspiracy charges concocted by the FBI. The revolutionary inmate is one of five Cuban patriots serving long sentences on similar charges. These included conspiracy to act as an unregistered agent of a foreign power and to commit espionage for the government of Cuba.

Cuban TV held a July 29 roundtable to inform the Cuban people of the events in Houston and to denounce the deportation of Pérez. Panelists pointed out the cruelty of Washington’s action. U.S. authorities had granted Pérez the visa in April and had until July 24 to revoke it, they reported, which they did not do. Instead they turned her back after she landed in Houston. Earlier this year, U.S. authorities also revoked a visa they had issued for Olga Salanueva, the wife of René González, another of the five Cuban revolutionaries. This action stopped Salanueva and her daughter from visiting her husband, who is imprisoned in Bradford, Pennsylvania. Washington had deported Salanueva to Cuba during the 2001 trial of her husband.  
 
 
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