Vol. 72/No. 1      January 7, 2008

The December 4 agreement also stipulates that Izquierdo may not return with his daughter to Cuba until May 2010. The foster family was granted 52 days of visitation rights a year.

The U.S. government’s hostility toward the Cuban Revolution marked the case from the outset. During the custody trial this fall, Judge Jeri Cohen declared, “The United States is reluctant to repatriate a child to a communist country.”

The child’s mother came to Miami in March 2005 with her two children after winning a visa lottery. Florida’s Department of Children and Families (DCF) took custody of the children in December of that year after the mother attempted suicide.

After notifying Izquierdo in Cuba that his daughter was in state care, DCF placed the children in foster care in the home of Joe and Maria Cubas in 2006. Sports agent Joe Cubas is known for attempts to recruit Cuban baseball players to defect to the United States.

Izquierdo applied for a visa to travel to Miami in July 2006 to gain custody of his daughter. The U.S. State Department resisted granting the visa until May 2007.

DCF charged that Izquierdo was unfit to raise his daughter. It argued that the father was guilty of neglect and abandonment for allowing the child to migrate to the United States with a mentally unstable mother, and it claimed he refused to take an interest in his daughter’s welfare once she was in Miami.

After dragged-out proceedings, in September the judge ruled that Izquierdo was fit to raise his child. But then she opened a second trial on whether the girl would be emotionally “endangered” by returning to Cuba with her father. Izquierdo agreed to the compromise settlement after the appellate court refused to hear whether the second trial was necessary.

Asked how he felt about having to stay in the United States 30 months before returning to Cuba with his daughter, Izquierdo said, “There’s many things that you have to suffer through in order to achieve what you want, but life is that way.”
 
 
Related articles:
Cuba and the African struggle against imperialism
Luis Miranda, five decades of organizing support for Cuban Revolution in U.S.
Int’l labor conference boosts effort for release of Cuban Five  
 
 
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