Haiti's neighbors pull back the welcome mat

[unhappycamper]

Haiti's neighbors pull back the welcome mat
By Frances Robles, McClatchy Newspapers
Stars and Stripes online edition, Sunday, May 16, 2010

PORT ANTONIO, Jamaica — Emmanuel Geurrier and 30 fellow Haitian quake survivors took to the sea last month with pretty much any port in mind.

"In Haiti, people are sleeping in the street and in the roadside, and I don't want to stay in a country where I have to live like a dog," he said last week, while in immigration custody in Jamaica. "I took a boat and said, 'I go anywhere!' Then I see Jamaica.

"Maybe I can stay."

On Sunday, three days after speaking to The Miami Herald about the challenges of living in Haiti after the quake, Geurrier was sent home. He is one of hundreds of Haitians who have landed on Caribbean shores in the four months since a 7.0-magnitude earthquake rattled the nation, killing an estimated 300,000 and displacing some 1.3 million people.

And while nations such as Jamaica and the Bahamas initially announced compassionate gestures toward their Caribbean neighbor, the welcome mat has been yanked. Fearing a deluge of Haitian migrants, Jamaica and the Bahamas — like the United States — have renewed repatriation policies for migrants captured at sea that were in place before the quake.

[malaise]

1. It is heartbreaking

but never mind we're in the process of demanding the resignation of the Prime Minister.

[Billy Burnett]

2. The US Coast Guard is preventing Haitians from getting to Cuba - where they wouldn't be deported.

On Tuesday, the Coast Guard repatriated an overloaded vessel in international waters north of Cuba which carried 105 Haitians.

This is not a new move by the USCG. They've been doing this since the US backed coup against Aristide.

Haitians have long been taken in and well cared for in Cuba, and the Cuban gov has promised not to repatriate Haitians unless they want to be.