Cuban doctors bribed officials to defect via Venezuela

[Bacchus4.0]

http://www.eluniversal.com/2010/01/08/en_pol_esp_cuban-doctors-bribed_08A3266017.shtml

About 200 Cuban doctors serving on aid mission Barrio Adentro defected in 2009 to the United States

After bribing Venezuelan and Cuban staff who work as immigration officers at Maiquetía airport (16 miles north of Caracas), seven Cuban doctors serving on aid mission Barrio Adentro arrived Wednesday in Miami.

The defectors, who were seeking to fly to Miami, were briefly detained at the airport, and paid USD 5,200 to have their passports stamped and be allowed to board a flight bound to the United States. "We collected money among the seven doctors who were detained and we finally managed to travel," Jesús Peralta, 26, one of the defectors, told El Nuevo Herald newspaper.

The group of three women and four men were held by the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), while they regularize their situation. The other defectors, besides Peralta, are physicians Lorenzo Toriza, Yessenia Martínez and Jesús Badillo.

Peralta and Toriza said that they were held when they were trying to board an American Airlines flight at 6 am on Tuesday. They explained that after being interrogated by officials of the Cuban Embassy in Caracas, who "subjected them to psychological pressure for more than 12 hours," they were released. When the group of physicians returned to the airport to try to leave the country, the officers asked them if they had enough dollars to pay the stamping of passports.



p.s. Note that Mika only knows a few of those who defected, and these are numbers from just one year.