CARACAS, Venezuela -- (AP) -- Two Cuban doctors who came to Venezuela
to
help in relief efforts after deadly landslides have requested
political asylum,
officials said Monday.
The doctors arrived in Venezuela in mid-December as part of a
team of 100
Cubans who treated victims of landslides that officials estimated
left between
5,000 and 30,000 people dead.
Many of the Cubans have stayed on to continue providing health
care in the worst
hit part of the disaster zone along Venezuela's northern Caribbean
coast.
The two doctors, Heberto Navarro, 38, and Reinaldo Calebrook,
35, spoke at a
press conference Monday and said they wanted to emigrate to improve
their
standard of living. They also praised the political freedoms
Venezuelans enjoy.
Navarro said the $25 a month he earned in Cuba wasn't enough to
support his five
children.
The two doctors said several other Cuban doctors also were planning
to request
political asylum, but had not formally done so.
The doctors' request to remain in Venezuela presents a dilemma
for President
Hugo Chavez, who is close friends with Cuban leader Fidel Castro
and often
praises Castro's communist revolution.
Granting the doctors political asylum would in effect be recognizing
that there is
political repression in Cuba. But returning them to the island
could also subject
them to harassment or imprisonment, since they criticized the
Castro regime in
Venezuela.
Venezuelan Foreign Minister Jose Vicente Rangel told The Associated
Press that
Chavez's friendship with Castro would not affect a decision on
the doctors'
request, which he said would be handled according to established
procedure.
The doctors' request also was likely to prove embarrassing for
Cuba. Instead of
trying to export revolution throughout the Third World the way
it did in recent
decades, Cuba has taken to sending doctors and teachers overseas
to
demonstrate what Cuban officials say are the revolution's achievements
in health
care and education.
Copyright 2000 Miami Herald