Weekly Report - 15 August 2013 (WR-13-32)

THE BAHAMAS-CUBA | Concern over treatment of Cuban migrants. On 8 August the foreign minister of The Bahamas, Fred Mitchell, paid a visit to Havana along with the national security minister, Bernard Nottage, where he met Cuba’s acting foreign minister, Marcelino Medina González, to discuss bilateral issues. Full details of the meeting were not disclosed but it came amid renewed international concern over the treatment of migrants at the Bahamian Carmichael Road Immigrant Detention Centre. This was fanned by the release of a video broadcast on 2 August by the Miami-based Spanish-language television channel, América TeVé, supposedly taken by a Cuban detainee with a hidden mobile phone, in which a Bahamian guard is shown kicking Cuban migrants. This prompted Cuban-American US legislators Ileana Ros-Lehtinen (R-FL), Albio Sires (D-NJ) and Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL) to send a letter on 2 August to the US State Department “requesting the State Department convey to the government of The Bahamas the necessity of ensuring the safety and well-being of Cuban detainees currently detained”. Since then, on 11 August, the Panamanian government announced it would grant asylum on humanitarian grounds to 19 Cubans currently detained in The Bahamas.

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