Christopher Coen
Melissa Sogard
nancylee1
The family of renowned Cuban dissident Orlando Zapata Tamayo, who died last year while on a hunger strike, are on their way to Miami for resettlement. The State Department has assigned them to the International Rescue Committee according to a BBC report.
The family of renowned Cuban dissident Orlando Zapata Tamayo, who died last year on hunger strike, have left their country for the US with his ashes.
Thirteen family members were due on a flight from Havana to Miami on Thursday, his mother said. Airport officials said they had arrived.
The family had earlier received visas allowing them to emigrate to the US.
Zapata was 42 when he died in February 2010 after an 85-day hunger strike demanding better prison conditions.
He was the first Cuban activist to starve himself to death in protest in nearly 40 years, and his death drew international condemnation…
…The International Rescue Committee in Miami, which assists refugees, said the family would be settled in four apartments and given food and clothing… Read more here
Checking our State Department monitoring reports page I see that the most recent monitoring of the Miami IRC office occurred in 2002. Yet, the Admissions Office claims to have given us every monitoring report from 1999 to 2008.
The 2002 report indicates that monitors found that the IRC was not visiting refugees at home within the first 30 days as required, and that refugee clients still did not have food stamps more than a month after being resettled. The office also had a very low 90-day employment rate for refugees – 39%.
Refugee home visits revealed that none of the 3 families visited had signed a lease with their landlord. Monitors found a refugee family of four crowded into a one-bedroom apartment. The mother and father slept in the kitchen on a small cot from the janitor’s closet in the hallway. It also appeared from case notes that the IRC did not visit the parents or younger son until just one-day before the older son’s arrival in the US. Another refugee family reported that they had been in the US for over a month yet still did not have food stamps. A third refugee family had only been in the US for four months, yet they received a notice that their food stamps would be cut off. IRC Miami staff seemed to be “unaware” of the family’s problems.
