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US Federal, state and local authorities Joint drill set to prepare for exodus from Caribbean

March 3, 2007

Federal, state and local authorities are preparing to dispatch boats, planes and hundreds of emergency personnel in a two-day drill aimed at preventing a mass migration to Florida.

The full-scale exercise, planned for Wednesday and Thursday, follows a December tabletop drill. But Coast Guard officials were quick Friday to stress that the recent power change in Cuba did not prompt the dry run, which will involve dozens of agencies in Broward, Miami-Dade and Monroe counties.

"The timing of this year's exercise in no way reflects concern over recent events in Cuba," Coast Guard officials said in a press release. "In fact the mass migration plan does not focus on any single country; rather it addresses mass migration from any Caribbean nation."

Coast Guard officials were referring to Cuban President Fidel Castro's decision in July to hand power to his brother Raul before undergoing emergency surgery.

Coast Guard spokesman Dana Warr said Cuba was not the only country in the region from which the United States could expect a flow of people. Haiti, with its rampant kidnapping and unsteady path to democracy is also a country on officials' radar, along with the Dominican Republic.

The Coast Guard has picked up 823 Dominicans so far in the fiscal year that began Oct. 1, compared with 621 Cubans and 267 Haitians.

The drill will involve 50 government agencies and will take emergency crews through a myriad of scenarios, including medical evacuations and interdictions. It will also train crews on how to process an influx of people and to deter them from coming in the first place.

Federal Homeland Security officials and Florida emergency management authorities will join local police and health officials, Warr said.

Jaime Suchlicki, director of the Institute for Cuban and Cuban American Studies at the University of Miami, said there was no denying Castro's health problems had added a sense of urgency to exercises like the ones planned for next week. But he said it was unlikely that a Cuban migration would be large enough to overwhelm U.S.-based authorities.

Suchlicki's institute estimates there are only enough boats in Cuba to bring 25,000 to 30,000 people to Florida.

Those figures fall short of the 125,000 Cubans who arrived during the 1980 Mariel boatlift, which saw 125,000 immigrants crossing the Florida Straits.

He predicted authorities would impound boats and slap heavy fines on smugglers to discourage Cuban-Americans from trying to fetch relatives from the communist island, as they did in 1980.

"In order to have a mass migration, Raul Castro has to say to the Cubans, `Go,' and the U.S. government has to look the other way and let Cubans go pick up family members," Suchlicki said. "That's unlikely."

More likely is that thousands of Cubans would head for the Guantanamo Bay Naval Station on the island's eastern tip, Suchlicki said. The United States has held an indefinite lease on the 45-square-mile base since 1903, and currently holds hundreds of "enemy combatants" there, many captured in Afghanistan in 2001.

Suchlicki said the base would be fairly easy to access by boat from nearby beaches.

A road runs up to the base's perimeter from the Cuban side, and a handful of Cuban employees enter every day.

Short of using force to stop Cubans from storming the base, Suchlicki said, "You can't prepare for that scenario."