Museo del Ministerio del Interior Roughly 4km from the mouth of the tunnel on Avendia 5ta is the Museo del Ministerio del Interior (Tues– Sat 9am–4pm; $2CUC, $3CUC with guide), the museum of the Cuban secret services. Housed in an airy Miramar mansion, much of the museum is devoted to charting the conflict between the secret services and alleged US attempts to undermine the Revolution. Many of the exhibits comprise billboards closely written in Spanish, so non-Spanish speakers will find considerably less of interest, though there is still enough here to warrant a quick spin around, should you be in the area.
The first room, an assortment of guns and bloodstained shirts, is mostly devoted to charting the pre-1959 Revolution struggle. More illuminating, however, is the somewhat incongruous display devoted to Elián Gonzáles which, through information on public demonstrations and examples of T-shirts, posters and fliers, charts the furore which gripped the country in 2000. There is also a copy of the infamously draconian Ley de Ajuste Cubano (see below) that impedes relationships between the two nations. Of the remaining rooms, the exhibits detailing the ongoing covert operations of the CIA in Cuba, complete with confiscated explosives smuggled in by suspected members of the Cuban-American National Foundation and evidence of several terrorist attacks, are the most informative. Further rooms are less emotive with histories of the lifeguard, firefighter and police forces, the last complete with a stuffed and mounted Alsatian – the first police dog to be used in a homicide case.
| El Ley de Adjuste Cubano |
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Introduced in 1966, the Ley de Adjuste Cubano (or Cuban Adjustment Act) has been criticized as an unfair piece of US immigration policy. Making a different case for Cubans than for any other illegal immigrants attempting to gain entry to the US, the law states that any Cuban who reaches US soil is eligible to apply for permanent residency after they have been physically present in the country for more than one year. For many Cubans, crossing the Florida Straits on a makeshift boat is seen as an infinitely easier route to securing US citizenship than making a conventional application for one of the limited numbers of permanent residencies granted to Cubans each year.
During the Clinton administration, and as a somewhat tardy response to the events of the Mariel Boatlift in the 1980s, some of the more contentious parts of the law were addressed. The administration announced that Cubans interdicted at sea would not be brought to the US but to the base at Guantánamo instead. This became known as the "wet foot, dry foot" policy, whereby those Cubans who made it onto US soil were accepted into the country, while those who didn't were returned to Cuba. Though there has not been another exodus matching the size of Mariel, each year a significant number of Cubans do take this route to the States.
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