Alejandro de la Rosa Herrant is one of 123 Cubans who were returned to the island this week in the first US deportation flight.
De la Rosa recounted that day: “They put us on the plane, handcuffed and until we got to Cuba they didn’t take our handcuffs off.”
Of his last night in the Krome detention center, De la Rosa recalls that “at about 11 p.m. they made us dress in gray and they took everything from us, the sheets, the bedspreads, and they froze all night in the bed with the bare mattress”.
But Alejandro de la Rosa’s nightmare started much earlier, exactly, in December last year. “I left on December 3 with my pregnant wife, I spent 20 days traveling.”
Together with Rachel Vázquez Batista, his wife crossed the border with the dream of a better life for the baby she was carrying.
But after her arrival “they separated her and me”.
“They didn’t credibly scare me or anything, they did it to him and he disapproved of it,” says Rachel Vázquez Batista, who recalls: “I spent four days in a cooler , I got out on parole.”
“There they made my fear believable, they put on paper what they wanted, it was not what I said… the judge told me that I was already expelled”, recalls From Rosa.
Immigration lawyer Avelino González points out that it is a differential treatment that they do with many migrants, “what they are doing is a disaster and they are really traumatizing these people who come to seek freedom and what they find is that they must begin a legal Via Crucis that has no end”.
“It’s inhuman, it’s a violation of rights. It is a violation and it is done mainly with Cubans”, he underlines.
The couple never saw each other again, although she told authorities “she was pregnant and carrying a baby by him”.
Now she is alone in Houston, Texas. “I am 7 months old, I am desperate because I am alone here in this country”.
Despair that extends to her husband in Cuba, deported and without hope and whose son may be born without her presence.
“Leave my seven month pregnant wife who has no one there, and I tell them and ask them to see if they can do something for us who are suffering here”, is all Alejandro asks from the Rosa Herrant.