To Leave and Return is a Right

To Leave and Return is a Right / Reinaldo Escobar
Reinaldo Escobar, Translator: Unstated

Although the fever to comment on the new travel and immigration
legislation has already passed, I don't want to let it pass me by. To
those who ask me in circumstances where there's little time to respond,
I tell them the following:

The Cuban government has eliminated the humiliating Permission to Leave
and established in its place the Permission to Possess a Passport, which
is somehow worse because it denies the citizen the right to possess
identification before the rest of the world.

If we have a little more time, then I say that I would have wished the
first article of the new law would say more or less the following:

All Cuban citizens, by the mere fact of having been born in this
archipelago, have the right to possess a passport and, once granted a
visa by another country, to leave Cuba with it for as long as he deems
appropriate and to return, as many times as his resources allow. This
right can only be violated by court judgement, where the citizen has all
procedural guarantees of defense and appeal.

The absence of the word "right" is the most important omission in the
new law.

22 October 2012

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