“Haitian-Americans watched in awe this week as a group of 44 Cuban entertainers applied for political asylum in Las Vegas, unmolested by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security.
The treatment of the Cubans could not have contrasted more sharply with the experience of Joseph Dantica, an 81-year-old Haitian Baptist minister who recently applied for asylum in Miami.
U.S. immigration officials took the Rev. Dantica to jail, where he died before he had the chance to make his case for asylum. His family held a wake for him Thursday at a Miami funeral home.
‘He died alone in a hospital bed,’ said his niece Edwidge Danticat, 35, who is a U.S. citizen. ‘It’s not that the others (Cubans) don’t deserve it. But there should be some fairness.'”
Here‘s the story from the St.Petersburg Times, and here is an article recently written for the New York Times by Edwidge Danticat, before she learned of her uncle’s death.