Plan to get brother out of Cuba backfires on LV man

Wednesday, June 8, 2005 | 11:05 a.m.

Fidel Heredia, a stocky, well-spoken man, sees the irony in having landed a job within months of arriving on U.S. soil from communist Cuba, in a hotel built by one of the paragons of capitalism -- Steve Wynn.

But then his life has been one irony after another for years, the most recent, and perhaps crowning irony -- that he is in Las Vegas while his older brother, Bernardo, is trapped in Havana, prevented from coming back by Fidel Castro's government.

Until recently, Bernardo was a Las Vegas taxi driver, while Fidel was scraping by as an electrician in Havana. But then a scheme to get Fidel out of Cuba with Bernardo's U.S. documents backfired terribly. The brothers landed in opposite fates, with each other's children and mates.

A Cuban government official said Tuesday there was no immediate comment on the case.

The U.S. government can't do much because Bernardo never obtained American citizenship.

"The government of Cuba has the sole legal authority to grant exit permission from Cuba for its citizens," a statement from the U.S. Interests Section said, urging Cuba to grant all its citizens the right to leave the island.

The stories of these two brothers stretch back almost as long as Castro's rule.

Fidel, who is 40, was named for "ese hombre," as Cubans here say, or "that man." His father, he said, fought with Castro in the revolution that landed "the bearded one" in power. Bernardo is 13 months older than Fidel.

One day in 1994, Bernardo, like so many others in the last four decades, boarded a raft headed north. Also like so many others, he landed in a hospital in Miami, nearly dead from the trip. A worker there told him he could do better finding work in Las Vegas than in Miami.

For a decade since then, Bernardo has been regaling his younger brother with tales of life in Las Vegas, with its ups and downs, in visits to the island and through videos and photos. Bernardo was granted U.S. resident status, the step below citizenship.

The younger brother became increasingly frustrated in his attempts to build a life in Cuba for his wife and now 8-year-old son, also named Fidel ("after me, not him," Heredia makes clear).

"I kept weighing the pros and cons, analyzing things, and things were always worse for me," Fidel said in an interview Tuesday at the Florida Cafe, a Cuban restaurant and one of the few places in Las Vegas he could easily identify as a meeting place.

His life in Cuba included the sorts of daily twists and turns that most people here dismiss as tall tales, he recalled.

As an electrician, he would get jobs for officials in government agencies, hop on his bike to hunt out materials such as cable or tubing, which can only be found in large quantities in locations that don't include receipts with purchases. Then he would get stopped by the police, who would ask for a receipt, and strip him of his materials when he couldn't produce one.

During a seven-year period, he actually was able to mount a business with the help of materials his brother sent from the United States.

He had an antenna that allowed him to receive news programs and soap operas from Miami, which he would then tape and sell or trade.

At the height of his venture, the videos brought in up to $200 a month. Meanwhile, his older brother would send $100 from Las Vegas many months to help their grandmother -- who had played a large role in raising the boys -- and their parents.

On Sept. 11, 2001, Fidel saw the twin towers fall three hours before the rest of Cuba was told by the government about the attack. He gave away tapes of the tragedy as fast as he could copy them.

On another occasion, a news program showed the face of a Cuban girl who died trying to reach Miami on a trip not very different from the one his brother had taken.

She was a neighbor. He ran the tape of the news over to her family's house.

"They always thanked me afterward, since it was the only way they ever would have found out what happened to their daughter," he said.

However, satellite antennas, and the information they bring from the outside world, are not viewed kindly by Cuban authorities, Fidel said.

One day in 2002, police ransacked his house. The business was finished.

Meanwhile, in another irony of sorts, his brother, after studying economics in Cuba, had built a life as a cabbie in Las Vegas. Bernardo also began studying to be a helicopter pilot, a job that can be lucrative with trips to locations such as the Grand Canyon always in demand.

"He said the socialist economy meant nothing here," so his degree meant nothing.

One day in 2002, their grandmother died, after an ambulance couldn't be called to the house because there was no gasoline, Fidel said.

"We supposedly have advanced medicine in Cuba, but we can't get ambulances to the hospital," Fidel said.

Reasons for leaving had piled up for years. He had tried legal means -- a lottery of visas, official inquiries. Nothing worked.

The electrician, who said he has always been close to his son -- "He would always ask me the 'How come this is that way' or 'How does that work' questions" -- began thinking about leaving the island alone. He would reach the United States, become a resident and then a citizen, and petition for his family to join him -- a process that, while shorter for Cubans, can still take years.

He and Bernardo hatched a plan centered on Fidel leaving Cuba with his brother's U.S. documents and Cuban passport and then sending them by mail from Mexico back to Cuba. The younger brother would then cross into the United States.

Under the United States' so-called "wet foot-dry foot" policy, Cuban migrants who reach U.S. soil generally are allowed to stay, while those intercepted at sea are usually returned to Cuba. U.S. officials say about 1,000 Cubans reach American shores by sea annually, and it is unknown how many who undertake the risky voyage never make it.

Under their plan, which they launched sometime in March, Fidel would then be granted a temporary work permit and land at his brother's house in North Las Vegas, where Bernardo's girlfriend, Teresa, and their 2-year-old daughter, Angela Maria, live.

Bernardo would join them all soon after.

Neither mate knew about the brothers' plan beforehand and both were -- predictably -- upset.

"My girlfriend was furious at first," Bernardo told an Associated Press reporter this week. Bernardo met his Cuban-born girlfriend in the United States. "Now she's just feeling hopeless."

But Havana had other plans. Bernardo spent 30 days in a detention center. When he was released, he said, he was told he wouldn't be leaving Cuba anytime soon.

"This is revenge," Bernardo said. "They know that to live in this country is so bad and depressing that that is the punishment. The immigration officials ... said to me: 'Your brother left, so you stay here.' "

Fidel didn't want to speak in detail about the treatment Bernardo has received, but he repeated a Cuban saying to describe the conditions his brother faces: "There's always a dog nipping at your heels."

Meanwhile, the younger brother considers himself lucky to be earning nearly $13 an hour as a porter at the recently-opened Wynn Las Vegas.

He describes a bittersweet scene about a month ago when Wynn himself gathered hundreds of new employees shortly before the grand opening.

"He talked for a long while to us all. I had recently arrived and didn't understand a word he was saying. Finally, I called a friend on my cell phone, held the phone up and asked him to translate what Wynn was telling us."

He thought his first check -- nearly $1,000 for two weeks' work -- was a mistake.

"I was surprised to see so much money," he said.

He has already sent clothes and a backpack to Havana for his son to use in school.

So begins his life in Las Vegas. He hopes he can eventually work as an electrician.

He also misses his wife, who is a hairdresser, and son -- "I'm not one to cry, but it's hard" -- and feels like he has taken one step forward and another back, with his brother now stuck in Cuba.

Bernardo finds himself at his brother's house in Havana, a few blocks away from their mother's apartment, with his sister-in-law and 8-year-old nephew.

Bernardo said he made another attempt in mid-May to leave the island in a raft, but the craft capsized, and he and his friend had to return, swimming seven miles.

"I'm not as young as I used to be," he said.

Despite the failed attempt, he said he would try again.

"Staying here is not an option. I have to be with my family."

Fidel hopes international media coverage helps -- not in getting his brother out of Cuba, but acting as a safeguard against the government imprisoning or torturing him.

Joanne Moore, spokeswoman for the State Department, said Tuesday the agency was not aware of the Heredia case. She said the U.S. Interests Section in Havana had not mentioned the case to Washington.

"As long as the world knows about him, they (the government) can't act against him," Fidel said.

He also falls back on a lifelong admiration for his big brother.

When Bernardo was sent in the late '80s to a war Cuba helped fight in Angola, he said, his brother told the family, "If one Cuban comes back alive, it will be me."

Then there was his trip to Miami 11 years ago.

"He has always set goals and reached them. One way or another, I know he'll come back."