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NEWS
Reggaeton star
Elvis Manuel still missing; mother returned to Cuba
Posted on Sat, Apr. 12, 2008
BY JOSE PAGLIERY AND TRENTON DANIEL
jpagliery@MiamiHerald.com
Cuban reggaeton star Elvis Manuel and nine others were still believed
missing at sea on Saturday. But the singer's mother and 11 other
migrants were sent back to the island.
Dana Warr, a Coast Guard spokesman, said the search for a second vessel
had been suspended and there has been no sign of Elvis Manuel Martínez
Nodarse and nine other people, who friends say left Cuba on Monday.
Elvis Manuel's family maintained a vigil -- but grew increasingly
concerned about the 19-year-old singer.
''I haven't heard anything from last night,'' his aunt, Mirtha Maria
Nodarse of Miami, said Saturday. ``I called Cuba, but nobody knows
anything. My family's waiting for me to find out for them.''
Ramón Saúl Sánchez, head of the migrant advocacy group Democracy
Movement, said he gave the Coast Guard a list of aliases the migrants
may have been using to help locate Elvis Manuel. Sánchez believes all of
the migrants left Cuba in two fragile rafts to meet with a faster
smuggling boat on the high seas -- and that one of those rafts did not
make it to the rendezvous point.
On Saturday night, Sánchez said the family in Cuba had yet to hear from
Elvis Manuel's mother, Irioska María Nodarse. He feared she was being
held by Cuban security agents.
''We fear that because his mother was the group's manager she is being
held by state security,'' Sánchez said.
U.S. Rep. Lincoln Diaz-Balart had sent a letter to U.S. Citizenship and
Immigration Services, asking for the rapper and his mother not be
returned to Cuba, but Sánchez said she likely failed the interview on
the Coast Guard cutter to plead her case for political asylum.
'The interviewer expects to hear certain words -- `a fear of
persecution' -- and too often Cubans don't have that type of political
training,'' Sánchez said. ``They say it in an indirect manner.''
The whereabouts of rappers Carlos Rojas Hernandez, who goes by ''DJ
Carlitos,'' and Alejandro ''DJ Jerry'' Rodriguez Lopez -- were unknown.
The Coast Guard would not confirm if they had been repatriated. Sánchez
said he had been told by the Coast Guard that the two men were not among
the group returned. ''I fear they've either been arrested in Cuba or
they're at sea,'' he said of Elvis Manuel and the others.
Two other people, suspected of being the smugglers of the group in which
Elvis Manuel's mother was found, were turned over to Border Patrol, Warr
said.
Confusion surrounds the event, with speculation arising Saturday that
Elvis Manuel and the nine missing migrants never made it to a boat that
carried the 14 others and was found Wednesday by the Coast Guard.
Miami Herald editor Myriam Marquez contributed to this report.
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