Amauris Samartino Flores

Amauris Samartino Flores is a Cuban physician who escaped from his native country in 1999 in a makeshift raft. He was given asylum in Bolivia, but after becoming politically active in that country, protesting the governments of both Fidel Castro and Evo Morales, was deported. He now lives in Norway.

On January 9, 2007, Samartino, a Cuban refugee who had been a resident of Bolivia since 2000, was expelled from that country after having been held for seventeen days for criticizing the Bolivian and Cuban governments. According to a report by the Human Rights Foundation (HFR), "Samartino was subjected to numerous human rights violations, including wrongful imprisonment, arbitrary detainment, forced exile, due process abuse, and undue restriction of free speech." He arrived in Colombia on the night of January 8. Thor Halvorssen, president of HRF, said: "Amauris Samartino’s case is a scandal and it reveals that the government of Bolivia will stop at nothing to silence dissent."

History Samartino left Cuba in 1999 in a homemade raft along with eleven other dissidents. A U.S. Coast Guard patrol boat picked him up and took him to the Guantanamo military base. He remained there for some months until the International Organization for Migration arranged asylum for him in Bolivia. He arrived in Bolivia on October 24, 2000. According to a Catholic priest, Fernando Rojas Silva, Samartino and the other dissidents were “brought to Santa Cruz by the U.S. Embassy, given a few dollars for their survival and a paper certifying that the Bolivian government would provide the paperwork necessary to remain in the country. Months passed and nothing happened. They ran out of dollars and moved to the capital,” where they began “knocking on doors of official institutions and the Embassy.” Finally, in desperation, they held “a hunger strike...outside the U.S. Embassy,” whereupon “the representative of UNHCR requested the intervention of mediators.”

Eventually Samartino was certified as a political refugee in Bolivia, and later he became a permanent legal resident. It was in Santa Cruz that he met his wife, Normina Chávez, and, according to the British medical journal The Lancet, “worked as a supervisor in natural gas operations.”

The Lancet paraphrased Samartino as saying that “Cuba's overseas medical programme is more political than humanitarian,” and as noting that “Cuba has sent many more medical personnel to oil-rich Venezuela, ruled by a close ally, than to Haiti, the hemisphere's poorest nation, and which is wracked by an AIDS epidemic.”

Samartino's arrest was ordered by Bolivian cabinet member Alicia Muñoz on the grounds that he had violated a 1996 immigration law prohibiting the involvement of foreigners in Bolivia's internal political affairs – a law that had been declared unconstitutional in 2001 on the grounds that it violated free-speech rights. On December 27, the Bolivian office of the Defender of the People maintained that there were no legal grounds on which Bolivia could return Samartino to Cuba. His lawyer, Rodolfo Téllez, expressed the same concern.

During this time, Cuba's ambassador to Bolivia, Rafael Dausa, who wanted Samartino returned to Cuba, met with Bolivian officials; on December 27, Dauza called Samartino a criminal, accused him of fraud, and described him as “anti-Castro, an alcoholic, a fraudster, and thief.” A Bolivian senator accused Samartino of planning violent protests, while a spokesman for Evo Morales said Samartino had “denigrated” Castro.

In January 2011, the website of the Norwegian state media organization, NRK, featured a major article about the Cuban medical system based largely on Samartino's testimony. Entitled “Behind the facade, there is only misery,” the article quoted Samartino as saying that Cuba's “low infant-mortality rate is a lie,” that patients in many Cuban hospitals have to supply their own food and bedsheets, and that it health personnel routinely falsify statistics.