US case highlights Cuban 'slaves' in Curaçao

Olivia Ocampo well remembers the night the two Cuban workers came to her house in January 2005.

Exhausted and afraid, they had escaped from the premises of the nearby Curaçao Drydock Company, where they said they and some 100 other Cubans had been forced to work 112 hours a week fixing ships for three cents an hour.

Ms. Ocampo approached the police and government authorities in Willemstad, the capital of the Netherlands Antilles, a Dutch dependency in the southern Caribbean, but "they just wanted to push all the trash under the carpet and say that everything is fine," she said.

But last month, a federal judge in Miami ordered the shipyard to pay the workers and one of their colleagues a total of $80 million in damages, after finding it had conspired with the government of Cuba to force them into what was, in effect, slave labor.

The case has focused a spotlight on the shadowy corners of the global economy, where capital moves freely across borders and laborers are sometimes forced to follow in bondage. While most cases involve abuses committed in developing nations with poor human rights records, this took place within the Kingdom of the Netherlands, home to the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court.

"These types of violations are not out of the ordinary for the Cuban government," says Tomas Bilbao of the Cuba Study Group in Washington, which helped the workers bring their suit. "What's surprising is that it happened in a dependency of the Netherlands, a country known for its interest in human rights."

The three men testified that they had been sent to Curaçao to work off Cuba's multimillion-dollar debt to the Curaçao Drydock Company, a private company whose largest shareholder is the government of the Netherlands Antilles. Their passports were seized at the airport and they were rarely allowed to leave the shipyard complex, and only in groups with a minder. They typically worked 15 days in a row and when off-duty had to watch Fidel Castro's videotaped speeches.

Working conditions were perilous, they testified. One of the men, Fernando Alonso, burned his hand while welding steel without proper safety gear. Another, Alberto Rodriguez-Licea, broke his foot and ankle when a rope he was dangling from snapped. The third, Luis Casanova, was ordered to work in water and says he was shocked so severely that electricity shot from his tongue.

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