[NYTr] Custody Fight for Cuban Child Continues (Still) Date: Tue, 16 Oct 2007 23:52:07 -0500 (CDT) Via NY Transfer News Collective * All the News that Doesn't Fit [This is just so sickening. This trafficker Joe Cubas, whom the Sentinel is calling a "foster parent" obviously doesn't give a damn about the child's emotional werll-being, nor do the creeps in the Child Welfare Dept., who are, after all, Floridians. They should remove the case entirely from the jurisdiction of anyone in Florida. This poor little kid has a mentally ill, abusive and suicidal birth mother who agrees with the Cuban child's father that she should go home. The son is another question -- he wants to stay, he has a different father, and he's of an age where he should have some say in his future. The only person with common sense and compassion in all this seems to be the judge. There was a time when Family Court judges took recommendations from all sides and was able to make a firm decision that would stick. No more, or at least, not in Disneylandia, it seems.-NY Transfer] NBC6.net - South Florida - Oct 16, 2007 6:01 PM EDT http://www.nbc6.net/news/14353451/detail.html Judge Urges Appeals Court to Take Up Cuban Custody Case Quickly MIAMI -- A judge postponed a hearing Tuesday in a custody dispute over a 5-year-old Cuban girl while both sides filed appeals, and she urged the higher court to review the drawn-out case as quickly as possible. Last month, Circuit Judge Jeri B. Cohen ruled that the Cuban father, Rafael Izquierdo, is a fit parent who did not abandon his daughter when her mother brought her to the U.S. in 2005. He wants to bring her back to Cuba. Cohen delayed the hearing on whether the girl would be endangered if she were removed from her foster family and returned to Cuba with Izquierdo, his wife and her 7-year-old half sister. Florida child welfare officials are trying to keep her here and want Florida's 3rd District Court of Appeal to get involved. "On my hands and knees I am begging them to hear the issues on an expedited basis for the sake of the child, the families, her brother, for everyone involved," Cohen said. State attorneys filed a notice of appeal Monday with the appellate court. They want to overrule Cohen's decision on Izquierdo's ability as a parent. The state also contends the girl's well-being would be harmed if she was taken from her Miami foster parents, who have already adopted her 13-year-old half brother by a different father. The father's attorneys say that since Izquierdo is fit, there are no grounds for an endangerment hearing. They filed an emergency appeal Tuesday with the 3rd District shortly after the hearing. It was denied about three hours later without explanation. Also on Tuesday, the Boston-based nonprofit Fathers and Families said it had urged thousands of supporters from around the country to contact Florida Gov. Charlie Crist and state officials, asking them to drop the state's appeal. State officials said they had received some letters but could not immediately say how many. Meanwhile, Izquierdo told the judge he was concerned that his older daughter was falling behind in her studies in Cuba, where classes began in September. Izquierdo and his family arrived in the U.S. in May to claim his youngest daughter after spending nearly a year seeking a U.S. visa. "I don't want her to fail second grade," he said. "I thought everything was going to be a lot faster." In a rare example of collaboration in the case, all parties agreed to work together to enroll the older girl temporarily in a U.S. school. Earlier, the lawyer for the younger girl's foster parents complained that the increased time she was spending with her father would affect the decision over her eventual placement. Since last week, she has spent weekdays with her father and weekends with her Cuban-American foster parents, Joe and Maria Cubas. "The court is preordaining the next hearing by requiring the child to spend five days with her father," attorney Alan Mishael said outside court. Mishael said any improvements in the father-daughter relationship would be used as pretext to "take the child against her wishes to Cuba." Therapists who have spent time with the girl say she is increasingly comfortable and playful with her father but far more loving and grounded with the Cubases. "She called me all last week, telling me 'Papi I miss you,"' Joe Cubas said outside court. Izquierdo said he was not surprised the girl is loving with the Cubases because she has spent a year with them. "I've had a week with her, and look how far we've come. Imagine if they just told me, 'take her, she's yours,"' he said. The custody case began after the girl's mother brought her and her half brother to the U.S. legally. The mother, a deeply troubled woman, later attempted suicide and lost custody. The children went into foster care in late 2005. The mother has supported Izquierdo's desire to regain custody of the girl. The state has accused Izquierdo of abandoning and neglecting his daughter by spending little time with her in Cuba and later failing to contact her for nine months once they had moved to the U.S. *** So. Florida Sun-Sentinel - Oct 16, 2007 http://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/local/southflorida/orl-custody1607oct16,0,2029660.story DCF to back foster parents of Cuban girl by Maya Bell Sentinel Staff Writer MIAMI--After the little Cuban girl now caught in a custody battle was placed with her Cuban-American guardians, her behavior reflected the tumult she endured during her first three years of life. She curled in a ball and cried. She tried to go home with a new woman she met. She threatened to cut another girl's "mouth out" with a knife. Nineteen months later, the state Department of Children and Families will return to Miami-Dade Circuit Court today to make the argument that the girl, now 5, should remain with Joe and Maria Cubas, the temporary custodians who provided the child her first sense of stability. That's even though a judge last month declared her biological father fit to raise her on the island. The girl's abusive mother lost custody of the girl and an older half-brother after attempting suicide in Miami in December 2005. DCF contends that tearing the girl from the Cubases and the 13-year-old boy the couple has since adopted would endanger her emotional health by destroying her already damaged ability to form healthy attachments. "She would never recover," DCF lawyer Rebecca Kapusta told the judge in an earlier hearing. The argument is unusual and likely doomed, legal experts say, because a fit parent's right to raise his child almost always trumps the child's right to remain with caregivers with whom he or she has bonded. In fact, DCF policy is to reunite abused, abandoned or neglected children with an eligible parent or closest relative whenever possible. Echoing sentiments expressed by the judge, Michael Dale, a professor who specializes in children's law at Nova Southeastern University, said DCF's case against the father, which already has cost more than $250,000, has been guided by the nearly half-century of tense relations between Miami's exile community and their communist homeland. "It's nuts," Dale said. "If this child were from any other country, or this happened in any other part of the state, she would be back home already. DCF should be spending all that money on the kids I represent who rot in foster care." During a three-week trial in which she ruled the father fit, Judge Jeri B. Cohen assailed the agency for making little effort to find Rafael Izquierdo, a farmer in rural central Cuba, after his daughter was removed from her unstable mother, and allowing the bond between the girl and the Cubases to grow. And though Cohen insists she has yet to make up her mind on who will raise the girl, she has taken steps to smooth the child's transfer from the Cubases to Izquierdo. Two weeks ago, the judge reversed the child's living arrangements, ordering her to live with her father on weekdays, and the Cubases on weekends. With Izquierdo's permission, the girl moved to the United States with her mother, her half-brother and her mother's new husband in March 2005. Nine months later, the state took the children into custody after their mother, Elena Perez, ditched by her husband and overwhelmed by her new life in a foreign land, slashed her wrists with a knife. Failing to comply with DCF's reunification plan, Perez eventually lost custody of both children, who were being cared for by the Cubases. Adding another political dimension to the case, Cubas, a real-estate developer and former baseball agent, is revered by many exiles for helping some of Cuba's best players join professional teams in the United States. The couple was not a part of the fitness phase of the trial, in which DCF and lawyers for the Guardian Ad Litem program, which represents the girl's interests, argued that Izquierdo had abandoned and neglected his daughter. They contend he failed to protect her from her mother's beatings, failed to keep in touch with her after she moved to the United States and waited months to apply for a visa to reclaim her after she was taken from her mother. But the Cubases' lawyer, Alan Mishael, argues that Cohen must leave the girl with the Cubases under a state law requiring judges to place children with a fit parent unless the placement would "endanger" the child's safety, or physical, mental or emotional health. "If the child is just an appendage of the parent, you can grab her like a football and run to the finish line," Mishael said. "But if you treat her like a human being, you have to focus on whether what you're doing is going to harm her." Izquierdo's lawyer, Ira Kurzban, counters that the endangerment case against Izquierdo is unconstitutional and should be dismissed. The law was never meant, he said, to be used against fit parents who have passed a home study, as Izquierdo has. "What if the child got attached to her nanny? Would they be making the same argument?" Kurzban said. "From day one, this has all been about politics." * ================================================================= NY Transfer News Collective * A Service of Blythe Systems Since 1985 - Information for the Rest of Us Our main website: http://www.blythe.org List Archives: http://blythe-systems.com/pipermail/nytr/ Subscribe: http://blythe-systems.com/mailman/listinfo/nytr =================================================================