(Barbados Nation) Prime Minister Freundel Stuart has confirmed that he visited Cuban Raul Garcia last week at Her Majesty’s Prisons Dodds.
He told the DAILY NATION that he visited Garcia, the prisoner without a country, last Tuesday, the day before he left the island to attend the CARICOM Heads Of Government Meeting in Suriname.
“I visited him on Tuesday afternoon . . . . His predicament is a unique predicament in the context of what we know in Barbados, and I felt that I should go and make contact with him to explain to him why he was in the situation that he was in; what the challenges were; how the Government was trying to deal with those challenges; and in relation to his future what we were hoping for and working towards.”
Garcia, 58, served close to 20 years in prison on cocaine-related offences. He was initially released from prison but held at the holding section of the airport as Immigration officials investigated his background.
Garcia, upon his arrest here on drug-smuggling charges, had said he was Colombian, but it was later discovered that he was actually Cuban.
Cuba has refused to take him in and so too has the United States, his adopted homeland.
