By NICK BUDD
Hays Post
To say Fort Hays State University President Mirta Martin took an unconventional path to northwest Kansas is an understatement.
After growing up in a poverty-ridden home in Cuba, her family fled to Spain where she was schooled in a convent. Later in her childhood, Martin’s family came to the United States with nothing but the clothes on their back. Martin worked in a Miami shop to help her family make ends meet. Now, the path to the United States isn’t as difficult after President Barack Obama and Cuban President Raul Castro announced several trade restrictions, trade embargoes, and remittance restrictions would begin to thaw between the United States and Cuba.
“Is what I hope happens as a result of this pact is that the common people of Cuba, the ones who have to work, will have access to food.” Martin recently told Eagle’s Mike Cooper. “My father lives in Cuba and, if it were not for the money we send him, he wouldn’t be able to eat. And sometimes, even when he does have the money, there is no food to buy. So hopefully these new policies will allow those individuals to have better lives.”
Click the video above for the entire interview.
But Martin cautioned some of the domestic policy issues that are still relevant in the communist island-nation. The pact included a prisoner swap that brought Alan Gross back to the United States after he was jailed in Cuba for providing Cuban Jews with equipment to gain Internet access on a humanitarian mission.
“Cuba is still imprisoning innocent people. There is no freedom of speech, and you can’t just jump on a plane and spend the holidays with relatives,” Martin said. “And if nothing has changed, I have serious concerns that the greatest democratic country acknowledging and giving credibility to a country that still enslaves its people.”
“(Gross) was able to come home to his family for the holidays and that’s something that touched my heart,” she said, “because he and his family had an experience that many of us Cubans will never be able to have.”
Martin said her family is still making efforts to bring her father to the United States.