The Boston Globe (ARCHIVE)
FORMER CUBAN PRISONER
GREETS FAMILY AT LOGAN
Author(s): Allan R. Andrews Globe Staff
Date: July 1, 1984 Section: RUN OF PAPER
Former Cuban political prisoner Humberto Noble Alexander was joyously reunited with his mother, sister, other relatives and friends last night at Logan International Airport.
Alexander was released by Cuban President Fidel Castro and flown to the United States with 47 other prisoners and the Rev. Jesse Jackson Thursday. Eighteen of the others were reunited with friends and relatives at a jammed Miami airport earlier yesterday.
It was the first time in 30 years that Alexander had seen his 73-year-old mother, Beryl, who lives in Salem, and the first time he had seen his sister, Paulina, in 25 years. The 50-year-old Seventh-day Adventist minister spent the last 22 years in a Havana prison.
"Where's Mom?" Alexander asked his sister as they walked hugging each other from the plane toward his mother and the gathering of friends and relatives who waited outside the jetway and gate. Reaching the group, the smiling son reached out and patted his mother's cheeks before they fell into each other's arms and began to erase the distance of three decades with a prolonged embrace.
"Welcome home, Noble," friends and relatives shouted amid repeated hugs, handshakes and high-fives.
Alexander's sister and his cousin, Jacqueline Alexander of Cambridge, had boarded the jetliner moments earlier to greet the released prisoner and lead him to his mother. Because of air traffic problems in New York and Boston, the plane's eventual arrival from Washington was delayed for two hours.
Asked at a hastily organized press conference why he had been imprisoned, Alexander said, "For preaching the gospel." He said the charge against him by the communist authorities in Cuba was that he was preaching counterrevolution.
Alexander said he will make a trip to Miami and then plans "to continue using the gospel, taking Christ to the millions."
Of the prisoners who remain in Cuba, Alexander said, "I won't forget them. I'm still with them." Alexander, who is divorced, left his former wife and a 22-year-old son in Cuba.
He said Castro released the prisoners because "he is seeking political favors. He thinks he can keep a lock on our mouths." The other prisoners in Cuba, Alexander said, told him and others who were released to "do all you can. We want the world to learn what is happening."
He called his release "a new birth" and said he wanted to spend time with his mother. Thursday's arrival in Washington marked the first time that Alexander, who was born in San German, Cuba, has set foot in the United States.
His mother, a native of Barbados, came to Boston in 1950 and moved to Salem the next year, hoping to bring her family behind her one by one. She returned to Cuba for the funeral of another daughter in 1954, and that was the last time she had seen her son until last night. Her daughter Paulina came to the United States in 1955.
"I didn't think he was going to make it," his tearful sister said. "I don't pray, but now I believe that prayers really do something," she said.
Another passenger on the plane from Washington, George Smith of Mesa, Ariz., who said he sat next to Alexander on the flight, said the former prisoner told him, "We should not trust Castro."
Leaving the press conference, Alexander went to a friend who was wheeling Mrs. Alexander in a chair supplied by the airline and said, "Do you mind if I do that?" He smilingly pushed his mother from the airport to the privacy of their family reunion.
