Rolando Arrieta, deputy director of news operations at NPR, spoke about his coverage of the Ebola outbreak and Cuban migration to the United States at a Syracuse University lecture on Wednesday night.

In 2015, Arrieta published a story about the journey of people from Cuba to the U.S. by land. Migrants hiked their way to the U.S.-Mexico border, being attacked by thugs, getting lost in the dense jungle for multiple days and fearing having to go back, he said.

Arrieta visited the S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications to talk about the reporting process behind his story as part of the Pulitzer Center Campus Consortium lectures. He has worked at NPR for more than 20 years and is a three-time George Foster Peabody Award-winner.

Cuba had the “wet foot, dry foot” policy in place in 2015, which took back anyone leaving Cuba for the U.S. if they had been caught in any body of water.  Many Cubans decided to travel through South America to get on a plane into Mexico to reach the U.S. instead of the closer Florida Keys entrance, Arrieta said.

When Arrieta was assigned to cover the journey of the people who traveled this way, he got in touch with a woman who completed the trek with her son and brother and ended up in Emporia, Kansas.

Arrieta said that, after he spent time building trust with the family, the mother detailed traumatizing events throughout the migration, including when the family lost their way for seven days in the jungle before making it to Panama City.

It was easier for Arrieta’s source to open up about the dangers she faced because he was knowledgeable about Cuban migration and the geography of nearby cities, he said. Arrieta grew up in Panama.

The family eventually made it from Ecuador to the Darién Gap, where they were supposed to board a small six-person plane that would take them to Costa Rica, Arrieta said. The Darién Gap is a jungle area at the border of Panama and Colombia that is not passable by ground.

Arrieta’s source was heartbroken to find out that her family could not get tickets for such a plane, he said. They continued on foot through the Darién Gap to Panama. At the time, tens of thousands of migrants were coming through Ecuador, Columbia and Panama, setting up camps and receiving humanitarian aid, Arrieta said.

Arrieta said the Cuban migrants were able to board a plane in either Costa Rica or Panama City to Juárez, Mexico, just across the border from El Paso, Texas. The U.S. had open arms for Cuban migrants when they arrived at the border, but migrants from other countries were denied entry.

“There is another wave of about 600 or 700 Cubans who are currently in Panama,” Arrieta said. “This continues to happen. The big difference now is that if they make it to the U.S. border, they are in the same detention center as every other person who is trying to get in, which was not the case before.”

Arrieta has also reported on the Ebola outbreak. He traveled to northern Liberia to find out what communities that were affected were doing in the panic. He recalled being stressed and paranoid of contamination. After a while, Arrieta said he realized that his group of reporters was not going to be in contact with people who had the virus.

He focused on a town in Liberia that did not accept outsiders. Arrieta had to be brought in by a United Nations helicopter. While he was there, he published reports about what hospitals in the area were doing and how a local church allowed neighbors to speak about their quarantined or perished family members.

One person said to him “a friend or another relative collapsed onto her as a result of having Ebola,” Arrieta added. “She was afraid of the effect of being exposed to it, so she quarantined herself for 40 days in her own house.”

Published on March 6, 2019 at 11:23 pm

Contact Richard: rjchang@syr.edu | @RichardJChang1