Cuba Returns Couple Who Fled With Sons in Custody Fight

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/11/us/cuba-returns-couple-who-fled-florida-in-custody-fight.html

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MIAMI — A Florida couple who are accused of kidnapping their two young boys after losing custody last week and then fleeing to Cuba were brought back to the United States on Wednesday and arrested in Tampa, a rare moment of cooperation between two hostile countries and one that sidestepped a possible international custody battle.

The parents, Joshua Hakken, 35, and Sharyn Hakken, 34, were charged with kidnapping and other crimes in the abduction of their boys, Cole, 4, and Chase, 2, and booked into the Hillsborough County jail. Sheriff’s detectives had flown to Cuba on an F.B.I. plane with state and federal officials to retrieve the family.

“Our grandchildren are safe,” said Bob Hauser, Ms. Hakken’s father, who also thanked the Cuban government. He and his wife, Patricia, have legal custody of their grandchildren.

A court stripped the Hakkens of custody on April 2. The next day, Mr. Hakken went to the grandparents’ house in Tampa, tied up the grandmother, snatched the boys, met up with his wife and drove to a nearby marina, the authorities said. The family hopped on a newly purchased 25-foot sailboat and headed for Cuba, ending up at Marina Hemingway, a fenced-in facility west of Havana. The person who had sold the Hakkens the sailboat tipped off the Hillsborough County authorities about them.

The children were taken from the Hakkens in Louisiana last year after the police found the couple acting strangely in a hotel in Slidell. The Hakkens spoke of “completing their ultimate journey” and traveling across the country to “Armageddon,” a Slidell police statement said. Officers said they had also found narcotics and weapons in the hotel room. The children were handed over to child welfare officials and ultimately to the grandparents.

Cuba was under no obligation to return the Hakkens; it has no extradition treaty with the United States and has not signed on to the Hague Convention, an international agreement that seeks to protect children from abduction and facilitate their return. It also has a history of harboring American fugitives.

But once it learned from news reports that the Hakkens had kidnapped their children, the Cuban government’s decision to cooperate was relatively straightforward. It reported their presence to the American authorities there and exchanged diplomatic notes, according to a statement from the Cuban Foreign Ministry. The goal was “guaranteeing the integrity and well-being of minors,” the statement added.

Unlike the saga of Elián González more than a decade ago, this case did not spin out of control. In 2000, Elián, who had lost his mother on a raft journey to the United States, was taken in by Miami relatives despite repeated requests by the boy’s father in Cuba that he be sent back, claiming Elián’s best interest. After a bitter tug-of-war involving the United States government, Cuba and the Miami family, the boy was reunited with his father.

In the Hakken case, “returning the children makes a lot of sense,” said Jorge Duany, the director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University. “Cuba doesn’t seem to have any political sympathy for this.”

For decades, Cuba has served as a refuge for fugitives. An estimated 70 people who are still being sought by the American authorities have fled to the island to avoid arrest or trial. Some of them are political militants, including Black Panthers and Puerto Rican separatists who fled to Cuba in the 1960s and ’70s.

In recent years, Cuba has also harbored Cuban-Americans charged with vast Medicare and Medicaid fraud. Seven fugitives accused of stealing millions are suspected of being in Cuba, said Don White, the spokesman for the Office of the Inspector General at the Department of Health and Human Services. Three others have been captured in the past year after leaving Cuba.

It is unclear whether Cuba cooperated on those cases. Mr. White said the agency does not comment on the nature of its investigations.