Havana rally condemns U.S. provocation
BY PATRICK O'NEILL
Under the slogan "Seguimos en Combate (we are still in combat)" tens of thousands of people rallied in the Cuban capital of Havana September 25 in protest at Washington's latest affront to Cuban sovereignty. Earlier that week U.S. officials had conferred legal immigration status on nine people picked up 50 miles from Cuban shores in the Gulf of Mexico after a failed attempt to fly a stolen aircraft across the Florida Straits.
On September 19 crop-dusting pilot Lenin Iglesias Hernandez seized the government plane used in his work, took his wife, two sons, and six other people on board, then took off from a small airstrip in Pinar del Rio. Cuban authorities say Hernandez radioed the control tower claiming that he was being hijacked. After running low on fuel and losing his way, he ditched the aircraft in the Gulf of Mexico 285 miles from Key West. One person died on impact.
U.S. Coast Guard officials lifted the survivors from the Panamanian-registered ship that had rescued them, and flew them to Florida.
In an interview conducted on September 22 in New York, the president of the Cuban National Assembly of Peoples Power, Ricardo Alarcón, said, "We have nothing against those who were shipwrecked." He called for the return of the pilot, who "stole an aircraft and is responsible for the fatality."
Alarcón referred to claims by Coast Guard officers that the survivors had to be taken to Florida for medical evaluation. "Why did they not take them to a hospital in Mexico or Cuba, which are closer than those in Florida?" he asked.
With their transfer to Florida by U.S. authorities, they were brought under coverage of the Cuban Adjustment Act. Under that law, Cuban citizens who leave Cuba illegally and reach the United States are permitted to apply for residency after one year. Normally Cuban citizens picked up at sea are repatriated to Cuba.
The Immigration and Naturalization Service terms this approach--with revealingly casual brutality--the "wet-foot, dry-foot" policy.
In the wake of the Elián González case, the government and working people of Cuba have stepped up their efforts to expose and oppose Washington's use of its immigration policy in its cold war against Cuba. In July delegates to the National Assembly issued a proclamation opposing the Cuban Adjustment Act.
This legislation, they stated, was designed from its enactment in 1966 to "encourage Cuban citizens to attempt to emigrate clandestinely and with all the risks of a sea crossing." It constitutes a "permanent violation" of a 1994 agreement to allow a minimum of 20,000 Cuban citizens to migrate legally to the United States each year, the delegates explained.
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