Refugees Cuba

Cuban refugees reaching the United States illegally will be sent back to Cuba from now on, U.S. immigration officials said. The controversial move, discussed for several months, marks the end of a policy of virtually automatic asylum for Cubans and has angered Cuban exiles in the United States. Lemar Wooley, an Immigration and Naturalization Service spokesman, said the Miami immigration office has received the new instructions. They went into effect immediately, retroactive to Dec. 6.

A group of Cubans will spend Christmas back home on the Communist-ruled island and not in Miami as they hoped. The U.S. Coast Guard said it had repatriated the group Monday to Bahia de Cabanas, three days after the speedboat in which they were trying to reach the United States stalled 17 miles off the Florida coast. The group--17 men, 12 women and a boy and girl--were picked up by a Coast Guard cutter in rough seas.

Cuban inmates fighting deportion to their homeland staged a bloody riot at the Federal Penitentiary Monday, seizing dozens of hostages and setting fire to the prison. At least one prisoner was killed. Local hospitals reported admitting a total of eight Cubans suffering gunshot wounds, along with two prison guards who were slightly injured. In Washington, Atty. Gen.

In the six years since U.S. immigration authorities declared Eliecer Lara-Salado a political refugee, the 37-year-old Cuban rafter has pleaded guilty to dealing crack cocaine in South Florida, escaped from federal prison in Georgia and spent two years on the lam. This month, the U.S.

Cuban gunboats fired for more than four hours Saturday on a Cuban freighter loaded with Florida-bound refugees who reportedly hijacked the vessel. Seven people were injured, one critically. Four of the wounded, including the ship's captain, were taken by Coast Guard helicopters to Key West Memorial Hospital. Three people who were hurt scrambling for cover during the shooting were treated on the ship, Coast Guard officials said.

A group of Cuban inmates fighting deportation to their homeland took over part of a federal prison Wednesday and were holding 11 hostages, authorities said. One worker at the Talladega Federal Correctional Institution was injured slightly in the takeover, officials said. Prison officials described the area seized by the inmates as a housing unit known as "Alpha Unit."

Cuban inmates in control of two federal prisons released seven hostages Tuesday but seized 25 more hostages early today at a prison hospital, despite a promise by Atty. Gen. Edwin Meese III to delay deportations. The hospital at the Atlanta Federal Penitentiary apparently had been isolated since the takeover began Monday. One of the 25 seized there was quickly released because of a medical problem, said Sylvia Simons, a federal Bureau of Prisons spokeswoman in Washington.

Military strategists said Monday that there probably is only one effective way to stop the flow of refugees from Cuba: Impose a naval blockade around the island and stop all vessels and aircraft that might be carrying would-be immigrants. A blockade worked in Cuba in 1962, when the United States "quarantined" the island to prevent further delivery of Soviet missiles to the regime of Fidel Castro. It has generally worked to embargo trade in Bosnia, Iraq and Haiti.

About the same time that 452 Haitian refugees were disembarking Wednesday from the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Tahoma in Port-au-Prince, Haiti--after failing in their attempt to sail into Florida--11 Cuban rafters who had been plucked from the sea hours earlier were being released to relatives in Miami. This year, 448 Cubans have crossed the Florida Straits, many on crude boats fashioned from inner tubes. Most have been rescued at sea, either by the U.S. Coast Guard or private vessels.

Ever since the end of the Cold War, U.S. foreign policy and intelligence officials have talked quietly about possible scenarios for the downfall of Fidel Castro's Cuban regime, which had long depended on economic subsidies from the former Soviet Union. "How do you deal with the end of it (Castro's government)?" mused one U.S. official last year. "Do you keep the pressure on or do you suddenly release it?" Another senior official suggested that an easing of the U.S.

Lost, confused and running low on fuel, the pilot of the stolen crop duster deliberately crashed the aging biplane next to a freighter in the Gulf of Mexico. Seconds later Pabel Puig and his younger brother Judel were in the water, pulling the other eight Cubans out of the wreckage. The Soviet-built biplane floated for a few minutes, and everyone--including three children--got out. "Go!

One day after a small plane with 10 Cubans aboard crashed at sea, exile groups and Cuban American politicians were gearing up Wednesday for a major test of U.S. immigration policy that many here believe was hijacked by Fidel Castro during the struggle over Elian Gonzalez. Because they were picked up at sea, the nine survivors of the clandestine flight could be returned to Cuba under the terms of a 1994 accord with the communist nation.

Nine Cubans attempting to flee the communist island in an aging crop duster were rescued at sea Tuesday after the single-engine Soviet-built biplane apparently ran out of fuel and plunged into the Gulf of Mexico. The body of a 10th person was pulled from the ocean about 60 miles west of Cuba, where a passing freighter found the survivors clinging to the plane's wreckage. U.S.

As Elian Gonzalez awoke in his fatherland Thursday for the first time in seven months, his towering portrait was almost gone--meticulously removed from billboards and byways where the 6-year-old's plaintive face had been omnipresent during Cuba's crusade for his return. Gone too were the massive crowds that had thronged the new seaside Dignity Plaza opposite the U.S. diplomatic mission here, the official lightning rod for Cuba's "Return Elian" campaign.

It's over. Even as the plane carrying Elian Gonzalez passed overhead unseen on its flight to Cuba, those exiles who fought for more than seven months to keep the child in the U.S. acknowledged defeat with a mix of frustration and anger. But they knew: It's over. "At the beginning, I thought Elian should stay in this country because his mother struggled so much to get him here," said Hilda Vallejo, 24, a Cuban-born secretary. "Now, I feel it's so political. Let him go . . .

Elian Gonzalez, the young castaway whose American odyssey became a metaphor for the changing relationship between the United States and communist Cuba, returned to his homeland Wednesday, bringing to an end a passionate and highly politicized international custody battle. Perched in his father's arms, framed by the doorway of a chartered jet, Elian smiled and waved a last goodbye to the country that was his home for seven months and three days.

Two small aircraft belonging to a Miami-based Cuban exile group were shot down by Cuban fighter jets Saturday off the north coast of the island, U.S. officials said. A U.S. military plane sent to search the area just before sunset spotted two oil slicks in international waters 15 to 18 miles off the Cuban coast, according to Coast Guard Lt. Cmdr. Marcus Woodring in Miami. Woodring said the Coast Guard received a call about 3:45 p.m.

A couple of months have gone by since 6-year-old Elian Gonzalez was found floating on an inner tube. He has lost his mother. He has been separated unlawfully from his father, his grandparents and his home. This boy has been through enough. He should be returned to where he belongs, Cuba, via the next available transportation. Instead, this pitiable child continues to be victimized by strangers and distant kin who claim to know what's best.

When Glynis Guerra Eligiga took the stand as the government's star witness against two Cuban Americans accused of profiting from human despair, she seemed almost as terrified as she had been the day she watched her family die beneath the smugglers' boat.

The Miami relatives of Elian Gonzalez returned to a federal appeals court Thursday and asked the judges to reconsider their refusal to grant the 6-year-old Cuban boy an asylum hearing. The latest attempt to block Elian's return to Cuba came in a motion for a rehearing filed just hours before a deadline set by a three-judge panel of the U.S. 11th Circuit Court of Appeals in Atlanta. Two weeks ago, those judges ruled that the U.S.