CUBA condemned Thursday the policies of the United States that incite illegal emigration by residents of the island to that country, with resulting human fatalities, as occurred this past December 22.

According to a communication from the Ministry of the Interior, read out yesterday on the Cuban “Roundtable” TV program, two Cubans perished on Saturday, December 22 after the speedboat in which they were attempting to leave the country capsized one kilometer off the northern coast of Havana province.

Autopsies performed at the Legal Medicine Institute in the capital determined that Yosvani Vera Alvarez, aged 29 and Zuleika Rodríguez Pérez, 43, died from drowning.

The text also reported that another nine citizens, women and children among them, who boarded the boat that came from the United States  for the purposes of human trafficking, managed to reach the shore alive.

The survivors said that as soon as they embarked, water began to leak into the boat which also had problems with one of its two engines.

This situation required their return to land within a few minutes.  However, the speedboat, manned by two crewmen, changed direction abruptly, turned over and began to sink, stern first.

Cuban authorities are searching for the two crew members, who apparently managed to escape into Cuban territory after abandoning the shipwrecked immigrants.

At the same time, the communication concludes, investigations are continuing into this unfortunate accident whose root cause is the murderous U.S. Cuban Adjustment Act, which incites illegal emigration and the lucrative activities of the Cuban American mafia in South Florida.

Translated by Granma International

Granma 28-12-2007