Andrew Cawthorne
Havana - Tensions between the United States and Cuba over the custody of a 6-year-old boy escalated on Tuesday as Havana demanded the return of six Cubans who allegedly hijacked a boat to Florida.
On the third day of the biggest anti-American protests in years on the communist-run island, Havana also sought international support in the custody battle over Elian Gonzalez, a Cuban boy rescued at sea after a disastrous attempt at migrant-smuggling across the Florida Straits.
"The arbitrary retention of the boy in US territory can only be described as an act of kidnapping and shameless piracy," Foreign Minister Felipe Perez Roque wrote in a letter to his counterparts around the world.
Rallying to calls from the ruling Communist Party to demonstrate daily over the case, tens of thousands of students and workers marched up to the US diplomatic mission at sunset for the biggest protest yet.
"We want Elian! Long live the Revolution! Down with the Yankees!" the crowd chanted, waving Cuban flags, singing patriotic songs and shaking fists at the imposing, fortified US compound behind them. To cheers from the crowd, little children climbed on to a giant stage to demand Elian's return.
On Tuesday night, the State Department issued a statement saying US regulations recognised the right of a parent to assert custody rights in an immigration proceeding.
"We are committed to working with the family of Elian Gonzalez, including the father, and all relevant officials, to achieve an appropriate resolution to this case," said State Department spokesperson James Foley.
Foley said US Immigration and Naturalisation Service officials would contact the boy's father, Juan Miguel Gonzalez, "in the near future to explain the process by which it will evaluate his rights in this case."
But the United States again rejected Cuba's ultimatum for the return of the boy.
In a separate incident, President Fidel Castro's government denounced the apparent hijacking on Monday of a tour boat off Cuba's coast, blaming US policy and anti-Castro Cuban exiles in Florida for inciting illegal immigration.
"They are guilty - with their Cuban Adjustment Act and with their broadcasts and exhortations to leave illegally - of the dozens, maybe hundreds of people, who die in those attempts," Castro told reporters. "They don't give them visas. Then they receive them as heroes."
A group of Cubans armed with knives overpowered and injured two tourist-industry workers off Havana Province's northern coast, then forced them to pilot their scuba-diving boat across 145km of open sea to Florida, the government said.
Cuban patrol boats tracked the hijacked craft before handing off the task to the US Coast Guard in US waters, where the boat was captured, the Foreign Ministry said.
US Coast Guard officials, who identified the craft as a fishing boat, said they had six suspected hijackers in custody. Castro put the number at eight.
Blood stained the ground at the site of the hijacking. Nearby, relatives of the two tourism workers tearfully pleaded for their return to Cuba in interviews with Reuters Television.
Havana contends that US immigration policy encourages illegal bids to make the perilous sea crossing by virtually guaranteeing asylum if Cuban boat people make it to U.S. soil. Migrants intercepted at sea are usually sent home.
Washington and anti-Castro exile groups in Florida blame the decades-old immigration problem, which has flared up into mass exoduses twice in the past 20 years, on dictatorial and impoverished conditions created by the Cuban government.
Castro demanded that the United States immediately return the two hijacked workers, who he said were held with knives at their throats during the ordeal, and the group who took them.
"What are they going to do with the hijackers? Let them go free?" Castro asked. "Or obey the law and return them to Cuba, as agreed in the migration accord we have?"
The veteran communist, wearing a photo of Elian Gonzalez on his military uniform, said the alleged hijacking might accentuate nationalist fury over the boy's case. Gonzalez has been in Miami since he was rescued at sea on November 25 clinging to an inner tube after a craft carrying Cuban boat people capsized, killing his mother and 10 others.
In Florida, the rhetoric matched that in Cuba. "The revolution that Castro likes to talk about so much during his endless speeches has been a complete failure, and he knows it," Representative Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, a tireless Castro critic, said.
"That is why he issues endless ultimatums, trying to divert attention from the suffering of the Cuban people, for which he is responsible," she said in a statement.
In Orlando, Florida, South African Archbishop Desmond Tutu invoked the wisdom of the biblical King Solomon in saying that "what is best for the child" is to "be with his closest relatives" in Cuba, free of "the added stress of learning new customs and a new culture." - Reuters
