Cuba Kills 4 Swimming to Guantanamo; U.S. Protests

WASHINGTON — Cuban border guards, armed with rifles and hand grenades, killed at least four Cuban civilians attempting to swim to asylum at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay during the last few weeks, the Clinton Administration said Wednesday.

“We view these actions against individuals who pose no threat to others to be extraordinarily cruel and unacceptable,” State Department spokesman Joe Snyder said. “We insisted that the Cubans end the practice.”

Snyder said that on at least five separate occasions in late June, U.S. personnel at Guantanamo Bay saw border guards shoot and throw grenades at fleeing civilians. The guards were seen pulling three bodies out of the water on June 26 and one on June 27.

The U.S. government filed a formal protest with the Cuban Foreign Ministry earlier this week, Snyder said, but received no response. It was Washington’s second diplomatic complaint to Cuba this week over “excessive use of force” by Cuban guards, whose civilian targets were trying to escape the deteriorating economic and political conditions on the Communist-ruled island.

In the earlier incident, Cuban guards in the seaside town of Cojimar opened fire on a U.S.-based speedboat last Thursday, killing three refugees and wounding the operator, Robert Hoddinott, 33, of Key West, Fla. In separate incidents, two other high-speed craft carrying would-be defectors were seized.

Snyder said that the U.S. government does nothing to encourage Cubans to try to gain asylum by making the hazardous swim to Guantanamo Bay, the base maintained by the U.S. Navy on Cuba’s southeast coast. Nevertheless, 195 Cubans have successfully reached the base so far this year, a pace substantially ahead of the 152 who made the swim in all of last year.

Unlike Haitian refugees, some of whom were held for more than a year at a makeshift camp at Guantanamo, the Cubans who reached the base were all sent to the United States to press their claims for asylum.

Cuba’s official Communist Youth weekly Juventud Rebelde called last Thursday’s attempts “just another incident in the long list of filibustering felonies perpetrated from the North on the Cuban coast.”

Juventud Rebelde said the Cuban guards were justified in acting as they did, given the history of “pirate attacks” carried out by U.S.-based Cuban exiles.