Pope John Paul II has written to Cuban President Fidel Castro to express his "deep pain" at the recent executions of three people who tried to hijack a ferry and sail it to Florida.
The April 11th execution by firing squad of three men who commandeered a Havana commuter ferry in a bid to reach US soil followed two successful hijackings of passenger planes to Florida within two weeks.
In his letter, the Pope called on Mr Castro to make a "significant gesture ofclemency" for other Cubans sentenced over the affair.
President Castro last night defended the executions, saying they were a deterrent to the mass exodus that he said the United States was seeking to provoke in Cuba.
|
"The wave of hijackings had to be stopped radically," Mr Castro said on Cuban television. The executions ended a three-year moratorium on capital punishment in Cuba and shocked human rights organizations.
The 76-year-old leader said Cuba had to apply the death sentence without hesitation to avoid further armed attempts to leave the island by Cubans expecting to be received as heroes in the United States.
Mr Castro, in power since a 1959 guerrilla revolution, warned that future hijackers should not expect clemency from his government and would be given summary trials.
The executions, which followed the arrests of 75 dissidents in the worst political repression in Cuba in decades, prompted an outpouring of criticism worldwide.
But Mr Castro blamed the United States for the hijackings, saying US authorities were tolerant of Cuban hijackers, granting bail to the six who forced a DC-3 airliner to fly 90 miles to Florida at knife-point.
While hundreds of its citizens try to leave economically battered Cuba each year, often by taking to the sea in small boats, Havana says the United States encourages the illegal migration by granting automatic residence to Cubans who make it to US soil, the only nationality to enjoy such treatment.
Mr Castro, smarting at the Bush administration's stepped up efforts to undermine his rule by pushing for democratic changes within his one-party state, charged that Washington, backed by Cuban exiles in Miami, was seeking to disown migration accords and provoke another mass exodus that would serve as a pretext for military intervention in the island.
"The sinister idea is to provoke an armed conflict between Cuba and the United States in the hope of ending the revolution," he said on a television program where he spoke for almost four hours.
Cuba has allowed mass departures in 1980, when 125,000 people left from the port of Mariel, and in 1994, when 35,000 Cubans were picked up at sea by the US Coast Guard, many taken to the US naval base at Guantanamo Bay. Most ended up in the United States.