5 Cubans Sent Back to Castro for U.S. Crimes

Five men who fled Cuba in the 1980 “Freedom Flotilla,” then were imprisoned for crimes in the United States, were returned to their homeland Friday in the first deportations under a pact that set off fiery prison riots last year.

The five handcuffed Cubans, watched by two guards each, took off from Birmingham Municipal Airport in a U.S. Marshal’s Service Boeing 727 that held about 50 people for the 90-minute flight to an airport near Havana.

The plane landed without incident, turned over the detainees to Cuban authorities and returned to the United States, said Joe Krovisky, a Justice Department spokesman in Washington. “Everything went smoothly,” he said.

The Cubans, the first of as many as 2,500 the government wants to deport, had been kept at the federal prison at Talladega pending a final ruling on deportation.

The U.S. Supreme Court voted 8 to 1 Friday to reject an emergency request by three of the Cubans to remain. Justice Thurgood Marshall cast the dissenting vote, with none of the justices commenting.

Attorneys for the three claimed they would be persecuted if sent home.

The deportations were the first since a 1987 agreement was reached between the United States and Cuban President Fidel Castro to resume the repatriations.

That pact set off 11 days of rioting in November, 1987, at federal prisons in Atlanta and Oakdale, La., with 125 people held hostage, one inmate slain, and heavy property damage to both institutions. As the riots ended, the Cuban inmates were dispersed to other prisons, including 114 to Talladega.

No Resistance Reported

No inmate resistance to the latest deportation proceedings has been reported.

The repatriation program for 2,746 Cubans was suspended at Castro’s insistence in 1985 after 201 were returned.

In the 1980 boat lift, about 125,000 people, some of them convicts or mentally ill, sailed illegally from Mariel, Cuba, to the United States.

Those the United States wants to return are “excludable aliens” or those convicted of serious crimes in this country.

The five Cubans were Miguel Beitia-Socarraz, 28, who pleaded guilty to second-degree burglary; Onel Calzado-Garlobo, 43, convicted in 1982 of attempted sexual assault involving a 13-year-old girl; Rene Maurin-Oliva, 25, who pleaded guilty to theft and battery; and Hector Hernandez-Quesada and Angel Meneses-Hernandez, who did not fight the deportation and about whom little was known.

Deborah Vurstion-Wade, a Justice Department spokeswoman, s aid a number of officials were on the flight, including John A. Simon of the Immigration and Naturalization Service and Talladega Warden Don Southerland, because “we consider this a training exercise for the department. We hope to have many of these flights.”

When the Cubans got off the plane, Vurstion-Wade said, three of them “knelt down and kissed the ground.”