Miami Strike Called to Back Militant Cuban

Hundreds of supporters of an anti-Castro Cuban militant threatened with deportation called a general strike Thursday in the city’s Little Havana section, and more people joined a hunger strike in his support.

Hundreds gathered for a noontime march and most businesses in the neighborhood participated in a three-hour work stoppage in the growing protest of the Justice Department’s decision to deport Orlando Bosch.

The Justice Department last week announced it will deport Bosch because secret U.S. intelligence information implicates him in several bombings and assassination attempts during Fidel Castro’s 30-year rule of Cuba. The Justice Department has said its requests that other countries expel terrorists will not be taken seriously if it grants asylum to Bosch.

Galvanizes Supporters

The deportation order galvanized Bosch supporters, many of them Cuban exiles who consider the 62-year-old pediatrician a patriot. He has been in federal prison since he returned to the United States illegally in February, 1988.

His daughter, Myriam Bosch, said she was heartened by Thursday’s show of support.

Demonstrators rallied at a monument to participants in the Bay of Pigs invasion.

U.S. Sen. Connie Mack (R-Fla.) has requested a meeting with President Bush to discuss the case, and a Spanish-language radio station asked listeners to send telegrams to the White House requesting a review of the case.

Justice Department attorneys told U.S. District Judge William Hoeveler on Tuesday that the government would not deport Bosch before July 14.

Hoeveler has set a Sept. 13 hearing to examine whether the Justice Department has handled the Bosch case properly.

Lauri Filppu, an attorney for the department, said the government probably would not deport Bosch before the September hearing.

Bosch was jailed from 1968 to 1972 for firing a bazooka at a Polish freighter docked in the port of Miami. He then spent 11 years in Venezuelan prisons fighting charges that he masterminded the 1976 bombing of a Cuban jetliner that killed 73 passengers.