Progress Told in Cuban Inmate Standoff

Prison officials reported some progress Friday in talks with Cuban inmates, two days after the prisoners grabbed a high-security unit and took 10 hostages on the eve of being deported to their homeland.

Prescription medication was delivered Thursday night for two hostages and two prisoners through a grille that covers an entry in the high-security unit at Talladega Federal Correctional Institution.

Warden Roger Scott said the medication was for “non-life-threatening” conditions. It was the first direct contact with the inmates.

“We felt we made some progress,” Dan Dove of the Federal Bureau of Prisons said of the talks, but he declined to elaborate.

“The hostages continue to tell us the inmates haven’t threatened them,” Dove said. “We do not believe it is the intent of the inmates to harm the hostages.”

Seven men and three women who work at the prison were taken hostage Wednesday when guards were overpowered. There were 121 Cuban detainees and 18 American inmates in the unit when the uprising occurred.

Prison officials say they do not know how many of the Cubans are taking part in the hostage-holding or what role non-Cuban inmates are playing.

The rebellion occurred one day before 32 Cuban detainees were scheduled to be flown to Cuba from Birmingham, Ala. The Cuban inmates were among 125,000 who fled Cuba in the 1980 Mariel boat lift. They were ordered deported after committing crimes in the United States.

Dove would not disclose what the inmates are demanding.

“If there were demands, they would not be released,” he said. “That could potentially harm efforts to return the hostages safely to their families.”

Dove said electricity and water continued to be provided to the unit, but he would not say whether outgoing telephones were available to the inmates.

The Cubans apparently stocked their lockers with non-perishable food, such as potato chips and cookies, in addition to fruit, before the takeover began, Dove said. Officials believe they are sharing the food with the hostages.

“We figure they have plenty of food,” Dove said. “Food hasn’t been an item of negotiations.”

The prisoners requested food Wednesday, but it was not delivered because the inmates broke off negotiations for awhile.

Freedom appears to be the goal of the Cubans housed at Talladega, about 50 miles east of Birmingham.

One detainee, Jesus de Armas, was quoted as saying in a call to the Spanish-language edition of the Miami Herald that they were “willing to kill everyone to not go to Cuba. The thing here is limited to two words: freedom or death.”