150 Inmates Moved From Hostage Scene : Prisons: Negotiations continue with Cubans who are holding 10 employees. Officials say the transfer will make it easier to manage the U.S. facility.

Authorities on Sunday moved 150 inmates out of a federal prison where a group of Cubans who came to the United States in the 1980 Mariel boat lift took 10 people hostage on the eve of being deported.

Roger F. Scott, warden at Talladega Federal Correctional Institution, refused to say if the inmates were taken from buildings adjacent to the 200-prisoner high-security unit controlled by the Cubans.

An end to the ordeal that began Wednesday was nowhere in sight, he said. He and another prison spokesman declined to give details about negotiations with the hostage-takers.

“We plan to continue communicating with the Cuban detainees . . . in hope of reaching a peaceful resolution,” said prison spokesman Ed Crosley.

The besieged unit holds 121 Cubans and 18 non-Cuban inmates in addition to the hostages.

Scott said the prison workers taken hostage were unharmed, based on face-to-face meetings with six of them and reports on the four others by their captors.

Transferring 150 inmates from the prison reduces the general population to 812, said Dan Dunn, spokesman for U.S. Bureau of Prisons. Scott said that will make it easier to manage the prison, which has operated at a higher security level since the takeover began.

Scott would not say where the inmates would be taken.

He refused to give any information about conditions under which the hostages are being held. Three women are among the captives.

Prison officials continued to keep reporters and the public away from the unit, about 40 miles east of Birmingham in the rolling, pine-covered hills of central Alabama. Only the top of the inmate-controlled building is visible from a hill outside the prison grounds.

Thirty-two of the Cubans were scheduled for deportation to their island homeland the day after the uprising began, and their fight against a return to Cuba is apparently central to the crisis.

Prison officials have not said what prompted the takeover. But Bureau of Prisons spokesman Dunn said the deportations “may be part of the negotiating process.”