U.S. Authorities Detaining 58 New Cuban Refugees

MIAMI —  Forty Cuban refugees swam ashore to a west Florida beach and were headed for a detention center in Miami on Tuesday, while U.S. officials decided what to do with 17 others being held aboard a Coast Guard cutter after they were plucked from a boat half a mile off the coast.

One other Cuban, suffering from exposure and back pain, was being held overnight in a Venice, Fla., hospital, said Cpl. Mike Bessette of the Sarasota County Sheriff’s Department.

The landing on Florida’s west coast, rather than in the Keys or in the Miami area, was a rarity.

“Our destiny is the United States,” one man said in English to a local television reporter after wading ashore at Manasota Key, about 20 miles south of Sarasota, just after daybreak.

Immigration officials said the migrants paid smugglers to bring them to the United States from a refugee camp in the Cayman Islands south of Cuba. They left Grand Cayman Feb. 10 in two power boats, officials said.

On the way to the United States, the Cubans told U.S. Border Patrol agents, one of the power boats sank and the other developed mechanical problems. The Cubans said that the group abandoned the boat and climbed into a smaller boat and a raft that were being towed.

The 58 men, women and children represent the largest number of Cubans to seek asylum since the refugee crisis of last summer.

The 36 men and five women who made it to shore are likely to be paroled into Miami’s Cuban American community within days. But the 15 men, one woman and 12-year-old boy aboard the cutter Point Countess could be denied entry and transported instead to a detention camp at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Last summer, after thousands of Cubans began to flee their island homeland in a flotilla of flimsy rafts, the Clinton Administration reversed 30 years of U.S. policy and declared that Cubans would no longer automatically be granted refuge here. Between mid-August and the end of September more than 30,000 Cubans were picked up at sea and transferred to Guantanamo. Most remain there.

Last month U.S. officials began airlifting more than 8,000 Cubans being held in Panana back to Guantanamo.