Funeral Held for 7 Cubans Who Drowned

MIAMI —  Seven men and women who drowned at sea fleeing Communist Cuba were buried Saturday in a politically charged funeral after a somber procession through the streets of a mourning Little Havana, Miami’s Cuban exile stronghold.

Exiles bitterly denounced Cuban President Fidel Castro as a tyrant whose government forced people to risk and sometimes lose their lives as they sought freedom through perilous crossings of the Florida Straits to the United States.

“It is because of this tyrant we are here today. Thousands and thousands have died, and Castro is to blame,” Armando Perez Roura, head of the exile station Radio Mambi, said in an address at the funeral service.

Despite the belligerence, the overall mood was one of great tragedy.

Orlando Rodriguez wept uncontrollably. He arrived in Miami last year on a small boat. His mother, father and two brothers perished in the sinking and were laid out before him in four coffins.

“All we Cubans here pray that these tragedies will not continue to be repeated and that this madness will end,” Father Francisco Santana, a Roman Catholic priest, told mourners. He spoke in front of the Cuban mausoleum, a black marble monument to refugees lost at sea, in Little Havana’s Graceland Memorial Park.

“Freedom. They wanted to come to this country and there’s no other way,” Luis Garcia, a Miami school official whose wife lost her aunt and two cousins on the ill-fated voyage, told Reuters.

The dead, four women and three men, ages 23 to 53, were among 11 people who drowned when their 17-foot boat capsized last week during an illegal attempt to cross to Florida. They were members of two extended families in Cardenas, Cuba.

The incident has gripped Miami’s 800,000-strong Cuban community and drawn national attention, largely because one of three survivors was a 5-year-old boy who was found by fishermen clinging to a rubber tube in the sea off Fort Lauderdale.

The mother of the boy, Elian Gonzalez, drowned and her body was not recovered. An international custody dispute has erupted because some of his relatives want him to stay with them in Miami but his father, who lives on the island, wants him sent home.