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Havana, Feb 21 (EFE).- Cuba said Tuesday that a woman died in an attempt by people smugglers to get a group of emigrants into the United States and accused Washington of encouraging illegal immigration.
The incident occurred Monday when Cuban authorities learned of an attempt to leave the island, organized with the help of people in the United States, from a point on the coast of La Habana province, the official daily Granma reported.
Authorities found the body of a woman on the shore that was left behind by a group of 14 emigrants, among them women and children, aboard a Scorpion inflatable boat.
Granma did not say what the woman died from, but it did report that a man and another woman who were unable to get on the boat were arrested.
Cuban patrol boats were not able to catch the boat, which was intercepted several hours later by a U.S. Coast Guard vessel some 35 miles north of the port of Mariel, which is 45 kilometers (about 28 miles) west of Havana.
Granma said the number of boats operated by people smugglers from Florida has increased recently.
"The government of that country (the United States), ever more tolerant of such criminal activities, is the main one responsible for the thousands of deaths that its murderous laws have cost the people of Cuba," the Cuban government said in a statement published on the front page of the newspaper.
"The shameless way in which it provides incentives and rewards those who violate the laws of Cuba and arrive illegally on U.S. territory with legal privileges not granted to any other citizens of the world promotes this harmful traffic," the statement said.
Granma was referring to the Cuban Adjustment Act, which allows Cubans who reach U.S. territory to remain and apply for residency a year later, and the wet-foot, dry-foot policy, which says that those who reach U.S. soil are allowed to stay and can apply for permanent residence.
The U.S. Coast Guard said more than 2,600 Cuban emigrants were intercepted last year on the high seas, the highest level since the mass exodus of 1994, when 37,000 people heading for Florida, most of them on flimsy rafts, were caught.
Cuba has also accused Washington of failing to comply with the immigration agreements signed in 1994 and 1995, under which the United States grants a minimum of 20,000 emigrant visas per year to Cuban citizens and must repatriate illegal Cuban immigrants intercepted at sea.
The United States, for its part, denies the Cuban allegations and contends that the U.S. Interests Section in Havana is following the agreements and granted 20,075 visas to Cuban emigrants in the last fiscal year, which ran from October 2004 to October 2005.
Applications for refugee status rose from 5,568 in the last fiscal year to 20,929 in the current one, and 10,547 were approved, the U.S. Interests Section said.
The United States also has a special program, established in 1998, that grants visas under a lottery system, and some 500,000 Cubans have taken part in it, according to U.S. estimates.
The United States and Cuba do not have full diplomatic relations but maintain interests sections in each other's capitals. The United States has imposed a 45-year-old trade embargo against the communist-ruled island. EFE
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