Says U.S. causing deaths at sea

 BY ANITA SNOW
 Associated Press

 HAVANA -- Members of the National Assembly unanimously condemned a U.S.
 law Wednesday that they say encourages Cubans to migrate illegally to the
 United States, thus putting their lives and those of their children at risk.

 The Cuban Adjustment Act, passed by the U.S. Congress in 1966, allows illegal
 Cuban immigrants who reach U.S. soil to remain and apply for legal residency
 after a year.

 ``It is a perverse policy, deliberately conceived to destabilize and suffocate Cuban
 society, cynically calculated to provoke death and suffering, shamelessly
 manipulating the tragedies that this law causes,'' said the proclamation approved
 by the National Assembly as it opened its two-day session.

 President Fidel Castro presided over the morning session. He noted that in the
 week after 6-year-old Elián González returned to Cuba, several large groups of
 illegal Cuban migrants started out on the same dangerous journey that cost the
 boy's mother her life.

 ``This is the killer Cuban Adjustment Act,'' Castro said.

 Elián's mother and 10 others died in their attempt to reach the United States last
 November, and Elián was set adrift. Two men on a fishing trip found him floating
 on an inner tube off the Florida coast.

 In a case last week, the U.S. Coast Guard found 36 Cuban migrants, including
 four children, stranded on a deserted island in the Bahamas without food or water.
 Four of the migrants -- a pregnant woman, a man complaining of abdominal pain,
 an unconscious 14-year-old girl and her mother -- were taken to hospitals in the
 Florida Keys. The other 32 were turned over to Bahamian authorities for
 repatriation to Cuba.

 Cubans picked up at sea once also were given the chance for legal U.S.
 residency. But under 1994 and 1995 Cuba-U.S migration accords designed to
 stem an exodus of boat people, the U.S. Coast Guard now returns them to the
 island unless they have reached U.S. soil.

 Cuban authorities blame the 1966 law for the international custody battle over
 Elián, who returned to Cuba with his father on June 28 after a seven-month battle
 with relatives in the United States who fought to keep the boy.

 Cuban leaders also says the law gives ammunition to their political enemies in
 Florida, who describe the migrants as desperate boat people fleeing their
 communist homeland for freedom.

 Havana maintains that the vast majority of Cuban migrants are seeking the same
 economic opportunities sought in America by Haitians, Dominicans and others
 from across the Western Hemisphere.

 Migrants from those countries who are caught in the United States without visas
 are not allowed to stay.

 ``In a colossal operation of falsification of acts and promotion of lies, they have
 tried to present Cubans as people who want to `escape' to North America, and
 that the United States as a `generous' nation receives them,'' Wednesday's
 proclamation said. That argument ``doesn't contain an atom of truth,'' it said.