Memorial: Victims perished when their boat capsized while
                                            making illegal crossing. Miami service draws exiles who denounce
                                            Castro regime.

                                            From Reuters

                                                 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.