HAVANA (AP) -- Communist lawmakers on Wednesday unanimously
                  condemned a U.S. law they say encourages Cubans to migrate illegally to the
                  United States, 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 American 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 Elian Gonzalez 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.

                  Elian's mother and 10 others perished in their attempt to reach U.S. shores last
                  November, and Elian was set adrift. Two men on a fishing trip found him
                  floating on an inner tube off the coast of Florida.

                  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 on the high seas once also were given the chance for legal
                  American 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
                  Elian, who returned to Cuba with his father on June 28 after a seven-month
                  battle with relatives who fought to keep the boy in the United States.

                  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 simply 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.

                  The proclamation also said the U.S. policy admits criminals who never could
                  have gotten visas and encourages immigrant smuggling.