By Anthony Boadle

HAVANA (Reuters) - President Fidel Castro defended on Friday the firing squad executions
of three ferry hijackers as a deterrent to a mass exodus that he said the United States was
seeking to provoke in communist-run Cuba.

The April 11 execution of three men who commandeered a Havana commuter ferry in a bid
to reach U.S. soil followed two successful hijackings of passenger planes to Florida within
two weeks.

 "The wave of hijackings had to be stopped radically," Castro said on Cuban television. The
 executions ended a three-year moratorium on capital punishment in Cuba and shocked
 human rights organizations.

 The 76-year-old leader said Cuba had to apply the death sentence without hesitation to avoid
 further armed attempts to leave the island by Cubans expecting to be received as heroes in
 the United States.

 Castro, in power since a 1959 guerrilla revolution, warned that future hijackers should not
 expect clemency from his government and would be given summary trials.

 The executions, which followed the arrests of 75 dissidents in the worst political repression
 in Cuba in decades, prompted an outpouring of criticism worldwide and lost Castro some
 close friends among left-wing intellectuals, such as Portuguese Nobel prize winning writer
 Jose Saramago and Uruguayan journalist and author Eduardo Galeano.

 But Castro blamed his longtime ideological enemy the United States for the hijackings,
 saying U.S authorities were tolerant of Cuban hijackers, granting bail to the six who forced a
 DC-3 airliner to fly 90 miles to Florida at knife-point.

 TO SEA IN SMALL BOATS

 While hundreds of its citizens try to leave economically battered Cuba each year, often by
 taking to the sea in small boats, Havana says the United States encourages the illegal
 migration by granting automatic residence to Cubans who make it to U.S. soil, the only
 nationality to enjoy such treatment.

 Castro, smarting at the George W. Bush administration's stepped up efforts to undermine his
 rule by pushing for democratic changes within his one-party state, charged that Washington,
 backed by Cuban exiles in Miami, was seeking to disown migration accords and provoke
 another mass exodus that would serve as a pretext for military intervention in the island.

 "The sinister idea is to provoke an armed conflict between Cuba and the United States in the
 hope of ending the revolution," he said on a television program where he spoke for almost
 four hours.

 Cuba has allowed mass departures in 1980, when 125,000 people left from the port of
 Mariel, and in 1994, when 35,000 Cubans were picked up at sea by the U.S. Coast Guard,
 many taken to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay. Most ended up in the United States.

 Castro said the top U.S. diplomat in Havana, James Cason, was sent to Cuba last year with
 instructions to stir up opposition to his government and had overstepped the boundaries of
 diplomatic conduct.

 The Cuban leader repeated his accusations that Cason was "a bully with diplomatic
 immunity" who had turned the U.S. mission into "an incubator of counterrevolutionaries" by
 allowing dissidents to openly hold meetings in his residence.

 Most of the 75 dissidents and independent journalists arrested and given stiff prison terms
 on charges of being on the payroll of the United States and conspiring to subvert the
 government were activists seeking peaceful reforms.