When the 13 de marzo got under way, the crews of three neighboring tugs at the dock woke up and set out in pursuit. They overtook the hijackers about six miles outside the harbor and tried to turn the stolen tug back. In the course of this effort, the 13 de marzo collided with the pursuit tugs and sank. The Cuban coast guard arrived on the scene when people were already in the water, and succeeded in picking up half of them. The rest drowned.
The Cuban authorities interviewed the survivors the following day and released all but the ringleaders. Prieto himself was among the fatalities.
The first hurdle to be jumped to characterize this as a "human rights abuse" was to cast it as a government action. Vigilante action by civilians doesn't qualify.
In pursuit of this aim, survivors' accounts began to surface that displayed a familiar brand of nuttiness. The crews of the pursuits tugs were identified by the survivors as Cuban G2 agents in disguise. They could tell because, drowning in the dark in a storm-tossed ocean, they observed symptoms of seasickness in the crews.
This may have been a bit too much to swallow even for the human rights agencies, although they published such claims in their findings. They gave the additional ground that the tugs were owned by the Ministry of Transport and therefore anything done by its employees was a government action.
(On this theory, the U.S. is guilty of major human rights violations every time a civil servant "goes postal".)
Honorable mention should go to the witnesses who reported that the tugs sailed very rapidly in circles around the people in the water, creating a whirlpool that sucked them under.
Then there are the conflicting accounts of exactly how the 13 de marzo sustained the damage that sank her. The Cubans say one of the tugs cut across her course trying to stop or turn her and was rammed by the hijackers. The survivors say the pursuit tug deliberately rammed the 13 de marzo in the bow.
(snip/...)
http://members.allstream.net/~dchris/CubaFAQ204.html
This is the '04 thread I got this from ...
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=102&topic_id=606284&mesg_id=606489
= new reply since forum marked as read