Dry Feet Fail to Keep Cubans in Florida

A derelict bridge in the Florida Keys is at the centre of a new dispute over US immigration policy after 15 migrants who landed there on a homemade boat were sent back to Cuba.

Their angry supporters insist the bridge is in US territory and that the group should have been admitted under the "wet foot/dry foot" legislation, which usually allows Cubans who make it to dry land to stay, while those intercepted at sea are repatriated. But the coastguard and department of homeland security ruled that sections removed from the Old Seven Mile bridge after its closure in 1982 left it disconnected from the mainland and therefore an isolated, artificial structure no longer deemed to be on US soil.

Had the migrants, who included a two-year-old boy and his parents, landed anywhere along the new Seven Mile bridge, which runs parallel and is just meters away, they would almost certainly have been allowed to remain in the US.

"They were determined to be ‘feet wet’ and processed in accordance with standard procedure," said Lieutenant Gene Maestas, a US coastguard spokesman.

The strict interpretation has infuriated many in Florida’s 600,000-strong Cuban community, including Republican senator Mel Martinez, who said the decision "again shows the complete and utter failure of the wet foot/dry foot policy. Because they reached an old bridge and not a new bridge there’s a judgment they didn’t reach American soil. The semantics used to return these men and women, who have risked so much to reach freedom and are now returned to an uncertain future, are an embarrassment."

William Sanchez, a lawyer acting for the migrants and their relatives already in Florida, said that parts of the old bridge were still in use. "People use portions of it as a pier and for fishing," he said. "It’s either a pier or a rock that’s sustaining a structure that the US has control over."

Mr Sanchez planned to file a lawsuit demanding a review of the case in a federal court. "Their feet were very dry," he said.

Ramon Saul Sanchez, head of the Democracy Movement, a Cuban-American group, said he began a hunger strike on Saturday that would not end until George Bush agreed to hear Cuban exiles’ views on the wet foot/dry foot policy.

Rising numbers of Cubans have tried to flee the regime. Coastguard figures show that 2,952 Cubans were intercepted at sea in 2005, twice the 2004 figure.

Meanwhile, a federal judge in Miami has ordered the remand in custody of a Florida professor and his wife on charges that they spied for the Castro government. Carlos Alvarez and his wife Elsa are alleged to have recruited students to help them.