Caymans crack down on Cuban migrants

Caymans crack down on Cuban migrants

Cuban boat people who get stranded in the Caymans face detention -- or being sent back.

BY SHURNA ROBBINS, Special to The Miami Herald

Francisco Reyes Benitez, right, has become the Cuban detainees' unofficial representative to the Cayman Islands because he speaks the best English.

GEORGE TOWN, Cayman Islands --

One Cuban inmate picked the lock at the Fairbanks Detention Centre, then he and 35 other Cubans went outside to stage one of the oddest protests in this Caribbean territory.

Marching down the streets of George Town, the world's fifth-largest banking center, the Cuban men and women shouted, ''No Cuba. No Castro.'' Police then rounded them up peacefully and returned them to detention.

The April protest was the latest chapter in the saga of hundreds of Cuban boat people who leave their island, bound mostly for Honduras, but are stranded in the Cayman Islands, about 125 miles south of Cuba, when their boats break down.