Miami Cubans protest deporting of stowaway

Calm returned to Miami's Little Havana after riot police fired tear gas to disperse Cuban exile demonstrators protesting the deportation to Havana of a Cuban stowaway.

Violence erupted for the second time over the weekend when several hundred demonstrators broke away from a generally peaceful protest march and headed for the Dade County jail. They demanded the release of 13 people arrested during an earlier series of protests outside the Miami office of the US Immigration and Naturalization Service (INS), police said.

The unrest was initially prompted by the deportation Friday of a young Cuban who stowed away aboard a ship from Havana to Miami but was denied political asylum here. He is believed to have been the first Cuban seeking asylum to have been sent back to his homeland from the US since Fidel Castro seized power in 1959.