THE UN Security Council early yesterday adopted a statement "strongly deploring" Cuba's shooting down of two unarmed US Cessna aircraft off the Cuban coast at the weekend. Four persons aboard the two planes are missing and presumed dead. All are Cuban exiles.
The statement, drafted and sponsored by the United States, invited the International Civil Aviation Commission to investigate the incident. China had wanted the vote delayed until the Cuban Foreign Minister, Mr Roberto Robaina, arrived to defend the action. Cuba said the US "rammed it through the Security Council."
An angry Cuban representative called the resolution "a total miscarriage of justice". Cuba had "unequivocal proof", including tapes of cockpit conversations, of the intentions of the group to invade Cuban air space despite warnings not to do so, he said.
He accused the Florida based organisers Brothers to the Rescue, of "intolerable provocations" which the US had ignored Cuban diplomatic protests going back to last August.
He added "International peace and security is not what is being threatened today [but] the security and sovereignty of Cuba which has been threatened for 35 years." He accused the United States of doing nothing to prevent these flights.
The US wanted an outright Security Council condemnation of Cuba with far stronger language, but it also wanted to avoid a China veto if it pursued the matter.
The US and China are at loggerheads on a number of UN issues, including UN troops in Haiti. China wants them with drawn. Cuba, with other Latin American states and the US, wants them to remain.
President Clinton is seeking to calm the debate, which could react against him in an election year. There are primary elections two weeks from today in Florida, where there is a politically powerful and emotional anti Castro exile community.
The President's retaliation against Cuba included halting all charter air flights and support for a conservative Republican congressional bill, drafted by Senator Jesse Helms, to impose tighter sanctions on the Caribbean island.
Senator Robert Dole, the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, blamed Mr Clinton's perceived "weakness" in foreign policy for President Fidel Castro's drastic action.
Mr Patrick Buchanan, the other main candidate for the nomination, called the Cuban action "an atrocity". If he were president, he would have US "fighter planes patrolling the Florida Straits, and I would tell Mr Castro that if his planes are up there shooting at civilian aircraft. . . in international waters, he will lose his air force."
There were three Cessnas in the flight, which was organised by Mr Jose Basulto, a veteran of the ill fated Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, and later an active supporter of the Contras in Nicaragua.
He was in the lead plane which he boasts was in Cuban air space but was not shot down. In the past he has dropped leaflets over Havana calling for the overthrow of the Castro regime.
The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) threatened in September to suspend Mr Basulto's pilot's licence if he continued his flights over Cuba.
A former Cuban MiG pilot who defected to the US four years ago and became a leading member of Brothers to the Rescue, appeared on Havana television on Monday night saying that the FBI was conspiring with the organisation to drop arms in Cuba and kill leading figures, including Dr Castro.
President Clinton, who described the shooting as brutal and unjustified, said he will use the $100 million in frozen Cuban assets held by the US to compensate relatives of victims.