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The sinking of the tugboat 13 de Marzo was an incident on July 13, 1994, when 72 Cubans attempted to leave the island of Cuba on a stolen tugboat, to seek asylum in the United States. 41 passengers were drowned at sea when the tugboat sank. It was alleged that the Cuban coast guard deliberately sank the commandeered vessel and then refused to rescue some of the passengers. The Cuban government stated that the boat was sunk by accident.
On July 13, 1994, at approximately three in the morning, seventy-two men, women, and children commandeered the tugboat 13 de Marzo ("13th of March"), intending to seek asylum in the United States. [1] [2] With all vessels in Cuba owned by the state, it would have been illegal to acquire such a boat. [3]
Cuba Archive, a Washington DC-registered and Miami-based organization which promotes human rights in Cuba, has alleged that the Cuban coast guard deliberately sank the commandeered vessel and then refused to rescue some of the passengers. [3] According to survivor María Victoria García, whose ten-year-old son, husband, and other close family members died, but who eventually resettled in the United States in 1999, the government vessels refused to provide assistance to some of the distressed passengers. As a result, only 31 survivors were pulled from the water. [3] She said:
After nearly an hour of battling in the open sea, the boat circled round the survivors, creating a whirlpool so that we would drown. Many disappeared into the seas... We asked them to save us, but they just laughed, they then told us to jam random objects up our noses. [3]
For their part, the Cuban government denied responsibility, and stated that the boat was sunk by accident. [1]
Amnesty International said the following with regard to the involvement of the Cuban Government "there is sufficient evidence to indicate that it was an official operation and that, if events occurred in the way described by several of the survivors, those who died as a result of the incident were victims of extrajudicial execution." [4]
International leaders, including Pope John Paul II, made statements about the incident and expressed condolences to the victims. [3]
Goya was a Norwegian motor freighter used as a troop transport by Nazi Germany and sunk with a massive loss of life near the end of World War II.
SIEV X was the name assigned by Australian authorities to an Indonesian fishing boat carrying over 400 asylum seekers en route to Australia, which capsized in international waters with great loss of life on 19 October 2001. SIEV stands for Suspected Irregular Entry Vessel and is the acronym used by the surveillance authority for any boat that has entered Australian waters without prior authorisation. The X is a designation used where a tracking number has not yet been assigned, in accordance with Australian Government orders.
Capsizing or keeling over occurs when a boat or ship is rolled on its side or further by wave action, instability or wind force beyond the angle of positive static stability or it is upside down in the water. The act of recovering a vessel from a capsize is called righting. Capsize may result from broaching, knockdown, loss of stability due to cargo shifting or flooding, or in high speed boats, from turning too fast.
A hell ship is a ship with extremely inhumane living conditions or with a reputation for cruelty among the crew. It now generally refers to the ships used by the Imperial Japanese Navy and Imperial Japanese Army to transport Allied prisoners of war (POWs) and rōmusha out of the Philippines, the Dutch East Indies, Hong Kong and Singapore in World War II. These POWs were taken to the Japanese Islands, Formosa, Manchukuo, Korea, the Moluccas, Sumatra, Burma, or Siam to be used as forced labor.
The Struma disaster was the sinking on 24 February 1942 of a ship, MV Struma, which had been trying to take nearly 800 Jewish refugees from the Axis member Romania to Mandatory Palestine. She was a small iron-hulled ship of only 240 GRT and had been built in 1867 as a steam-powered schooner but had recently been re-engined with an unreliable second-hand diesel engine. Struma was only 148.4 ft (45 m) long, had a beam of only 19.3 ft (6 m) and a draught of only 9.9 ft (3 m) but an estimated 781 refugees and 10 crew were crammed into her.
German submarine U-48 was a Type VIIB U-boat of Nazi Germany's Kriegsmarine during World War II, and the most successful that was commissioned. During her two years of active service, U-48 sank 51 ships for a total of 299,477 GRT and 1,060 tons; she also damaged four more for a total of 27,877 GRT over twelve war patrols conducted during the opening stages of the Battle of the Atlantic.
Ukishima Maru was a 4,731-ton Japanese naval transport vessel originally built as a passenger ship in March 1937. On 24 August 1945, while on a trip to repatriate Koreans in the wake of World War II, it exploded and sank in the harbor of Maizuru, Kyoto Prefecture. The sinking caused controversy in Korea and became the subject of films and documentaries years later.
The Battle of the Caribbean refers to a naval campaign waged during World War II that was part of the Battle of the Atlantic, from 1941 to 1945. German U-boats and Italian submarines attempted to disrupt the Allied supply of oil and other material. They sank shipping in the Caribbean Sea and the Gulf of Mexico and attacked coastal targets in the Antilles. Improved Allied anti-submarine warfare eventually drove the Axis submarines out of the Caribbean region.
SS Robin Moor was a United States cargo steamship that was built in 1919 and sunk by a U-boat in May 1941, several months before the US entered World War II.
SS Henry was a Norwegian steam-powered cargo ship best known for being one of the two ships sunk in one of the most controversial incidents in Norway during the Second World War.
The Maleconazo was a protest on 5 August 1994, in which thousands of Cubans took to the streets around the Malecón in Havana to demand freedom and express frustration with the government. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, Cuba fell into a crippling economic crisis that had many citizens looking to flee the island. On the day of the uprising, the Cuban police blocked people from boarding tugboats leaving Havana, prompting thousands of citizens to storm the streets in the largest anti-government demonstration Cuba had seen since the Cuban Revolution. In the weeks following, President Fidel Castro quelled the frustration by opening the doors of the country and allowing Cubans to leave, which proved to have a significant impact on Cuba's relationship with the United States moving forward.
On 15 December 2010, an Indonesian fishing boat carrying 89 asylum seekers and 3 crew members sank after being dashed against the rocks near Rocky Point, Christmas Island, an external Australian territory. 50 people died and 42 were rescued. The incident was the worst civilian maritime disaster in Australia in more than a century.
Bulgaria was a class 785/OL800 Russian river cruise ship which operated in the Volga-Don basin. On 10 July 2011, Bulgaria sank in the Kuybyshev Reservoir of the Volga River near Syukeyevo, Kamsko-Ustyinsky District, Tatarstan, Russia, with 201 passengers and crew aboard when sailing from the town of Bolgar to the regional capital, Kazan. The catastrophe led to 122 confirmed deaths.
The Russian-flagged fishing trawler Dalniy Vostok sank on 1 April 2015, off Russia's Kamchatka Peninsula in the Sea of Okhotsk. Fifty-seven of the ship's 132 crew members were confirmed dead, with rescue operations underway for survivors. The freezer trawler sank 183 nautical miles west of Krutogorovsky, a settlement in Kamchatka's Sobolevsky District.
Cuban boat people mainly refers to refugees who flee Cuba by boat and ship to the United States.
On 14 June 2023, an Italy-bound rusty, aging, overloaded fishing trawler smuggling migrants sank in international waters in the part of the Mediterranean known as the Ionian Sea, off the coast of Pylos, Messenia, Greece. The boat, named Adriana, which had a capacity of 400 people carried an estimated 400 to 750 migrants, mostly from Pakistan, Syria, Palestine, and Egypt, and some from Afghanistan. After departing from Tobruk, Libya, on 10 June, concerns were raised by 13 June, with the vessel then located in the Maritime Search and Rescue (SAR) zone assigned to Greece. The Hellenic Coast Guard (HCG) helicopter and later the HCG vessel ΠΠΛΣ-920 arrived on scene, took aerial photos of the vessel, made offers of assistance that were allegedly refused, then remained there as an observer until the boat capsized and sank. After the Adriana had sunk in the "deepest part of the Mediterranean Sea", the HCG and the military initiated a massive search and rescue operation. One hundred and four men were rescued, and 82 bodies were recovered. By 18 June, officials had acknowledged that over 500 people were "presumed dead."
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