A dozen Cubans who were held for months at the U.S. Naval Base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, have been resettled in Uruguay under a U.S. policy to discourage rafters from fleeing their island nation.

The Cubans, who range from teenagers to adults and include small families, arrived Wednesday in Montevideo under an agreement to resettle them arranged between the Uruguayan government and the U.S. State Department.

``We're always very grateful to countries that make this kind of humanitarian gesture. . . . This is part of the continuing process of moving people out,'' said a State Department official. The official declined to say if any of the 12 were among about two dozen people who staged a hunger strike at the base earlier this year.

Pedro Solares of a Miami human rights activist group, Agenda: Cuba, said three of those people resettled this week in Uruguay were hunger strike participants.

He identified them as Marta del Carmen Penton, 41, Michael Penton, 17, and Raul Victor Olivera, 35, who had been held there for at least two years.

Agenda: Cuba has served as a public relations firm for the Cuban migrants, but Solares was unable to identify the other nine who were sent to Uruguay. The State Department, meantime, is mostly mum on the details of the migrants, declining to discuss other efforts to resettle the rest of them or to identify those who have been sent off the island.

Before Wednesday's airlift, about 60 Cubans were being held in a dormitory-style detention center at the camp. Some swam through Guantanamo Bay or walked through Cuban mine fields to reach the base.

Others were intercepted at sea by the Coast Guard, which has government officials interview Cuban rafters to see if they have a fear of persecution if they are repatriated. Most are returned immediately. But the few who make it to the base have their cases reexamined on the island and, if they are deemed to be subject to persecution, are held on the base until the State Department finds a third country to repatriate them.

About two-thirds of the ``40 to 50'' Cubans held at the base this week are awaiting third countries; the rest are having their cases evaluated. If they are not granted U.S. protection, they are returned to the Cuban side of the island through a gate in the base's 17-mile barbed-wire fence.

The Clinton administration created the third-country resettlement policy amid the 1994-95 rafter crisis to try to persuade Cubans that the only way to resettle in the United States is to apply for visas at the U.S. Interest Section in Havana.