Cubans, Go Home

By GEORGE J. CHURCH

all their rainfall. The 32 acres of U.S.-leased land on both sides of the bay resemble less the lush semitropical island across the minefields than the set for a Hollywood western: sandy, rock-strewn hills and beaches, barren except for a random dotting of cactus. Hardly the site anyone would choose to build from scratch what amounts to a new city for 65,000 people.

But when Bill Clinton sat down with his top advisers last week to figure out what to do with the thousands of Cuban refugees floating toward Florida on every kind of makeshift raft they could tie together, there seemed no other choice. The President had already insisted he would not let the boat people into the U.S. proper -- that was politically unacceptable -- but the refugee flow swelled rather than ebbed. Blockade the island? Not really; that would be an act of war. Send the refugees back to Castro? Too heartless, and besides, he would not take them.

Well then, negotiate some kind of deal with Fidel to replace the U.S. embargo that has been in place for 32 years -- and Clinton has just tightened? Castro coolly declared that he was ready and willing to talk, seizing the high ground in a game he largely controls. His ability to provoke or stop a flow of refugees almost at will gives him a power to bedevil Washington that he is using with relish. This week American and Cuban officials will resume low- level talks, focused strictly on migration, that were suspended last December. But as for wide-ranging negotiations -- no way, responded Clinton; that would look like capitulation. Yet something had to be done with the balseros, or rafters, as Cubans dubbed them. So Secretary of Defense William Perry calmly assured his Administration colleagues that a tent city under construction at Guantanamo to house the first Cuban refugees could be rapidly expanded to hold many more.

So Gitmo it is, and never mind that shipping the Cubans there is the ultimate in stopgap solutions. "It's a day-by-day situation, and that's how we're looking at it," acknowledges a top White House aide. Another Administration official declines to discuss how stashing the fugitives at Guantanamo might fit into any long-term policy toward Cuba. Says he: "We're focused now on the immediate problem -- handling the refugees." Nor will anyone speculate just how long the Cubans might have to stay in Guantanamo. The standard answer is "Indefinitely," but does that mean months? Years? Until the 68-year-old Castro falls from power or dies? One official huffs, "Indefinitely -- that's what it means."

It is neither an easy nor a cheap policy to carry out. Expanding facilities to house up to 65,000 refugees -- 14,000 Haitians already camped at Gitmo plus as many as 51,000 Cubans, of whom nearly 14,000 were in residence by Saturday -- will cost $100 million for openers, the Pentagon estimates. Keeping them in food, water and other "consumables" will take an additional $20 million a month. That spending would come on top of $230 million the U.S. has already shelled out since last Oct. 1 to care for the Haitian refugees.

Finding land on which to pitch tents for the balseros is no problem -- except to the 3,000 U.S. service members who will lose the company of their families and the use of recreational facilities. Tents, flown in from the U.S. mainland, are being set up on the base's softball and baseball diamonds, a soccer field, even the paltry sand-and-rock golf course; the beach where the soldiers and sailors swim will soon house the headquarters of a military- civilian task force that will oversee the camps. Military spouses and children are being flown out because of electric-power and water rationing. But enough land is available to put up tents for the Cubans in clusters holding about 2,500 people each, and to keep plenty of elbow room between their quarters and those of the Haitians.

Since Castro cut all connections between the base and the rest of the island in 1964, Guantanamo is entirely dependent on its own resources and supplies flown in from mainland U.S. or floated by barge from the Florida Keys. Massive new shipments of water, desalinating and generating equipment may be needed. Plus food, of course. And people -- maybe 4,000 more U.S. troops to build, cook for and police the camps.

A tougher problem will be to keep the Cubans occupied. The camps are bleak, though not squalid: many of the tents, housing 20 people each, have no floors, but contain comfortable cots with clean sheets; they are served by rows of portable toilets and curtainless outdoor showers. The yards, though, are sweltering, dusty and bare, and ringed by concertina wire. Humanitarian organizations and community-relations specialists from the Justice Department intend to set up church services, school classes, recreation programs. But for now there are no radios or TV sets, no music, no toys for the children, nothing to do except sit or wander back and forth, nothing even to look at except one another.

Early arrivals feel betrayed. American journalists visiting the camps found not a single refugee who knew that the Administration now refused to let them into the U.S. When they heard the news from the reporters, they were stunned, overwhelmed, disbelieving. "There is no way to go for us?" stammered Reynaldo Valido, a professor of English in Matanzas province until he fled in a rickety boat Aug. 18, the day before Clinton announced the exclusion policy. He was too shocked to say anything more for several minutes, and then murmured, "It's a big deception of the U.S. government if they say that." Carlo Vilajeras, a Pentecostal minister, agrees: "Clinton is not just. We hope that God will come into his heart."

If not? The refugees do not want to talk about anything but their burning desire to get out of Gitmo and be united with family members in the U.S. The visiting journalists were mobbed by people begging them to accept tiny slips of paper or bits of Kleenex boxes scrawled with names and numbers. "Call my mother," refugees pleaded. "Please let my uncle know I'm O.K." They do not even want to talk about what they will do if they have to stay in Guantanamo for good, and refuse to believe that will happen. Says Lazaro Rubio, a 30- year-old sculptor who has both parents, three brothers and three sisters living in Miami: "Our only struggle is to be unified with our families."

Nonetheless, that is what the Clinton Administration insists will not happen soon or ever. But interning the refugees in Guantanamo is an expedient, not a policy. A contradictory expedient at that. The U.S. long lashed Castro for keeping his people prisoner; now it is urging him to stop them from fleeing -- while simultaneously cutting off family remittances and worsening the poverty driving most of the balseros to brave the perils of the Straits of Florida. Clinton loudly proclaims he will not let Castro "dictate American immigration policy" -- in the very act of reversing the 35-year policy of welcoming Cuban refugees with "an open heart and open arms," as Jimmy Carter put it in 1980.

The expedient, however, is the only thing the Administration can think of at the moment. Officials seem to have no good idea of what might happen next. It is conceivable that they can put off further the day when they will have to rethink basic Cuban policy -- or their lack of one. The flood of refugees could slow to manageable proportions. After almost 6,500 Cubans were plucked from the waters on Tuesday and Wednesday last week, the Thursday-Friday total dropped to a bit more than 2,000. But the drop-off may have resulted only from the heavy rain, high winds and stormy waters that threatened to swamp the pitifully unseaworthy rafts before they could reach the picket line of more than 70 U.S. Coast Guard and Navy vessels patrolling beyond the 12-mile territorial limit off Cuba's northern coast.

It is equally possible that the refugee tide will rise again when the seas subside, until it eventually overwhelms any facilities that can be built in Guantanamo, or in Panama and the 11 other Caribbean, Central and South American countries that the U.S. is asking to help take some refugees off its hands. (They had agreed earlier to take some Haitians, but the U.S. found it unnecessary to send any.) As loudly as the U.S. proclaims that it will never let any of those interned in Guantanamo enter the American mainland, many Cubans preparing to flee, as well as those already in Gitmo, refuse to believe it. Others might even prefer camp life with three meals a day in Guantanamo to hunger in Cuba.

If the disaffected keep coming in numbers sufficient to overflow Guantanamo, Clinton will have to look again at the options he has tried mightily to dodge. His major goal so far has been to avoid, at almost all costs, a replay of the Mariel boat lift. That 1980 exodus dumped 125,000 refugees in five months into Florida and from there to other Southern states unready to receive them. The fiasco badly hurt not only President Carter but also Bill Clinton, who believes he was defeated for re-election as Governor of Arkansas in part because Cuban refugees sent to Fort Chaffee rioted, and dozens of people were injured. Even after reclaiming the statehouse in 1982 and going on to the presidency, he remembers Mariel all too well. In discussions of what to do with the new wave of refugees, says a senior Administration official, "the fundamental issue" in the President's mind "was that there was not to be a repetition of the Mariel boat lift, that we were not going to tolerate that happening again."

In addition, Clinton has let his policy be driven by the hard-nosed anti- Castro Cuban exile community in the U.S., or rather the faction of it composed of early exiles, many of whom are grouped in the Cuban American National Foundation. It was after meeting with them at the White House that Clinton followed up his decision to bar the refugees by forbidding U.S. residents to send money to relatives in Cuba and by cracking down on the charter flights by which families could visit those left behind. The moves especially distressed younger and more recent refugees who still have relatives in Cuba. But the steps were urged by the Cuban-American foundation, whose members have often had little contact with the island since the early 1960s, whose relatives have long ago immigrated, and who support anything that would hurt Castro -- regardless of the impact on ordinary Cubans.

Clinton's solicitude for the foundation might seem misguided. Its members are mostly staunch Republicans unlikely to boost the President's meager chances of carrying Florida in 1996, whatever he does. But a foundation- spurred surge against Democrats could cost Florida Governor Lawton Chiles his job in November. Also, generosity toward Cubans seeking to enter the U.S. would put Clinton at odds with a powerful sentiment against illegal immigration that is gaining strength in key states like Texas and California.

But suppose the flood of refugees continues? White House aides admit, though only as a theoretical possibility, that Clinton would then either have to allow the very entry of refugees into the U.S. that he considers so politically disastrous or institute a still tougher policy. Yet an outright blockade to bottle them up is not a practical alternative when scores of friendly nations trade actively with Cuba. In fact, Washington has enough on its plate lining up hemispheric support for a possible invasion of Haiti: this week high-ranking officials will travel to a meeting of the Caribbean community in hopes of formalizing their approval. The obvious alternative is to open wide-ranging discussions with Castro aimed at swapping an end to the U.S. trade embargo for Cuban reforms leading to a freer economy and politics. Some Administration policymakers are known to favor the idea, but Clinton and his top aides are adamantly opposed. Defense Secretary Perry dismisses the idea as "a loser."

Administration aides have some intellectual arguments for maintaining a cold war stance toward Cuba. Washington officials insist that the U.S. embargo is not a significant cause of Cuba's economic desperation, which stems primarily from the loss of its Soviet lifeline and Castro's subsequent refusal to make free-market reforms. While the U.S. negotiates with other repressive communist regimes like Vietnam, North Korea and China, officials say these are cases where the U.S. has important strategic interests to safeguard: nuclear nonproliferation in the case of North Korea, a booming trade with China. In contrast, says an Administration official, "we have no interest in Cuba other than the promotion of democracy and the containment of immigration."

But the real reason for refusing to engage in any broad negotiation is emotional. The weight of 35 years of demonizing Castro is not easy to shrug off. Clinton is afraid that Republicans -- and plenty of Democrats -- will scorch him for cozying up to a communist devil. Yet that fear may be exaggerated: the Wall Street Journal editorial page, a powerful voice of conservatives, came out last week in favor of lifting the embargo, arguing that the best way to undermine communist regimes is to open them up to outside goods, exchanges of people and ideas. It worked with the Soviet empire. But Clinton does not yet dare risk taking that advice.

The best outcome Washington can wish for is a sudden transformation of Cuba into an open-market democracy, preferably by evolution, though maybe by internal revolutionary upheaval. But it would be unwise to count on such a lucky break. For all his economic bungling, Castro retains strong political control and the loyalty of many Cubans, probably still a majority of them. The new surge of people fleeing is sometimes seen as the beginning of the end for Fidel, but it might equally provide him with a safety valve that drains away the most seriously discontented -- as well as illustrating once again his unrivaled ability to torment American Presidents.

It is true that discontent is more widespread and vocal than ever before. The refugee crisis came in the wake of a melee on Aug. 5, when hundreds of young Cubans, watched by thousands of amazed onlookers, rioted over the suspension of a Havana bay ferry that had been hijacked three times to Florida. As some of the rioters dared to shout, "Down with Fidel!" the demonstration was quickly halted. But the message was not lost on Castro. Unleashing refugees has proved an effective attention getter for him in the past, and he has been disappointed that a Democratic Administration in Washington has not proved more receptive to dealing with him. So Castro let it be known that his police would no longer arrest or even try to stop Cubans attempting to flee by makeshift boat or raft. Ergo, two problems solved at once: angry Cubans were distracted from turning their despair against Fidel, and he certainly got Washington's attention.

Castro primarily has himself to blame for Cuba's current travails. Some reforms he instituted since mid-1993 had begun to pull the country back from the brink of disaster after the collapse of the Soviet bloc cut Moscow's aid from a torrent to a trickle and then to nothing. When he legalized individual private business last September, Havana suddenly sprouted plumbers, hairdressers, restaurateurs, repairmen and other overnight entrepreneurs permitted to work for themselves. But the July 1993 legalization of dollar holdings was a two-edged sword. It brought much needed hard currency into Cuba, but also split what had been a largely egalitarian society into two classes: the haves, who had access to dollars earned in the tourist industry or sent by relatives in the U.S.; and dollarless have-nots, who could not shop in the new hard-currency stores.

Castro then returned, disastrously, to Marxist principle. In February and March he cracked down on the flourishing black markets that had sprung up, particularly in food. Police stopped all vehicles coming from the countryside into cities and searched them for contraband food to make sure that farmers sold only to the state, not to private buyers. Food shortages intensified.

Even so, Castro seems thoroughly in control. The ability of many Cubans to describe harrowing privation and in almost the same breath profess loyalty to Fidel -- or at worst a kind of numb resignation -- is startling. Raise, 31, an engineer, pauses along the Almendares River in western Havana to watch the return of several rafts that had tried to make it across the Straits of Florida but were forced by bad weather to turn back. "These people are out of their minds," he says. "This is a difficult period of the revolution, but I wouldn't even think about doing it, no matter how bad things get here. It's just too dangerous." Felix, 38, manager of a government-run bodega, complains that supplies are the leanest he has ever seen. "I don't see how they can send any less and expect us to survive," he says. He feels guilty when customers complain. "But what can I do?" he asks -- a depressingly familiar refrain throughout Cuba these days.

Some experts think Castro's most likely course is to emulate China, combining a turn toward economic freedom with continued political control. While that would be far from ideal, it would still be in the U.S. interest to encourage it and seek through negotiation to promote political loosening too. The best way to do that would be to talk to Castro. Trade and investment that % might relieve Cuba's economic despair are the only ways to reduce the refugee flow permanently, even if Castro stays in power. His days of encouraging red revolution throughout the hemisphere are long since over; continuing to isolate Cuba only promotes hunger, desperation and floods of refugees that are not in anyone's interest -- including the interest of a U.S. now driven to violate its cherished principles of offering asylum to the oppressed.

With reporting by Cathy Booth/Havana, James Carney and Ann M. Simmons/Washington and Elaine Shannon/Guantanamo Bay naval station there is another world. A fence, a gate locked on both sides and two minefields one Cuban, one American separate it from Fidel Castro''s domain.