THE PAPAL VISIT : Crowds Along Parade Route Smaller Than Expected : Miami’s Latins Emotionally Greet Pope

Melita de Bustillos didn’t try to contain the joy that flushed her face and brought tears to her eyes as the Popemobile cruised by the wildly cheering crowd surrounding her and Pope John Paul II seemed to cast a fleeting smile in her direction.

“I feel beautiful because the Holy Father passed before me,” said Bustillos, 76, a Nicaraguan who said she came to this country several years ago in search of freedom. “This visit from the Pope is for all the exiled people of the world.”

From Bustillos’ vantage point, the crowd was about 10 deep. Along other points in the route, however, the turnout was moderate to light.

County and city police authorities agreed that although only 25,000 people were gathered along the 4.5-mile parade route for most of the day, it swelled to 200,000 within an hour of the motorcade’s start at 7:40 p.m. EDT.

But spokesmen for Florida National Guardsmen, who lined the parade route, said that by their reckoning, the initial count of 25,000 “is a much more reliable figure.”

Armando Villorin, spokesman for the Miami Police Department, suggested that most of the latecomers arrived on Metrorail, perhaps after their workday ended outside the downtown area. Others, he said, may have been scared away by near-record temperatures reaching the high 90s but reconsidered when they learned that the parade started late and well after sunset.

Few Emergencies

Emergency response units were surprised by the relatively low number of medical emergencies during the first day of the papal visit. Miami rescue officials said they responded to 12 calls for emergency medical service, including a man who suffered a possible heart attack and a child experiencing nausea from heat exposure. Five people were transported to hospitals with the most serious case involving a woman who fell through a skylight in a building along the boulevard and suffered a broken leg.

Bustillos’ emotion was shared by the thousands of mostly Latin American refugees and immigrants whose problems elsewhere brought them to this city. Their enthusiasm had been fueled earlier in the day by the pontiff’s remarks in Creole and Spanish to a jubilant group of Haitians outside St. Mary’s Cathedral.

By their very presence along the parade route, they hoped to convey a personal message.

Cubans, Nicaraguans, Haitians, Jamaicans, Colombians, Hondurans, Puerto Ricans, Mexicans--even Ukrainians and Poles--all converged on Biscayne Boulevard to wave the flags of their homelands and welcome the man who has come to stand in their minds for both religious faith and social justice.

Individually and in family groups they yelled personal pleas for attention and held up placards and posters bearing the words of their most fervent desires.

“Libertad para Cuba!” screamed many Cubans in the crowd, some of whom even carried signs with the same words in Polish. “This way he’ll get the message,” one Cuban American said.

“We want to tell him not to forget us . . . to pray for Haiti, which has so many problems,” said Gina Lilavois, 23. “If he prays for us, our country will be better off in the future--I know it.”

“He suffered the same oppression in Poland that we endured in Cuba,” said Josefa Rodriguez, 52, a jewelry saleswoman, who, like many others in the crowd, wore clothing in the yellow and white color scheme of the Vatican state.

Another Cuban-born woman, Isabel Simeon, 51, said she hopes that the Pope will “direct himself to the Cuban problem. . . . As a religious leader, how can he ignore such a large population?”

But even Simeon acknowledged that the Pope’s ultimate message here is one of unity and peace for all people.

“I feel that his presence here will bring more love and human compassion,” she said.

Not All Impressed

Not everyone along the parade route, however, was impressed.

Some of the more intensely political Cubans said they felt slighted by the fact that the Pope’s tour did not include a visit to their community’s most revered shrine, a chapel to the patroness of Cuba: Our Lady of Charity. But most were assuaged when the chapel’s three-foot statue was moved to the residence of Archbishop Edward McCarthy, where the Pope went to spend the night after the parade.

In one of the few visible signs of protest, Carol Ettingshaus, 43, of Fort Lauderdale, was dressed in priest’s vestments and carried a large sign that said, “Peter, do you love me?”

“While we celebrate his presence, we (women) ask for his recognition as potential priests in his church,” said Ettingshaus, who was accompanied by another woman also dressed in red vestments. “As American women, we are used to claiming our rights.”

An employee in a Mexican restaurant along the parade route smirked: “I think this . . . is vastly overrated.” Susan Bunetta, 33, who described herself as a “Catholic with a small c,” added: “I don’t think the church has changed all that much and it needs to.”

Susan Bleemer, 34, who owns a local restaurant, wished she never became involved in the event. She said she spent $3,000 to buy permits and supplies needed to open a food stand on the boulevard. The problem, she said, downing her fifth aspirin of the day, was the smaller-than-anticipated crowds.

Load of Unsold Food

“See that 18-foot truck over there?” she said. “It’s got 1,600 pieces of chicken, 3,000 hot dogs, 4,800 Cokes and 1,000 bags of chips I haven’t sold yet.”

Standing on the steps of a downtown building for a better view, Jamaican-born Prince Smith, 37, a clinical researcher at the University of Miami, surveyed the cheering masses and philosophized.

“Pope John Paul gives people a special kind of social message beyond what you get at Sunday Mass,” said Smith, who wore a T-shirt emblazoned with a smiling picture of the pontiff. “The people you see here came in the belief that just by seeing him they would deliver a message--a social and political one.”

Contributing to this story was Times researcher Lorna Nones.