Cubans in Dire Straits--and Florida Beckons : Caribbean: Thousands apply for U.S. visas or take their chances on flimsy rafts and boats. Lower legal travel age spurs the exodus.

Angel Miguel, a 41-year-old Cuban with three children to feed, lives at the edge of the water and the edge of the law.

Every few weeks, the police raid his modest seaside home to confiscate the shoes he makes for sale on the unofficial market. He pays a fine and starts over. “That makes me a delinquent,” he says with a shrug.

When Communist regimes collapsed across Eastern Europe two years ago, Angel Miguel imagined that President Fidel Castro might abandon rigid socialism in Cuba, freeing him to work in peace. Castro’s refusal to change course has prompted the shoemaker to plot one of his own--into the sea outside his door and right across to Florida.

Before the first hurricane of September, Angel Miguel says, he will build a raft from inner tubes and canvas, rig it with oars, and, if he can get one, an outboard motor, and slip away in darkness across the Florida Straits, joining the largest exodus from this Caribbean island in more than a decade.

“Our country is going against the rest of the world,” he told a visitor to this fishing town west of Havana, withholding his last name to shield his plans from the Cuban shore patrol. “I want to get out and change my life, to have something of my own. Then my family can follow.”

Thousands of other Cubans, doubtful that Castro’s one-party system will soon collapse but equally dubious of its capacity to ease the worst consumer shortages of their lifetimes, have reached the same decision.

Encouraged by Cuba’s dramatic easing of travel restrictions, a record number of Cubans are applying for six-month tourist visas to visit the United States, many intent on settling illegally. The surge of would-be immigrants is a challenge to the Bush Administration, which has granted 40,000 such visas to Cubans since last Oct. 1 and has such a backlog of applications--about 28,000--that last month it temporarily stopped taking new ones.

Unwilling to wait for an official way out, a smaller but growing number of Cubans board flimsy rafts or rickety boats on the island’s north coast each night for the perilous 90-mile voyage to Florida, where Cubans washing ashore are not turned back.

At least 1,495 Cuban boat people, known as lancheros , have reached Florida this year, compared to 495 in all of 1990, according to the U.S. Coast Guard.

“Half the young people in this neighborhood have become lancheros ,” said a 15-year-old boy standing beside his bicycle near Jaimanitas’ rocky shoreline, where the daytime frolicking of bathers and snorkelers in calm, turquoise waters gives way to a silent cat-and-mouse game between government patrols and lancheros at night.

Asked if they too aspire to leave by sea, the boy and three teen-age cycling companions nodded enthusiastically. “There is nothing here for us,” said a 16-year-old. “Pretty soon the whole town will empty.”

The Cuban government has contributed to the exodus by lowering the legal minimum age for foreign travel three times since the beginning of last year, when it was 65 for men and 60 for women. The latest relaxation, effective Aug. 3, allows Cubans 20 or older to leave the country as long as their fare and exit fees--as much as $800 per traveler--are paid to the Cuban government in foreign currency by a relative living abroad.

Loose enforcement by Cuba’s coast guard swelled the boat exodus early this year. Although this kind of departure is still illegal and shore patrols have been stricter since May, lancheros caught in Cuban waters are increasingly likely to be fined rather than jailed.

As a result, more Cubans are leaving the island than at any time since 1980, when Castro allowed 125,000 migrants to sail from the Cuban port of Mariel to south Florida in a matter of weeks.

The current migration, though less sudden, could eventually put a similar strain on public services in Florida, U.S. officials say. They estimate that more than 13,000 Cubans who have come to the United States as tourists over the last year have overstayed their visas and have no intention of going home.

Foreign diplomats and Cubans outside the government say they believe that Castro, as in 1980, is using emigration as an escape valve to ease economic and political pressure on a beleaguered regime.

“If 1 million Cubans left tomorrow, the Cuban government would celebrate,” said Elizardo Sanchez, a leading human rights activist in Havana. “That would mean 1 million fewer Cubans to feed, clothe and educate (and) 1 million fewer Cubans complaining.”

Ramon Sanchez Parodi, a deputy foreign minister, acknowledged that many Cubans “don’t like the system” but denied that the government is pushing them to leave. He said that Havana for years restricted travel to limit Washington’s potential to recruit Cold War spies from Cuba but now feels more secure. “As (emigration) becomes less and less a tool against the interests of Cuba, then we can make it more and more flexible,” he said in an interview.

U.S. officials suggest that Cuba, starved for cash to pay for imports it once bartered with the Soviet Bloc, is driven by a profit motive--tens of millions of dollars in fees collected from travelers each year.

“Cuba has been criticized for years for not allowing its citizens to travel,” said a U.S. diplomat. “Now it can satisfy those critics and earn valuable foreign exchange. . . . It’s an extortion racket.”

Sanchez Parodi denied any such motive, saying, “Whatever figure you put to this (income) is irrelevant, unimportant and not the reason” for Cuban policy. “We charge for services as everyone else does. It’s nothing extraordinary.”

The United States has always been the haven of choice for Cubans fleeing Communist rule, and almost 1 million have settled there since Castro seized power in 1959. Washington issues about 2,000 permanent visas each year to Cubans with relatives living in the United States and a similar number to Cuban dissidents it classifies as political refugees.

An American diplomat said the U.S. Interests Section in Havana will start taking tourist visa applications again when the backlog is cleared, a task he thinks might take six months. Meanwhile, he said, younger applicants are being screened more carefully to weed out potential immigrants.

Washington’s move to slow the Cuban influx as Havana eases its own rules has confused many would-be migrants here and shifted the focus of criticism over who is frustrating their dreams.

In a living room in the neighboring coastal town of Santa Fe last week, three men in their 20s debated which was wiser: take the dangerous boat trip or stay home, join with dissident groups and lobby the United States to widen its doors to legal entry by Cubans.

“The United States has imposed a trade embargo on Cuba for 30 years, but instead of endangering the government it has only made the people suffer,” said one man. “As long as it keeps so much pressure on Cuba, the United States should open up and give us an easier legal way to escape. Why should we be forced to risk our lives?”

“And what are we going to live on in the meantime?” asked another man, blacklisted by the government for an abortive boat trip in 1989 and unable to find work. Of the three, he was the only one who voted to try the voyage again this season.

He has plenty of inspiration. Even before the spring shift of prevailing winds favored a northerly trip, hundreds of Cubans had cast their fate with the Gulf Stream, floated to Florida and boasted of their adventures to U.S. radio stations heard back home.

Lazaro Sandoval, a 21-year-old textile worker, set out on a plastic foam raft and was picked up near the Florida Keys by the HMS Britannia, Queen Elizabeth II’s private yacht. A group of stowaways hijacked the M.V. Patrice Lumumba, a Cuban sand-dredging ship leaving Mariel, and forced it to land in Florida.

Launching a raft had become so easy and the voyagers so overconfident that 80 to 85 of them were arrested along a 25-mile stretch of beach here on each of the first few nights of May when the coast guard belatedly cracked down, residents said.

Tales of tragedy come back from Florida, too. Amado Echeverria, a 43-year-old maritime machinist here, agreed to use his knowledge of the waterfront to help three relatives leave, then decided the day before to go with them. Exhausted and dehydrated, they were rescued by a U.S. helicopter, but hours later Echeverria died of heart failure in a Florida hospital.

Francisco Chaviano, head of a group that lobbies for the rights of imprisoned lancheros, estimates that 500 to 700 Cubans have disappeared and presumably drowned while crossing the straits this year. Among the latest victims is 14-year-old Arisdey Galvan, who left here July 17 without telling his mother but never turned up in Florida.

Neither the shore patrol nor the dangers beyond seem to have stemmed the exodus.

Aspiring lancheros here say they are paying off truck drivers for inner tubes, carving oars from wooden planks in their homes and stealing outboard motors from the nearby Marina Hemingway, a fishing resort for tourists. A typical raft is two rows of three inner tubes each, they say, and the minimum cost of preparing a trip is about $500 per person.

Waterfront neighbors keep an eye on the coast guard’s four-man foot patrols to help lancheros get into the water. From there, it is a matter of stealth to slip through the offshore cordon of patrol boats, 12 to 20 miles out, that pass about every 20 minutes, and a matter of luck to avoid sharks and squalls.

“The best way is to leave just when it’s getting dark and be at least 25 miles out by sunrise,” beyond the view of helicopter pilots who spot rafts for the patrol boats, said Rafael Torres, 32, a fisherman. He sailed halfway to Florida two years ago and boarded what he thought was an American ship. It turned out to be a Soviet navy training vessel, and it returned him to Cuba.

Now he wants to try again. His reasons are a mixture of the economic and political pressures mentioned by many others seeking to leave--the inability to live comfortably on a state salary, and the hassles of trying to earn an independent existence.

“The economy is just one factor,” said activist Chaviano, who was arrested as a lanchero in 1989. “People feel repressed. They are constantly watched to see if they mix with foreigners, if they sell something on the side. They’re obliged to patrol their neighborhoods, to go cut sugar cane, because if they don’t do those things they can lose their jobs. All this was a little more bearable when times were better, but in this economic climate it is driving more and more people out.”