U.S. Scrambles to Accommodate Haiti Refugees : Caribbean: Up to 1,000 people a day are arriving at temporary processing centers in Jamaica and Cuba.

For Haitian teacher Prophet Guerrier, his pregnant wife, Yolette, and their five children, Friday had a happy ending. After 24 hours aboard a white U.S. Navy hospital ship where he had recounted the harrowing murder of his parents and years of living in fear in his native land, U.S. immigration authorities said “yes.”

The Guerriers are coming to America.

“We are happy because we knew we could not go back to Haiti,” said Guerrier, 37, as he and his family sat in a Jamaican shuttle bus whose side was painted with the words: “Smile With Pleasure Tours.”

The children were wide-eyed and silent as the bus took them from the ship to a military transport plane bound for the U.S. Naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Their parents, a week after leaving Petite Goave in a small boat, looked stunned with fatigue and good fortune.

In what is fast becoming one of the largest, most complex emergency immigration operations in U.S. history, the tide of refugees continued to build Friday. Since June 15, the U.S. Coast Guard has picked up more than 7,000 Haitians fleeing a country in the grip of economic sanctions designed to drive its military rulers from power.

It is a migration fueled by oppression, poverty--and much-improving odds of winning asylum in the United States. As many as 1,000 Haitians a day are making the trip to a processing center, either here aboard the hospital ship in Kingston Harbor or a rapidly expanding tent city at Guantanamo.

So far, about 30 of every 100 Haitians interviewed have been judged to have a well-founded fear of persecution, a huge increase over the five in 100 who had been granted asylum before last month. After a complete physical exam at Guantanamo, where they will be tested for tuberculosis and AIDS, all those granted asylum will be permitted to enter the United States.

The large numbers of immigrants sent military officials at Guantanamo scrambling to accommodate them. Working around the clock to build shelters, they warned that they could not absorb the current flow of migrants for long.

By noon Friday, 1,956 Haitians had arrived, including 1,081 on Thursday alone, and there is space for only 12,500.

Base officials are providing refugees with meals and clothing while constructing tent villages. They are determined not to repeat the mistakes of 1992, when Haitians flooded the base, exceeded the capacity of facilities built for them and threatened to riot.

“If there was any lesson learned, it’s that you’ve got to show these people that there’s some kind of flow-through,” said Col. Michael Pearson, a 21-year veteran of the U.S. Army who heads the joint operation at the base.

But Pearson said he does not expect to begin processing the migrants, who must be interviewed by Immigration and Naturalization Service adjudicators, until next week. Refugees who pass INS screening must wait at the base until the State Department finds a U.S. family or group to sponsor them.

Pearson repeatedly underscored the need to process refugees before they fill the facility to overflowing.

“They’ve got to move on,” he said. “I’ve got to assume the flow out of Haiti is going to remain fairly constant.”

And if the stories the migrants are telling are any indication, he is correct.

A 29-year-old man wearing a gray Honolulu surfing T-shirt said that Haitian military officers jailed and beat him after he protested the coup that ousted elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide. Army death squads are still seeking him, he said, and he left when President Clinton announced that the United States would begin processing migrants. He would not give his name, saying that he feared retribution from the military.

Approved for refugee status, he said that he hopes to find a job in Florida. “Anything I find will be better than Haiti,” he said.

Another man, wearing a faded light blue T-shirt and sandals, said that soldiers shot at him as he ran to a boat leaving Haiti. He had arranged to rendezvous with the boat elsewhere in case of trouble, he said, and managed to escape. Others were not so lucky.

“Thirty people were shot down trying to get on the boat,” said the man, who gave his first name as St. Hubert. He spent three days on a 17-foot vessel with 62 other people before a Coast Guard cutter intercepted them, he said.

Many of the refugees collected by Coast Guard cutters are now being taken directly to Guantanamo, but earlier refugees were taken to Jamaica. Aboard the hospital ship, Haitians are put into an assembly line that processes asylum claims around the clock.

New arrivals are given surgical masks in case they have tuberculosis, a computer chip identification bracelet and a promise that their stories will be heard.

“These are people who need to be treated delicately and given a careful interview,” said Bo Cooper, an INS attorney. “There is no quota on the number granted asylum. We know conditions in Haiti are bad, but each case is different.”

The majority of Haitians are still shuttled to Port-au-Prince, the Haitian capital, either because they are deemed to be lying or because they cannot prove that they would be in fear of persecution back home.

With a multi-agency staff of 1,100, the floating processing center here can handle several hundred migrants a day. But Friday almost 1,000 Haitians were aboard and many would wait 24 hours before sitting for their first interview.

Times special correspondent Clary reported from Kingston, and Times staff writer Leeds from Guantanamo.