New U.S. Policy Will Hold Cubans in Refugee Camps : Immigration: Administration plans detention centers after an emergency appeal by Florida’s governor. Thousands reportedly prepare to flee the Castro regime.

The Clinton Administration, fearing a surge of refugees fleeing Cuba by boat and raft, announced Thursday that those who come here will be held in detention camps rather than being permitted to settle in Florida or other parts of the country.

The major policy change, announced late Thursday by Atty. Gen. Janet Reno, came after an emergency appeal by Florida Gov. Lawton Chiles and intelligence reports showing that thousands of Cubans are massing to set sail for America.

Reno said the Administration wanted to “be sure we did everything we could” to discourage Cubans from making the voyage before the refugee situation got out of hand.

Chiles said Thursday night that he was delighted with the Administration action.

“This keeps Castro from being able to call the shots in regard to immigration policy,” Chiles said. “It also allows us to make sure these people get the proper health screening, that other screening is done. Right now, we don’t know who is coming in.”

The Administration is trying to stave off a repeat of the Mariel boat lift of 1980, during which about 125,000 Cubans--many of them criminals or mentally ill--streamed into South Florida over a five-month period.

The detention policy, which officials said was approved personally by Clinton late Thursday afternoon, was one of several that the Administration has been considering since the number of refugees began swelling this week.

The Coast Guard said its vessels picked up 369 Cubans on Thursday in the Florida Straits after a record-breaking 537 Wednesday. Those figures are up from a rate of about 300 refugees a day last weekend.

Reno gave no indication where the Administration plans to detain refugees picked up at sea, but officials suggested that some could be housed at federal installations in Florida.

Officials said the Administration already has made plans to open tent cities to hold about 8,000 refugees at Homestead and Key West, Fla., to serve as screening centers.

It was not immediately clear Thursday whether refugees would be afforded formal hearings to determine whether they should be allowed to settle in the United States. Under current law, U.S. officials do not have to accept Cuban refugees, but once the refugees are allowed to settle here, they are granted immigrant status.

Key Administration policy-makers said the White House also is considering asking other Caribbean countries to accept some Cuban refugees temporarily, as Jamaica did in the case of Haitian boat people. Those details were also incomplete.

The Administration also is considering other options, ranging from increasing the number of Coast Guard vessels assigned to pick up Cubans to tightening pressure on Cuba so it will stop encouraging dissidents to leave.

The White House also is expected to announce soon a plan to make it easier for Cuban nationals to apply for standard immigration visas at the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, which functions as an unofficial U.S. embassy.

The action Thursday amounts to a major policy reversal for the Administration, which until now has maintained that it is obliged under the 1966 Cuban Adjustment Act to allow all Cuban refugees to settle here.

Actually, the law permits the Immigration and Naturalization Service to refuse entry to Cubans who do not qualify for immigration status. But since Cuba has declined to take them back, such people have no place to go.

Reno’s announcement came after an emergency meeting of Clinton’s top national security advisers earlier Thursday, in which policy-makers reviewed the refugee situation and discussed possible options for dealing with it. Although Clinton did not attend the meeting, officials said he was briefed on it later and decided to go ahead with the detention plan. He also talked to Chiles by telephone.

Chiles formally declared a state of emergency Thursday in Florida and, in an emotional early morning press conference, urged Clinton to make a similar proclamation and send more Coast Guard vessels and aid to Florida.

“There is no question that a true emergency exists,” he said.

However, top Administration officials appeared to give Chiles the cold shoulder earlier. Reno pooh-poohed Chiles’ request, as well as any suggestions that the Cuba refugee policy would change, and White House Press Secretary Dee Dee Myers dismissed Chile’s plea out of hand.

“We’ve been able to handle the surge in Cuban migrants in an orderly fashion and we’ll continue to do that,” Myers had said bluntly.

Officials of refugee aid groups in Miami also expressed skepticism. Ken Tota, coordinator of the U.S. Catholic Conference’s resettlement effort, said the influx looked manageable.

A few hours later, however, leading Administration officials said the White House was considering Chiles’ request seriously, and Clinton called the Florida governor to ask for his suggestions on how to deal with the surge in refugees.

U.S. officials said the quick action apparently was prompted by fresh intelligence estimates reporting that thousands of Cubans were lining the dock at Mariel, waiting to sail to Miami.

Although Castro has not actively promoted the current exodus, as he did in 1980, officials said he has made clear to dissident Cubans that he will not try to stop them if they want to go to Florida.

So far this year, about 6,872 Cubans have arrived in the United States by sea--up from 3,656 in 1993.

Many in recent days have come by homemade boats and even inner tubes, a move that Coast Guard officials warn is dangerous in the 90 miles of open sea between Cuba and Florida.

U.S. officials have said the main difference between the 1980 Mariel boat lift and today’s situation is that this time Cuban Americans in South Florida are not taking their boats to pick up relatives in Cuba.

As a result, the Administration has concentrated its efforts on persuading Cuban Americans to stay home rather than set sail for Cuban waters. So far, it has been reasonably successful, but some officials worry that could change overnight.

Besides the facilities at Homestead and Key West, officials said the Administration is planning relocation camps at three dozen sites across the United States.

In Miami’s Little Havana neighborhood Thursday evening, refugees by the busload arrived from Key West at two separate facilities, where they were put in contact with family members and helped with settlement problems.

Cuban Americans gathered outside one of the centers, curious to see if loved ones were among the new arrivals.

Carmin Baas, 51, burst into tears of joy when she spotted a nephew and niece through the bus windows. “I feel so happy,” she said. “At last they are out of Cuba and that’s the best thing. They could have died there with no food.”

Baas had left Cuba 15 years earlier with her three children and husband and had worried ever since about relatives left behind.

Some refugees who arrived were dirty from their treacherous voyage across the Florida Straits. The crowd cheered each time a cluster of refugees emerged from the center.

Gilberto Blanco, a topographer, arrived on a 23-foot motorboat Thursday morning with 20 family members. “We left five houses empty in Havana,” he said. The last month had been particularly difficult because food was scarce and Blanco dropped from a trim 140 to 112 pounds.

But food, he said, is not the reason he left. “The most difficult thing in Cuba is the way the government obstructs the lives of the people. No one can say what they want to say. You can’t express your feelings or you will go immediately to jail.”

In his press conference Thursday, Chiles declared that the large numbers of refugees was creating “an emergency situation for services and assistance,” and he called on Clinton to invoke a federal contingency plan to provide additional help for the state.

“The emergency is the direct responsibility of the federal government,” he said. He called out the Florida National Guard, Marine Patrol, state law enforcement department and other state agencies to help.

Chiles also issued a warning to Cubans, pleading with them not to “risk your lives on a very dangerous journey” to the United States. “The Castro government is clearly weakening and the day of freedom is near in Cuba,” he said.

White House officials clearly were piqued at the stridence of Chiles’ appeal, particularly since he is a Democrat in a state whose electoral votes Clinton will want if he decides to run for reelection. The President did not carry Florida in 1992.

However, Chiles, who is facing a tough reelection bid this fall, is worried about the burden of immigrants on his state. Earlier this year the state sued the federal government for $1.5 billion, Chiles’ estimate of the public cost of accommodating hundreds of thousands of illegal immigrants.

Chiles said then that the refugees threatened to overwhelm the ability of state and local agencies to provide housing, health care, education and other services.

The United States’ special treatment of Cuban refugees stems from the mid-1960s, when Congress, eager to encourage defections from Castro’s Communist regime, passed the Cuban Adjustment Act.

Washington has more than enough slots for the few thousand Cubans each year who apply for standard entry visas through the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, a kind of unofficial embassy that the United States maintains in the Cuban capital.

Cubans who come to American shores by airplane or boat--as most among the current wave of Cuban asylum-seekers are doing--have been permitted to stay for at least a year and have been granted near-automatic immigrant status after that.

The Cold War-era policy has delighted Cuban Americans in South Florida but it has gnawed at leaders of the area’s fast-growing Haitian community, who have watched their own relatives in Port-au-Prince being turned away from U.S. shores and sent back to Haiti.

Haitian American relief groups have complained bitterly that Haitian asylum-seekers--who in many cases are being subjected to political threats similar to those that have plagued the Cubans--have been discriminated against by U.S. policy.

The Haitians have a point. Under current law, Haitians who are seeking asylum in the United States must prove that they have a well-founded fear of persecution in their homeland. If they merely are seeking to come here to better their economic plight, they are summarily rejected.

But Cubans who have come by boat have been admitted with no questions asked and have not had to prove that they are escaping from a repressive regime. The government has assumed that they are political--rather than economic--refugees.

In addition, Castro has refused to allow U.S. authorities to return Cuban nationals who have been rejected for entry. Except for those sent back after the 1980 Mariel boat lift--after protracted negotiations with the Castro government--Washington has only been able to return one Cuban national in the 35 years that Castro has been headed the Cuban government.

Shogren reported from Miami and Pine from Washington. Researcher Edith Stanley contributed from Miami.