Hopes Wane for Stalled Cuba Talks : Migration: A third day of negotiations fails to bring progress in the refugee crisis. U.S. negotiator points to ‘substantial gaps’ between the two nations.

A sense of possible failure engulfed the U.S.-Cuban talks Sunday as the Clinton Administration acknowledged that the negotiations could end without agreement on a formula to stop the streams of Cuban rafters intent on finding refuge in the United States.

After a third day of talks ended without a settlement, State Department spokesman David Johnson, in a carefully worded statement cleared by his superiors in Washington, said: “There are substantial gaps between us, and I would caution against any premature speculation that an agreement will be reached.”

The two sides, who have been negotiating alternately in the offices of their missions to the United Nations, will meet again today in the Cuban mission in Manhattan.

Johnson did not detail the nature of the gaps between the two sides, but the United States has offered to grant more than 20,000 legal visas to Cubans every year if President Fidel Castro’s police stop the embarrassing exodus of refugees toward the United States. The Cuban negotiators evidently want more visas than that--some unofficial reports put the number higher than 100,000--and they may also be holding out for concessions on other issues.

The U.S. negotiators, led by Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Michael Skol, presented their proposal in writing to the Cubans on Friday. After consultations with Havana on Saturday, the Cuban negotiators, led by Ricardo Alarcon, the president of the National Assembly and a former foreign minister, presented their reply and counterproposals in writing Sunday.

The Cuban response clearly disappointed the Americans, and three hours of talks at the U.S. mission--including separate conferences of the two delegations to hone their positions--failed to close the gaps.

As they have throughout the negotiations, scores of demonstrators gathered Sunday on the sidewalk outside the U.S. mission, located across the street from U.N. headquarters. Security was tight, but the protest was peaceful as demonstrators chanted insults about Castro and his negotiators.

Alarcon has continually insisted that it is impossible to solve the problem of unauthorized Cuban emigration without discussing the trade embargo imposed by the United States 32 years ago. But he has also said that if the United States refuses to discuss anything but emigration, Cuba is prepared to do that.

Breakup of the talks without an agreement would force President Clinton to search again for a way to stem the tide of Cuban refugees. In hopes of doing so last month, he reversed longstanding U.S. policy and refused to allow the rafters automatic asylum in the United States. Instead, Clinton ordered U.S. vessels to pick up the refugees and detain them in camps at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, on the eastern tip of Cuba.

There are now more than 15,000 Cubans in these camps, located alongside other detention camps housing thousands of Haitian refugees.

Clinton has received some limited relief from the government of Panama, which gave permission Sunday for up to 10,000 Cuban boat people to stay on portions of U.S. bases along the Panama Canal.

U.S. military personnel are building four tent cities for the refugees who, according to Panamanian Foreign Minister Gabriel Lewis Galindo, will be allowed to stay in Panama for no more than six months. A U.S. official said the first Cuban refugees are expected sometime after the middle of this week.

Meanwhile, Radio Marti, the station operated by the U.S. government, broadcast warnings urging Cubans not to attempt the dangerous flight by raft into the Florida Straits.

“So many people have lost their lives at sea, drowning in the treacherous currents, risking attack by sharks,” the station’s warnings said. “It is a death sentence.”

Although Cubans were not leaving at the earlier pace of more than 2,000 a day, the exodus was substantial. The U.S. Coast Guard, which picked up 850 Cuban refugees on Saturday, had pulled 1,069 rafters out of the sea by Sunday evening.

Two boats attempting to smuggle more than 60 Cubans into the United States were intercepted late Saturday night by the Coast Guard. Five Cuban Americans living in southern Florida were arrested and will be turned over to the U.S. Border Patrol, officials said.

One group of 22 Cubans managed Saturday to slip through the Coast Guard’s patrolling web of 41 cutters and 30 aircraft. They used a compass to navigate a homemade 20-foot fishing boat to Dry Tortugas, a tiny island national park 68 miles west of Key West.

Rafters who reach the United States are sent to a camp at Port Isabel, Tex., where they can apply for residency.

In Cairo, where he had traveled for an international population conference, Vice President Al Gore discounted a military solution to the dilemma. Asked why the Clinton Administration was threatening an invasion of Haiti but not Cuba, he replied that they represent a “very different set of circumstances, historically different . . . apples and oranges.”

But he also told interviewers on NBC-TV’s “Meet the Press” that the Administration wants a change in government in Cuba and that Castro has a worse record on human rights than the military leaders of Haiti.

On another program, civil rights leader Jesse Jackson joined other critics in calling on Clinton to take steps to loosen the trade embargo against Cuba.