Cuban Americans Seek End to Refugees’ Long Detention : Immigration: Despite accord, Florida activists call for the release of migrants held at U.S. facilities. They say children are suffering most.

Despite the agreement Friday between the United States and Cuba, frustration is mounting in south Florida’s Cuban community over the indefinite internment of exiles here and at the U.S. Navy base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Now that the United States has agreed to increase the number of Cubans allowed into the country each year, Cuban Americans here believe that the Clinton Administration should abandon its policy of refusing to process immigration requests at detention centers.

Administration officials said Friday that Cuban rafters being held at safe havens must return to Cuba and make their application in Havana.

“Who is going to return to Cuba to apply for political asylum? That’s a joke,” said Miami human rights activist Siro del Castillo. “These people have the right to apply. The U.S. can turn them down.”

Most Cuban Americans here had voiced support of the Administration’s hard-line stance in handling of the Cuban crisis, even accepting as necessary the vow of U.S. Atty. Gen. Janet Reno that no migrant picked up at sea after the Aug. 20 cutoff will be permitted to enter the United States.

At the same time, stark conditions in the barbed-wire camps have led many Cuban Americans to call for the release, at the least, of more than 600 children in custody.

“This environment is just not appropriate for children,” said Francisco Hernandez, president of the Cuban-American National Foundation and a member of an ad-hoc monitoring group, Cuba Crisis Steering Committee, which this week visited more than 600 Cubans being held in the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service’s Krome Detention Center, west of Miami.

“It does not look good seeing children who have gone through a difficult situation--risking their lives--and their parents, being subjected to this situation,” Hernandez said. “We think those who come in with children should be released.”

All others held at the centers should be given an opportunity promptly to apply to enter the United States, Cuban Americans said.

Arturo Cobo, director of the Transit House for Cuban Rafters in Key West, harshly criticized the Administration’s detention policy as violating “the basic human rights of the Cuban nationals who are fleeing from Castro’s dictatorship.”

In paid newspaper advertisements in English and Spanish, Cobo charged that Cubans are being held “incommunicado” in camps and being denied adequate medical attention.

Del Castillo said that under United Nations conventions, “people cannot be expelled or forced to go back to the country from which they fled. If the U.S. in some way pressures these Cubans back to Cuba to apply, then it is not complying with the U.N. agreement.

“It is a sad irony that through this agreement the U.S. government asks the Cuban government to do what they have criticized them for years for doing: not letting people leave the country.”

Although the exodus of Cubans has slowed in recent days--only 86 rafters were rescued by the U.S. Coast Guard by midafternoon Friday--more than 30,000 remain in custody, most at Guantanamo. More than 500 others are being held in Panama and at a detention facility in Port Isabel, Tex.

Interning Cuban refugees as a way of halting the dangerous flotilla of rafts was never a palatable prospect, especially for Cuban Americans. But most Cubans in Miami supported the Clinton plan if it promised to thwart Castro’s attempts to ease internal tensions in Cuba by letting discontented citizens flee.

But in recent days, tensions in the Guantanamo camp and in the Krome detention center have spilled over into the Cuban community here, especially regarding children.

“Some of these children are in critical (emotional) condition,” said Robert Boyer, one of two Miami attorneys who has filed a class-action lawsuit demanding that the INS release more than 100 children held at Krome. “They are agitated, on edge, asking when they’re leaving, going home to relatives, grandparents. These people are not criminals.”

Cuban-born U.S. Reps. Ileana Ros-Lehtinen and Lincoln Diaz-Balart of Florida have also called for the children to be freed.

In the 12 years that Krome, a converted missile base on the edge of the Everglades, has been used as a detention center to hold illegal immigrants, no child has ever been held for longer than a few days. Children stay in dormitories with their mothers, while men sleep in a large tent. Fathers are allowed to visit their wives and children twice a week.

Although Dade County has dispatched Spanish-speaking teachers to the detention center, even the director of the school system’s outreach program has called for the detainees’ release.

“We have hundreds of children, and their relatives, in American detention centers,” said Eduardo Martinez-DuBochet in a letter to the editor printed in Friday’s Miami Herald. “Where is the spirit of Ellis Island?

“All these children and their anguished parents are beautiful human beings. We need to open the detention center’s doors.”