Families Grasp for Information Lifeline : Cubans: News of loved ones’ fates in refugee exodus is painfully scanty.

Migrants detained in dreary camps approach strangers from the outside world with hope in their eyes and crumpled pieces of paper in their hands bearing the scribbled names of relatives from Florida to California, wherever the far-flung Cuban diaspora has taken them.

“We’re completely isolated,” lamented Odalis Gonzalez, a 29-year-old mother from Havana, accompanied behind the barbed wire by her 11-year-old son, Yosset. She asked a reporter to telephone a sister in the United States.

Meanwhile in Miami, hundreds of apprehensive residents make the pilgrimage every day to the drab stucco building of Radio Mambi, a Spanish-language station that posts the latest lists of those held at Guantanamo and other sites. Their ultimate fear: that loved ones who took to the rafts to risk a treacherous escape from President Fidel Castro’s Cuba have perished in the Florida Straits.

“My mother left with my two sons 12 days ago, and we haven’t heard a word,” said a distraught Luis Sosa after yet another disappointing examination of the rolls at Radio Mambi. “Imagine how one feels in such a terrible situation.”

And in Cuba, residents listen intently to radio broadcasts from Miami giving names of rescued migrants and examine partial lists circulating in the streets.

The seaborne exodus of thousands of Cubans on small craft has been a wrenching, traumatic experience for both migrants and their families in the United States, Cuba and elsewhere. Anguish about separated loved ones is weighing heavily on Cubans and Cuban Americans alike.

A broad information chasm has only made things worse.

The more than 26,000 Cubans detained here, like the 14,000-plus Haitians who are sharing the naval base’s hospitality, worry that relatives know nothing about their fates and fear the worst. Communication with loved ones is virtually nonexistent.

No family visits are allowed at this U.S. bastion on the southeast corner of the Western Hemisphere’s last communist enclave. Many Cubans, accustomed to hearing about exiles’ political clout, cling to the hope that kin will somehow be able to get them out of here--although the White House says they are to be held indefinitely in Guantanamo and in third nations such as Panama, with no prospect of entry to the United States.

The U.S. military forces here, mostly young soldiers abruptly transformed into overseers of refugees, have struggled to keep pace with the influx and provide the essentials--shelter, food, water and medical care.

Mail, messages and telephone service have not been a priority. Authorities hope to soon set up some kind of postal system in conjunction with the Red Cross, and AT&T; plans to open long-distance lines in Guantanamo for collect calls from rafters.

“They’re absolutely desperate for information and communication,” said Marine Brig. Gen. Michael J. Williams, who heads operations here.

For now, camp residents typically rely on anonymous visitors to relay crucial developments about their whereabouts and the status of ill relatives, missing children and other intimate family concerns.

“This boy’s mother needs to know that her son is here,” Aleyla Claro explained breathlessly to a journalist interviewing Cubans bound for the new camps in Panama. Back in Miami, Grisel Ortega was duly informed that her 7-year-old son, Edgar Acosta, was among the first of 10,000 Cubans transferred to Panama, where conditions are said to be better and family visits are permitted.

In information-starved southern Florida, capital of the Cuban American community, telephone service with Cuba is so erratic that many people cannot determine whether their loved ones have left the island. Nagging suspicions impel them to the impersonal lists.

“I think this is my cousin!” exclaimed one young woman examining the rolls outside Radio Mambi this week, her finger planted beneath one name on a wall filled with computer printouts from Guantanamo and the Immigration and Naturalization Service detention centers near Miami and in Port Isabel, Tex.

Studying the listings has become a somber daily routine in Florida, a modern-day version of queues to examine casualty rolls of wars past. Spanish-language newspapers in Florida publish the names on a regular basis. Radio stations broadcast the monotonous rolls, along with occasional curt messages--typically, “We’re all safe,”--relayed from Guantanamo. Impromptu support groups have formed to pool often-unconfirmed bits of information.

“There is great uncertainty,” said the Rev. Rafael Lira, a Mexican priest working at the Sacred Heart Chapel near Little Havana. The site was one of several where processions were held last week in honor of Cuba’s Roman Catholic patroness, la Virgen de la Caridad del Cobre, who, appropriately, is also the protector of navigators and the shipwrecked.

Simply finding a loved one’s name on a list is a source of relief and even exhilaration, although life at the sweltering, makeshift camps is difficult and detainees face uncertain futures. Everyone recognizes that rafts and other jerry-built small craft can be no match for the shark-infested Florida Straits during the perilous 90-mile crossing to the United States.

Benito Blanco, who had checked the photocopied lists outside Radio Mambi daily, was growing more pessimistic by the day. Six relatives, including two brothers, left Cuba’s northern coast eight days ago. There was still no word.

“I’m hopeful, but I have to recognize that they may be at the bottom of the sea,” concluded Blanco, a 49-year-old laborer who went to Florida during the Mariel boat lift of 1980, the last large-scale burst of Cuban emigration.

Another man peering over lists said that he, his wife and two children reached the Florida coast on July 4 after a clandestine boat trip from the Havana beach of Sagua la Grande. That was before the current flood of would-be immigrants prompted the White House to reverse the longstanding policy of giving refuge to all Cubans who make it to U.S. shores.

Now the man was worried about his mother, sister and six other relatives, who all left in a 20-foot boat from the same Havana strand a week ago. The escape craft may have drifted to Louisiana, the man speculated hopefully, citing a news report that a boat of that size carrying Cubans had landed near New Orleans.

The torment is only accentuated for those who encouraged loved ones to embark on the hazardous trip, confident that the U.S. Coast Guard would quickly pick them up and take them to the United States.

“What else could I do? My mother told me there was no more milk for the children in Cuba,” said Sosa, whose mother and children, ages 9 and 14, departed from Havana’s Playa Jaimanita.

Sosa and his wife, Tania Rodriguez, themselves had set sail in a raft from the same beach two years ago, making landfall in the Florida Keys three days later.

The couple hoped to bring in the family legally, but Sosa, echoing a common perception, complained that immigration applications processed at the U.S. interests section in Havana were routinely denied after endless delays.

Many whose relatives are in the Guantanamo camps say the names never appeared on the official lists; they learned of their loved ones’ whereabouts from journalists and other visitors. Relatives have become accustomed to receiving late-night telephone calls from someone who heard something from someone else.

“We’re looking at all the lists, listening to the radio, trying to contact people however we can,” said Elizabeth Rodriguez of Tampa, Fla., who was informed by a reporter that her nephew was being held at Guantanamo. “People are desperate.”

Like many Cubans and Cuban Americans, Rodriguez said she deeply resents the Clinton Administration’s new policy of detaining Cubans. Many complain that the United States long used fleeing Cubans as vivid Cold War symbols when it served U.S. foreign policy purposes, but now caricatures them as prospective drains on public coffers.

“Wouldn’t it be more economical and more humane to let them be with their families, who will support them, help them find work?” asked Rodriguez, who fled to the United States 30 years ago in the first great wave of emigration after then-rebel leader Castro entered Havana from his base in the Sierra Maestra, not far from Guantanamo.

Today, Rodriguez is eager to lend a hand to nieces, nephews and other relatives, many of whom she has never met. It is a widespread sentiment in the Cuban exile community. “Is the United States going to keep these people in camps until Fidel falls or dies?” Rodriguez wondered aloud.

Those left behind in Cuba don’t even have the limited comfort of regular access to the lists, leaving them little hope of discovering the fates of just-departed husbands and wives, children and parents.

“Please call my family in Cuba,” Javier Rodrigues Freloe implored a visitor in Guantanamo.

Rodrigues explained that he lost all his meager belongings--including cherished papers detailing relatives’ whereabouts in the United States--during the difficult raft voyage. Half a dozen others here also said they could not find their lists of addresses.

But without postal and telephone service, even those few Guantanamo detainees with detailed directories have little hope of getting in touch with kin. The maddening sense of isolation from loved ones has greatly aggravated tensions in the tent cities. Over and over detainees repeat the same complaint: Our loved ones don’t know if we’re alive or dead.

“We’re cut off from everything,” sighed Jose Antonio Echeverria, a 37-year-old former hotel administrator from Santiago de Cuba who arrived in Guantanamo two weeks ago with his mother, wife and 1-year-old daughter.

Communication is so poor here that Jeffrey Lomal has been unable to contact his wife and daughter--even though he said they arrived at Guantanamo with him almost three weeks ago.

The family was split up and placed in separate camps, Lomal explained, after he was hospitalized on Guantanamo for dehydration and severe sunburn following his harrowing four-day journey from Cuba on a raft crafted from inner tubes. Military authorities have been unresponsive, according to Lomal, a 31-year-old former broadcast technician from Havana.

“I must find my family,” he said, dazed and close to tears as he stood in the shade of a giant tent, his barracks-mates trying to console him. “They are everything to me.”