Exhausted, Exhilarated Cubans Beat Deadline : Exodus: U.S. cutters rescue new surge of refugees. Castro regime is scheduled to bar departures from the island beginning today.

Day and night, the flimsy crafts and their desperate crews kept popping up on the horizon, bobbing on the waves like the bedraggled remnants of some long-lost armada.

“At this moment I am a free man,” declared an exhausted, drenched and exhilarated Sergio Denis Sanchez, after he and three others were pulled to safety aboard this Coast Guard cutter from their dubious conveyance of inner tubes, wood planks and metal rods.

In recent days, hundreds of Cubans anxious to beat Havana’s deadline of today for illicit departures have headed for these treacherous waters in a frenzied last-ditch effort to leave their beleaguered island. They left even though most knew that they would be taken to the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay on Cuba’s southeastern shore and would have little chance of reaching the United States.

The weekend volume did not match last month’s record levels but did produce a sudden surge in the numbers of those rescued.

“This is one chance in a lifetime,” said Jose Manuel Ramirez, a 30-year-old truck driver from Havana, who embraced his wife, Marisol Sardinas, when the two were safely aboard the Chandeleur, one of a flotilla of Coast Guard cutters busily scooping rafters from the swelling seas.

“I’ve already wasted most of my youth in a Cuba without opportunities,” Ramirez noted, “and I don’t want to waste any more time.”

Elena Sanchez, four sons, a nephew and a dozen others shoved off from Bacuranao beach in Havana Saturday morning, following the announcement in Cuba that illicit rafters would have until Tuesday to clear out before their vessels would be confiscated.

“We knew we had to act quickly,” explained Sanchez, whose group utilized a modified rowboat outfitted with a Chevrolet automobile engine--one of the bewildering array of ingenious contraptions employed by the rafting masses.

The sense of urgency was conveyed over and over again by those pulled from the waters since the United States and Cuba reached an agreement Friday aimed at ending the chaotic exodus, which has seen more than 30,000 Cubans take to the seas in the last six weeks or so and has created a policy crisis for the White House.

President Clinton has voiced hope that renewed Cuban coastal enforcement--a central component of the Washington-Havana pact--will end the mass departures. In return, the Administration vowed to boost the number of Cubans granted entry visas at the U.S. Interests Section in Havana, which processes immigration petitions filed on the island.

The fate of the rescued Cubans remains uncertain.

The Washington-Havana accord makes no special allowance for the more than 26,000 intercepted Cuban rafters being held in makeshift camps at Guantanamo. Those detainees will have to apply for U.S. entry in Cuba, U.S. officials have said, though there is currently no mechanism to repatriate them.

The same “apply-in-Havana” policy applies to the 1,555 Cubans pulled from the Straits on Saturday and Sunday, many spurred by the Cuban deadline. Those and others rescued since then are also to be transferred to Guantanamo, further stretching resources at the tense Cuban camps now bristling with discontent.

Rafters generally have indicated resolute resistance against returning to Cuba, where many fear that they would face reprisals. Moreover, few want to go back to a nation where bleak economic prospects and fierce political repression prompted them to take to the seas in a hazardous roll of the dice of personal fortune.

“I’d prefer to die than go back to Cuba,” said Ernesto Gonzalez, 26, who was among a group of seven men and one woman aboard a raft plucked from the ocean in Monday’s pre-dawn hours. “We have no prospects there,” said Gonzalez, who noted that he was trained as a medical technician in Cuba but had to scramble for work as a shoemaker and in other laboring jobs.

Also rescued was Lazaro Benitez, a 42-year-old father of two from Havana who said that he was granted a much-cherished visa to go to the United States two years ago. However, Benitez added, Cuban police later arrived at his home and confiscated his passport.

Like others, Benitez expressed pessimism that many rafters--even if they did somehow return to Cuba--would ever be allowed to leave the island again.

“They won’t let us leave but none of us have a future in Cuba,” said Benitez, slouched on the deck of the Chandeleur along with his colleagues.

Ricardo Camilo Lopez, who said he was granted a visa to go to the United States in 1991 but was never permitted to depart, agreed.

“I’ll never get out,” said Lopez. He said that he was trained as a theoretical physicist in Cuba and East Germany but could find work only as a garbage man because of his opposition to the Fidel Castro regime.

The raft traffic was so thick Sunday afternoon that at one point more than a dozen craft were in view as the Chandeleur patrolled a zone about 15 miles northeast of Havana that is in the path of most of the drifting rafts as they are pushed along by the Gulf Stream.

“There’s at least six up front, four to the left and four more to the right,” said Lt. Glenn F. Grahl, commanding officer of the Chandeleur, as he surveyed the scene from the Chandeleur’s flying bridge.

On the cramped deck, 159 Cubans pulled from almost two dozen rafts crammed the cutter’s limited deck space, waiting to be transferred to the Ashland, a troop transport transformed into a floating camp that would ferry the migrants to Guantanamo.

The Chandeleur is one of 40 of the sturdy, 110-foot cutters that have been the workhorses of the massive search-and-rescue operation. The vessels have been brought from as far away as Maine and Washington state to bolster Coast Guard resources in Key West, the rescue nerve center. With Cuban police slated to cut off departures starting today, however, officials hope that this recent surge represents the death throes of a migrant flow that will soon shut down to a trickle. Rescues seemed to be down Monday.

Those joining the harried rush to beat Havana’s deadline and who cast their lot with the roiling waters included the young and old, men and women, the sick and healthy, white, black and mixed-race Cubans of seemingly all socioeconomic levels, save the governing elite. Many said that they had sold virtually all their possessions, expended meager savings and borrowed from loved ones to purchase the materials needed for vessels that might take them beyond Cuba’s 12-mile territorial limit.

Among those picked up was an ailing Julio Riberon Cortero, whose intestines were literally protruding from an opening on his left side, the aftermath of unsuccessful surgery in Cuba. He wanted to be with his family, Riberon explained, noting that his mother, father and sister left on the same raft, and another sister already had drifted away from Cuba days earlier.

“We have nothing left in Cuba,” Riberon said as he lay on a stretcher on the Chandeleur deck, soon to be evacuated to the waiting Ashland.