CRISIS IN THE CARIBBEAN : 221 Haiti Refugees Come Home From Guantanamo : Repatriation: Group is the first to return since the Americans landed. Many are bewildered and fearful.

With glum resignation, vague hope and lingering fear, 221 Haitian refugees came home Monday afternoon, filing off the U.S. Coast Guard cutter Northland at a Port-au-Prince harbor now teeming with U.S. combat forces.

In a ceremony, U.S. officials called the Haitians’ return the first concrete demonstration of why America intervened in Haiti.

Clad mostly in T-shirts and shorts or soiled dresses, their belongings tied up in plastic garbage bags, the men, women and children who fled Haiti’s horrors of poverty and violence in rickety boats just months before were the first Haitians to voluntarily return from a makeshift camp at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba since thousands of U.S. forces entered Haiti a week ago.

“This is, in effect, a reverse flow of what we had a couple weeks ago,” declared U.S. Ambassador William L. Swing, who stood by the cutter’s gangplank with U.S. forces commander Lt. Gen. Hugh Shelton to welcome the refugees home.

“We had Haitians leaving in large numbers in unseaworthy boats, and now they’re coming back.”

Curbing the numbers of Haitian refuge seekers who had filled the Caribbean with a precarious flotilla bound for U.S. shores was high among the reasons President Clinton used to justify a costly military intervention that already has left 10 Haitians dead.

On the surface, Monday’s arrival ceremony appeared to confirm, in what one U.S. official here called “an eloquent expression of the dramatic changes in the people,” how the U.S. presence and the promised return of exiled President Jean-Bertrand Aristide can end the U.S.-bound exodus.

In reality, the group of voluntary repatriates, plucked from the sea just months ago by Coast Guard patrols, were part of a weeks-old program to convince the 14,000 Haitians still at the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay that it is better to come home than to live in limbo. And already, U.S. officials said, 5,783 Haitians have done so voluntarily on Coast Guard vessels like the Northland since July 25. The last such arrival was 19 days ago.

But timing was everything on Monday. Ambassador Swing said the group’s arrival--the first under the watchful guard of dozens of U.S. soldiers in full battle gear--was a demonstration that security in the country has improved sufficiently to entice the rest back in what he predicted will be a rapidly escalating program.

“We feel this is the time to start moving the refugees back, at least the ones who come voluntarily,” he said.

The refugees themselves were not so certain. For most, the homecoming from a painful journey that ended where it had begun was clouded with uncertainty. None had abandoned the dream of reaching U.S. soil someday, but most said they agreed to return largely because they were resigned to the impossibility of ever reaching it from Guantanamo Bay.

All said they were joyous over America’s military presence here, but they were equally unanimous in expressing what U.S. officials on the scene described as “a natural apprehension” about what awaits them.

“I’m worried about just getting home from here,” said Ansell Marcelus, 33, who was among a group of 36 people from the northern town of Port-de-Paix who left together July 5 and returned together Monday.

“Port-de-Paix is still run by army and the (Tontons) Macoutes, the terrorist army that made us run away in the first place. Yes, I came back because the Americans are here with us. And I can see they have a lot of security right here. But you know the Macoutes. We were hoping the American soldiers would escort us to Port-de-Paix and protect us when we get there.”

They didn’t. The U.S. Army escorted the returnees in army trucks and buses only as far as the Port-au-Prince bus station, an open sewer of mud and garbage a few blocks from the port. From there, equipped only with the equivalent of $15 that the U.S. government provides each voluntary returnee through the Red Cross, the 221 repatriates had to find their own way home with the small bundles that were the last of their personal possessions.

“I don’t even know where I’ll sleep tonight, let alone how I’m going to get home--or what I’ll find when I get there now,” said Milina Marty, who had fled the troubled northern town of Cap Haitien on June 19 in a tiny skiff with her three sons.

Marty and her family will have the benefit of the U.S. presence when they do get home. But Cap Haitien was the site of Saturday night’s fatal shooting of 10 Haitian policemen by the U.S. Marines who occupy the town. Marty said she was well-aware of how chaos spread through the town when the Haitian forces fled after the incident. What she didn’t know is whether, when she gets there, she will be happy she came home.

When Marty was asked why she voluntarily abandoned the Guantanamo camp, she smiled wryly. “They threw me away,” she said. “What choice did we have? It was either the camp in Cuba or this--back home.”

Joseph Camilien agreed. A fisherman who, like his fellow returnees, had crowded into a shabby, ancient sailboat several months ago only to be picked up by the Coast Guard the following day, Camilien said he, too, felt he had no choice but to come home.

“I couldn’t live in that camp another day,” he said. “There was nowhere to work, nowhere to really live. And they told us we weren’t going anywhere else.

“But now I have no idea what I’ll do. I wanted very much to go to America. And of course, I still want to go. But this is the right way to do it, come home first and see what happens tomorrow.”

Rita Petit-Frere was perhaps the glummest of the group as she struggled to carry both her bundle and her new baby. The 23-year-old had left Haiti seven months pregnant in June, praying her son would be born an American. She gave birth 26 days ago.

“The country is changing,” she said with little enthusiasm when asked why she and her husband decided to come home voluntarily.

“Changing for the better?” she was asked.

She looked down at the newborn son in her arms and shook her head.

“No,” she said as soldiers and Red Cross workers guided her to a waiting bus. “But we’re home now all the same.”