Rafter Rescue Group Alters Tactics to...

Diego Perez squeezes the hands of his fellow volunteer pilots in prayer before taking off in a small blue-and-white plane to search for Cuban rafters.

The donated Cessna 337 rumbles past the flamingo pink and sandy yellow Art-Deco hotels of Miami Beach and over a deep-blue ocean churned by early bird pleasure boaters and an occasional steaming freighter.

It is a horizon he has scanned many times in his three years as a pilot for the group Brothers to the Rescue. Until May, his mission was crystal clear: Find rafters and call the U.S. Coast Guard to come to their rescue.

The skies are still blue and the waters still treacherous. But everything else has changed.

Faced with the new U.S. policy of returning Cubans found at sea to their Communist homeland, Perez flies under new orders: Drop plastic-wrapped radios and warn the rafters of the new policy. And if the refugees are in a seaworthy boat, ask them if they want him to call the Coast Guard.

It is an agonizing decision.

“Do I save their lives and they go back to Cuba or let them take a chance to see if they can get to the United States?” asked Bill Schuss, a pilot and founder of Brothers to the Rescue.

Another pilot, Carlos Costa, said that if they find refugees in rickety rafts or sinking boats, they have no choice but to contact the Coast Guard.

“If someone’s out there and they tell us they would prefer to die than to go back, we really can’t do that,” he said. “We have to save their lives, even if they’re going to go back. At least we will know they are alive.”

Perez, an airplane mechanic from Argentina, is still astounded by those who attempt the dangerous 90-mile crossing, some in rafts of black inner tubes lashed together or in rusted metal boats.

“Some people say they’re trying to get a better lifestyle or better economic situation, but to jump into the water in those things, they must be a little bit desperate,” he said.

On a recent weekend flight, Perez found no rafters to warn. He saw only sea gulls clinging to the chain of jagged rocks of Elbow Cay, about 35 miles from Cuba, where refugees have been picked up in the past.

Out again in deeper ocean, Perez searched through sunglasses for the “white dot that stays steady,” the dogged bobbing of a makeshift sailboat.

“It’s a great feeling when you see someone out there, but when you realize how many people die risking this, it’s a bad feeling,” Perez said.

He spotted a large Coast Guard cutter where the ocean melts into a blue-white sky, and he circled over it. It did not seem to carry rafters.

In the eyes of his group and others in the Cuban exile community, the deep line between the good guys and the bad guys has blurred. But Schuss blames the Clinton Administration, not the Coast Guard.

“I think that they’re torn, too, like we are because they save the lives of these people. . . . They know how these people feel, and I’m pretty sure they don’t feel good either by returning them to Cuba,” Schuss said.

Brothers, which has videotaped Cuban patrol boats stopping fleeing rafters, now has turned its cameras on the Coast Guard repatriations. Costa, who helps coordinate the group’s flights, tells Perez to videotape any Coast Guard pickups.

“We’re here to document crimes in the Florida Straits committed by the [Fidel] Castro government, and now we find ourselves documenting the crimes committed by the Clinton Administration,” Costa said.

Coast Guard Chief Warrant Officer Dan Waldschmidt said his agency’s main mission is simply to save lives. He noted that Brothers no longer keeps in frequent contact about where and when its planes are flying.

Waldschmidt added that it is against the law to help illegal immigrants get into the United States. But he said it would be up to a judge to decide whether dropping radios, or perhaps warning refugees of the location of Coast Guard cutters, would be considered assisting illegal immigrants.

Brothers to the Rescue began four years ago after Schuss saw televised images of a dying Cuban teen-ager picked up by the Coast Guard. He thought of using boats to search for rafters, but Jose Basulto, who became the group’s president, had a plane.

The group now has five planes and a $1.2-million annual operating budget, all from donations. The group estimates that its pilots have saved nearly 6,000 lives through their sightings and life vest drops.

Despite the new U.S. policy, Basulto expects Brothers to keep flying and Cubans to continue taking to the seas. It is wrong to turn away those who flee Castro’s rule, said this man who left Cuba 34 years ago.

“I’m doing my share, I’m trying to save them,” he said. “The U.S. should do their share, which is to receive them.”