UPDATE : Cuban Rafters From Guantanamo Still Flowing Into Florida : After months in the refugee camp, they try to adjust to America. Family and charities help make the transition easier, though, as hundreds arrive each week.

Six weeks after flying in from the U.S. naval base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, Lester Torres and his cousin Pavel Cruz have enrolled in English classes, obtained Florida driver’s licenses and discovered a suburban singles bar called Cafe Iguana.

Torres, 23, has decided that he prefers non-Latin women. “They are less temperamental than Cuban Americans.” Hearing this, Cruz, 22, rolls his eyes, as if to say, “I’m not so sure of that.”

But both men agree that finally, after more than a year in the hot, dusty limbo of a refugee camp on the same island they attempted to flee on a raft, an inviting future beckons. “A good job, a house, getting married--that’s some of what I think about,” Torres says.

Adds Cruz: “I learned a lot about myself at Guantanamo. I’m more serious now. And I am willing to work at whatever I can get.”

In the past year, more than 23,000 Cubans have been airlifted from the naval base to new lives in South Florida. The balseros , or rafters, come in at the rate of 500 a week. They are handed over to a sponsor--usually a relative who can provide a place to stay--and assigned to a resettlement agency that helps the refugees find work.

And they are still coming. As of Tuesday, 6,620 balseros remained in the detention camp on Cuba’s southeast coast, the last of about 32,000 people who fled the island in the summer of 1994 aboard flimsy rafts fashioned from inner-tubes, boards and Styrofoam packing. Clinton had announced on Aug. 19, 1994, that the rafters would be intercepted and taken to Guantanamo. The seaborne stampede ended a month later when Cuban leader Fidel Castro reimposed beach patrols to stop launches. Rafters picked up at sea after May 2, 1995, have been returned to Cuba.

Like Cruz and Torres, all those still at Guantanamo are single men. And although the majority have at least the equivalent of a high school education, few speak English.

Entry level jobs are hard to find. “It’s getting to the saturation point,” says Danny Martinez, supervisor of a resettlement program run by the Catholic Archdiocese of Miami. “We’re just trying to place them anywhere: factory jobs, hotel housekeeping, airport baggage handler.”

About 70% of the rafters stay in South Florida, already home to more than 1 million Cuban Americans, and in recent weeks some refugee agencies have reported a surge in sponsorship breakdowns and housing problems. The last to leave Guantanamo will mostly be the ones with the weakest of family ties, to distant cousins or step-siblings they may never have met.

“It used to be harder to get people to leave this area,” says Susan Krehbiel, director of refugee services for Church World Service in Miami. “But if they can’t get a job here, they are willing to leave.” About 15% of the rafters are resettled outside of Florida.

Yet it is a measure of both this city’s experience taking in Caribbean refugees and the expansive embrace of the Cuban community that the steady flow of balseros --men, women and children--into Miami goes virtually unnoticed by most of the metropolitan area’s 2 million residents. In fact, the Dade County schools take in an average of 248 new foreign-born students--including Haitians, Nicaraguans and Venezuelans--every school day, according to Assistant Supt. Henry Fraind. In terms of numbers, says Fraind, “the rafters are damn-near negligible.”

Still, making room for a relative you don’t know is an act of faith and charity.

“I didn’t know how it would be,” admits Guillermo Reyes, an Amway distributor, when his wife told him that her 28-year-old brother, Oziel Lopez, was coming from Guantanamo and would be moving into their spare room in Hialeah. But, says Reyes, Lopez quickly got a job in a purse factory, saved $600 to buy a 1984 Toyota, found a girlfriend and gets along well with the Reyes’ two teen-agers.

“I’m glad it worked out,” Reyes says. “I think he realizes what his sister sacrificed for him.”

The transition between communist Cuba, where money and consumer goods are scarce, and the competitive, faster-paced United States can be a shock, especially to people who have spent a year or more killing time and growing anxious in a barren refugee camp.

“They come from a system where there is no incentive,” says Catholic Community Services counselor Silvia Santiago. “In Cuba, many people had jobs where they reported in the morning and then spent the day taking care of personal business. They are survival people. They don’t know about calling in sick, going to work every day.”

In orientation sessions, balseros are schooled in the American work ethic, the banking system, laws prohibiting sexual harassment and the rights of children, for example.

Cultural differences between life on the island and in Miami are also discussed. Personal privacy--more respected here than in Cuba--is sometimes an issue in sponsors’ homes, says Martinez, especially for the men who came from barracks life in Guantanamo. Counselors also remind the men, many of whom wore nothing but shorts and flip-flop sandals in the camp, that they need to be fully dressed in Miami.

In Cuba, many also are accustomed to paying unannounced visits on friends or family, at almost any hour of the day, Martinez says. “Here, they drop in, and then Uncle Fred says: ‘But you didn’t tell me you were coming!’ It’s a cultural thing.”

The chief obstacle to full assimilation, however, is language. “We emphasize that you can live in parts of Miami with only Spanish, but to move out in the world and get a better job the first question is always, ‘Do you speak English?’ ” explains Louise Eckels Fericelli, coordinator of the archdiocese job program.

Many balseros arrive in Miami with some English skills, the result of Guantanamo classes financed by a $100,000 grant from Bacardi Imports Inc. That program, administered by United Way, also pays for visits to the camp by Miami business people who pass on their success stories.

“We tell them the reality; the sidewalks are not paved with gold,” says the United Way’s Lourdes Quirch. “To prosper they have to learn the language.”

Arnaldo Bera, 29, realizes that. After he came from Guantanamo in July, Bera was hired by a Hialeah electrical firm, where his cousin, Raul Perez, is a foreman. Bera’s wife, Yamile, 28, is working as a hotel maid, and the couple recently rented their own apartment.

And Bera studies English at night school. “The language is a problem because he is working side-by-side with [English-speaking] good old boys,” Perez says. “It’s going to be hard, but if they want to live in freedom, they are going to have to get used to the system.”

Torres and Cruz also appreciate the importance of learning English. In daily classes with Fericelli and her staff, they are at the basic vocabulary stage, learning that guagua in Cuban Spanish translates as bus in English.

But they have also learned some phrases useful at Cafe Iguana. “Do you want to dance?” says Torres, practicing his smile and his English. “OK.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

From Cuba to U.S., via Guantanamo

The Numbers

Cubans interdicted at sea and sent to Guantanamo naval base: 32,781

Refugees voluntarily repatriated from the base: 915

Those who jumped the fence or swam back to Cuba: 1,001

Cubans repatriated because they arrived after a May 2, 1995, cutoff date: 36

Refugees waiting for repatriation because they arrived after that date: 55

Total number brought to United States from Guantanamo since July: 23,373

Cubans remaining at the base as of Nov. 6: 6,620

Peak number at the base at one time, reached on Sept. 30, 1994: 29,166

Source: U.S. Defense Department