BY CAROL ROSENBERG

 Airline charter agencies are booking many more Miami-to-Havana Christmas
 flights this season than ever before -- an average of six flights a day in the coming
 week.

 State Department officials say there are 45 charter flights from Miami, two from
 Los Angeles and two more from New York City next week. During the same week
 last year, 30 flights left Miami for Cuba.

 On Saturday alone, 11 flights will leave Miami for Havana.

 "It's an amazing number of flights, that's phenomenal,'' said Charles Shapiro,
 director of the State Department's Cuba Desk.

 Off-season demand is at best 10 flights a week, more typically six or fewer.

 "There's always an increase in December, near the holidays, because people are
 going to visit relatives,'' said John S. Kavulich II of the New York U.S.-Cuba Trade
 and Economic Council.

 NOT SINCE REVOLUTION

 But he called 45 in one week ``a record, at least since 1959.'' Before the
 revolution, ``there were a heck of a lot of DC-3s going all over the place,'' mostly
 from Miami to Key West to Havana.

 Maria Aral, general manager of Little Havana's ABC Charters, said for example
 that she added six extra flights that week, mostly to accommodate whole families
 traveling south to see relatives during the holidays.

 Normally, she said, she operates two flights a week, mostly with 130-seat
 aircraft.

 Because the charter operators lease different-size aircraft from different major
 carriers to run their flights, U.S. diplomats were unable to say how many people
 would travel on the 45 flights so far.

 But Marazul Charters vice president Armando García said the Cuban tourism
 authority Havanatur, which processes travel permits, has estimated that 15,000 to
 16,000 Cuban Americans will visit Havana this Christmas. The only comparable
 period of intense travel, he said, was in 1979, when family reunification visits were
 first permitted.

 FAMILY REUNION TRIPS

 Because of U.S. regulations on who might legally visit Cuba, the vast majority of
 those travelers are Cuban-born or Cuban-American children and grandchildren on
 family reunion trips.

 Each seat costs $299 round trip plus $50 in airport fees, Kavulich said, fixed by
 the consortium of travel brokers that arrange the charters with licenses from the
 Treasury Department's Office of Foreign Assets Control.

 Some trace the trend to the diminishing taboo in the Cuban exile community on
 visiting the land of their births, especially after Pope John Paul II's 1998 pilgrimage
 there.

 Marazul had four flights scheduled to leave New York's John F. Kennedy Airport
 for Havana's José Martí International between last Friday and Christmas.

 Charter companies would add more flights, some business people said, but it's
 difficult to locate additional aircraft during the heavy travel season.

 POLITICAL HOSTILITY

 Juan Carlos Espinosa, director of St. Thomas University's Felix Varela Center for
 Cuban Studies, called the phenomenon "quite amazing,'' especially because
 "political repression is on the increase and the Cuban government's tone is more
 acidic toward the exiles in general.''

 Some Cuban Americans have opposed return travel to deny dollars to Cuba's
 communist economy, which is hugely dependent on exile remittances, he said.
 But ``that zero-sum way of looking at things is less and less a widely held
 opinion,'' Espinosa said.

 The trade council's Kavulich credited the phenomenon to other factors as well:

 The Clinton administration, encouraging so-called people-to-people contacts, has
 simplified the licensing process for travel while "more people of Cuban descent
 are availing themselves to their once-a-year visit to Cuba that does not require a
 specific license.''

 SENSE OF URGENCY

 Kavulich said there may also be a greater sense of urgency for Christmas travel to
 Cuba this year because many Miami exiles have elderly grandparents and aunts
 and uncles living there -- and American-born children who have never met them.

 An example: Elena García Wagner, 45, of Virginia Beach, Va., came to this
 country in 1962 at age 7 in the Catholic Church-sponsored Pedro Pan movement
 that helped Cuban parents send their children away from fear of communist
 reeducation.

 Now she is planning a February pilgrimage to her birthplace, Pinar del Rio, with
 two sisters, Ana and Maria -- their first trip back.

 For years, she said, such a trip was unthinkable because ``the family was
 separated and we had this horrible feeling that we would be spitting in the face of
 their sacrifices.'' More recently, though, since the Elián González case aroused
 emotions, she said, she decided to go: ``When you're older, you're more afraid of
 never seeing it again than hurting your parents.''

 So she ``gently'' told her mother of her sisters' travel plans ``and she was
 wonderful. . . . She wasn't too thrilled, but she said she understood.''