Herald Staff Report

 CARDENAS, Cuba -- Little did Johnny Ponte Landrian know when he took
 hostages in a Louisiana jailhouse uprising last year that the freedom he sought
 would be this:

 Life in a hut where light and rain pour through the wooden slats. Showers with a
 water-filled pail. Playing marbles on a street corner all afternoon because there's
 no work to be had.

 In other words, life in small-town Cuba.

 ``If you're in prison the rest of your life, what choice do you have? said Ponte, 28,
 who left this island at age 9 in the Mariel boatlift and returned Dec. 20, 1999, in
 U.S. marshals' shackles under a rare deal to repatriate Cubans to their homeland.

 Just a year ago, Ponte was a detainee of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization
 Service, doomed to indefinite detention in an American lockup after committing a
 string of burglaries and a car theft.

 He and other Cubans were caught in a legal limbo: ordered deported under
 immigration law because they were noncitizen convicts, but unable to be sent
 back to their homeland. While the Cuban government takes back migrants who
 have been stopped at sea, it doesn't accept Cubans who have settled in the
 United States and then been deported.

 So the inmates staged a revolt in the St. Martinville, La., jail and a surprising thing
 happened: Cuba welcomed them back. Earlier this month, a visit found the former
 felon coping with the daily struggles of adjusting to a system he never knew, in
 Cardenas, a Cuban coastal community best known as the hometown of Elián
 González.

 Ponte likens living in Cuba to being on probation. Everybody -- the neighbors, the
 government -- wants to know everyone else's business, he said.

 In the space of a few minutes, Ponte cursed the town market for not having
 tomatoes for sale and then gave thanks for being in the village where he was born,
 far away from his former Louisiana jail cell.

 ``Sometimes I sit back and think, `I can't believe I made it,'  he said.

 Neither can his mother, Martha Landrian, a disabled hotel worker who lives on the
 outskirts of Hialeah. She is happy he's out of jail but worried he may not be able
 to adapt.

 ``He is from here. He was raised here,'' Landrian said from her Northwest
 Miami-Dade County home. ``Cuba is not like here.''

 EARLY PROBLEMS

 Ponte's troubles began early, at age 3, his mother said, when he fell from a
 second-floor window, bumped his head and lost consciousness.

 From that moment, his attention span has been short.

 He rarely paid attention in class at Booker T. Washington Junior High and Miami
 High and was essentially illiterate, she said.

 He took out his frustration in the streets.

 At 12, he started packing an automatic pistol.

 He was initiated into the Miami gang the Latin Disciples at age 15 and was jailed
 within months. By 1995, he was designated a habitual felon.

 Ponte was serving a burglary sentence in 1992 when the INS first ordered him
 deported and and had him detained in a Louisiana jail under contract with the
 agency. Ponte couldn't stand the idea: He pried open a jail window and lowered
 himself out with a rope, INS records show.

 He escaped to Miami but wasn't out of trouble for long. In 1995, Ponte was
 arrested again -- this time for stealing a pickup truck and crashing into a Miami
 Police car as he tried to flee.

 After serving two years in prison for stealing the truck and assaulting a police
 officer, he still faced the deportation order.

 The INS indefinitely detained him for the second time in a Louisiana jail.

 SPURRED TO ACTION

 He steamed in his cell, fuming after the INS declined to give him a pass to two
 funerals in 1999: his father's and that of his 6-year-old niece who died Nov. 25 of
 heart problems. So he hatched a plan with a buddy to take over the jail's control
 room on the walk to the rooftop recreational area. Their weapon: a drawer handle
 sharpened like a knife.

 On Dec. 12, Ponte called his mother.

 ``Mami, I'm leaving here,'' he said from the Louisiana jail. ``If they do anything to
 me, I'll kill them.''

 Martha Landrian had no idea what would unfold in the coming hours.

 Ponte and seven others who joined the takeover initially demanded to be sent
 anywhere -- Libya, China, Cuba. The U.S. government contacted Havana, which in
 an unusual agreement accepted the men by substituting their names for others
 on a 1984 list of career criminal deportees that Cuba would  accept.

 All had come to the United States during the Mariel boatlift in 1980.

 Eight days after taking over the jail, Ponte and most of those involved in the revolt
 landed in Cuba and were immediately taken to a Havana prison. One, Roberto
 Villar Grana -- whose mother helped broker the deal -- was left behind in Louisiana
 to face state drug charges on which he was subsequently convicted.

 WARM WELCOME

 The Cubans disappeared from the eye of the media and their future seemed
 uncertain. The Cuban government said only that they were being held pending an
 investigation.

 But Ponte said he and the others were warmly welcomed as people who had
 outwitted the Americans, and as rare Cubans who wanted to return.

 ``You could tell they were happy in their hearts, he said.

 During what was called a 46-day ``quarantine,'' doctors examined the men's blood
 and gave them HIV tests. Psychologists asked them about why they had risked
 their lives to stage the tense revolt. Cuban security personnel wanted to know just
 how the men had taken over a seemingly secure jail.

 The freed inmates, meanwhile, had access to a basketball court, television and a
 24-hour food and beverage service that allowed them the entree of their choice.

 ``It was nice,'' said Ponte, who added he does not keep in contact with the other
 inmates who were returned to Cuba.

 The Cuban government gave Ponte two gifts, he said: a clean police record and
 permission to travel outside the country -- a privilege ordinary Cubans do not
 enjoy -- as long as the visit isn't to the United States.

 The government also issued him Cuban citizenship papers that don't mention his
 20-year stay in the United States, making it appear he never left. The papers, he
 said, even mention his Cuban elementary school, as if he had completed the
 sixth grade there.

 PHANTOM LIFE

 Ponte has gone along with that story ever since a patrol wagon dropped him off at
 his brother's Cardenas home in February.

 Although he walks with the swagger of the American streets, he rarely mentions
 his phantom life.

 He keeps up with contacts in Miami, though.

 When a Herald reporter asked to meet with him, Ponte called up an old friend at
 the Miami Police Department, he said, and asked him to run the reporter's name
 through the Internet to make sure the interview was legitimate.

 Most days, Ponte wakes up each morning in the bedroom he shares with his
 girlfriend, Lidia, and her two children, Yandy, 13, and Lidia, 3. It is the hardest
 part of the day, he said. His eyes open, and he begins to worry about how he's
 going to make money.

 He doesn't have a job, per se. His English would make him a good candidate for
 employment at one of the nearby resorts in beach-town Varadero, but he thinks
 his 31 tattoos, which form a green carpet from his calves to his neck, would
 disqualify him.

 He entertained teaching English, but said, ``I don't have no dictionary, no books.''

 BLACK MARKET

 Instead, he has sought out a living in Cuba's black-market economy -- a
 calculated risk. Before beginning work as an under-the-table VCR repairman and
 tattoo artist -- skills he picked up while in prison -- he headed to the library and
 memorized which crimes carried jail sentences and which -- such as
 black-market work -- carry a fine. He walks that fine line.

 When there's no work, he kneels in the street and plays marbles with his
 7-year-old nephew, his namesake, Johnny. Sometimes Ponte enjoys nighttime
 hide-and-seek games on the Cardenas rooftops or rides a horse to the beach.
 When it rains, he runs through the flooded streets in his INS-issued shower
 shoes.

 He aches for the Miami Beach nightclubs.

 And there are some parts of Cuban life he flatly rejects. He refuses to get a ration
 card, which ensures each Cuban receives a certain amount of daily food at a
 reduced price, and instead buys fresher meats and vegetables with the few U.S.
 dollars he earns or his mother sends.

 Ponte also hopes to live the American dream in Cuba. His goal is to save money,
 buy a plot of land, build a house and open a business -- even though Cuban law
 forbids private property ownership and puts heavy restrictions on private
 enterprise.

 The man who caused an international incident with a handmade knife insists it
 can be done.

 ``There's no telling what I'm capable of, he said.

 That's what worries his mother.

 She fears he's going to ``do something crazy,'' perhaps hop a boat to Miami to
 visit her. They haven't seen each other in five years.

 ``It's coming. It's coming. He's not well in the head, she said, pointing to her
 temple. ``It's coming.