BY MARIKA LYNCH

 It was a twist of fate, divine providence via the Yellow Pages. When she stops to think about it, Virginia Haskin can't remember how, or when, or why the phone book started listing her Little Havana shop as La Casa de las Banderas, Spanish for House of Flags.

 But the name stuck. And it has been good for business, especially in these days of pride and protest. Especially when the shop is four blocks from the home of Elian Gonzalez's Miami relatives.

 ''Our rear ends are on the ground. We're waiting a day or two to lift ourselves up,'' Haskin said at the shop also known as the Flag Center.

 The counter-top store not much wider than two parking spaces was packed for weeks, at the peak of street demonstrations, selling 500 flags a day. Postcard-sized ones for 45 cents that fit in a purse, shop-sewn ones measuring 6 by 10 feet for $102. They sold out and sold out again.

 ''They were practically buying our underwear,'' Haskin said.

 Three generations of Haskins worked the counter, from 82-year-old Virginia to her 11-year-old granddaughter, Victoria, on the register. Five seamstresses in the back workshop cut red and blue stripes from spools of nylon and sewed nonstop. There was a lot of sign language.

 Haskin's Spanish skills don't much surpass the phrase un poquito, which means ''a little.''

 The business dates to 1948, when Virginia Haskin and her now deceased husband, Clare, opened their first shop. This was before Little Havana was Little Havana, when their corner of Southwest First Street was a shopping district ''off downtown.'' This was Miami B.C. -- before Castro.

 STARTING BUSINESS

 The Haskins started in the business of bunting, decorating convention halls from Miami to Michigan, sticking red push pins into a map of the United States to mark their projects.

 Decorating streets was another specialty. When Jamaica won independence from England, the Haskins decorated lampposts from Kingston to Montego Bay.

 Their banners were strung through 45 miles of Havana in 1959 -- when Castro was in power, but had not yet declared himself a communist, the family is quick to point out -- to welcome an international tourism convention.

 The family business evolved into flags a year later, when Clare Haskin bought a Union Special sewing machine he named Betsy, moved into their current location at 2187 SW First St., and hung an American flag out front.

 The shop now relies largely on selling custom flags to high schools, home builders and businesses such as the Seaquarium. But many of the flags stay in the neighborhood, on front lawns, buried six deep at local cemeteries, or flying among the palm trees at La Plaza de La Cubanidad on Flagler Street and West 17th Avenue.

 ''La Casa de las Banderas, I've been buying flags there for 25 years,'' said Gerardo Rosales, a member of Cuban exile group Alpha 66. The flags are good quality at a good price, he said, and it's near group headquarters.

 LOYAL CLIENTELE

 The location also has helped cull a loyal clientele, said Cindy Zoeller, Haskin's daughter, who helps her run the store. ''Cuban customers make better flag customers than Americans,'' Zoeller said. ''They care a lot about their flag. They talk about it more. We take ours more for granted.''

 The tension surrounding the fate of Elian, the 6-year-old boy in the midst of an international custody battle, has not escaped the shop. A few customers left in protest after the shopkeepers shared their opinions on Elian's plight. One caller last week hung up the phone after realizing Haskin doesn't speak Spanish, she said. But the shop owner says she has a few things to be proud of throughout the saga.

 TENSE POLITICS

 When Miami politics grew tense, Haskin turned down a request to print a flag with a portrait of a crowned Miami Mayor Joe Carollo that read ''República de Miami.'' The store also stopped selling the Confederate flag, which is popular with German tourists who see it as a symbol of rebellion, Zoeller said. ''We thought it would cause ill will,'' she said.

 Now, in the lull in the legal battle, the seamstresses replenish the stock in the workshop, sewing Cuban flags and others from Colombia, Nicaragua and Puerto Rico for those who marched in solidarity with the exile community.

 The only flag they don't sew is the American one.

 Haskin orders those from a factory in Roseland, N.J. Sewing the Stars and Stripes, she said, is just too complicated.

                     Copyright 2000 Miami Herald