By The Associated Press and Reuters

HAVANA — Cuban police inspected a house and several auto repair shops yesterday in a neighborhood where residents recently converted two 1950s cars into boats
that refugees used in attempts to reach the United States.

The search came a day after eight residents of the Diezmero neighborhood in Havana were returned to Cuba by the U.S. Coast Guard after their converted 1959 Buick
was spotted floating off Key West, Fla.

That was the second time in seven months such a trip was attempted. Last July, a group including some of the same refugees from Diezmero "set sail" in a converted
1951 Chevy pickup outfitted with pontoons and waterproofed doors. They too were stopped by U.S. authorities and returned to Cuba.

Yesterday, police said they were looking for a red 1951 Ford pickup belonging to the family of Marcial Basanta, one of the refugees returned to Cuba on Tuesday,
according to Basanta's father, also named Marcial.

"They broke the door (of the family's house) and said they were going to take the truck away," the elder Basanta said.

Faced with a rare expression of defiance of their authority, police withdrew without the well-preserved red truck. Residents clapped at their departure.

The younger Basanta was one of four refugees who participated in both last week's failed journey and the one that took place in July.

"I want to set off again, and many others here would do the same," said Reinier Rodriguez, who was intercepted by the U.S. Coast Guard on a raft four years ago and
repatriated to Communist-run Cuba.

"I would get on anything, as long as it does not sink, just to leave," said Osmany Brito, 27, who almost made it to Florida aboard a converted 1951 Chevy truck last year
before he was intercepted.

"Everyone here wants to leave," said Diezmero resident Antonio Vinales.

Ariel Diego, 28, owner of the wooden house where Basanta's truck is kept, said he would have gone on the Buick if there had been room. The Buick carried six adults
and five children as it drove into the sea from a beach east of Havana.

Diego was aboard the Chevy flatbed truck that was intercepted in the Straits in July. All 12 aboard were returned to Havana.

Now he is cleaning streets for 137 pesos a month ($5.27), a wage that is hardly enough to survive on, even though health, education, housing and food rations are
subsidized by Cuban President Fidel Castro's government.

Leaving Cuba without a permit, even when you have a visa to visit another country, is a crime in Cuba.

Many Cubans have tried to reach the United States on rafts and inner tubes and aboard smugglers' speedboats for a hefty fee.

The government blames the United States for encouraging illegal and dangerous crossing to Florida with its policy of granting almost automatic residency to those that
reach U.S. soil. Under migration agreements signed in 1994 and 1995 to prevent disorderly mass exoduses from Cuba, the United States usually repatriates those it
intercepts at sea.

Emigres thought to be at risk of political persecution if they are returned to Cuba are taken instead to the U.S. naval base in Guantánamo Bay, eastern Cuba, for
immigration processing.

Luis Grass, the Cuban who led the Chevy truck and Buick sedan voyages before being stopped by the U.S. Coast Guard, may win asylum as a political refugee in the
United States.

A Cuban exile group in Miami said U.S. authorities agreed yesterday to consider the asylum request of Grass, his wife and their 4-year-old son, and they were being
sent to Guantánamo.