New country proves vastly different from rafters' dreams

 BY MARIKA LYNCH

 Dodging water cannons and pepper spray, six Cuban men scrambled from a
 wooden skiff in a desperate bid to reach the Florida coast at Surfside.

 Now, a year after the six ran a gantlet of Coast Guard boats and television
 cameras, their dash to asylum looks like the easy part.

 Living in obscurity in Homestead and the Florida Keys, the Surfside Six have
 gone from Cuban folk heroes who lunched with the mayor and paraded on Calle
 Ocho to struggling immigrants who can barely afford a meal. They've flailed in
 undertows of jail time and separation, nearly foundered in the demands of a free
 society.

 One yearns to return to Cuba. All are struggling in a new country vastly different
 from their dreams.

 For Carlos Hernández Córdova, getting to Florida meant the difference between
 life and death.

 He had made it once before, spending one year in the United States before he
 returned to Cuba in 1995 after his mother committed suicide.

 For a second chance at freedom, he was willing to give his life, he said.

 ``I felt like the devil was behind me,'' Hernández said minutes after he sprinted to
 the Surfside beach and dove face-first into the sand as crowds cheered.

 Now, he says, he wants to return to Cuba -- for good.

 The second of the six to reach shore, Hernández, 30, quickly became the group's
 affable spokesman. He mugged for the cameras, a wide grin on his narrow face.
 But soon after the TV lights dimmed, Hernández's life unraveled.

 His troubles began Sept. 17, just after settling aboard a motorless boat docked
 behind the Marathon Trailerama, a mobile-home park, which has an on-site
 bondsman.

 That night about 8 o'clock, he was returning from a fishing trip with his cousin
 when a Marine Patrol officer sighted someone dumping lobsters overboard, a
 state report said. On board, the officer found 40 lobsters -- 16 over the recreational
 fishing limit. Hernández said they simply miscounted the lobsters.

 Out on bond, he got into trouble again less than a month later. On Oct. 12, he
 fired a stolen flare gun at a woman who had rejected his advances, missing the
 woman's head by six inches, a Monroe County Sheriff's Office report said.

 Hernández said another man fired the flare.

 With no bond, Hernández remained in jail for 73 days. Then on Dec. 20 he
 pleaded no contest to a battery charge. He is on probation for a year.

 Hernández has developed a conspiracy theory: He asserts that police have
 targeted him as the ``leader'' of the group that defied the Coast Guard and are
 making him pay by harassing him.

 Deputies at the Monroe County jail were in on the act, too, he said, torturing him
 by not letting him watch Spanish-language television. Becky Herrin, a
 spokeswoman for the Monroe Sheriff's Office, said the inmates, not deputies,
 decide TV programs.

 ``I feel like I've been criminalized by this country,'' Hernández said angrily. ``I want
 to know, what are human rights?''

 ``I think there are less here than there are in Cuba.''

 Later, when a reporter asked permission to take his picture, Hernández insisted
 on a photo that would show him installing a roof on the cafeteria of Marathon's
 Stanley Switlik Elementary School.

 ``Show them I'm not a delinquent,'' he said.

 Despite his legal troubles, the construction company D&J Industries hired him
 four months ago as a laborer. Supervisor Matt Dillon said he ``comes to work all
 the time. He's dependable.'' Another of the six, Luis Chantel Bienes, 23, who lives
 in a public housing project, works alongside him.

 But when a photographer showed up at his boat to catch him before the 7 a.m.
 shift, Hernández was still asleep. An hour later -- an hour after his shift began --
 Hernández emerged wearily. Someone had kept him up all night splashing around
 in a canoe, he explained. He feared they were going to break in and steal his TV
 and refrigerator. Hernández perched on an overturned boat and pronounced: ``I'm
 tired. I'm not going to work today.''

 His thoughts returned to his homeland.

 ``At any moment I'm leaving,'' he said. ``Any moment.''

 DAYDREAMS

 Friends on the streets of Marathon wave to Juan de Dios Mirabal Fumero. Lost in
 thought, he doesn't even notice. Once, while riding his bike along U.S. 1, he was
 so caught up in daydreams that he lost control, hit a car, and tumbled to the
 pavement.

 He's hounded by anxiety for his mother, who is plagued by ulcers and living in a
 one-room palm hut in Caibarién. His father is ill, too, having suffered two heart
 attacks since Mirabal set off for the United States.

 Now 30, Mirabal feels defeated because he said he came to the United States
 solely to provide for his family, yet hasn't been able to hold a job for more than
 two months.

 Though he lives in the county with the highest cost of living in Florida, Mirabal quit
 his first job as a Marathon roofer because the work hurt his leg and back --
 injuries, he said, caused by the Coast Guard when he tried to reach shore.

 LANGUAGE BARRIER

 He was fired as a dishwasher in a pizzeria, he said, because without a car he
 kept showing up late. Then he was fired again, this time from his job as a stock
 boy, he said, because of miscommunication with his English-speaking manager.

 ``How am I going to get a job if I don't speak English? Mirabal, a machine operator
 in Cuba, asked, frustration in his raised voice. Yet he hasn't enrolled in English
 classes, either. He says his girlfriend Yolanda García, a Cuban who came to the
 United States on a raft in 1994, tries to teach him words. But ``they escape me.''

 On a recent afternoon, friend Juan Terry took him to the docks on Big Pine Key
 where he was introduced to fishermen scraping barnacles and preparing traps for
 lobster season, which starts Aug. 6.

 ``What kind of work do you want to do?'' fisherman Juan Carlos Rodríguez asked.

 ``I don't know,'' Mirabal replied. The words flew out of his mouth, but his motions
 belied them. Mirabal was already trying to impress by mimicking the worker in
 front of him and coiling the long black, trap rope. One-two-three, he counted, arms
 outstretched to measure the coils. He did this again and again, until finally
 Rodriguez told him the boss wasn't around to make a decision. Mirabal left his
 girlfriend's phone number on the back of a store receipt. Again he retreated deep
 behind his cavernous brown eyes.

 He spent that night aboard his brother's rickety sponging boat, the Ark. His own
 home, a wooden skiff a friend brought over from Cuba, sank after it sprung a leak
 last week.

 A TAPE FOR MAMA

 The worst day of the past 365, though, was May 14: ``Mother's Day. I couldn't
 send anything to my mother.''

 With sending money out of the question, Mirabal borrowed a home video camera
 and made a 60-minute tape of himself and brother Carlos Mirabal Fumero -- who
 came to the United States on the same voyage and now filets fish in Homestead.

 In the video, Carlos plays songs on his guitar about loneliness and lost loves. At
 one point, the 37-year-old brother unzips his jeans and turns to the side to show
 his mother his belly, how much weight he's gained in the United States. Laughs
 abound. A grin breaks Mirabal's icy face.

 He was going to send the tape to his mother with García, but the Cuban
 government denied her a visa.

 So, Mirabal spent Mother's Day at his girlfriend's kitchen table, weeping.

 STUDY FOR FUTURE

 At 5:30 a.m., when the alarm clock goes off in their Job Corps dorm in
 Homestead, Israel Ramos Consuegra and Duviel Rodríguez rise to make their
 bunk beds. They make sure the sink and mirror in the former Army barracks are
 spotless. Then the two ninth-grade dropouts go to class for eight hours, studying
 English, math and air-conditioning repair.

 They had quit studying in Cuba because they saw they had no future on the
 island. Now they rise early and abide by a 10 p.m. curfew in exchange for free
 meals and an education.

 ``We have to make sacrifices to learn,'' Ramos, 19, said.

 ``Like what Oscar de la Hoya says, `With education you can go to the moon,'
 Rodríguez, 18, said half-joking, refering to the famous boxer's commercials.

 After arriving in the United States, both went to live with uncles and cousins in
 Hialeah. Ramos took a job with an alarm company earning $7 an hour. Rodríguez
 made freezer doors. Then a friend from Caibarién, Yasamanny Benavides, who
 arrived by boat from Cuba one week after their dramatic entry, told them he had
 joined Job Corps.

 Ramos and Rodríguez enrolled, too, moving from Miami-Dade County's most
 Cuban city to a sparse campus of pillbox buildings where only about 35 percent of
 the 437 students are Hispanic. Ramos, teachers say, is the studious one, who
 lifts weights and returns to his room to memorize his lessons.

 AN EYE FOR THE GIRLS

 Rodríguez, who puts on his gold hoop earrings the minute class is done, is the
 charmer who focuses on girls. He sneaks a kiss with his girlfriend, Natasha
 Rodríguez, in the classrooms' peach hallway. Before dating her, Rodríguez went
 out with an ``Americana, who only spoke English.

 ``Teacher, I have a blue-eyed dictionary, he boasted to Rafael Alvarez, his English
 teacher.

 Though Alvarez said both Rodríguez and Ramos have improved their English
 since their first day three months ago, they still struggle. During class one recent
 afternoon, the timid Ramos hesitated to offer answers. Rodríguez, to his teacher's
 dismay, often blurts out phrases in Spanish.

 Frustrated with his lack of progress two weeks ago, Rodríguez decided to return
 to his cousin's house in Hialeah to look for work. Job Corps teachers and
 counselors immediately called him.

 ``Remember what your life was like back in Cuba. You came to the United States
 for a purpose, counselor Doriliz De Jesus told him. ``You can do it.''

 He was back within 48 hours.

 ``Both of them are headstrong and know what they want,'' air-conditioning teacher
 Frank Díaz said of Ramos and Rodríguez. ``I think they are going to make it.''