By RICK BRAGG

          MIAMI -- They used to be called rafters, after the rickety crafts of
          plywood, inner tubes and empty oil drums they launched from the
          beaches of Cuba, praying that the homemade boats would hold together
          long enough to cross the treacherous Florida Straits.

          They struggled ashore in the Florida Keys, at Palm Beach and on barrier
          islands in-between, burned by the sun, half-starved, dehydrated, telling
          stories of circling sharks and of loved ones who vanished when their
          crafts came apart in the waves. In Miami, there are monuments to the
          ones who disappeared, their rafts washing ashore, empty.

          Others, like Ray Dieppa, piled into fishing boats crowded with sick,
          terrified people and sobbing children, and pushed off into uncertainty. He
          remembers gazing into the pitch-black night, almost 20 years ago, and
          wondering if he would ever see the United States. "I am against the
          communist regime," he said, when asked why he made that passage.

          It has not been that simple for a long time.

          In the heaviest exodus since Fidel Castro turned his back and allowed
          33,000 people to exit the island in 1994, more than 1,500 Cubans have
          made it ashore in South Florida so far this year. But increasingly, say
          U.S. Coast Guard officials, the Cubans are making their passage not on
          rafts or in fishing vessels but in the boats of smugglers, who bring them in
          close enough to swim ashore or launch a small dinghy. The cost: as much
          as $8,000 each.

          Meanwhile, more than 1,000 Cubans have been stopped at sea and
          forced to return to the island in compliance with the so called "wet-foot,
          dry-foot" policy that was put in place by President Clinton after the 1994
          exodus. That policy allows those Cubans who make it to shore to apply,
          ultimately, for asylum, but sends those caught at sea back to Cuba.

          The policy, part of an agreement with Castro to halt the 1994 exodus,
          has led to high drama at sea and on the beaches of South Florida, as
          Cubans try almost anything, including threatened self-immolation and
          suicide, to hold off the Coast Guard long enough to put at least a foot on
          dry sand.

          "We had an incident a month ago in which a woman threatened to drown
          her baby if the Coast Gurd crew members came closer," said Glenn
          Rosenholm, assistant district public affairs officer for the Coast Guard.

          "This is not normal, not usual," he said. "These are very, very volatile
          situations."

          Life in Cuba has become increasingly difficult, say recent arrivals, so
          people are ever more desperate to escape.

          Jose Martinez, 34, was one of the lucky ones. He reluctantly conceded
          that he was smuggled into South Florida in October with six others, for a
          per-head price of $8,000 each. But, he does not apologize for doing
          anything that he could to leave Cuba. "We lived like rats," he said of his
          homeland.

          He and his relatives lived in a deteriorating house, without running water,
          in a neighborhood where informants turned in people who spoke against
          the government, and sometimes even those who did not, Martinez said.

          "I think back" to life there, "and I feel like crying," said Martinez.

          It is no wonder, say he and Cuban Americans here, that people will do
          almost anything to leave and cannot meekly accept being sent back,
          especially when they are in sight of land.

          In the past few weeks, confrontations between the Coast Guard, which
          stopped 1,047 Cubans in 1998, and the people they interdict -- now
          more often referred to by the more generic term, "migrants" -- have
          turned ugly and sometimes violent.

          Recently, a Cuban doused himself, his boat and others in it with gasoline
          and threatened to set them all on fire, if the Coast Guard did not let him
          continue to shore. Earlier this month, another man threatened to hurl
          himself into the propellers of a Coast Guard cutter.

          In the past three weeks, two groups of migrants have jumped into the
          water, some miles from shore, instead of giving up to the Coast Guard.
          On Friday, several men jumped into the water off Islamorada in the
          Florida Keys, saying they would rather drown than be sent back. They
          had to be rescued by members of the Coast Guard, who jumped in after
          them.

          More recently, a Cuban woman drowned after the small boat she was on
          was struck by a Coast Guard boat. That happened after a Cuban man
          used a machete to break a tow-line, as others on the boat waved
          machetes at Coast Guard sailors, said Rosenholm. When Coast Guard
          sailors threw life jackets to people on the boat, some of the Cubans
          threw them back.

          "They know they have to make it to land," said Cheryl Little, executive
          director of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center. "When they're
          getting this close, they're desperate. We can expect desperate people to
          do desperate things."

          In just one day recently, 56 Cubans made it safely ashore, some posing
          for photographs in front of art deco hotels before going off to what has
          been -- more often than not -- a temporary detention with U.S.
          immigration. In the same 24-hour period, 24 Cubans were interdicted
          and sent home, some in sight of land.

          The most publicized landfall came June 29 just off Surfside, north of
          Miami Beach, when six Cubans aboard a small boat were blasted by a
          Coast Guard water cannon as a news helicopter thundered overhead,
          broadcasting live footage of the drama to Miami television stations, which
          interrupted afternoon soap operas with the story.

          As the men tried to swim the 200 yards to shore, members of the Coast
          Guard shot pepper spray into their faces and hundreds gathered on the
          beach, cheering the swimmers on. Two made it ashore, one of them
          darting and feinting between police before diving, as if across a goal line,
          onto the sand.

          A demonstration blocked off a main causeway from Miami to Miami
          Beach, and more than 1,000 demonstrators marched on the adjacent
          Coast Guard office, chanting "Assassins." As traffic jammed, Coast
          Guard officials relented, allowing the other four to come ashore and seek
          political asylum.

          Less than a day later, they were released from immigration custody and
          were on the streets of Miami, being feted. On Independence Day, they
          shared a seafood dinner with Mayor Joe Carollo of Miami.

          As they were being greeted as heroes against communism, the U.S.
          Border Patrol questioned why the men, who said they had rowed all the
          way from Cuba on a 14-foot boat, had shown no signs of dehydration or
          exposure, and their hands had no splinters or calluses.

          Less than a week later, a Miami artist fashioned a sculpture of a man
          diving for the sand and freedom as two police closed in, and it was
          erected on the site of that real-life confrontation. A beach-goer later
          knocked it over, cracking it.

          "People are more sympathetic to the Cubans that arrive by themselves,
          struggling with a raft, than Cubans who arrive with a suntan and
          well-fed," said Jaime Suchlicki, director of the Institute for Cuban and
          Cuban-American studies at the University of Miami.

          But that is not a major issue in a Cuban American-dominated Miami, he
          added.

          Some -- including a Cuban doctor who recently made it to Florida grimy
          and exhausted -- are still coming the old-fashioned way, on their own
          boats. But while the ones who pay smugglers to deliver them are not
          accorded quite the same hero status, there is little condemnation of them
          in the Cuban community, where the hatred of Castro colors everything.

          In fact, immigration officials say, the one-time rafters who came here
          years ago are largely financing the new wave of migrants.

          Elena Freyre, executive director of the Miami office of the Cuban
          Committee for Democracy, said that Cuban-Americans in Miami are
          largerly footing the bill for this new migration, paying the smugglers to
          bring their relatives in from Cuba. Most of the smugglers themselves are
          probably of Cuban descent, she said.

          And while many Cuban Americans may still refer to them as balseros --
          rafters -- they sometimes do so with a smile.

          Dieppa said it is wrong for the smugglers to make money off that
          suffering, but he, like many others here, will accept what they see as a
          lesser evil.

          "If my family could afford it, I would want them to try," said Dieppa, now
          an editor at a South Florida television station, who still has family in
          Cuba. "Five members of my family live in a small house infested with flies
          and bugs. My mother raises a pig, and she has to bring him in the house
          and let him stay in the bathroom sometimes so no one will steal him."

          Just because smugglers are bringing them in, it is no guarantee of a safe
          trip, said Martinez, who would not speak specifically about his own
          journey, saying only that "we were taking the biggest risks of our lives."

          While some here in Miami wonder if the steady trickle of Cubans is a
          sign of another exodus like in 1994, experts on Cuban immigration say
          they doubt if it will get that large.

          "This will die," said Suchlicki. "I don't think it's a permanent situation. It
          has to do with the toughening political situation."

          The present exodus is not tied to the worsening Cuban economy alone,
          say experts on Cuba, but is also attributed to a general feeling that small
          freedoms won after Pope John Paul's visit to the island last year have
          been taken away. Small business, vendors and even prostitutes have
          been forced to close up shop, and every boat load of refugees brings
          another story of increasing punishment and the tightening government
          control.

          Another mass exodus can only come with Castro's blessing, said Steve
          Schnably, professor of International Law at the University of Miami. "If
          he makes it clear at anytime that people can just leave the island, then
          you will have an exodus," he said.

          But Cuba has already moved to quash the exodus, according to the
          state-controlled newspaper, Granma.

          "Every desire to leave the country by safe and legal means will be
          permitted," read an editorial in the newspaper. "Attempts by illegal means
          will categorically not be allowed."

          Experts on immigration say the U.S. policy almost guarantees future
          altercations at sea, not only with the Cubans but with Haitians who, in
          smaller numbers, are also trying to make the passage. The economy in
          Haiti is in shambles, and people there are, if anything, worse off than the
          Cubans, said Haitian advocates.

          As for Cuban advocates in Miami, the once white-hot reaction to the
          Coast Guard's actions has cooled over the past few weeks. "The Coast
          Guard is trapped in a difficult situation," said Ramon Saul Sanchez, a
          delegate with Movimiento Democracia in Miami, an anti-Castro protest
          group.

          But, he said, "the politics of applying migration laws have to be revised to
          become more humane."

          And in Miami, all the blame for most things sad and Cuban ultimately
          ends up at Castro's doorstep.

          As long as he is Cuba's dictator, said Ninoska Perez, a spokeswoman
          for the Cuban American National Foundation, the rafters will keep
          coming.

          "A dictator of 40 years," she said, "does not change.