JUAN O. TAMAYO

 Five weeks after he was arrested in an alleged plot to assassinate Cuban
 President Fidel Castro, Francisco Cordova's 30-foot lobster boat was stolen from
 its dock in Marathon. Two weeks later, the boat turned up in Cuba.

 Cordova, who was cleared of the plot accusation in a trial in Puerto Rico, doesn't
 blame Castro for the loss of his boat. He chalks it up to a little-known
 phenomenon -- Cubans in South Florida who take boats to the island illegally.

 Some simply grow disenchanted with a U.S. lifestyle that once seemed alluring.
 Some are running from the police. Some want to visit relatives in Cuba. A few
 later return to Florida.

 Elian Gonzalez's late stepfather, Lazaro Munero, was one of the South Florida
 residents who sneaked back to Cuba. So was one of the six migrants roughly
 handled by the Coast Guard off Surfside last summer.

 FLEEING CHARGES

 Cordova says the man who stole his boat was apparently fleeing charges of
 passing counterfeit money.

 It's unclear how many people sail boats to Cuba. The Cuban government briefly
 jails most of them.

 U.S. Coast Guard and Florida Marine Patrol officials know the phenomenon well.

 ``We get people going back and forth to Cuba all the time, said Florida Marine
 Patrol Capt. Bob Donnelly. ``They come here but can't fit in or have some
 problem, so they go back for a while and sometimes even return again later. A
 Coast Guard official said: ``There is significant anecdotal evidence of a small but
 regular number of folks who go back because they can't adjust here.

 HIJACKINGS

 In the 1960s and 1970s, disgruntled Cubans living in the United States hijacked
 many jetliners to Havana. But with increased airline security and stiff jail terms
 awaiting them in Cuba, boats are now the preferred means of returning. Most of
 the returnees appear to be young fishermen from Cuba's northern coast, men
 whose sea experience and access to boats on the island make it easy for them
 to make the illegal 90-mile trip from Cuba to Florida.

 But once in Florida they learn that they lack the education and language skills
 needed to find good jobs, and that making a living as commercial fishermen here
 is not as easy as it was in Cuba.

 ``We have a lot of regulations here, Donnelly said. ``You have to have a license,
 and you have to have experience before you earn a license, so it's tough to get
 started.

 ``They get into trouble here and suddenly we hear they're back in Cuba, said
 Donnelly, adding that he has heard of four or five such cases in the Marathon area
 over the past year.

 Lazaro Rafael Munero was another who crossed the Florida Straits both ways.
 Munero was the stepfather of Elian Gonzalez, the 6-year-old Cuban boy at the
 center of an international custody dispute.

 Munero arrived in Florida in 1998, aboard a 12-foot boat. But he missed his wife,
 Elizabet Brotons Rodriguez, and her son Elian, so he returned to Cuba last
 October aboard a motorized inflatable raft.

 PRISON TERM

 He spent 62 days in a Cuban prison, but then loaded his family and 11 other
 people on a small aluminum boat and set off for Florida again. This time, the boat
 sank, and only Elian and two others survived.

 ``It is easy, if you know what you're doing, so fishermen do it all the time, said
 Carlos Hernandez, 29, one of the refugees involved in the incident at Surfside on
 June 29 last year.

 In that incident, Coast Guard crews used jets of water from fire hoses and pepper
 spray against six Cuban migrants in a boat off Surfside beach, then tried to block
 them from swimming to shore and used pepper spray on one migrant who was
 treading water.

 Hernandez, now a fisherman in Marathon, said he left Cuba in 1994 on a raft but
 borrowed a small boat from an uncle in Florida and returned to Cuba in 1995 to
 see his ailing mother.

 Cuban law bans those who leave illegally from returning to the island for at least
 five years, and Hernandez said he spent four months in prison. But he soon
 began saving money for his second escape to Florida.

 Hernandez said he did not try to hide when he returned to Cuba in 1995, and
 presented himself to the coast guard outpost in his hometown of Caibarien, a
 fishing town on the north-central coast.

 ``I had to convince them that I had come back from here, Hernandez said. ``No
 one would believe me.

                     Copyright 2000 Miami Herald