CUBA: Tiny village is jumping-off point for trip by fast boat to Biscayne Bay

 SAGUA LA CHICA, Cuba -- Wilfredo Galan remembers that moonlit night in June
 last year when 40 men, women and children waded out into the shallow ocean until
 they were just specks on the horizon.

 ``Then the boat came,'' says the thin man, leaning up against his favorite tree beside
 the beach. ``And they were gone. Yes, I remember it -- because there were so many.
 Around here, this is what happens.''

 Sagua La Chica, a tiny village of simple, whitewashed cottages at the mouth of a
 slow-moving river in Cuba's northern Villa Clara province, is no more than seven
 hours by fast boat from glittering Miami.

 It is, in fact, one of the closest places in Cuba to Biscayne Bay. That proximity is
 why Sagua La Chica is a hub of intrigue, even though it appears to doze in the
 heat of the afternoon.

 The smuggling venture recalled by Galan failed because the grossly overloaded
 boat ran out of gas only seven miles from Miami. The two Miami men who
 captained the craft -- Jose Lima and Miguel Broche -- were later convicted in a
 U.S. District Court trial made unusual when a Broward resident named Frank
 Cruz testified he agreed to pay $23,000 to the defendants to transport three of his
 relatives.

 Despite the notoriety of Sagua La Chica, there is no apparent police presence
 there. No Cuban gunboat prowls the shore.

 Cuban President Fidel Castro insists that his government is cooperating with
 Washington in halting smuggling. But nothing has happened to the Cuba-based
 relatives of Jose Lima, even though U.S. prosecutors call them unindicted
 co-conspirators.

 The testimony of the Broward man cannot be a secret to the Cuban government.
 Nor can the fact that Alberto Lima, Jose Lima's younger brother, picked up many
 of the passengers in his 1958 Chevy after they gave a password, and hid them in
 the two-story Lima home in the hamlet of Aguada de Moya owned by his mother,
 Valentina Lima.

 AFFLUENT APPEARANCE

 By rural Cuban standards the home -- 17 miles by road from the beach at Sagua
 La Chica -- looks affluent. It has a new TV and a VCR. A photo sitting on a table
 shows a grinning Maylin Lima, sister to the two brothers, riding a Jetski with the
 Miami skyline as a backdrop.

 Alberto, 28, talks boldly.

 ``Yes, I gave people rides,'' he said. ``But this is not a criminal organization. I am
 one man, trying to help people, like my brother.''

 It is easy to understand why Cubans are eager to risk their lives to get to fabled
 Florida.

 A teenager in Aguada de Moya puts it this way: ``My uncle lives in Miami. There
 are jobs,'' he says, pointing to his belly to indicate a need for food. ``I am the last
 of my family left here.''

 The illegal flow has not been stemmed by the Cuba Adjustment Act of 1994,
 which Havana and Washington signed in a rare moment of cooperation to
 supposedly enhance opportunities for Cubans to migrate legally.

 But many Cubans say there is a need for smuggling because the agreement said
 that applicants must win a place in a lottery administered by the U.S. Interests
 Section in Havana to get one of minimum of 20,000 visas theoretically available
 every year. The rules say if you don't win, you don't go to Miami, but the frequent
 smuggling attempts that capture headlines in Florida show that families will
 always find a way.

 ``If you do not win, or they refuse you, what are you going to do?'' asks an
 unemployed schoolteacher in the old tobacco-processing town of Camajuani, six
 miles east of Aguada de Moya on the highway to the provincial capital of Santa
 Clara. The bus terminal at Camajuani is where Alberto said he picked up
 passengers.

 MAKING ARRANGEMENTS

 ``You make arrangements,'' she said. She gave her name, but asked that it not be
 mentioned. ``In these small towns you know who to ask.'' She mentions that she
 earned the equivalent of $7 a month before she resigned to try to find a job in
 tourism, and asks what a teacher makes in Miami.

 Orlando ``El Duque'' Hernandez knew what pitchers make in the majors. He left
 from a beach near Sagua La Chica with five others in December, 1997, and
 apparently made it in a small skiff to Bahamian territory at Anguilla Cay, 50 miles
 to the north. The speculation that smugglers got the pride of the Yankees out has
 never been resolved.

 The planning for the unsuccessful attempt to get to Florida from Sagua La Chica
 began about a week before the trip was attempted on June 19, a Saturday.

 In the rice and tobacco growing center of Las Vueltas, two miles east of Aguada
 de Moya, two men occupying a bench in front of an ancient church daubed with
 yellow paint said their brother was among the group.

 A used tire dealer had a job waiting for him in Hialeah, they said.

 FLORIDA PHONE CALLS

 ``There were a lot of phone calls from Florida,'' one of the men said in a description
 similar to that given by Alberto Lima. He said their brother, who was sent back to
 Cuba by U.S. immigration authorities, is looking for work in the Villa Clara capital
 of Santa Clara.

 ``Our sister [in Miami] made the arrangements,'' the man said. ``She said make
 sure you are at the beach [Sagua La Chica] on Saturday. We went there. There were
 thousands of people having a good time. They told us who to look for.''

 The men claimed they did not know if their sister paid to try to get their brother
 out, as Frank Cruz testified he did. ``I am guessing she did,'' one of the men said.
 They said they had talked over such a scheme when their sister came to visit
 them in the spring of 1998, bearing with her photos of a modest Miami house they
 called ``a palace.''

 Other passengers not so familiar with Villa Clara were transported by Alberto
 Lima from his mother's home to the beach, a drive through lush rolling hills
 covered with towering royal palms. In the late fall, the red earth of the fields is
 being turned for tobacco planting in this region cigar lovers know as Vuelta Arriba.

 Come sundown, the brothers said, the passengers hid in a ramshackle beach
 house. Friends and relatives embraced them before departing. ``We prayed to
 God that he would be safe,'' they said of their brother.

 CARRYING CHILDREN

 At the trial of Lima and Broche, Graciela Alonso Cruz, half-sister of Frank Cruz --
 the Broward man who testified for the U.S. government -- said some adults, like
 her brother, Gil -- carried children in their arms as they waded out to sea after
 night came. She was allowed to stay in the U.S., along with her brother and her
 child, in return for her testimony.

 The water was warm, she said.

 It was so shallow they could walk out for what seemed like half a mile. They
 carried flashlights. They listened for the sound of the powerful outboard engines of
 the 29-foot Wellcraft Scarab into which the 40 passengers and the two smugglers
 would all have to squeeze. The vessel, designed for nine people, carried only nine
 life vests.

 Alonso said Jose Lima and Miguel Broche helped her and the others quickly
 scramble aboard. And then at about 11 p.m., as Wilfredo Galan recalls, they were
 gone. The stars were bright, he said. Beside the beach, some of the relatives
 wept.

 Bad luck soon dogged the Scarab. One of its twin engines began acting up and,
 70 miles out, the boat put in at one of the Cay Sal islets in Bahamas territorial
 waters. The problem was fixed, but the weather was bad and five passengers
 were put ashore to lighten the load. The castaways were given canned meat and
 water and were eventually rescued.

 Seven miles out from Miami, the boat ran out of gas. There was no more water.
 Many passengers were throwing up. The Caribe II, a Panamanian freighter,
 stopped and gave water, but its captain refused a request for gas and called the
 U.S. Coast Guard in Miami.

 32 SENT BACK

 Thirty-two of the Cubans were quickly put on a Coast Guard cutter and deported.
 Lima and Broche were interrogated and jailed, along with Juan Carlos Ruiz, the
 Scarab's owner and an employee at a popular Little Havana juice bar. All three
 men were convicted of smuggling, but the jury rejected the government's claim
 that they did it to make money.

 The journey didn't end there for many of the 32 who were repatriated.

 On Nov. 2, 1998, the Border Patrol picked up 30 Cubans on Big Pine Key.
 Fourteen of them were among those from the June group. Because they had
 made it ashore, they were allowed to stay. The two men on the bench at the
 church in Las Vueltas said most smuggler groups promise a repeat voyage at no
 extra cost if the first one fails.

 Alberto Lima acknowledges that he helped.

 Did he profit?

 ``Everything you see here,'' he says, pointing around the house and to his grey
 Chevy with the black roof parked in the shade outside, ``is because of my father,
 Jose Antonio Lima Gonzalez. He grew rice and beans and worked every day very
 hard. But nine years ago he had a heart attack and died.''

 Alberto says he has a heart murmur that is inoperable and that he cannot work.

 His wife, Jacqueline Gonzalez, and their daughters Yaneli, 7, and Yelena, 11, live
 with him in his mother's home. It is, perhaps, twice the size of other houses in the
 caserio of Aguada de Moya -- exactly 202 miles by road from downtown Havana.

 His mother, Valentina, 72, has no income, Alberto says. His wife is unemployed.
 He has not received a letter, or had a telephone call from Jose Lima, he said,
 since his brother was arrested. Yet there is food on the table and Valentina
 serves coffee in elegant china.

 RELATIVE PROSPERITY

 How is all of the relative prosperity they have possible given that they have no
 income and the $25 to $50 a month Alberto says his brother wired from Florida
 stopped long ago? ``We are able to manage,'' is all he would say, with a smile.

 Valentina Lima rejects the U.S. government's contention that Jose is a smuggler.
 She responds angrily to a suggestion that he profited from running human cargo.

 ``It is not true,'' she says, her voice rising several octaves, her whole body
 shaking.

 ``He did not come to Cuba,'' she shouted. ``If he had come here, he would have
 taken me and his brother and all of us with him!

 ``He was out fishing and he came across those people in a small boat and he
 rescued them,'' Valentina Lima said, echoing a line espoused by her son's
 defense lawyer. ``Those people nearly drowned at sea, and he rescued him.

 ``And now they have him in jail,'' she said, turning her wrath on the American
 authorities. ``My son who went to the United States in a small boat and nearly
 drowned himself. I almost died when he left me. What do they care about my son
 who told me that in your country you can have anything from a bicycle to an
 airplane if you study and work hard.

 ``If they punish him,'' she said of the uncompleted sentencing, ``God will respond.
 All my son wanted to do was help people.''

 Down the waterlogged dirt road leading to the Lima house, Roberto Machin pulled
 on the reins of his scrawny horse and pushed back the battered straw hat he was
 wearing. A machete hung from his waist. A homemade cigar smoldered in his
 mouth.

 ``Oh, you found them,'' he exclaimed, backing up his horse so a car could pass.

 ``They are the family of Jose Lima, right?'' he asked. ``A nice young man.''

 Machin was one of several villagers who earlier had volunteered directions. It was
 he who suggested asking at the small, gleaming white cottage serving as the
 office of the local chapter of the Union of Young Communists. The party emblem
 is painted on the wall.

 A smiling woman at the chapter, 30 yards from the Lima home, had shown the
 way.

 ``Oh you mean those people with relatives in Miami?'' she asked. ``Everyone
 knows that family.''