BY ELAINE DE VALLE AND FABIOLA SANTIAGO
 

 For a long time, Etienne Hernandez-Medina  avoided disclosing when and how he arrived in
 this country from his Cuban homeland. He  would dance around the details, hope he
 wouldn't be pressed to divulge them.

 ''I rejected who I was,'' says Hernandez-Medina,  27, one of 125,266 Cubans who fled the island
 during the chaotic five months of the 1980  Mariel boatlift. ''There was too much
 justification needed in explaining it. I would  never lie or say 'I'm not Cuban.' It's just not
 information I would volunteer.'' A polished executive who speaks flawless
 English and has quickly moved up the ranks of a public relations firm to become a top Latin
 America Internet expert, Hernandez-Medina now openly proclaims that he's a Marielito --
 and ''extremely proud'' of it.

 That he has accomplished so much, and gained immeasurable self-esteem in the
 process, makes Hernandez-Medina a stellar example of what has become of many of the
 onetime refugees who were once vilified and deemed worthless.

 Launched 20 years ago this week, the Mariel boatlift forever changed South Florida,
 cementing the Cubanization of Miami, expanding the exile community to more broadly
 reflect Cuba in terms of race and age, economic and social strata, as well as political
 perspectives. It also prompted the biggest surge of white flight from Miami-Dade County,
 fueling the growth in Broward and Palm Beach and pitting English- and Spanish-speakers in
 Miami-Dade in an angry battle over bilingualism.

 The turbulent exodus, which the Cuban government sought to undermine by including
 thousands of criminals and mental patients among good people seeking refuge, came at a
 time of great social stress in Miami. At the dawn of the '80s, the city was riddled with
 violence: Colombian drug lords openly fought cocaine wars on the streets; blacks protested
 police brutality and their lack of access to economic and political power.

 The Mariel refugees -- branded ''escoria,'' scum, by Fidel Castro -- quickly became a flash point
 of the discontent in South Florida and the nation. With their exodus, the U.S. government
 ended its open-arms policy toward immigration from Cuba, leaving the Mariel refugees in legal
 limbo and without status in this country for five years.

 For all the wounds that Mariel opened in the community, the deepest were
 sustained by the Marielitos themselves. Now, two decades later, the wounds have
 healed for many. And they have more than just survived the stigma -- they have
 turned it into the engine for success.

 ''In Cuba, I spent all my life with the label gusana, worm,'' says Ana Maria Rabel,
 37, the daughter of a political prisoner who died in a Cuban jail. ''Then I came to
 Miami and I was a Marielita. It was like the plague. . . . All the time, el cartelito,
 the label, followed me.''

 IN THE MIDDLE

 But today, the Coral Gables restaurant owner who braved street mobs in front of
 her house and escaped on a shrimper packed with strangers, finds herself
 comfortably in the middle of two Cuban-exile generations.

 ''We are like the stuffing in the sandwich. We have adapted, I think very well, and
 now we are the bridge between those who have been here 40 years and those
 who are arriving 20 years after we did,'' Rabel says.

 The Mariel Cubans have, for the most part, assimilated and prospered and put
 behind them the harshness of their early exile years.

 ''Despite the initial problems, the experience of the Mariel refugees has not been
 dissimilar to that of other Cuban refugees, who have the highest levels of
 employment and the lowest reliance on public assistance among refugee groups,''
 said Michael Kharfen, a spokesman for the U.S. Deparment of Health and Human
 Services. ''The Mariel refugees have been absorbed into the community, and it
 has been a very successful resettlement.''

 ALMOST INVISIBLE

 Although no studies have measured how the Mariel Cubans have fared, they are
 such an integral part of the multicultural mix in South Florida that they are almost
 invisible.

''The biggest irony of Mariel is that it was the migration most stereotyped, yet it has been the
most diverse of all waves from Cuba -- racially and in gender and age -- and the one that most
defies generalizations. All kinds of people came -- and came very quickly,'' says Lisandro
Perez, director of the Cuban Research Institute at Florida International University. ''But who's to
say who is a Mariel refugee anymore? You can't tell.''

Examples of successes abound.

The Vila family founded a multimillion dollar nursery-landscape firm in South Dade.
The Vilariño family started the 16-restaurant chain La Casita. Juan Carlos Piñera is
a Miami high-fashion designer.

 So many have carved careers in the field of culture as artists, writers and
 intellectuals that they are spoken of as The Mariel Generation.

 ''Those who were bad revealed themselves as bad, like they do in every group,''
 says Maria Montoya, a WSCV-Telemundo 51 television anchor, who was among
 the Mariel refugees. ''We showed we were able to integrate, to adapt, to be
 successful, like everyone else.''

 STIGMA LINGERS

 Still, some believe the negative stereotype lingers.

 ''In general, it has been erased, but it still crops up . . . '' says Roberto Madrigal, a
 Cuban psychologist who settled in Cincinnati shortly after he arrived on the
 boatlift. ''What is remembered, unfortunately, is the bad.''

 But for many who have worked hard to prove that the stigma was unwarranted,
 being identified as a member of the Mariel exodus is now a source of pride.

 ''There's nothing I like better than to say who I am and where I came from,'' says
 Isidoro Vilariño, 52. ''There is nobody who knows me who doesn't know I'm a
 Marielito.''

 Vilariño, originally from the tiny rural town of Buey Arriba in Oriente province,
 owns franchises of La Casita restaurants from Coral Gables to West Palm Beach.

 ''I like to show that the immense majority of us were hard-working, honorable,
 family men who came for liberty and the opportunities this country offered -- and
 because we hated communism,'' he says.

 The Vilariños had wanted to leave Cuba since 1961, but they were determined to
 leave all together or not at all.

 The boatlift provided the chance for 81 Vilariño family members -- including a
 22-day-old boy -- to leave the island.

 DIFFICULT YEARS

 On May 27, they were put aboard a big shrimper with about 300 other people.
 Along the way, they picked up passengers from three sinking boats. They arrived
 in Key West the next day.

 Vilariño calls May 28, 1980, ''the day I set foot on this saintly soil.'' But he
 remembers the first few years as difficult -- and painful.

 ''At the beginning, I felt a bit of discrimination, when the crime went up,'' he says. ''Nobody
 trusted us. We had no credibility. You had to have references or nobody would give you a job.

 ''They needed time to identify who was here to work and who was here to do ill,'' Vilariño says.
 ''It's the truth. I know they are our compatriots but we have to recognize the truth. There was a lot of
 bad element that came with us in Mariel.''

 The pain of being shunned or mistrusted, and the fact that there were few Hispanic restaurants
 north of Miami-Dade, drove the four brothers and their wives and children to Broward to start
 their restaurant empire in 1987.

 ''I never imagined what we would do in the United States would be restaurants, but
 we knew we would do something. That's what we came for: liberty and success,''
 Vilariño said.

 The formula for his success: Last year, he took his first vacation.

 ''We did not believe in parties or Sundays. We never looked at clocks,'' Vilariño says.

 SIMILAR STORIES

 His story is echoed by many others across the country.

 In Cuba, Filiberto Hebra was expelled from the University of Havana ''for
 ideological deviancy,'' a euphemism used for people who were anti-communist
 and gay. When word reached him that gays were being sent to the United States
 on the boatlift, Hebra went to the police station, declared himself gay, and asked
 to be put on the list.

 Today, the 51-year-old is a successful bedding designer in New York.

 ''It was traumatizing to arrive through Mariel, and because so many delinquents
 and homosexuals were coming, not even my own family would sponsor me,'' says
 Hebra, who was sent to one of the worst refugee camps at Fort Chaffee, Ark. ''But
 I have always said openly that I am a Marielito, and except for my family's attitude
 when I arrived, I have never felt discriminated. I think it has to do with your
 attitude.''

 It was all attitude -- a strong, creative work ethic -- that brought him success.

 Hebra started out cleaning a home-furnishings store in New York City.

 ''On my own initiative, I started organizing displays, and three months later, I
 became the store's display manager,'' says Hebra, who now lives in Weehawken,
 N.J.

 A year later, he was named art director for the chain's stores nationwide, then he
 left to become art director at a larger firm. He is now a senior designer and travels
 all over Asia on the job.

 TWO VIEWS

 Rabel, the Gables restaurateur, says the ill feelings against Mariel Cubans have
 dissipated as later waves of refugees have replaced them as newcomers. Now,
 she says she often finds herself in conversations between older exiles and the
 new arrivals, explaining the feelings of one group to the other.

 ''The big difference is that the early exiles came fresh after living a good life in
 Cuba,'' says Rabel, who was 17 when she came to Miami. ''The newcomers are
 exhausted from living a life of daily struggle. In Cuba, they worked and worked for
 nothing. Exiles worked hard, but they have a lot to show for it. We understand
 both points of view.''

 Rabel's father, Jose Ricardo Rabel, fought alongside Americans in World War II
 and was awarded a silver medal and a Purple Heart for his participation in the
 invasion of Normandy. He also fought against the Fulgencio Batista regime in
 Cuba, and then turned against Castro when he embraced communism. Jailed
 after he tried to whisk his family out of the island, he died in prison in 1975 of an
 untreated heart ailment.

 Castro himself forbade the family from ever leaving Cuba, Rabel said, but in the
 confusion of the massive boatlift, her mother braved the mobs outside their house
 and managed to escape with her three daughters on a boat loaded with criminals.

 Two years ago, Rabel, who at first struggled with English and still prefers
 Spanish, was able to fulfill a lifelong wish and open a restaurant. She called the
 chic cafe Yerba Buena, after the minty herb used in the famous Cuban mojito
 cocktail.

 NEED TO ASSIMILATE

 Like Rabel, Hernandez-Medina and his brother braved the Florida Straits with their
 mother. It was May 20, 1980 -- Cuban Independence Day -- when
 Hernandez-Medina, then 7 years old, boarded a boat that his aunt in Miami had
 rented to pick them up.

 Within months, he picked up English because ''I felt I really needed to assimilate
 quickly.''

 At Coral Gables Senior High School, most of his friends were Anglos from affluent
 families.

 ''It was not until after adolescence to early adulthood that I started to appreciate
 my background,'' Hernandez-Medina says. ''As I grew older, I started to
 appreciate my culture more. As soon as I began to achieve, I could be Cuban.''

 Now, he even attributes much of his entrepreneurial success on the Internet to his
 Mariel legacy.

 ''I'm an immigrant and so I want to succeed,'' he says. ''I am what I am because of
 what I come from and the experiences my family has gone through. I have a
 certain work ethic, a certain resolve in my life from being an immigrant, from being
 a person who lost everything to come here.''