BY CAROL ROSENBERG

 The U.S. Coast Guard decision Wednesday to bring eight Cuban plane crash
 survivors to Key West comes at a tricky time in both domestic politics and foreign
 relations.

 On one hand, Florida is a battleground state in the presidential campaign and any
 U.S. government decision on the Cubans' fate would inevitably be seen through
 the prism of national politics.

 On the other hand, the on-again, off-again talks between
 the United States and Cuba on migration issues are to begin today in New York --
 and Havana could be expected to see any decision that leads to the eight
 remaining in the United States as a breach of previous U.S.-Cuba migration
 accords.

 For the record, Clinton administration officials said throughout much of
 Wednesday that they would stick to the letter and spirit of the 1995 Cuban
 Migration Accords. That would have meant keeping the survivors at sea, aboard a
 Coast Guard cutter, either to be returned to Cuba or taken to the U.S. naval base
 at Guantanamo Bay for interviews on whether they were entitled to political
 asylum, in a third country.

 But, officials in Washington said, they were in the end overruled by ``humanitarian
 circumstances'' at sea: A Navy flight surgeon dropped aboard the freighter Chios
 Dream to treat the survivors decided that, for the benefit of their well being, they
 should be evacuated to dry land from stormy seas.

 Privately, Clinton administration officials said they understood that either decision
 would provoke charges of political partisanship. But ``absolutely, categorically,
 unequivocally, election politics had nothing to do with it,'' one official said.

 In a rueful recognition that the timing was terrible, the official added: ``We can
 never win, can we?''

 U.S. diplomats were braced for sharp words from their Cuban counterparts at
 today's renewal of migration talks in New York -- if Havana decides to show up.

 Cuba had frozen the talks, usually held at six-month intervals, since December to
 protest the seven-month custody battle over Elián González, the 6-year-old
 shipwreck survivor whose return to Cuba Fidel Castro had made a crusade.

 RETURN TO TALKS

 Cuba recently agreed to return to the talks, a framework that emerged from the
 huge rafter crisis in 1994 for the annual migration of some 20,000 Cubans to the
 United States each year.

 Under U.S. policy that evolved from the accords, Cubans who make it to dry land
 can stay, under the 1964 Cuban Adjustment Act, which Havana has repeatedly
 criticized as a magnet for risky attempts to cross the Florida Straits.

 But those intercepted at sea are mostly returned, under the so-called ``wet foot,
 dry foot'' policy.

 On the political front, both the Republican and Democratic presidential candidates
 have signaled their support for continued U.S. interdiction of Cuban migrants while
 trying to woo Cuban constituents on the Elián case.

 Both Vice President Al Gore and George W. Bush in effect neutralized the Elián
 controversy by saying they would have preferred the boy's plight be decided in a
 Florida Family Court.

 Wednesday, Gore campaign spokeswoman Ellen Mellody responded with a flat
 ``no'' to a query on whether the campaign had any input on the question of
 whether to return the air crash survivors to Cuba.

 NO GORE IN KEY WEST

 But Mellody also said from Nashville on Wednesday that Gore would not be
 making a campaign stop in Key West on Monday, contrary to an earlier leak.

 ``I can tell you that Al Gore would love to visit Key West, at some point, but we
 never had confirmed it,'' said Mellody.

 A spokesman for Jimmy Buffett, Gore's intended host for the visit, leaked the visit
 last week, and campaign officials were privately confirming it as recently as
 Wednesday morning. Mellody, for her part, said the visit was ``absolutely not''
 canceled because the Cuban issue was too hot.

 Either way, the issue comes at an awkward time.

 Bush is due in Miami on Friday and Cuban migration issues are expected to be a
 main topic, in light of his remarks last week that while he intended to review
 Clinton administration policies he in general supported the concept of interdiction.
 Democratic vice-presidential candidate Joe Lieberman, meanwhile, is due in both
 Fort Lauderdale and Orlando today.

 Lieberman, the centrist Democratic senator from Connecticut, has long been a
 darling of Cuban Americans.