A project to list each person killed for and against the Cuban revolution by name and date is underway, but it struggles to garner the funding it needs to complete its mission.

BY FRANCES ROBLES

At night when their children slept, Armando Hernández and his brother-in-law Ramón Toledo Lugo painted anti-Castro slogans on bed sheets, slipping out before dawn to hang them in the streets of Havana.

It was a family affair that landed virtually all 20 members of the extended family in jail, and worse.

Falsely accused of poisoning the water supply and vandalizing car tires by spewing nails in the streets, the law was hard on Hernández, 29, and Toledo, 39. They were executed by firing squad Oct. 2, 1982. Their wives and Toledo's parents went to prison for eight years each.

The two men's names are now on the Cuba Archive, a labor of love by two Cuban Americans who have vowed -- at great personal costs -- to record the history of those killed fighting for and against the Cuban revolution. It is a tedious task being undertaken by Dr. Armando Lago, a 66-year-old half-paralyzed economist, and Maria C. Werlau, 46, who gave up her consulting business to focus on documenting the dead.

The two seek to list, by name and with at least two sources, those who lost their lives fighting against or alongside Fidel Castro. Theirs is believed to be the first such systematic and well-sourced list of the names, which have been mounted on white Styrofoam crosses displayed each year at the Cuban Memorial in Tamiami Park.

Although the project is struggling financially, Werlau and Lago hope to create a searchable database that would be accessible at their organization's existing website, www.cubaarchive.org. A simple name search would show the fate of the victims. (Meanwhile, while Werlau and Lago work on the database, an extensive list of Castro's victims is now posted on The Cuba Memorial's Web site: www.memorialcubano.org .)

''I think this project is going to impact people, because it's about things that happened in the past and things that are happening now,'' said Armando A. Hernández, the son of the man executed 23 years ago. ``I've never talked about what happened to my father. I am doing it now, because if you don't tell, no one will ever know.''

Werlau and Lago have made the somewhat controversial decision to begin their count in 1952 -- and include those killed by dictator Fulgencio Batista's forces in the fight against Castro's guerrillas. The list also mentions peasants executed by Castro's rebels before they seized power, those executed by the Castro government after the 1959 revolution and prisoners who died through neglect or suicides.

At 31,173, the tally of documented cases keeps growing, and includes:

• 5,728 killed by Castro firing squads

• 1,207 extrajudicial killings after Castro took power

• 1,216 deaths in prison.

''Things are now coming to light that no one knew, and they are showing it with proof,'' said Hernández' daughter Oraykys. ``You start feeling the deaths weren't in vain.''

There have been other attempts to catalog the Cuban deaths. A Miami organization, Circuito Sur, has a similar effort, but no sources are cited. Cuban-American historian Esteban Beruvides has published a series of almanacs that list -- among other things -- each day's execution. He also has a book titled Cuba and Its Martyrs, but it does not cover as many types of killings or such a lengthy period of time.

Other efforts on the Internet are often riddled with error and offer no clue to who the victims were.

Werlau said the idea of creating a more rigorous list of the dead came to her in 1997. Having been raised in Puerto Rico and studied in Chile, she was amazed that Gen. Augusto Pinochet's ill deeds were well-known -- his dictatorship has been blamed for 3,000 deaths -- while Cuba's weren't.

''This was important. There should be accountability,'' she said. ``People think of Guatemala, El Salvador, but never Cuba.''

A former second vice president at Chase Manhattan Bank with a master's in international relations from the University of Chile, she wanted a serious scholarly approach, so she joined forces with Lago, who had already published a 1991 book about torture at Cuban psychiatric facilities.

But Werlau's self-imposed mission has had its consequences.

Werlau, a business consultant who owns Orbis Consult, found herself spending more time on her project than on paying clients. In 2003, she put the business on hold to dedicate herself to the Cuba Archive. Her three children are out of the home, so she rented out her New Jersey house and moved into a condo her mother helped buy so she could live cheaply. She is president of the Free Society Project, a New Jersey-based nonprofit group, and executive director of its chief program, Cuba Archive. She works full time, with no salary.

''And here I am in 2006, still struggling,'' she said.

Among the names on the list: Armando Cañizares, her father. He participated in the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion; his body was never recovered. She was 1 ½ years old when he died.

''I am sure it impacted me, but am I aware of it? No,'' Werlau said. ``I am aware of the tremendous abuse showered on the Cuban people.''

For Lago, documenting the dead has become a reason to live. Hit by two strokes, he is paralyzed on one side and gets dialysis three times a week. He works about 40 hours a week typing on a 1990s-era computer with his one good hand.

Lago does the painstaking research, combing books, yellowing newspaper clippings and microfiches to document each person killed with at least two sources. He does not use the Internet, fearing viruses unleashed by enemies in Cuba.

The economist, a former professor at Catholic University of America who has a Ph.D from Harvard University, lived in Washington after leaving Cuba in 1960. He moved to Miami 1 ½ years ago because the warmer weather was kinder to his ailing body.

Lago said his physician has advised him to find a new endeavor. But he's sticking with it.

''The sheer immensity of the tragedy surprised me,'' Lago said. ``I wasn't prepared for this. I wasn't prepared for thinking my countrymen are savages, or trigger-happy or blood-thirsty. I like to think of myself as educated and cultured, yet in my genes I have all this blood.

``My God.''

His list includes 20 people he knew, including a beloved law school classmate, Virgilio Campanería, executed in 1961. Lago still chokes up when he talks about him.

Meanwhile, Lago has also come up with a mathematical formula to estimate the number of rafters who perished at sea -- a number he estimates at 77,879.

Juan Carlos Espinosa, who helped Lago with the research just after finishing graduate school at the University of Miami, describes Lago's painstaking method:

He holds a magnifying glass in one hand, to better see the small print in scores of books and news articles. When he finds a name, he puts down the magnifying glass and uses that hand to type it into his computer.

Lago says the standards to make his list are tough. It would undermine the credibility of the entire project if a single incorrect name slipped through, he said.

People have tried to send him phony entries, he said. But if Lago can't document them, they don't go in.

''They talk about 100,000 dead in Iraq with no proof, and everyone believes it,'' said Renato Gómez, who heads the Cuban Memorial project, which displays the Cuba Archive names on the Styrofoam crosses each year. ``Dr. Lago is proving it, documenting thousands.''

Lago is about to complete a book on his efforts called Cuba: The Human Cost of the Social Revolution, but has yet to find a publisher.

But even as the names keep rolling in, donations to finance the project have been few. Werlau and Lago are outsiders to South Florida's Cuban American community; while respected as Cuba researchers, they haven't been publicly active in the area's anti-Castro groups.

''Maria doesn't belong to anybody,'' said Holly Ackerman, Amnesty International's Cuba specialist. ``And unless you do, you don't get the money.''

Lago believes that Miami Cubans are not funding the project in large enough numbers because he's including the 2,070 deaths blamed on the Batista forces prior to Castro taking power.

Werlau, the chief fundraiser for the project, said she recently got a pledge of a $10,000 donation by a prominent Cuban American in Miami and has had good talks with another potential donor. But for the project to thrive with a web-based and searchable database, it would need a $100,000 start-up, she says. A request for funding from the U.S. Agency for International Development was denied.

Elizardo Sánchez, head of Havana-based Cuban Commission on Human Rights and National Reconciliation, a dissident group that tracks abuses on the island, said that if the revolution ever collapses, the Cuba Archive can serve as a basis for a ''truth commission'' -- like the ones established in Peru and Guatemala after the end of brutal governments there.

''That subject is a Pandora's box opened when governments end,'' he said. ``We can be sure when that box is opened in Cuba, there will be many surprises.''

Former political prisoner Ricardo Bofill said Lago's work is particularly difficult because paperwork is hard to come by in Cuba. Some executions were carried out after summary trials. Some dissidents who spent long stretches in prison were never officially sentenced. And there is no central penal system registry that lists executions, he said.

''I have no criminal record in Cuba,'' said Bofill, who spent 15 years in prison.

Espinosa, now a Miami Dade College administrator, says he has only admiration for Lago and Werlau.

''Here was one man, helped by a grad student, and a woman whose life was shaped by the loss of her father in the Bay of Pigs,'' he said. ``People took for granted that this had been done before, and it hadn't.''

He calls it a ''work in progress for next 20 or 30 years'' if there is interest. And he is not so sure there is.

''This project is about the past, and most people are concerned about the future,'' Espinosa said. ``Most academic groups are looking forward, not backward. Armando is looking backward. Armando believes you must understand the past so we can build a better future.''