LIMA, Peru (AP) -- Luisa Toledano fled her tropical home in Cuba in
                  search of a better life. Nearly 20 years later, she's stuck in a desert
                  shantytown earning barely enough to feed herself and her four children.

                  In Pachacamac, on the outskirts of Lima, a coastal fog known as "garua"
                  blots out the sun for much of the year.  The odor of burning garbage hangs in
                  the chill mist. There are no tall palm trees to break the wind, or to offer
                  shade from the intense sun when it returns fleetingly each December for
                  Lima's short summer.

                  "For Cubans, this weather is like death, slow death," says Toledano,
                  bundled in a worn blue sweater.

                  Toledano was just out of high school when she, and nearly 11,000 other
                  Cubans seeking asylum, invaded Peru's embassy compound in Havana in
                  1980.

                  The occupation convinced Cuban authorities to allow 742 to leave for Peru.
                  And it prompted President Fidel Castro to open the gates for 125,000
                  Cubans to sail to Miami in a makeshift flotilla from the port of Mariel.

                  Political asylum for the Cubans who headed to Peru started in a tent
                  city in a public park.

                  Their escape from Castro's communist regime landed them in one
                  of the poorest countries in South America at the outset of Peru's
                  bloody war with leftist Shining Path rebels.

                  In September 1984, after four years languishing in the park, the Cubans
                  staged a five-day protest outside the  Lima office of the United Nations
                  Refugee Commission.

                  The agency responded by building 100 one-room, concrete-block houses in
                  Pachacamac.

                  Since then, nearly two-thirds of the Cubans have left Peru for Canada,
                  Brazil, Australia and the United States, using legal -- and illegal -- means.

                  Of the 266 Cubans remaining from the 1980 exodus, the largest
                  concentration is in the now-deteriorated, crime-infested housing project on
                  the coastal desert.

                  Poverty has kept most of them from moving. Running water is available once
                  or twice a week and garbage is picked up every 15 days. Some of the
                  houses are trash-strewn shells.

                  The residents' Cuban identity is still evident. Cuban flags adorn walls. A
                  poster of Afro-Cuban salsa singer Celia Cruz hangs in a window.

                  One of the eldest of the refugees, known as Mama Rosa, practices the
                  Caribbean religion Santeria, offering spiritual counsel to a mostly Peruvian
                  clientele for about $3 a session.

                  Mama Rosa's economic success is the exception.

                  Toledano ekes out a living cleaning homes in some of Lima's wealthier
                  neighborhoods. Her clothes, and those of her children, are hand-me-downs
                  from her employers.

                  "I'm very grateful to the Peruvian government" for political asylum, "but I'm
                  not grateful for the way we live," says Toledano, whose husband was
                  murdered eight years ago.

                  Ines Reyes, another Pachacamac resident, says the Cubans have been
                  abandoned.

                  "The only good thing we have here is the liberty we wouldn't have in Cuba,"
                  she says. "But we live in inhumane conditions. There's no work. I'm a single
                  mother with four children. Sometimes I can feed them, sometimes I can't."

                  Beatriz Roman, the U.N. Refugee Commission representative in Peru, says
                  her agency has little left to offer the refugees after helping them settle and
                  trying to provide them the same opportunities as the rest of society.

                  The oldest among the refugees, and those with medical problems, still get
                  about $40 to $50 a month, and there are some small subsidies for the
                  Cubans' children, Roman says.

                  As for the rest, she says, "they've been here 19 years. One would assume
                  they would be working. They have residency permits that allow them to
                  work like any Peruvian."

                  But employment is scarce in Peru, where half the labor force is without jobs
                  or has only part-time or temporary work.

                  Reyes washes clothes and sells cookies in Lima's streets to make ends meet.

                  "We look for jobs and there are none," she says. "When we say we're
                  Cubans, it's worse. We're told if there isn't enough work for Peruvians, there
                  isn't work for Cubans."

                  Odalys Brito-Alvarez, a Cuban refugee, says her mother and two younger
                  brothers entered the United States with forged Brazilian passports in the
                  early 1990s. Asylum was automatically granted when her mother presented
                  her Cuban passport to U.S. immigration officials.

                  Brito-Alvarez tried to follow her mother as a legal immigrant in 1992, when
                  the United States granted asylum to about 200 Cuban refugees in Peru. U.S.
                  immigration officials denied her application because she could not prove
                  political persecution awaited her if she returned to her homeland.

                  "When I left Cuba I was 13 years old," she says. "I didn't do anything
                  political in the sense that I didn't set off any bombs, I didn't march against
                  Fidel, I didn't carry protest banners."

                  Some of the Cubans still dream of the United States, or returning to Cuba
                  after Castro dies. Others are resigned to their existence in the lunar-like
                  landscape of Peru's desert coast.

                  "I no longer have hope. All my hope is gone," says Reyes. "I'm just living,
                  struggling until the very last for my children."

                    Copyright 1999 The Associated Press.