BY ELAINE DE VALLE

 A Hialeah couple who flew to Cuba to visit relatives was found slain Monday on the highway between Havana and Santa Clara -- along with their daughter, 8-year-old grandson and a friend, the couple's grieving family said.

 ``What we know is not a lot,'' said the couple's son, Osmani Placencia, of Hialeah. ``The only thing we have confirmed is that five people have been killed.''

 His parents -- Ada Lorenzo, 52, and Celedonio Placencia, 60 -- left Miami International Airport about 4 p.m. Sunday, he said. They were going to visit his paternal
 grandmother, who is gravely ill, Placencia said.

 ``I never spoke to them again,'' he said.

 Placencia, 32, said they were picked up at José Martí International Airport by family friend Domingo Delgado. He took the couple's daughter, Yailen Placencia, and their grandson, Daniel Osmani Placencia, along for the ride.

 All five were found dead on the side of the road after relatives in Santa Clara -- wondering why they had not returned the night before -- set out to find them Monday, said Placencia, a rafter who left Cuba in 1994.

 ``They all had been shot or stabbed,'' he said. ``It doesn't look like a robbery because there were still personal items on them.''

 But his wife, Ileana Atucha, said information from friends and family on the island was coming in bits and pieces.

 ``At first they said that nothing was taken,'' Atucha said. ``But somebody else told us afterward that everything was gone.''

 A cousin in Cuba, Maritza Hernandez, told them that the police provided few details. ``Just that they were assaulted, that they had bullet wounds and stab wounds,'' she said.

 Atucha said her in-laws were not carrying huge sums of money. ``They took what's normal . . . what they were taking to family and friends.''

 That included $120 that Osmani Placencia had sent to his son, Daniel, one of the victims.

 ``The boy wanted gears for his bike and Osmani told him it would be better to send him money because his grandmother did not want to carry the weight of the gears,'' Atucha said. ``He was excited about getting a new bike.''

 The couple, who had planned to stay for 15 days, also took medicine, bathrobes and sheets for the sick matriarch, as well as new clothes and shoes for the boy.

 Atucha said that the family wants the couple to be buried in their native Cuba. ``Why bring them back now?''

 But the hospital in Matanzas -- near where the abandoned car and bodies were found at kilometer 114 on the Ocho Vias highway -- would not release the bodies until the Cuban Interests Section in Washington, D.C., gave instructions, Atucha said.

 The Herald called the hospital for further information late Monday night, but there was no answer. No one could be reached at the Cuban Interests Section or the U.S. Interests Section in Havana.