CAROL ROSENBERG, crosenberg@herald.com

Vivian Mannerud , the Little Havana entrepreneur whose air charter service transported everyone from Gladys Knight to Elian Gonzalez to Cuba and brought political prisoners to new lives in America, has sold her business and will retire to her home in Arkansas.

Mannerud, 46, who has been battling cancer, said she sold her Airline Brokers Inc. "for health reasons.'' She said she'll work as a consultant for two years for the new general manager, Maria Aral, 43, a Cuban-born U.S. citizen with a Department of Treasury license to run the Calle Ocho business.

Aral's mother, Maria Brieva, bought the business for an undisclosed, six-figure sum in September. Brieva owns and operates Machi Community Services, which has been selling tickets to Cuba and sending packages there for years.

Asked whether she would miss the Eighth Street business, Mannerud replied: "Not at all. I'm tired. I'll still be involved, but I won't have the day-to-day routine.''

Mannerud has at times been a controversial player in the cast of Cuban characters engaging in enterprise across the Florida Straits. Her father, Fernando Fuentes -Coba, ran an earlier charter business, was convicted of trading with the enemy in 1982 and fled the United States, presumably to Havana, rather than serve a year in jail.

She set up her business the same year with a weekly, seven-passenger Cessna shuttle that took one hour and 45 minutes for the trip and mostly transported diplomats.

At its height, between 1985 and 1991, the firm moved 1,200 people a week in 50-minute flights on "every single airplane except the Concorde'' that she chartered from Eastern, American and United.

Some staunch anti-communists have characterized her as a crony of Fidel Castro and profiteer, while others see her as a shrewd businesswoman who successfully navigated U.S. and Cuban policies that, at times overnight, grounded flights for months on end.

"She's played a key role, maintaining that tenuous link between Cuban Americans and Cuba. It has been like a mission for her,'' said U.S. diplomat Charles Shapiro, chief of the State Department's Cuba Desk in Washington, whose colleagues commute between the United States and Havana on her fights. "It something she's taken on and grown extraordinarily - and a profitable one, no doubt.''

Diplomatic sources recalled that it was Mannerud 's flights that moved some plantados - political prisoners who endured years in prison rather than undergo the re-education of Fidel Castro's revolution.

Mannerud also arranged the flights that ferried Elian Gonzalez's grandmothers, father and stepmother from Cuba throughout the international custody dispute, eventually returning the boy home in late June.

She also provided the charter for celebrities who went to Cuba for the March 1999 Cuba-Orioles game that launched a Clinton administration policy of encouraging people-to-people contacts. Entertainers on the flight included Gladys Knight of Pips fame and Woody Harrelson, the actor.

The Rev. Francisco Santana, a Cuban activist-priest who celebrates mass at Our Lady of Charity shrine, also praised Mannerud 's behind-the-scenes work in making sure medicines and other humanitarian gifts arrived safely in Havana aboard her flights.

"She has always been very helpful to both the Catholic Church and Catholic charities, in a quiet way with no publicity,'' he said. "She has really done it out of her good heart.''

Her flights also delivered, without charge, Vatican cargo from Miami for Pope John Paul II's historic January 1998 trip. And she didn't charge for the sporadic so-called ``mercy missions'' that brought Cuban youngsters here for medical treatment.

John Kavulich II, president of the New York based U.S.-Cuba Trade and Economic Council, said Mannerud is likely getting out of the passenger business just in time. Major carriers such as American, United and Delta have obtained licenses to transport passengers between the United States and Cuba, and other charters now have flights to Havana from Los Angeles and New York.

Mannerud has also been controversial on Capitol Hill. Her name came up amid campaign finance scandals for encouraging Jorge Cabrera in 1995 to make a donation to the Democratic National Committee, when they met for the first time at Havana's Copacabana Hotel. Cabrera was subsequently invited to the White House, much to the party's chagrin when it was later revealed that he had a cocaine conviction.

A lifelong Democrat, Mannerud consistently denied any wrongdoing but was embarrassed in April when Hillary Rodham Clinton's New York Senate campaign returned a $22,000 donation, which Mannerud said the campaign had solicited.

Aral, her successor in the business, is a registered Republican. She said this week the new venture would be her first foray into the Cuba-related travel industry. Her background is in the more mainstream aviation industry. She worked for Eastern Airlines before it closed and has a degree in travel and transportation.

Meantime, Mannerud said she will retain her Treasury license so that she can arrange cargo flights of food and medicine made legal in recent legislation, but that she has given up party activism in favor of an activity closer to her heart - fundraising for breast cancer research.